Why is Bryan Caplan’s perspective on poverty so unpopular?
The obvious answer is that Effective Altruism is usually unpopular. Soft hearts and soft heads go together. Most people are instinctive Ineffective Altruists. They want to solve poverty with sacrifice and without math.
Arnold Kling thinks that people perceive government bonds as if they were wealth:
The government borrows $1 from me and spends it on you. You have a new dollar. And I think I still have a dollar, because the government owes me a dollar. Neither of us thinks that we will have our taxes raised next year, when the government has to pay me the dollar.
[…]
I assume that people are myopic and just look around and say “I got paid $x by the government” or “I lent $y to the government and got a $y bond in return” without thinking about what comes next.
They were in the middle of a story about the Appalachian Trail, profiling some of the people who were hiking its two thousand miles that year. The reporting was calm, patient, intelligent, allowing the subject to find its own shape, unfolding slowly, minute after minute, like the trail itself.
What is this, I thought? What portal had I fallen through? I’d been raised on 1010 WINS, “all news all the time,” blaring the same rotation of headlines, weather, traffic, and trivia, in 40-second increments, for hours at a stretch. The piece that I had happened on that day went on, improbably, for over 20 minutes.
The radio station was, of course, NPR, and he listened to it for hours a day, every day, for 30 years:
That is, until around the beginning of last year. My discontent had been building since the previous summer, the summer of the George Floyd protests. It was clear from the beginning that the network would be covering the movement not like journalists but advocates. A particular line was being pushed. There was an epidemic of police violence against unarmed African-Americans; black people were in danger of being murdered by the state whenever they walked down the street. The protests were peaceful, and when they weren’t, the violence was minor, or it was justified, or it was exclusively initiated by the cops. Although we had been told for months to stay indoors, the gatherings did not endanger public health — indeed, they promoted it. I supported the protests; I just did not appreciate the fact that I was being lied to.
But it wasn’t just that story. Overnight, the network’s entire orientation had changed. Every segment was about race, and when it wasn’t about race, it was about gender. The stories were no longer reports but morality plays, with predictable bad guys and good guys. Scepticism was banished. Divergent opinions were banished. The pronouncements of activists, the arguments of ideologically motivated academics, were accepted without question. The tone became smug, certain, self-righteous. To turn on the network was to be subjected to a program of ideological force-feeding. I was used to the idiocies of the academic Left — I had been dealing with them ever since I started graduate school — but now they were leaking out of my radio.
Nor was it only NPR. One by one, the outlets that I counted on for reliable reporting and intelligent opinion — that I, in some measure, identified with — fell in line.
[…]
“Moral clarity” became the new journalistic standard, as if the phrase meant anything other than tailoring the evidence to fit one’s preexisting beliefs. I was lamenting the loss, not of “journalistic objectivity,” a foolish term and impossible goal, but of simple journalistic good faith: a willingness to gather and present the facts that bear upon an issue, honestly and clearly, regardless of their implications.
[…]
For months, I felt trapped, alone with my incredulity. Was I the only person seeing this? Every time I turned on NPR, my exasperation grew — basically, I was hate-listening after a certain point — but what was the alternative? I literally couldn’t think of any. Then, by sheer dumb luck, I was invited on a podcast to discuss a book I had recently published.
[…]
But I didn’t start listening to them because I felt I had a civic duty to expose myself to opinions I disagree with. I started listening to them because I couldn’t stand the bullshit anymore. Because I needed to let in some air. They make me think. They introduce me to perspectives that I hadn’t entertained. They teach me things, and they are usually things the Times or NPR won’t tell you.
I have learned about the lab-leak hypothesis before it became an acceptable topic of discourse. About the lunacy of transgender orthodoxy (“affirmative therapy” for small children, the “cotton ceiling”). About the real statistics on police killings of unarmed black people (according to a Washington Post database, the number shot to death came to 18 in 2020, 6 in 2021). About the truth about Matthew Shepard (who was murdered, by a sometime lover and another acquaintance, over drugs), Jacob Blake (who was shot while stealing his girlfriend’s car, kidnapping her children, resisting arrest, and trying to stab a cop), and Kyle Rittenhouse (who worked in Kenosha, had a father who lived there, and was out that night, however misguidedly, to protect property and provide medical assistance).
Deresiewicz originally wrote the essay for a different publication:
It was one with which I’ve had a long and fruitful relationship, and the editor-in-chief, who is retiring, invited me to contribute to his valedictory issue. His initial reaction was positive, to say the least. “Like all your best pieces,” he wrote, “and like many of the other best pieces I’ve run, this one makes me a little scared, but also makes me excited by the prospect of waking people up. It wakes me up. I’ve felt some of this without ever quite admitting it to myself.”
