The experts on Russia

Continuing with my theme of the experts getting it wrong, Tyler Cowen has been writing a lot about international relations experts getting Russia completely wrong.

Part I, about why the IR community was so wrong.

Part II, an estimate of how many relevant academics were wrong: it breaks down to about a 60/40 split with the slight majority being correct.

I’m not for a public shaming so that people lose their jobs. What I would like to see is for prominent experts who got it wrong to reflect on why they were wrong on how they’re adjusting their methodology accordingly. This is especially important as China is a growing threat to the West.

These are the sorts of posts that are better read in their entirety, but here are a few of the reasons Cowen speculates that Western IR academics got it wrong about Russia:

The IR community is mostly Democrats, and they were unprepared for the narrative that Putin might invade under Biden but not Trump. They too much had mental models where the evil of Putin works through Trump.

The IR community is risk-averse, and preserving of its academic reputations, and thus its members are less willing to make bold predictions than say pundits are. You might even think that is good, all things considered, but it will help explain the missed predictions here.

Perhaps partly for ideological reasons, it is hard for much of the IR community to internalize how much Putin (correctly?) thinks of the Western Europeans as cowards who will not defend themselves. The Western European nations are supposed to represent reasonable ways of running a polity, committed to social democracy above all else, and that is what so many academics believe as well. It might be hard for them to see that Western Europe has been full of folly, including with respect to nuclear energy and also collective defense.

Amongst academic and many of the scholars outside of academia but on the fringes, thoughts about evil are channeled into domestic directions, such as Trump, guns, “the right wing,” and so on. Maybe there isn’t enough mental energy to stay sufficiently alert about possible evils elsewhere. Along related lines, we don’t always have the background in the humanities, and history, to recognize that a certain kind of destructive evil still is possible in today’s world.

I’d been following Michael Koffman and many in the OSINT community throughout the fall and winter, and was convinced some major escalation was in order. It seems like those who didn’t accept the possibility of a wider war refused to look at any hard evidence of troop movements, hardware deployments and supply lines. Theory vs. reality.

I’m still amazed and thankful we managed to make it out in time.