When Risk Isn’t Rational: The Economics of Scarcity, Survival, and War
A post by Antowan Batts
Risk is rarely rational.
A man leaves home believing he has found a job opportunity. Months later, his family receives a photo of him in military gear, fighting in a war he never intended to join.
We like to imagine that people make decisions by weighing outcomes, calculating probabilities, and choosing the best option. But that is rarely how decisions actually happen, especially under pressure.
Textbooks give us rational agents, perfect information, and tidy Nash equilibria. Real life gives us incomplete information, emotional stress, poor communication, and choices made in uncertainty. What looks like a strategy from a distance is often confused up close. And many decisions do not end in careful optimization. They end in instinct.
Risk is not usually a clean calculation. It is often a messy response to pressure, fear, limited options, and imperfect understanding.
Prospect Theory
Kahneman and Tversky’s foundational work on prospect theory set the standard and showed that people are not symmetric in their processing of risk. In the domain of gains, they are cautious, but once they are already facing loss, the math inverts, and they become risk-seeking, willing to accept gambles they would have rejected from a position of stability.
The experimental evidence was stark: subjects consistently demanded roughly twice the potential gain to accept a fifty-fifty chance of losing a given amount, but when the choice was framed as choosing between a certain loss and a risky bet, they pursued the gamble.
Scarcity
Mullainathan and Shafir pushed further, showing that scarcity does not just shift preferences — it degrades the cognitive architecture behind the decision itself. In studies measuring mental bandwidth, individuals under financial pressure performed the equivalent of 13 to 14 IQ points lower on cognitive assessments; Indian farmers tested worse before harvest, when money was scarce, than after, when it was not — the same people, the same questions, measurably different results.
When bandwidth is consumed by survival, long-term probability assessments do not just suffer; they collapse. What we do know is that when people are under real pressure, their risk tolerance tends to shift and not in the direction you’d expect.
Adversity doesn’t make people more cautious; it often makes them more willing to gamble. It is precisely this behavioral reality, not fiction, that explains why African citizens from multiple nations are dying in Ukraine fighting for Russia.
Ukraine War
According to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, over 1,780 citizens from 36 African countries are currently fighting in the Russian army (Al Jazeera). These are not irrational actors making uninformed choices. They are men operating under a constraint set that most risk models were never designed to account for.
Recruitment typically flows through third-party agencies, dangling the promise of lucrative civilian employment (The Star ). A deliberate exploitation of the gap between what a man needs and what his home economy can deliver.
Inpact, a Geneva-based organization that has investigated Russian recruitment networks, verified a list of 1,417 recruits from across the continent, with Cameroon, Egypt, and Ghana among the most represented, and concluded that the recruitment of Africans formed the core of a deliberate strategy to overwhelm Ukrainian defensive lines (SRN News).
Pier Pigou of the International Crisis Group framed the logic plainly: “These dudes are just trying to earn a living. And because their countries don’t provide that for them, they’re going to take opportunities that arise.” Japan Today
But economic frameworks have limits. They can explain the decision. They cannot absorb the cost.
Russia
This is worth sitting with, because Russia is not operating in Africa out of neglect or accident. Russia-Africa trade has grown by more than 60 percent over the past five years, rising from $16.8 billion to $27.7 billion. Moscow has been explicit about its ambitions — in 2024 alone, trade between them grew by more than 17 percent (Modern Diplomacy). A third Russia-Africa Summit is scheduled for 2026.
The pitch to African governments is partnership, multipolarity, and sovereign economic development. What the pitch does not mention is that Russia’s on-the-ground presence across the continent is driven primarily by the Africa Corps, which operates directly under the Russian Ministry of Defense, as reported by GIS Reports — the same institutional architecture funneling African men into Ukrainian defensive lines. The investment courtship and the recruitment pipeline are not separate strategies. They are two instruments of the same policy.
Ghana
Ghana reported that more than 50 of its citizens had been killed after being lured into combat, with its foreign minister acknowledging the true figure could be higher (SRN News)
Behind every number is a household reckoning with a silence that no institution has officially broken. Felista Njoki, whose husband, Samuel Mwaura Wainaina, was recruited to fight in Ukraine, sat for a Reuters interview at her family home in Kenya, holding a phone with a photo he had sent her — in military gear.
In Japan Today, that image is more than a data point that no regression captures. A woman holding a screen, waiting, in a war her country had no formal stake in, and her government is reluctant to confront. African governments, wary of taking sides overtly, have largely avoided angering Moscow, mindful that the recruitment scandal has not yet triggered widespread public outcry or political heat (Daily Nation). The courtship continues. The summits are scheduled. The trade figures climb.
The real cost that risk models cannot price. The permanence is borne not by the institutions that created the incentives, but by the people closest to the man who responded to it. Russia is building an economic relationship with African governments while simultaneously liquidating African lives on the front line.
Dashboards for the story
Ukraine War Statistics Dashboard
The Russo-Ukrainian War Tracker - Spatial Studies Lab
News Reporting
Reuters / Daily Nation — African nations tiptoe around recruitment of citizens by Russian networks (March 15, 2026)
Al Jazeera — Kenya and Russia agree no Kenyans will be recruited for Ukraine war (March 16, 2026)
Economic & Geopolitical Analysis
Modern Diplomacy — Russia Steps Up Trade With Africa, Aiming to Fill in American AGOA’s Vacuum (October 2025)
Pressenza — Russia Outlines Broader Trade Strategies With Africa (October 2025)
GIS Reports — Russia’s Africa footprint is deeper than imagined (January 2026)
Academic Literature
Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. — Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk, Econometrica (1979)
Mullainathan, S. & Shafir, E. — Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013)
About the Author
Antowan Batts writes for Business Without Borders, a publication designed for working professionals seeking perspectives beyond the headlines. Each issue breaks down how business and economic shifts cross borders and impact decision-making in companies, careers, and everyday life.
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Sad to see the link between to make a living and deaths in wars. An eye opening all the data and information you provided .