This, I should say, was according to plan. While politically neutral in theory, the journal had been drifting in the same direction as the rest of the mainstream media. Waking up his readers, whom I doubt had ever heard this kind of argument before, was exactly my intention.
Alas, it was not to be. Two weeks later, the editor wrote me again. “[T]he more I’ve thought about it, the less comfortable I’ve become with associating [the journal] with many of the assertions you make…. [T]here is too much in your piece that I could not defend.”
I had written a piece about the truths we aren’t allowed to utter on the Left, but that truth too, apparently, must not be uttered. The editor, it seemed, did not appreciate the irony.
He took with him 18 library books, for which the monks demanded payment of 18 roubles and 15 kopeks. When, 54 years later, the same voracious bookworm died, he had 72 unreturned volumes from the Lenin Library in Moscow on his packed shelves. At the time, the librarians probably had too many other issues with Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aka Stalin, to worry about collecting his unpaid fines.
Those squirrelled library loans formed a tiny part of a vast collection amassed by the Soviet dictator, estimated by historian Geoffrey Roberts at 25,000 items. Joseph Stalin’s books, as Roberts recounts in his new study Stalin’s Library, belonged to “a serious intellectual who valued ideas as much as power”. He spent a lifetime as a “highly active, engaged and methodical reader”. His tastes and interests spanned not only politics, economics and history but literature of many kinds. The book-loving shoemaker’s son from Georgia grew into an absolute ruler who deployed his library not as a prestige adornment but a “working archive”. Its bulging shelves stretched across his Kremlin offices and quarters, and around his dachas outside central Moscow.
Stalin not only read, quickly and hungrily: he claimed to devour 500 pages each day and, in the Twenties, ordered 500 new titles every year — not to mention the piles of works submitted to him by hopeful or fearful authors. He annotated with passion and vigour. Hundreds of volumes crawl with his distinctive markings and marginalia (the so-called pometki), their pages festooned with emphatic interjections: “ha ha”, “gibberish”, “rubbish”, “fool”, “scumbag”; and, more rarely, “agreed”, “spot on”, or the noncommittal doubt conveyed by the Russian “m-da”.
Stalin also drafted, wrote, and re-wrote, keenly and tirelessly — everything from Communist Party propaganda to Soviet legal edicts and textbooks in history, Marxist-Leninist philosophy and economics. He loved to edit and, as Roberts shows, he did it very well, slicing through the verbiage of sycophants to achieve greater “clarity and accuracy”. Although not an original thinker, “his intellectual hallmark was that of a brilliant simplifier, clarifier and populariser”. Robert Service, in his biography, calls the dictator “an accumulator and regurgitator” of ideas.
The problem with the idea of a no-fly zone is its enforcement:
Russian anti-aircraft batteries in Belarus and Russia easily cover all of Ukraine’s territory, and would shoot down allied planes at will. In order for a no-fly zone to be enforced, therefore, we would have to be ready to bomb military installations outside of Ukraine, and indeed on Russian soil. While acknowledging these dangers, Breedlove himself thinks that we should not take the threat of a no-fly zone off the table, presumably for strategic ambiguity reasons. As a bluff never carried through, it has some merits: the more Russia wonders about our final intentions, the better. But it’s worth carefully thinking through the consequences of actually taking the decision.
Once the United States starts losing planes over Ukraine, for example, the domestic pressure to get revenge will become orders of magnitude greater than it already is. Demands for punitive actions against Russian ground forces will become shriller, with calls to bomb troops in Ukraine as well as bases in Belarus or Russia. Besides a thirst for revenge, righteous indignation would also increase. After all, most of the horrors we are witnessing are the result of Russian artillery pounding an overmatched Ukrainian resistance and targeting helpless civilians in cities. Air power has its limits, however. Properly punishing Russian forces will at some point require deploying ground troops of our own. A no-fly zone could transform into a more ambitious land war for securing Ukrainian territory in no time, a land war that itself spills over into Belarus and Russia.
How bad could that be, though? Doesn’t the apparent sorry state of the Russian army mean that NATO would have little trouble in stopping Moscow’s murderous campaign fairly quickly?
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While the United States was preoccupied fighting low-grade colonial wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan and building up its force posture to most effectively kill aggrieved shepherds with machine guns riding around in Toyota LandCruisers, Russia (and China) have been upgrading their tactical nuclear arsenal in preparation for exactly the kind of confrontation we see now in Ukraine.
