Consider the following piece in the Daily Telegraph, which may begin making the rounds:

Scientists find ’law of war’ that predicts attacks: Scientists believe they may have glimpsed a “law of war” that can be used to predict the likelihood of attacks in modern conflicts, from conventional battles to global terrorism. … The European Consortium For Mathematics in Industry was told today that an international team has developed a physics-based theory describing the dynamics of insurgent group formation and attacks, which neatly explains the universal patterns observed in all modern wars and terrorism. The team is advising the United Nations, the Pentagon and Iraq. …

Most remarkable, “or the case of modern insurgent conflicts, our results are in close agreement with observed casualty data.” “What we found was really quite startling,” said Prof Johnson. “Although wars are the antithesis of an ordered system, the datapoints for each war fell neatly on to a straight line.” The line meant they obeyed what scientists call a power law. The “power laws” describe mathematical relationships between the frequency of large and small events.

This finding is remarkable given the different conditions, locations and durations of these separate wars. For example, the Iraq war is being fought in the desert and cities and is fairly recent, while the twenty-year old Colombian war is being fought in mountainous jungle regions against a back-drop of drug-trafficking and Mafia activity. This came as a shock, said the team, since the last thing one would expect to find within the chaos of a warzone are mathematical patterns. …

“We can use the power-law distribution to accurately predict the likelihood of different sized attacks occurring on any given day. This is useful for military planning and allocating resources to hospitals. .. “The fact that the power-law distribution seems to be constant across all long-term modern wars suggests that the insurgencies have evolved to find an ideal solution to the problem of how to fight a stronger force. … “Unless this structure is changed then the cycle of violence in places like Iraq will continue,” said Dr Gourley.” We have used this analysis to advise the Pentagon, the Iraqi government and the United Nations.”

This one has all the ingredients: a few economists, some physicists, a couple of papers on arxiv, power laws, media coverage, and of course the thrilling sense that no-one has noticed anything like this before. Except, of course, they have.

I’m by no means a scholar of this stuff, but even I know that this isn’t such a new idea. The classic analysis of the relationship between the severity and frequency of wars is in the work of Lewis F. Richardson, which dates from the mid-twentieth century. More recently there is Lars-Erik Cederman’s 2003 APSR paper Modeling the Size of Wars: From Billiard Balls to Sandpiles, which tries to theorize the regularity that Richardson discovered. In between there’s a fair bit more, including some work by the great Anatol Rapoport (reading his work is how I know about the other stuff). Here’s a clipping from a discussion of his from 1957:

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Classic (and counter-intuitive) findings from the sociology of military conflict about the proportion of soldiers in armies who see action, get injured or killed, or even fire their weapons on the battlefield, are also relevant here on the micro-side. Randy Collins discusses some of this work in his recent book, Violence.

To be fair, the papers by Johnson, Spagat et al. do at least cite the Richardson and Cederman papers, though (in their first paper) all at once and for a single, short sentence. The substance of the paper is quite interesting, too, so far as I can tell as a non-expert. Their innovation is to collect, as best they can, data on the distribution of casualties and violent events within conflicts in addition to the distribution of total casualties for a population of wars, and try to model that. Their finding that the observed distributions seem to follow a power-law should by now be unsurprising, though I’ll leave it to others to discuss whether any roughly straight line on a log-log scale can be said to be evidence of this kind of distribution.

What irks in these cases is the seeming disregard for existing research, the avoidance of a distribution channel where reviewers might make one aware of that research, and the presence of a decent PR division and journalists who like to write stories about how the boffins are discovering amazing, new, never-before-seen truths about society. The goal of science is not to pay homage to only slightly relevant work from the past in a ritualistic lit review; but nevertheless the principle of giving credit where credit’s due is supposed to be a core incentive for doing scientific research in the first place. Leveraging the broader social legitimacy of one’s discipline (physics is real science; economics is the physics of social science) in order to effectively short-circuit that process seems wrong to me, especially when it’s clear that there’s something important to be learned from the poor relations (and someone to be credited). Though I can see why it keeps happening, if some good publicity is at stake and digging into the literature might take some of the shine off of your own paper.