'Did the Iraq War Cause the Great Recession?'

Via Henry Farrell:

Did the Iraq War Cause the Great Recession?, Henry Farrell: Thomas Oatley thinks that it very plausibly did. His argument draws upon an interesting article (should be ungated) in the new issue of Perspectives on Politics, where he, Kindred Winecoff, Andrew Pennock and Sarah Bauerle Danzman argue that international political economy scholars pay too little attention to the structural characteristics of international politics. By concentrating too much on states as unitary actors, they fail to recognize the importance of the network connections between them. The network topology – the shape of the network – can have consequences – networks where no node gets very much more links than any other node are quite different in their consequences from networks where one or a couple of nodes receive a lot more links than others. This has implications for financial contagion – if contagion spreads across links, network topology will have important consequences for the likelihood of spread. As it turns out, there is strong reason to believe that the international financial system is one of the latter kinds of networks rather than one of the former. On two measures of financial ties, most countries on the periphery of the network have few links to other peripheral countries, but pretty well everyone has links to the US, and many have links to the UK too. ...[more]...

I'm not fully convinced by this theory that the Iraq war caused the recession, but it does bring up some important issue about network connectivity. Are highly interconnected networks better at dispersing risk? It depends upon the type of risk. Suppose a toxin hits a network. If diluting the toxin across the network also dilutes its effects to practically nothing, then we want the network to be as large and interconnected as possible. When shocks hit they will be quickly diluted and rendered relatively harmless. But for toxins that are deadly in minute doses, toxins that kill whatever they touch even when they are highly diluted, we want the infected node on the network to be isolated as much as possible.

Optimally, then, assuming that most shocks are not toxic if they are dispersed across a large network, we want the network to be large and highly interconnected so that risks can be diversified across the network to practically nothing. But we also want the ability to quickly disconnect nodes that become infected with toxins that don't lose their potency as they are diluted. And that's the problem, identifying when such a toxin hits a network is difficult -- there will always be denial if disconnecting nodes in the financial system costs people money -- and it may not be easy to quickly disconnect nodes from the network so that problem nodes can be isolated/quarantined before the toxin spreads.

We have been told that problems in places like Cyprus have been walled off -- nodes in the network have been isolated -- but so long as a few isolated connections still exist that are difficult to cut, highly toxic shocks can pollute the rest of the network. In addition, as we saw today when "Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the current head of the Eurogroup, held a formal, on-the-record joint interview with Reuters and the FT today, saying that the messy and chaotic Cyprus solution is a model for future bailouts" and financial markets reacted negatively (the statement is being walked back), some connections -- those involving expectations -- cannot be severed in any case.

Highly interconnected networks are highly desirable so long as (1) we can quickly identify trouble, and (2) nodes can be quickly and effectively isolated. But when those conditions are not present, the occasional highly toxic shock will cause quite a bit of damage.