The problem with this argument is ignoring the counterfactual cases: the wars that have not occurred, that would have occurred otherwise.

Europe was mired in endless wars for millenia. It's now in the longest stretch of peace in centuries and, by sheer coincidence, at its highest levels of trade.

In the rest of the world trade has steadily risen and wars and deaths from wars have fallen steadily. Correlation might not be causation, but it would interesting know what third factor explains both "more trade" and "fewer wars" other than "it's hard to fight a war with the people who feed you".

I suggest that the third factor is US policy.

Before World War II, Britain had its trading empire, France had its empire, Japan had its empire, etc. Oceanic trade between nations not in the same empire ran a high risk of the cargo simply being confiscated or destroyed by one of the imperial navies. A key pillar of the US's strategy in the Cold War was to use its naval supremacy to prevent the return to the imperial trading system; in other words, it extended to nations an offer of the ability to trade freely on the world's oceans in exchange for that nation's joining the US in opposing the Soviets.

The United States also suppressed wars. For example, the 2 nations that arguably had the most powerful pre-WWII militaries (Britain and France) allied with Israel to attack Egypt after Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, but the United States, worried that the Soviets could enter the conflict, threatened Britain and France with economic sanctions unless they withdrew, which they did.

Or rather, it was the nuclear “balance of terror” that emerged between the US and the USSR. Neither of those powers wanted to risk a confrontation that could turn into World War III, so they both had a strong incentive to limit their own ambitions and to restrain their allies/client states.

Europe fought the two most destructive wars in the history of the world in the three decades immediately following the publication of that book.

I guess you could argue that things could somehow have turned out even worse than that, but that feels like a reach.

You could just as well argue that the highest levels of trade are the result of peace, not the other way around. Especially given that levels of trade were already high enough for people to make this same argument before WW1, as this book illustrates.

I think one of the greatest mistakes made over and over by sociologists, futurists, and economists, is to assume that people are rational.

Empirically, I'd say it's doing very well.

The world has more trade than ever, and fewer wars than ever.

If you're referring to WW1, lowering a risk and completely eliminating it are different things.

It did quite well for its author though. It appears he got a Nobel Prize in 1933. Maybe he was pulling the illusion thing.

The book didn't argue that the war wouldn't happen, only that it would be economically disastrous for everybody involved, and thus to choose to go to war is foolishness, since everybody is strictly worse off than they were before - i.e. there are no absolute winners. Countries did go to war anyway, and, exactly as predicted, it was a disaster for all of them, proving the point.

Most people think WW1 was so bad because people kept killing each other (with machine guns, artillery and poison gasses). Less so because they severed their commercial ties.

Today, yes. But in that era? The notion of declaring a war to profit from the plunder (or reparations, or whatever you call it) was not yet dead back then.

> It has, let’s say, not aged gracefully.

It's aged wonderfully. The Europeans proved its premise in spades between 1914 and 1945.