Tactical nuclear weapons should be distinguished from strategic nuclear weapons. The former are of much lower yield and destructive power than the latter, and are designed to obliterate a tank battalion or a base rather than an entire city. Indeed, they were first developed by the United States in the Cold War in order to deter superior Soviet land forces from contemplating an invasion of a comparatively overmatched NATO army on the European continent. The idea was that if the Soviets rolled tanks into the Fulda Gap, for example, NATO could destroy them without triggering the ultimate escalation to Mutually Assured Destruction — a nuclear exchange targeting cities on both sides that would likely end human civilization as we know it.
The military strategist Elbridge Colby was among those warning in 2018 that American complacency on the question of tactical nukes was leading us to disaster. Liberals and doves were certain that with nuclear war now “unthinkable,” there was no point in investing in weapons that would skirt the threshold of total annihilation. It was part a failure of imagination, and part of a broader belief in rationalist “progress” — with the madness of the Cold War behind us, no one would again risk taking the world to the brink. A new day had dawned on the world with the fall of the Soviet Union. There was no going back to darkness.
Sadly, planners in Moscow were not as idealistic, or complacent. Willick cites a Congressional Research Service report, saying that “the United States has only 230 [tactical nuclear weapons], ‘with around 100 deployed with aircraft in Europe.’ Russia has up to 2,000.” Talmadge nails down the predicament we find ourselves in: “The problem is that precisely because all-out nuclear war would be so costly for both the U.S. and Russia, Mr. Putin likely believes it won’t happen. As a result, he may feel relatively safe engaging in conventional aggression or even limited nuclear use below that threshold — demonstration strikes, for example, or attacks on military targets — without much risk of a Western response.”
In The Kill Chain, Christian Brose describes a time when new secretary of defense had just taken office:
He openly championed the need for a revolution in military affairs. He created a new Office of Force Transformation in the Department of Defense to oversee the development of new military technologies and new ways of fighting. He signed a new defense strategy that directed the Pentagon to solve key operational problems that looked as if they had been lifted directly from Marshall’s 20XX wargame series — the focus not so much on the less-capable adversaries the United States had been contending with since 1991 but rather more so on emerging great powers with increasingly capable militaries. In other words, China.
But — in what ultimately proved unfortunate for the idea of a revolution in military affairs — that secretary’s name was Donald Rumsfeld, and nine months after taking office in 2001, America was attacked.
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As in 1991, US forces operated from sanctuaries on the doorsteps of our opponents, who were powerless to stop us. We controlled the timing of when the wars were fought. We could operate with near impunity. We were technologically superior.
The Javelin has been fielded to the U.S. Military since the mid-1990s
However, it came to great notoriety during the 2003 invasion of Iraq when Green Berets from 3rd Special Forces Group pushed across the green line with Peshmerga fighters and engaged an enemy armor battalion. Over the course of several days, ODA 391 and ODA 392 called in airstrikes and fired a total of 19 Javelin missiles at enemy trucks, armored personnel carriers, and T-55 tanks.
Of the 19 missiles fired, 17 resulted in hits. Interestingly, although the manual states that the maximum effective range of the Javelin is 2,000 meters, all of the shots fired during what became known as the Battle of Debecka Pass were over 2,200 meters. The longest shot was 4,200 meters. The Green Berets demonstrated that a small unconventional force could take on an enemy armor unit with the proper mix of ground mobility vehicles, Javelin anti-tank missiles, and close air support.
[…]
The FGM-148 Javelin consists of two separate components, the reusable Command Launch Unit (CLU) and the launch tube that houses the missile itself. The CLU consists of a body with a day site, thermal sight, hand grips, battery compartment, firing mechanism, and the interface that actually attaches the CLU to the launch.
[…]
In 2015 and 2016, officials were still debating the merits of giving the Ukrainian military the Javelin for fears that it could provoke another Russian invasion. Bureaucrats argued amongst themselves as to how to mitigate the risk by engaging in games of semantics.
[…]
A deal was worked out that they would call it defensive aid, with the pre-requisite that the Ukrainians could only use it if fired upon first. Also, the weapon systems would be locked up in a secure facility, and only issued out to the military during an emergency. The Ukrainians shrugged off the conditions and dully agreed.
The first shipment of Javelins arrived in 2018, the weapons systems along with a training and sustainment block (called the Total Package Approach) totaling somewhere around 75 million dollars. “It takes like 18 months to get shit approved, then it spends six months on a boat,” the U.S. Military official complained, saying that we are way behind in providing training in assistance when other countries go to Russia and request fighter jets or helicopters and get them in a couple of weeks.
But the first shipment did arrive, and initial training was conducted by a contractor from Lockheed before the training program was taken over by the Security Assistance Training Management Organization (SATMO). This little-known organization has Warrant Officers, Master Gunners, and others on staff specifically to train foreign partner forces. Working with the Ukrainian military for six years, SATMO delivered an additional 200,000 pounds of lethal military aid to Ukraine in late 2021.
