For those in the Ithaca area, I’ll be giving talks at Cornell on Monday and Tuesday for economists and political scientists in the Persistent Poverty and Upward Mobility Group.
Monday is a public lecture, Child Soldiers: How Our Hype Can Harm. Tuesday is a more academic paper, The Industrial Organization of Rebellion: The Logic of Forced Recruitment and Child Soldiering.
When I gave the public lecture at SFU, some people asked if there was a paper. Not really–it’s a synthesis of a body of work–though this and this paper are close.
The academic paper should be posted in a couple of weeks.
The IO of Rebellion presentation was most engaging. Thank you for coming out.
I’m still interested in that question about decreasing marginal usefulness of rewards and punishments (my intuition tells me it would raise the cost ratio threshold before coercion enters the picture as well as introduce some overlap and coercion on older recruits), particularly since it seemed the plots for use of method by age seemed to intersect just after childhood. Could it also be that the marginal value of rewards increases with age and the marginal value of punishments decreases with age? Those would also raise the threshold cost ratio.