Thomas C. Schelling > Quotes

“And there is escaping things the knowledge of which makes one unhappy. If "truth" is what we know and are aware of, in the most engrossing fiction we escape truth. Whatever else it is, drama is forgetfulness. We can forget and forget that we are forgetting. It is temporary mind control. If memories are pain, fiction is anesthesia.”
― Thomas C. Schelling

“Military strategy...has become the diplomacy of violence.”
― Thomas C. Schelling

“I define game theory as the study of how rational individuals make choices when the better choice among two possibilities, or the best choice among several possibilities, depends on the choices that others will make or are making.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“Furthermore, theory that is based on the assumption that the participants coolly and “rationally” calculate their advantages according to a consistent value system forces us to think more thoroughly about the meaning of “irrationality.” Decision-makers are not simply distributed along a one-dimensional scale that stretches from complete rationality at one end to complete irrationality at the other. Rationality is a collection of attributes, and departures from complete rationality may be in many different directions. Irrationality can imply a disorderly and inconsistent value system, faulty calculation, an inability to receive messages or to communicate efficiently; it can imply random or haphazard influences in the reaching of decisions or the transmission of them, or in the receipt or conveyance of information; and it sometimes merely reflects the collective nature of a decision among individuals who do not have identical value systems and whose organizational arrangements and communication systems do not cause them to act like a single entity.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy Of Conflict

“let me remind you of the particular characteristics of all of these behavior systems that I am trying to focus on. It is that people are impinging on other people and adapting to other people. What people do affects what other people do.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“Coercion depends more on the threat of what is yet to come than on damage already done. The pace of diplomacy, not the pace of battle, would govern the action; and while diplomacy may not require that it go slowly, it does require that an impressive unspent capacity for damage be kept in reserve.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence

“Communication is often neither entirely possible nor entirely reliable”
― Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict

“Models tend to be useful when they are simultaneously simple enough to fit a variety of behaviors and complex enough to fit behaviors that need the help of an explanatory model.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“We may wish to control or influence the behavior of others in conflict, and we want, therefore, to know how the variables that are subject to our control can affect their behavior. If we confine our study to the theory of strategy, we seriously restrict ourselves by the assumption of rational behavior — not just of intelligent behavior, but of behavior motivated by a conscious calculation of advantages, a calculation that in turn is based on an explicit and internally consistent value system. We thus limit the applicability of any results we reach. If our interest is the study of actual behavior, the results we reach under this constraint may prove to be either a good approximation of reality or a caricature. Any abstraction runs a risk of this sort, and we have to be prepared to use judgment with any results we reach. The advantage of cultivating the area of “strategy” for theoretical development is not that, of all possible approaches, it is the one that evidently stays closest to the truth, but that the assumption of rational behavior is a productive one. It gives a grip on the subject that is peculiarly conducive to the development of theory. It permits us to identify our own analytical processes with those of the hypothetical participants in a conflict; and by demanding certain kinds of consistency in the behavior of our hypothetical participants, we can examine alternative courses of behavior according to whether or not they meet those standards of consistency. The premise of “rational behavior” is a potent one for the production of theory. Whether the resulting theory provides good or poor insight into actual behavior is, I repeat, a matter for subsequent judgment.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict

“If the option of taking the course pass-fail (without a letter grade) is available to all students, it is usually observed that there are some who will elect pass-fail no matter how many others do, some who will elect letter grades no matter how many elect pass-fail, and an intermediate group who will elect pass-fail if enough do but will choose letter grades if pass-fail is uncommon. Notice that the first and second groups’ behavior is independent of how the third group chooses, but not vice versa; the people whose behavior is uninfluenced nevertheless influence others.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“Nuclear weapons can do it quickly. That makes a difference.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence: With a New Preface and Afterword

