Weekly Top 5 Papers
“The Decline of Violent Conflicts: What Do the Data Really Say?”, NYU Tandon Research Paper no. 2876315, written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (professor of risk engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering) and Pasquale Cirillo (professor at Delft University of Technology) was featured in SSRN’s top 5 weekly papers.
The paper proposes a methodology to look at violence in particular, and other aspects of quantitative historiography in general, in a way compatible with statistical inference, which needs to accommodate the fat-tailedness of the data and the unreliability of the reports of conflicts. It investigates the theses of “long peace” and drop in violence and find that these are statistically invalid and resulting from flawed and naive methodologies, incompatible with fat tails and non-robust to minor changes in data formatting and methodologies.