[…]
A U.S. Special Operations official monitoring the conflict in Ukraine told Connecting Vets that he had seen estimates of 280 Russian armored vehicles taken out by the Javelin as of this writing, out of 300 total missiles fired.
Jacob Stoil shares seven strategic lessons from the first days of the war in Ukraine. The first two are sobering:
Lesson 1: The logic of nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction has not changed.
Throughout the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war kept the nuclear powers from engaging directly. Indeed, a clear show of sufficiently armed resolve was generally enough to prevent escalation by the other power. It is hard to conceive of any limited objective worth nuclear war. This led to careful deployments. US forces did not protect Hungary in 1956, nor did Soviet forces press their advantage around Berlin. Both sides generally accompanied their troop movements and forward deployments with significant escalation-control measures.
The US deployment in Eastern Europe over the last several months continues to reflect this logic. As Russia became more bellicose toward Ukraine, the United States was careful to deploy to NATO countries. The countries were not areas likely to see aggression by Russian conventional forces, at least in this round of conflict. This unchanged prevailing logic also means that a great power adversary is unlikely to engage any robust US deployment through large-scale conventional means. At the same time, it does not make wars less likely because of what became known among deterrence scholars during the Cold War as the stability-instability paradox. The logic of this paradox did not go away when the Soviet Union collapsed. At its essence this paradox suggests that because of mutually assured destruction, nuclear-armed great powers will engage in proxy conflicts (such as in Syria) or limited operations against their rivals, while at the same time feeling more comfortable in engaging in conflicts against minor non-nuclear-armed powers because they believe that once war starts a rival great power will not intervene through conventional military means. This tendency is clearly evident in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Lesson 2: US nuclear deterrence extends no further than the most forward US soldier.
This lesson follows from the first. Nuclear deterrence is determined by the perception of commitment. This explains in no small part why large numbers of US forces spent the Cold War forward deployed in Europe. Presence and commitment go hand in hand. At the heart of the matter is the question of which county has to make the decision to risk a potential nuclear confrontation. In this regard the limitations of nuclear deterrence reflect the theory of first-mover advantage. If there are significant numbers of US military personnel in area, then to launch a large conventional attack on that place is to choose to risk the possibility of escalation. Attacking a country that has no significant US presence forces the United States to choose to risk escalation over a conflict of comparatively limited national interest.
Rotational forces provide deterrence when they are present but no deterrence when they are not. Only a permanent presence serves to create the deterrent effect. If the United States has not backed up its commitment on the ground, then that commitment, in effect, does not exist. The recent requests from NATO countries near Ukraine for an enhanced US military presence reflect this principle. The military presence does not have to be sufficiently robust to repel a large-scale offensive by a rival great power but it does have to be sufficient to demonstrate that any invasion will cause escalation and a great power war. The deployment of the 82nd Airborne Division to Poland matches this logic exactly.
At its most fundamental this lesson should teach us to think of US presence as signaling not only our resolve to defend one country, but also our lack of resolve to defend those countries in which we do not commit permanent forces. By deploying to the NATO countries of Eastern Europe and not to Ukraine we signaled Russia that we were not committed to the defense of Ukraine and our deterrent umbrella did not cover the country. This was a critical step in the development of the Russia campaign. As a result, Russia gained the first-mover advantage, which will make any attempt to affect Russian forces’ removal far more difficult. This lesson has direct relevance to any place, such as Taiwan, to which the United States has made a commitment but does not have an enduring presence.
After all, academics dwell in the realm of the abstract and the theoretical while military professionals dwell in the realm of the concrete and the real. Moreover, military professionals are not entirely comfortable with violence as a bargaining process. One does not, they believe, “bargain” with one’s enemies — one fights them. Nor do they find congenial the idea that coercion requires the cooperation of the enemy. Even if one explains that this is by no means happy cooperation, it rankles nonetheless because they (especially those in the U.S. military) believe they should own the initiative and maintain dominance across the full spectrum of conflict at all times.
The word “coercion” itself sits uneasily with military professionals. It has overtones of blackmail and manipulation, which are anathema to their self-identity. In general, they also do not take readily to Schelling’s emphasis on threats. While they fully understand deterrence, they may draw back from the idea that they are in the business of “threatening” others (and sometimes making those threats credible by actions) in order to deter and compel. For Schelling, conflicts involving coercion unfold through a kind of violent communication about intentions and commitment. Understandably, few military officers see killing and dying as just a form of communication.
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Schelling was interested in the ability of military power to “hurt” the enemy — to inflict pain or punishment — and the inherent “bargaining power” this confers. Coercion is about future pain, about structuring the enemy’s incentives so that he behaves in a particular way. It manipulates the power to hurt and involves making a threat to do something one has not yet done. The coercer forces another actor to calculate, to decide — based on his own interests and position — whether or not to resist the threat being made.
