Fight Or Flight

The journal Science notes that Ukrainian scientists are deciding whether to become resistance fighters against the Russian invasion, or to flee the country as refugees, giving this event a very human and practical dimension.

On 24 February, as Russian troops poured across the border in an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Sergei Mosyakin, director of the Institute of Botany in Kyiv, set out with a few key staff to secure the institute and its National Herbarium, which holds more than 2 million specimens representing the wealth of Ukraine’s floral and fungal diversity. 

Several kilometers to the south, Fedor Danevich and six colleagues at the Institute for Nuclear Research had joined an online workshop for a multinational physics project in South Korea. The Zoom call included Russian physicists. “One said that he is sorry for the war,” Danevich recalls. The other Russians kept silent. 

. . .

As Russian forces bombarded and sought to encircle Kyiv, Mosyakin and some fellow botanists hunkered down at home, whereas others took refuge with relatives in the countryside. 

Danevich says he and his wife intended to stay in Kyiv, but their son persuaded them to seek shelter in Budapest, Hungary. As Science went to press, the family had made it as far as Romania.

Condemnation of the invasion has rained down on Russia from many quarters, and a rising chorus is calling on the West to sever ties with Russian scientists. “I’m sitting now with my 86-year-old mother, who is a prominent biochemist, listening to the sounds of battle some 20 kilometers to the west, and waiting for the next bombardment,” says Maksym Strikha, a physicist and former top official in Ukraine’s science ministry. “Could you imagine asking a Polish physicist, surrounded and bombed in Warsaw in September 1939, whether it would be fair to maintain scientific diplomacy with scientists in Nazi Germany?” 

. . .

In Europe, a number of institutions have offered refuge to Ukrainian scientists, some of whom have joined an exodus of more than 500,000 people from the besieged country. 

The Polish Young Academy, part of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), has lined up scores of institutes and universities willing to host refugee scientists. “We want to find them jobs in their expertise,” says Jacek Kolanowski of PAN’s Institute of Bioorganic chemistry. So far, they’ve secured positions for a psychologist in Warsaw, a cancer researcher in Lublin, and a law professor in Poznań.  

In Germany, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Philipp Schwartz-Initiative, which helps find succor for scholars at risk, has invited Ukrainian scientists to apply for funding with German partners. “Our lab in Berlin will support researchers who had to flee Ukraine,” tweeted Matthias Rillig, an ecologist at the Free University of Berlin.

Many Ukrainian scientists have vowed to stay and defend their homeland. “Virtually the entire population has taken up arms,” says Oleg Krishtal, a neurophysiologist with the Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology, who is sticking it out in Kyiv. 

Mosyakin says that although he is a mixture of at least four nationalities, “I am a Ukrainian, period.” And most Ukrainians he knows “are not afraid to die for their native land.”

Reflections On The Military Aspects Of The War In Ukraine

A week into the active fighting in Ukraine, it is possible to make some meaningful assessments of the conflict from a military perspective.

The biggest point, by far, is that unexpectedly, despite being outnumbered and having far fewer major military systems and far less military equipment, Ukraine has not yet fallen to Russia's invasion. 

Russia's Military Has Underperformed

Ukraine has not fallen yet, mostly to an underwhelming performance by the Russian military, and secondarily, to a more robust than expected Ukrainian defense of its territory. Still, Ukraine remains an underdog in this conflict. 

Obvious Screw Ups

Perhaps most glaringly, many Russian military vehicles has literally run out of fuel en route to Ukrainian cities, have gotten lost using outdated maps, and have been impaired by shortages of food. Some of the rations that they do have are spoiled. Russian military logistics and attention to the basics has been abysmal.

Keep in mind that Russia is the most oil rich country in Europe, whose international trade is dominated by its sales of oil and natural gas to the rest of Europe. 

Russia is also at least as rich, on a per capita basis, as Ukraine, although oil and natural gas wealth, and concentration of Russian wealth in the hands of a new class of oligarchs and kleptocrats, overstates the relative edge that Russia's other 99% and Russia's non-natural resource core economy over Ukraine.

