The Uncertainty Principle

Bolivia has a navy. In and of itself, this may not seem noteworthy. But a map will reveal why it is peculiar: Bolivia is landlocked.

After one of the bloodiest wars of the 19th century in Latin America, a victorious Chile took control of Bolivia’s coastal provinces, leaving it without a coastline. Hence, Bolivia has not had access to the sea since the end of the War of the Pacific, which culminated 125 years ago with the Treaty of Ancón. In the country’s capital, constitutions have been passed and repealed, many regimes have risen and fallen; and yet, defying all rationality, the Bolivian Naval Force lives on. Arguably the poorest country of Latin America, and torn apart by racial tensions and political instability, Bolivia still maintains a force of over 5,000 sailors and 173 vessels, whose most important activity is the commemoration of ‘Sea Day’ at the centric Abaroa square in La Paz every March 23.

Some have argued that this is a uniquely Latin American phenomenon. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1982, Gabriel García Márquez addressed a regional “madness” afflicting the continent, perhaps at the core of what he famously described as “one hundred years of solitude” in his most celebrated novel. Although García Márquez may be correct about Latin America as a whole, the Bolivian navy does not fit his regional argument. This is not just because other landlocked countries, like Rwanda and Serbia, also have navies. Rather, it is because irrational behavior has always been at the core of international relations.

Recently, models have become an increasingly popular way to predict outcomes in a variety of arenas. Most notably, this applies to economic research. Drawing from both times of boom and bust, investment firms have built detailed models to predict the behavior of specific stocks and markets as a whole. These models are driven by cutting-edge mathematical research on topics ranging from game theory to risk calculations. Perhaps less publicly, many have tried to use similar models in international politics, convinced that several of the insights from market research can help illuminate how political actors make decisions.

But not everyone embraces this development as a panacea. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan argued in the Financial Times on March 16 that “we will never have the perfect model of risk.” Amidst a paradigm-shifting financial crisis originated at the core of financial markets, Greenspan felt the need to remind the audience of the FT that despite the amazing complexity of existing models and their relative success for many years, the very fact that they are an abstraction of reality makes it impossible for them to flawlessly predict where the market will go tomorrow. They will perhaps work as they claim, but there is a chance–if small–that they will not. And it all comes down to the human factor. According to Greenspan, “the innate human responses that result in swings between euphoria and fear that repeat themselves generation after generation with little evidence of a learning curve.”

Although Greenspan’s analysis referred specifically to financial markets, it also restates a valuable historical lesson about politics: If we expect what is reasonable, we will be disappointed. At least in the financial world, models are more helpful, because despite the inexistence of a homo economicus, most people in most circumstances are driven by profit maximization. They may not know how to achieve it at all times, but they always want better results for their portfolios. When it comes to politics, however, for better or for worse, motivations more often transcend rational concerns.

This goes all the way back to the beginning. According to The Iliad, it was not the endless wealth dreamt of by Agamemnon, but rather Helen’s beauty, that triggered the Trojan War. In a similar vein, the Greeks’ greatest hero, Achilles, was not motivated by rationality; more than anything, he sought kleos, an untranslatable word describing war glory, honor, and a victory over death through future remembrance. Closer to our days, similar pursuits driven by ideologies ranging from nationalism to religious enthusiasm have resulted in real tragedies later described as “unimaginable.”

Ultimately, political scientists attached to models can consider kleos as a possible motivation for action, just as they could ascribe a particular value to the Bolivian obsession with the sea. But values, in models and elsewhere, change just as much as motivations do. Thus, like Greenspan proposed, we need to understand the impossibility of foreseeing a particular actor’s full set of motivations when making a political decision. Given that the future is eternally foggy, our only option is to study the past in a qualitative, rather than quantitative, way.

That is the only path to understanding the Bolivian Navy’s challenge to all existing rationality: No matter how complex our equations get, history will remain our best compass with which to navigate the uncertainties of human decision-making.


Pierpaolo Barbieri ’09, a former Crimson associate editorial chair, is a history concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears regularly.