Observing human behavior, Schelling recognized that humans use threats constantly to shape the behavior of others. We do this for a range of reasons. Anyone who has raised a child has learned quickly how to influence that child’s choices: A parent may issue a threat in order to keep a child from harm, or to set boundaries to help prepare the child for civil interaction with others. As children grow older, the content of those behavior-influencing threats must change in order to reflect the child’s level of comprehension and new interests and the parent’s changing leverage over the child’s behavior.
Similarly, if we wish to keep our homes safe from intruders, we may install a security system and then post a sign advertising it. A potential intruder is alerted to the negative consequences that will greet any attempt to enter without permission. This action is meant to deter — to prevent someone from taking an action he otherwise might take. But threats can be used to compel actions as well as deter them. In the film The Godfather, Don Corleone promises to influence the decisions of the head of a film studio, stating, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” If the recipient of the threat refuses to accept the “offer” (which is actually a demand), then harm will follow. The coercive threat is designed to compel an individual to do something he would prefer not to do. If the threat derives from a source known to be willing and able to produce harm, then it is credible and must be taken seriously.
An actor being coerced (i.e., the target state) must assess its own willingness and ability to endure pain, as well as the credibility of the adversary’s threat. “The power to hurt,” Schelling explained, “is a kind of bargaining power, not easy to use, but used often.” Even great powers possessing high levels of coercive leverage over others find that target states can resist in unexpected ways, making the line between the application of power and the achievement of a desired outcome anything but direct and straightforward. By its nature, coercion requires a decision by the actor being coerced, thus placing the outcome in the actor’s hands. This is what makes coercion difficult and complex — and distinct from a more direct use of power that Schelling defined as “brute force,” wherein there is no need for a decision by the target state because power is imposed directly in such a way as to obviate choice.
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The power to hurt confers bargaining power, Schelling insisted. The willingness to exploit it is diplomacy — “vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.”
Schelling explained that the use of “the power to hurt” operates like blackmail in that it exploits an enemy’s fears and needs. The power to hurt is usually most successful when it is held in reserve. Hostages, for instance, are taken and held for coercive purposes. Those taking the hostages seek to make another actor give up something — money, political prisoners, etc. But if they kill the hostage, the other actor no longer has an incentive to concede and coercive hostage-taking fails. Any coercive act that kills the hostage, as it were, reduces its own effectiveness. Hostages, Schelling argued, “represent the power to hurt in its purest form.”
In Schelling’s taxonomy, “coercion” is an overarching category encompassing both “deterrence” and “compellence.” The word “deterrence” was in common usage when he wrote Arms and Influence. The term “compellence” he coined himself, after rejecting several alternatives. Since 1966, it has become part of the lexicon of security studies. (Schelling admired, but chose not to select, the terms “dissuasion” and “persuasion” that J. David Singer had used several years earlier to describe a similar idea.)
Deterrence involves a threat to keep an adversary “from starting something,” or “to prevent [an adversary] from action by fear of consequences.” Compellence is “a threat intended to make an adversary do something.” In deterrence, the punishment will be imposed if the adversary acts; in compellence, the punishment is usually imposed until the adversary acts. As noted, the central characteristic of both forms of coercion is that they depend, ultimately, on cooperation by the party receiving the threat. This is by no means friendly cooperation, but it is cooperation nonetheless. Compellence can be used in peacetime and in wartime, the former use being referred to generally as coercive diplomacy.
Alexander Downes describes coercion as “the art of manipulating costs and benefits to affect the behavior of an actor.” Explaining its two forms, he writes, “Deterrence consists of threats of force designed to persuade a target to refrain from taking a particular action. Compellence, by contrast, utilizes force — or threats of force — to propel a target to take an action, or to stop taking an action it has already started.” The United States, he notes, is one of the most frequent users of compellent threats. Examples abound. Sometimes they involve the use (or threatened use) of U.S. troops, and sometimes they do not. But military power always stands in the background. In one notable example from 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower used economic and diplomatic threats to compel the British, French, and Israelis to cease the military operations they had begun in response to Egypt nationalizing the Suez Canal. More recently, the administration of President Donald Trump used a threat of economic sanctions to try to compel the Mexican government to more aggressively discourage population flows across the U.S. border.
Mathew Burrows and Christopher Preble argue that the impulse to cut Russia out of the international system is understandable but also impractical:
In the wake of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, it is tempting to want to go beyond the very severe sanctions that the West has imposed, even as the publics in both the United States and Europe are not prepared for the likely economic pain. Others have proposed that NATO impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, or provide arms to the Ukrainians resisting Russian aggression, which would not affect Americans’ pocketbooks, but do increase the risk of escalation that could directly threaten global security.
