Hayek Program Podcast · Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Shruti Rajagopalan and Chris Coyne on War, Conflict, and the Quest for a Stable Peace

·1 hr 45 min·5 clips

“Sometimes things that appear to have moral weight may have no moral weight at all” once unintended consequences are counted.

1. Hayek Program Podcast frames Shruti Rajagopalan and Chris Coyne on war, conflict, and the quest for a stable peace. 2. Shruti Rajagopalan hosts Chris Coyne, an economist whose work on war, intervention, and postwar reconstruction shapes the discussion. 3. The episode asks how Boulding’s Stable Peace framework changes the way listeners think about intervention, empire, and the limits of state action. 4. Coyne says Kenneth Boulding’s 1978 book Stable Peace helped him distinguish human action, peaceful conflict, and violent conflict. 5. He applies that framework to micro-level disputes, such as two people choosing turn taking, a lottery, or violence. 6. He extends the same logic to nations and groups within nations, where conflict can be managed peacefully or violently. 7. Coyne describes Boulding’s phases as stable peace, unstable peace, unstable violence, and stable violence. 8. He says societies are not simply peaceful or violent in a homogenous aggregate sense. 9. He argues that individuals make choices inside changing social processes, so agency matters. 10. Coyne says his own work uses Virginia political economy, public choice economics, institutional economics, and Austrian economics. 11. He describes one research strand on whether the U.S. government should intervene outside its own territory. 12. He says economics and political economy cannot answer moral questions directly. 13. He argues they can inform moral judgment by describing what is possible and what consequences are likely. 14. Coyne uses After War to compare Japan and Germany after World War II with Afghanistan and Iraq. 15. He says the Bush administration aimed to spread liberal democracy, economic development, human freedom, and flourishing. 16. He argues that designing meta-institutions of society from outside ran into local knowledge problems and incentive problems. 17. He says U.S. officials knew from the Afghanistan papers and Iraq documents that reconstruction was not going well. 18. He compares intervention in complex systems to a whack-a-mole game where fixing one problem produces several others. 19. Coyne says he uses the precautionary principle for government intervention and starts from non-intervention. 20. The episode will suit listeners interested in public choice, foreign policy, empire, and constitutional political economy, but may not suit listeners wanting a short, nontechnical overview.

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A sharp discussion of war, public choice, and the limits of government power.

This episode treats war as an argument about institutions, incentives, and limits, not as something slogans can explain away. It moves from rational choice to public choice, then settles on a harder question: when governments stretch their reach across the world, what exactly…

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You want a clear-eyed take on war that treats government power, public choice, and global spillovers as one hard problem.

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