On Democracy and War - Quotes from Robin Hanson and An Essay

I already know Robin Hanson is not too fond of democracy. I mean, I think he played a key role in causing me lose faith in democracy. But here are some more persuasive enlightening arguments.
Democracy does not necessarily equates to progression or good quality of life:
"3. When people think about changes they’d like in the world one of their first thoughts, and one they return to often, is wanting more democracy. It’s their first knee-jerk agenda for China, North Korea, ISIS, and so on. Surely with more democracy all the other problems would sort themselves out.
But in fact scholars can find few consistent difference in the outcomes of nations that depend much on their degree of democracy. Democracy doesn’t seem to cause differences in wealth, or even in most specific policies. Democracies today war a bit less, but in the past democracies warred more than others. Democracies have less political repression, and our moral spotlight finds that fact to be of endless fascination. But it is in fact a relatively small effect on nations overall.
Nations today have huge differences in outcomes, and we are starting to understand some of them. But most of them have little to do with democracy. Plausibly larger issues include urbanization, immigration, foreign trade, regulation, culture, rule of law, corruption, suppression or encouragement of family clans or religion, etc. If you want to help nations, you’ll have to look outside the moral spotlight on democracy.
Yes, why should you personally sacrifice to help the world? The world will reward you for taking a clear moral stance regarding whatever is in the shared moral spotlight. And it will suspect you of immorality and disloyalty if you pay too little attention to that spotlight. So why should you look elsewhere? I think you know.
Added 3 July: Bryan Caplan points out that democracy can reduce the worst excesses of totalitarian governments. I accept that point; I had in mind less extreme variations, so North Korea was a poor choice on my part."
There was also a link to a history paper embedded which is also quite interesting. It argues that "early parliamentary regimes fought in significantly more wars than absolutist
monarchies, both against one another and overall. Such regimes, we argue, had
a relatively large capacity to make war, but, unlike modern democracies, not enough
institutional constraints to prevent it." The data it used was "interstate conflict in Europe between 1200 and 1800."
I haven't read the whole thing cuz the stats part I simply don't get... Who knows history requires this much math! Anyways here are some interesting points:
1. explanations for the high prevalence of pre-modern warfare
(1). Conventional explanation
"Absolutist monarchs may have treated warfare like a “royal sport” (Hale, 1985, pp. 29-30), sparking conflicts based on their whims."
(2). Proposed explanation
"the emergence of more representative and accountable institutions made warfare more affordable, and more likely to occur. To help finance warfare, monarchs exchanged (partial) political representation for new fiscal resources (Bates, 2010, p. 56). As the fiscal and military strength of early parliamentary regimes grew, however, the institutional constraints on the ruler’s
war-making ability did not appear to keep pace."
2. Early parliamentary system lacks the constrained to prevent wars because:
(1) It's entrenched in the culture
"Princes learned from a young age to focus much of their attention on military affairs (Hoffman, 2015, pp. 24-5)."
(2) The "democratic part" actually didn't make the call in terms of starting a war
"while elites in parliament may have controlled taxation, the decision to go to war typically remained in the ruler’s hands (Hale, 1985, p. 29)."
3. War becomes more about money
"the 1500-1800 results are consistent with those for the full sample: parliamentary dyads were significantly more likely to go to war with each other than absolutist dyads. Furthermore, the predicted probabilities of conflict among parliamentary dyads were larger for this subperiod. This
result is consistent with Gennaioli and Voth (2015)’s claim that the fiscal requirements of war increased after 1500, disproportionately affecting parliamentary regimes."
For the original blog post, please go to:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/06/beware-the-moral-spotlight.html