The overriding question, therefore, is of how to ensure the punishment is appropriate, and eliminates the potential for long-term damage.
[…]
There is a tendency in the short-term to focus on the morally superior stance, that it is always better to aid the defenders against the aggressors. But it is worth asking whether that is in the best interest of the Ukrainian people, for example if the additional arms prolong a war that might otherwise have ended more quickly in a negotiated settlement.
[…]
People like to imagine turning Ukraine into Putin’s Afghanistan, but they should remember the extraordinary — even sometimes absurd — lengths that the Carter and Reagan administrations employed to conceal U.S. involvement in that earlier war (even though the Soviets were quite aware). As Austin Carson explains in his book Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics, the United States worried about the spread of the conflict should that support be disclosed. And there were inadvertent consequences as well. The United States’ arming of the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan, though justified at the time, eventually produced al-Qaeda.
One way or another, the Russian war in Ukraine will wind down. Our common interests should push toward something other than a new Cold War between Russia and the West. All parties should recall that decades-long confrontation, with vast armies massed along militarized borders, as a tragedy to be avoided. The only thing worse, also a distinct possibility, is World War III.
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Efforts to totally isolate Russia will increase its dependence on China, and no doubt expand Western frictions with Beijing, further accelerating deglobalization. The dramatic expansion of trade and cultural exchange over the last three decades opened up unprecedented economic opportunities for the world, almost ending extreme poverty. Putin deserves to be punished, but not at the cost of a much poorer future for everyone.
Ukraine is offering amnesty plus five million rubles (about $48,000) to anyone who deserts from the Russian army and agrees to go to a Ukrainian prison, and Bryan Caplan suggests some improvements to this deal:
On the surface, this sounds like a sweet deal, but on reflection, it’s anything but. Put yourself in the shoes of a Russian soldier. First, you have to elude the Red Army, knowing you could be shot for desertion. Then, you have to surrender without getting killed by Ukrainians. After that, you’re stuck in prison; maybe they’ll deposit you in a regular POW camp, complete with Russian loyalists ready to kill you when the guard’s not looking. Wherever you languish, you know your fate hinges on the outcome of the war.
[…]
But let me propose a Version 2.0 to better fulfill the intent of the original offer.
Version 2.0: The EU, in cooperation with Ukraine, offers $100,000 plus EU citizenship to any Russian deserter. Russians can either go directly to the EU, or surrender to Ukrainian forces for speedy transport to the EU border.
The key gain: Deserters no longer have to gamble on Ukrainian success. As long as they escape from the Red Army’s zone of control, they survive. A much better gamble.
Extra benefits: Instead of going to a Ukrainian prison or POW camp, you get to enjoy freedom in the EU. And the EU is far more likely to swiftly hand over the promised monetary bounty.
How much of a burden is this on the EU? Chump change, really. Even in a magical scenario where all of the roughly 200,000 Russian troops in the vicinity take the deal, $100,000 per soldier is a mere $20 billion. That’s less than one-fifth of what Germany now plans to spend on defense in 2022 alone. It wouldn’t be crazy to go up to $1,000,000 per deserter. You could even do a classic multi-tier offer, where the first 10,000 deserters get a million bucks each to compensate for the high initial risk, followed by lower payments for late-leavers who get to desert in comparative safety.
[…]
Scary countries are deeply vulnerable to paid desertion, while the nicest countries are almost immune. How much would Russia have to offer Germans to desert to Russia? Nein, danke!
It’s an odd place for an American president, Matt Welch of Reason notes:
His country sits transfixed by a war more than 4,500 miles to the east, rooting openly in solidarity for the hopelessly outgunned underdogs fighting bravely for their homeland against a ruthless invader from Moscow. Hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees have already poured out to the West, while the young men back home fashion Molotov cocktails to hurl at tanks. The United States, unusually, is not a central protagonist in this military conflict, to the disappointment of both the ragtag rebels and some overenthusiastic hawks back home.
U.S. history being long enough, the above description fits another State of the Union address: Dwight D. Eisenhower’s somber message to Congress on January 10, 1957, two months after the dramatic and bloody Soviet putdown of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, an event seared into the memory of the Americans who lived through it. Time had declared the “Hungarian Freedom Fighter” its 1956 Man of the Year; Elvis Presley hawked donations for refugees on The Ed Sullivan Show. Even Jean-Paul Sartre broke with his longtime communist comrades (as did many fellow travelers in the West).