Less Obvious Screw Ups

Other short fallings of the Russian military have been less obvious without insight from military experts, but also very basic.

While the initial Russian strike against predominantly military targets across Ukraine on February 24 was made up mostly of guided missiles, Russia has used few guided missiles and "smart bombs" since then. In contrast, the U.S. has used guided ordinance almost exclusively for the last twenty years and hasn't used as small a proportion of guided missiles and bombs in active conflicts since twenty-five or thirty years ago. This may be because Russia has limited supplies of guided munitions because it couldn't afford to purchase large volumes them (which are more than ten times more expensive than unguided rockets, shells and bombs) and has used up much of its available supplies of guided munitions in other small wars it has fought in Syria and in former Soviet Republics.

Russia has failed to secure complete air superiority in Ukraine in a suppression of enemy air defenses (SEADs) campaign at the outset, leaving Ukrainian jet fighters in the air to oppose it and leaving Ukraine with some significant anti-aircraft resources. Dozens of Russian fighters and military helicopters have been shot down by Ukrainian forces, partially through the efforts of Ukrainian fighter pilots that have produced some new "aces" (i.e. pilots with five or more enemy kills), and partially through anti-aircraft weapons, both some surviving major anti-aircraft missile systems and infantry carried MANPADS, which are light anti-aircraft missiles like the "Stinger" missile that has been in use around the world since the 1980s.

Possibly, in part, because Ukrainian air defenses have not been fully suppressed, Russia has deployed only a small fraction of its roughly three hundred advanced military aircraft in the region. 

Russia has also not used aircraft to provide the degree of close air support that Western military forces deployed in places like Iraq and Afghanistan have come to expect as the norm.

Intelligence sharing from Western allies (especially the United Kingdom and the United States) who declined to put "boots on the ground" in the conflict has also reduced the importance of Russia's successful destruction of Ukraine's early warning system radar at the outset of the conflict.

Lots of the tanks, artillery, and armored personnel carriers that Russia has deployed are thirty year old vehicles, even though Russia has designed and built more modern ones which have inexplicably not been fully deployed in this conflict.

A basic principle of fighting with armored vehicles like tanks is that they need to be deployed in connection with dismounted infantry to resist enemy infantry with resources like modern anti-tank missiles - which are about the size and weight of a golfer's bag full of golf clubs - and less sophisticated rocket propelled grenades. Instead, Russian infantry have been reluctant to leave deceptive sense of security they have when they stay inside the armored personnel carriers that have brought them to the front. This has made Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers, and mobile artillery vehicles vulnerable to attacks from Ukrainian forces (who have been bolstered with advanced anti-tank weapons supplied by allies, most notably, by the United Kingdom).

Russian forces have advanced, convoy-style towards major Ukrainian cities single file in large, dense convoys on major Ukrainian highways.

As I footnote, my Facebook account was disabled for a few days for "violating community standards" related to threatening violence against real people, when I suggested in a comment that Western military forces used their air power to do what this not censored meme implies, after previously being cited for posting memes that observe that many U.S. companies raising their prices and claiming that this is due to inflation are simultaneously making record profits and paying record high amounts to their CEOs (both at greater rates than inflation).

Even supposedly elite Chechen armored units led by a storied warlord turned general from Eastern Russia has apparently seen its tank column decimated with its general killed, as a consequence of this kind of tactically thoughtless convoy-style deployment on major roads.

There are reports that a contingent of Russian marines has defied orders to deploy into southern Ukraine from a base in Crimea.

Russia's Military Seems Ill-Trained And Hollow 

Until now, there has really been no reason to doubt the competence or capabilities of the Russian Army and Air Force which have fought effectively with seemingly modern and effective equipment in a variety of insurgencies and small military engagements in countries that were formerly a part of the USSR and in Syria.

