Fascinating article from Malcolm Gladwell.
“David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan
Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred
years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in
71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was
analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in
terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in
those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.”
Read online at the New Yorker’s website, or download pdf here.
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