“We want to deter an enemy decision to attack us—not only a cool-headed, premeditated decision that might be taken in the normal course of the Cold War, at a time when the enemy does not consider an attack by us to be imminent, but also a nervous, hot-headed, frightened, desperate decision that might be precipitated at the peak of a crisis, that might result from a false alarm or be engineered by somebody’ s mischief—a decision taken at a moment when sudden attack by the United States is believed a live possibility.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence: With a New Preface and Afterword

“Against defenseless people there is not much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick. And it would not have strained our Gross National Product to do it with ice picks.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence

“The art of looking at the problem from the other person's point of view, identifying his opportunities and his interests, an art that has traditionally been practiced by diplomats, lawyers, and chess players, is at the center of strategic analysis.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Choice and Consequence

“This is a difference between nuclear weapons and bayonets. It is not in the number of people they can eventually kill but in the speed with which it can be done, in the centralization of decision, in the divorce of the war from political processes, and in computerized programs that threaten to take the war out of human hands once it begins.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence: With a New Preface and Afterword

“Because people vary and because averages matter, there may be no sustainable critical mass; and the unravelling behavior, or initial failure to get the activity going at all, has much the appearance of a critical mass that is almost but not quite achieved. This is therefore a kindred but separate family of models.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“The principle of critical mass is so simple that it is no wonder that it shows up in epidemiology, fashion, survival and extinction of species, language systems, racial integration, jaywalking, panic behavior, and political movements.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“Earlier wars, like World Wars I and II or the Franco-Prussian War, were limited by termination, by an ending that occurred before the period of greatest potential violence, by negotiation that brought the threat of pain and privation to bear but often precluded the massive exercise of civilian violence. With nuclear weapons available, the restraint of violence cannot await the outcome of a contest of military strength; restraint, to occur at all, must occur during war itself.”
― Thomas C. Schelling

“If a model meets the criterion of simplicity it will often, like the thermostat-controlled heating system, describe physical and mechanical systems as well as social phenomena, animal behavior as well as human, scientific principles as well as household activities. An example is “critical mass.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“The generic name for behaviors of this sort is critical mass. Social scientists have adopted the term from nuclear engineering, where it is common currency in connection with atomic bombs.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“Measles vaccination shares some crucial features with the thermostat system but differs in important respects. A measles-epidemic model without vaccination will be different but recognizable as a member of the family. And”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“The tipping model is a special case—a broad class of special cases—of critical-mass phenomena. Its characteristics are usually that people have very different cross-over points; that the behavior involves place of residence or work or recreation or, in general, being someplace rather than doing something; that the critical numbers relate to two or more distinct groups, and each group may be separately tipping out or tipping”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“If there is enough uranium so that half the neutrons produce two others, the process is self-sustaining and a “critical mass” of uranium is said to be present.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“It enhances one’s appreciation of a model, and often the use one can make of it, to be aware of applications outside one’s own field. Recognition of the wide applicability of a model, or of a family of models, helps in recognizing that one is dealing with a very general or basic phenomenon, not something specialized or idiosyncratic or unique.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“What is common to all of these examples is the way people’s behavior depends on how many are behaving a particular way, or how much they are behaving that way—how many attend the seminar how frequently”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“At some point several appear to decide that the flow of pedestrians is large enough to be safe and they join it, enlarging it further and making it safe for a few who were still waiting and who now join. Soon, even the timid join what has become a crowd. The drivers see they no longer have any choice and stop.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“Or, it goes the way of the dying seminar—fun but not enough fun, because there are not enough people to generate the loyalty and enthusiasm that would keep the number large and the absentee rate small.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“The observed outcome may be one that everybody prefers, it may be one that nobody prefers, or it may be one that some prefer and others deplore.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“When the supply at last gets back to normal, some years hence, replenishment will be at an abnormally low level, with a “famine” that will get worse for at least six years before it can begin to get better. And then the cycle can start over.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior

“But whether the measure is the number of people engaged, or the number times the frequency or the length of time they engage in it, or the ratio of the number who do to the number who do not, or the amount of such activity per square foot or per day or per telephone extension, we can call it a “critical-mass” activity and a lot of people will know what we mean.”
― Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior