Nuclear war — and peace — was this economist’s cup of tea
Thomas Schelling, an economist and Nobel laureate whose interest in game theory led him to write important works on nuclear strategy and to use the concept of the tipping point to explain social problems, including white flight from urban neighbourhoods, died on Tuesday at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 95.
The death was confirmed by Richard Zeckhauser, a former student and colleague.
It was while working as an economist in the Truman administration that Schelling became intrigued by the stratagems and negotiating ploys that he observed in international bargaining. In particular, as the Cold War developed, he became fascinated with the complexities of nuclear strategy, then in its infancy and a source of worldwide anxiety.
After spending a year studying nuclear weapons at the RAND Corp. in 1958 and writing The Strategy of Conflict (1960), he took his place as a leading theorist of nuclear war and peace along with RAND intellectuals Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter, as well as Henry A. Kissinger, the director of the Defense Studies Program at Harvard.
Schelling analyzed superpower negotiations in the way that he analyzed the conflicts between, say, a blackmailer and his client, a parent and a child, or management and labour. In each case, he wrote, “there is a mutual dependence as well as opposition,” with each side seeking out tests of strength at less than crisis levels.
The Strategy of Conflict introduced the concept of the focal point, often called the Schelling point, to describe a solution that people reach without the benefit of communicating, relying instead on “each person’s expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do.”
In Meteors, Mischief and Wars, published in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1960, Schelling looked at the possibility of an accidental nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union and reviewed three novels that imagined such an event. The director Stanley Kubrick read his comments on the novel Red Alert and adapted the book for Dr. Strangelove, on which Schelling was a consultant.
In the film, the Soviet “doomsday device,” set to respond automatically to a nuclear assault by the United States, was, Schelling said, a poor piece of gamesmanship.
“One obvious point in the Strangelove movie was that the Soviet doomsday thing was not a deterrent when the other side did not know in advance that it exist- ed,” he pointed out in an interview with the New York Times in 2005, when he and Israeli economist Robert J. Aumann were awarded the Nobel in economic science.
In the 1970s, Schelling moved on to other social questions that seemed to be fertile ground for game theory, notably the dynamics behind racial change in American neighbourhoods. Expanding on the work of Morton Grodzins, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who used the term “tip point” to describe the crucial moment when white fears become white flight, Schelling offered a simple diagram, almost like a game board, to show how mixed urban neighbourhoods could quickly become entirely black, even when white residents expressed only a slight preference for living among members of their own race.
His papers on the subject and his book Micromotives and Macrobehavior (1978) achieved wider currency when his ideas were popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book The Tipping Point (2000).
Despite being identified with game theory, Schelling described himself as an opportunistic user of its ideas, bringing them in when needed and sometimes not at all.
“When people ask me what game theory is, my answer is that it is an attempt to formalize any kind of study of strategic behaviour where people are trying to affect or anticipate the behaviour of others,” he told the Baltimore Sun. “So all kinds of people are game theorists.”
He was born on April 14, 1921, in Oakland, Calif. His interest in mass unemployment in the Depression led him to major in economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1944.
He published his first book, National Income Behaviour: An Introduction to Algebraic Analysis, in 1951, the year he received his doctorate from Harvard. He joined Yale’s economics department in 1953 and in 1958 became a professor of economics at Harvard, where he taught until 1990.
That year, he was named a distinguished university professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Economics and School of Public Policy. He retired in 2003.
Schelling later turned his attention to addictive behaviour and climate change. In both, he found intriguing the strategies of self-constraint and bargaining, which he discussed in Choice and Consequence (1984) and Strategies of Commitment (2006).