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Having foregrounded this “season of stress that is testing the fitness of political systems and the validity of political philosophies,” Ike then laid out two very different approaches to confronting it: patient institution-building in Europe, and a more hegemonic responsibility for security arrangements in the Middle East. Biden would be good to learn lessons from both.
“The recent historic events in Hungary demand that all free nations share to the extent of their capabilities in the responsibility of granting asylum to victims of Communist persecution,” Eisenhower said. So asylum, not bombs.
The president also emphasized non-military means of bolstering the anti-communist bulwark in still-rebuilding Western Europe. “We must emphasize aid to our friends in building more productive economies and in better satisfying the natural demands of their people,” he said. Critical to that effort were long-term tariff reduction and mutual cooperation. “We welcome the efforts of a number of our European friends to achieve an integrated community to develop a common market.” For the duration of the Cold War, increasingly freer trade would be seen by Washington as an essential component of strengthening what was then called “the free world.”
None of these measures provided anything like immediate relief for Polish workers, Hungarian students, or other routed freedom fighters in the East Bloc. But — importantly! — they also avoided hot military conflict between two nuclear-armed superpowers, while also clearing the way for the eventual anti-communist revolutions of 1989 by the very people who’d been subjugated for so long.
While the U.S. and Russia have a similar number of deployed strategic (i.e., high-yield) nuclear weapons as limited under New START, Russia has a 10:1 advantage over us in nonstrategic (i.e., low-yield) nuclear weapons — aka tactical or battlefield nukes:
Today, while open-source numbers are fuzzy, Russia has about 2,000 nonstrategic nuclear weapons, while the U.S. has about 200 total — with half in the U.S. and half in Europe as part of NATO.
[...]
The idea is Russia might employ one (or more) tactical nuclear weapon during a conventional conflict with NATO forces to prevent a defeat, consolidate gains, or even freeze a conflict in place without further fighting.
Because the disparity between Russian and U.S. tactical nuclear weapons is so large, Moscow may perceive a NATO nuclear response to lack credibility.
It is tempting to think that working at a think tank is a way to encourage possible social change, but Arnold Kling found that working in business is the activity most likely to achieve positive social change:
In 1980, I completed my Ph.D dissertation. My goal was to solve a theoretical problem in Keynesian economics, hoping to steer the profession away from the “rational expectations neoclassical” macroeconomics that was all the rage within top economics departments. The idea was to explain price stickiness as based on information problems.
Trying to solve an important theoretical problem is a terrible strategy for a dissertation. Instead, you should figure out what the departments that are hiring are looking for. What they were looking for at the time were dissertations that were based on the rational expectations approach.
For me, the result was particularly bad. A professor who interviewed me on the job market stole my idea and published it before I did, without acknowledgment. The idea had no impact on the profession. In fact, it has been periodically rediscovered since (with no credit either to me or to the man who stole it), but again with no impact. This experience has left me less than excited about the academic research process in economics as a way to generate social change through ideas.
My first job out of grad school was at the Fed. I do not recall coming up with any significant ideas when I was there.
In 1986, I started working at Freddie Mac, the mortgage giant. At the time, I thought of it as a profit-seeking enterprise, albeit with some peculiar features. One feature was that it was supposed to “serve” upward mobility in the housing market.
Another feature was that with its government guarantee, its debt costs were low, and this gave it an advantage in undertaking certain forms of financial arbitrage. I was appalled when an economist told me excitedly about an anomaly in the Eurodollar market that he thought that Freddie could and should exploit. To me, that seemed like an abuse of Freddie’s Congressional charter.
In the 2000s, long after I had left, Freddie and Fannie took on riskier borrowers in a (misguided) attempt to serve upward mobility in the housing market. They also engaged in more of what I thought of as abuses of their low-cost debt status. I ended up happy to see them shut down during the financial crisis of 2008. I think that profit-seeking and a tight relationship with the government were ultimately a bad combination.
But working at Freddie gave me the best opportunity I have ever had to produce social change. My most significant idea there was to change the underwriting process to reduce judgment and rely more on data. Instead of trying to use AI to imitate human underwriters, I pushed for using credit scores. I also promoted using the Case-Shiller method for estimating home prices in an attempt to reduce the reliance on appraisals. The goal was to reduce the cost of obtaining a mortgage loan, to reject fewer good loans, and to accept fewer bad loans.
Freddie Mac adopted the credit scoring approach in 1994. For me personally, this was more bitter than sweet. Just as the idea I was pushing for was adopted, I was treated to a humiliating demotion, and I soon left the company.
As far as social change is concerned, the move toward credit scoring dramatically changed the mortgage industry. Yes, underwriting costs fell, and decisions became more accurate, with fewer good borrowers turned down and fewer bad borrowers accepted. But it also allowed new players to enter the mortgage lending market. Some of these players developed the so-called subprime mortgage market, with mortgage securities provided by Wall Street. These new players were central actors in the financial crisis of 2008.
