Books & Contributed Chapters
Gary Shiffman makes the complex intersection of economics, violence, and AI accessible to everyone.
His books and essays translate rigorous research into practical insights that help leaders, policymakers, and institutions understand—and prevent—violence in the age of intelligent systems.
Featured Book
The Economics of Violence
How Behavioral Science Can Transform Our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism
By Gary Shiffman | Cambridge University Press, 2020
How do we understand illicit violence? Can we prevent it? Building on behavioral science and economics, this book begins with the idea that humans are more predictable than we like to believe, and this ability to model human behavior applies equally well to leaders of violent and coercive organizations as it does to everyday people. Humans ultimately seek survival for themselves and their communities in a world of competition.
While the dynamics of 'us vs. them' are divisive, they also help us to survive. Access to increasingly larger markets, facilitated through digital communications and social media, creates more transnational opportunities for deception, coercion, and violence. If the economist's perspective helps to explain violence, then it must also facilitate insights into promoting peace and security. If we can approach violence as behavioral scientists, then we can also better structure our institutions to create policies that make the world a more secure place, for us and for future generations.
What Readers are Saying
"[Shiffman emphasizes] the argument that a lot of what we're calling terrorists, or insurgents, or criminals are providing something else that is masked by the things that are costly to us as the non-participants of the terror, the death, the activities. And that the opportunity to affiliate with these groups gives participants a way to truck, barter, and exchange more effectively because you can trust their insiders… I thought that was the most provocative idea in the book."
“As advances in behavioral science reveal the complex but animating dynamics of human behavior, all those forces that make us fear, or fight, or give us courage, or move us to some action, nefarious states and organizations are learning how to manipulate people and become drivers of violence. In his illuminating new book, national security veteran Gary M. Shiffman takes us to the edge of understanding the nexus between behavior and organized violence. This is a must read not only for leaders in the defense and security sector, but all leaders who want to better understand the opportunities and the dangers of manipulating human action.”
“Conventional wisdom often views sub-state violence as an irrational expression of religious, tribal or ethnic identity. In his must-read book, Gary M. Shiffman offers a powerful counter, demonstrating that understanding organized violence requires analyzing individual decision-making - and the available incentives and choices. Shiffman combines his own rich experience with deep economic analysis and case studies that range from Pablo Escobar to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and, in so doing, has written a definitive volume on the insights behavioral science offers to national security policymakers.”
Russ Roberts, EconTalk host.
Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution
Steve Clemons, Founding Editor at Large of Semafor, former Editor-at-Large of The Hill and Washington Editor-at-Large of The Atlantic.
Richard Fontaine, Chief Executive Officer of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).
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