I am not saying that I personally brought down mortgage lending costs, or that I personally caused the financial crisis. My guess is that the move toward credit scoring was going to happen at some point, anyway, and so that my efforts accelerated the process by at most a few years. And the financial crisis had many causal elements, mostly involving the political economy of mortgage lending in the U.S. I still think that introducing credit scoring into mortgage lending was socially beneficial, at least directly. But in a complicated world, the indirect effects of actions are difficult to assess.
When I left Freddie Mac in April of 1994, I created The Homebuyer’s Fair, one of the first commercial sites on the World Wide Web. The goal was to use the Internet to disintermediate in real estate and mortgage lending. For me personally, it worked out well. But apart from any role that the site played in stimulating interest in the Web (we got tons of press in 1994-1997), I would not say that it came anywhere close to achieving any major social goals. As any number of people who have tried to get rid of the excessive costs in real estate can tell you, institutional resistance to change is strong. In principle, the Internet could have eliminated real estate commissions 25 years ago. In practice, not so much. In principle, a digital property database could eliminate the title insurance industry. In practice, the title industry’s grip on Congress is too strong.
After our web site was sold in 1999 (to a subsidiary of the National Association of Realtors(tm), ironically enough), I “retired” to a career of teaching and writing. I taught on a volunteer basis for 15 years at a local high school. I mostly taught AP economics and AP statistics. I hated the AP econ curriculum, because my experience in business had led me to believe that a lot of mainstream economics is poorly conceived. I really liked the statistics curriculum, although one of my students, an autodidact who was a follower of the rationalist community, chided me for teaching a “frequentist” rather than a Bayesian approach.
My goal was to have some long-run influence with at least a few students. I think I was somewhat successful, although by 2015 or so I was struggling with what appeared to me to be the reduced maturity of the students.
I also taught for a few years at George Mason University, at the ridiculous adjunct salary of about $1500 for a class of 100 students. And, as my wife is fond of pointing out, GMU even made me pay for parking. Again, I would have been happy to reach a small number of students with a long-term impact, but I don’t think that I did.
Discussion in Westminster suffers from false dichotomies. People on ‘the right’ who don’t know about great management talk as if ‘bureaucracy is a public sector problem’ that can be cured by ‘making government more like business’. People on the left including many defenders of the status quo say ‘government is not the same as business … it’s simplistic to say cutting bureaucracy is the answer … lessons from great teams aren’t relevant to most of government … we need more money…’
They’re both a bit right and a lot wrong. Whitehall can and should learn from great businesses and great managers, though generally not in the ways ‘free market’ Tory MPs say. And Whitehall is different in critical ways that limit the application of some lessons from business in some narrow ways. But at a more general level, the lessons from great private sector management and the lessons from great public sector case studies are the same. Great businesses can and do learn from projects like Apollo. Governments can and should learn from great businesses. The breakthroughs of ‘systems management’ came in the public sector between the 1940s and 1960s then spread to business then were largely forgotten by western governments (though are much studied in China).
One of many useful things about this book is the way it shows how many problems of ‘bureaucracy’ we see in government are the same or similar to those experienced in Amazon — and Amazon is, by common consent of the great judges of these things (e.g Charlie Munger), one of the very best managed organisations in the world.
Overall the book is an anti-checklist for Westminster in the sense that if you look at all the things they do really well and really value, and you’ve worked around No10/Cabinet office, you’ll say to yourelf ‘tick, tick, tick, government does the opposite, opposite, opposite’. It’s similar to my paper on the ICBM and Apollo projects which also illustrated a set of ideas about brilliant management that are an anti-checklist for Westminster.
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A more fundamental problem than the failures of the civil service is that politicians do not care and are not incentivised to care about performance and unless this changes we can only expect the same sort of failures over and over.
When I said this years ago nobody wanted to hear it. But in 2021 we saw that even after a global pandemic costing 150k lives and hundreds of billions, Westminster collectively turned away from facing the reasons for the implosion of core institutions in 2020, No10 embarked on an attempt to rewrite history, most MPs tried to ‘move on’ rather than force honesty about what happened, while the media mainly overwhelmed serious debate with noise. Errors of spring 2020 were repeated more than once killing thousands more. Things that worked well but challenged traditional ways of doing things, such as the Vaccine Taskforce, were dismantled rather than learned from and built on. Rather than have a very fast lessons learned process, the PM and other senior figures have repeated the historical pattern — punt an extremely lengthy inquiry led by lawyers far into the future where it will have little practical effect on how critical decisions are made, just as the Iraq inquiry did not fix the problems of the MOD and Cabinet Office.