Vladimir Putin's rule has been characterized by what has been touted as and perceived internationally as restoration of the Russian military's professionalism and upgrading of its equipment to more modern systems.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, however, casts serious doubts on this assessment, suggesting that its military is "hollow".

Part of the lack of use of air power by Russia may be due to the fact that Russian pilots without combat experience have had only the bare minimum amounts of training time to operate their warplanes and armed helicopters, let alone time spent training to coordinate with ground forces to support them. 

Part of the underperformance of Russian group troops may be due to the fact that about a quarter of Russian troops, even in supposedly elite "special forces" units and among low ranking non-commissioned officers, are eighteen or nineteen year old conscripts on one year tours of duty, with less than six months of post-training experience.

Part of this is due to the fact that Russia lacks a large corps of highly experienced career non-commissioned officers (e.g. sergeants) that are a backbone of Western military forces, leaving officers without the support of seasoned small team leaders and expert military system operators.

The average active duty enlisted soldier and sailors in the U.S. military is 27 years old and has a little less than seven years of experience, and many of those active duty military personnel have combat experience. The average Russian enlisted soldier appears to be younger, to have less experience, and to have never previously been in actual combat.

The dismal underperformance of Russia's military in its invasion of Ukraine, even if it ultimately prevails due to the sheer brute force scale of its military, suggests that Russia's senior officers are also far less competent than widely believed.

It could be that Russia's most competent military personnel are a small corps of mid-level officers who have been placed in charge of operations in its "small wars" using resources cherry-picked from the newest and most modern equipment available, against opponents with less modern military training and equipment than those it is encountering in Ukraine (Ukraine's supply of modern equipment has been boosted in part by infusions of modern military equipment from its European allies during the Russian buildup).

But, perhaps Russia's senior level officers are "past their prime" and lack the priorities and habits that come from participating in real world combat operations, and that it isn't possible to limit your forces to cherry picking the best military systems in your arsenal when fighting a conflict on the scale of Russian's Ukraine invasion. 

Russian Force Size And Casualties

The Russian military as a whole has 900,000 active duty personnel and 2,000 reserves (while Russian reserves have recently been called up, it appears that they are backfilling positions within Russia that have been left vacant as active duty troops have deployed for the Ukraine operation). Russia's military budget is about $43.2 billion U.S. dollars equivalent per year. 

Russia has a nuclear arsenal comparable to that of the United States, each of which have nuclear arsenals far greater than any other country in the world, which are easily capable of ending life as we know it on the planet in an apocalypse. Unlike the U.S., Russia is believed to have small tactical nuclear weapons intended for use in circumstances other than an all out mutual assured destruction (MAD) nuclear war.

There are reported to be about 60,000 to 150,000 Russian troops in Ukraine. One source says about 82% of the troops that built up near Ukraine leading up to the invasion of entered Ukraine now.

Estimates of the number of Russian soldiers killed have ranged from about 2,000 to about 5,300 in the first week, with more Russian soldiers wounded. Russia claims that it has about 2,100 casualties, but that only about a quarter of those are deaths, with the remainder being serious injuries. U.S. intelligence experts estimate that about 1,500 Russian soldiers have been killed.

The percentage of Russian soldiers deployed into Ukraine who have been killed is more than 1% but less than 10%, and is probably at the low end of that range (perhaps 1.5%).

About 400 Russian soldiers were killed in its military operations in Ukraine in 2014. Thousands of Russian soldiers were killed in the Chechen counterinsurgency operation. About 15,000 Russian soldiers were killed in its occupation of Afghanistan (compared to 2,500 U.S. soldiers killed in its 20 years in Afghanistan).

Ukrainian forces, combined with Russian military logistics incompetence, have neutralized at least six hundred Russian armored personnel carriers, more than 140 Russian tanks, several dozen Russian mobile artillery vehicles, a couple dozen Russian military helicopters, and more than a dozen Russian fixed wing warplanes. 

It isn't clear how many armored personnel carriers, tanks, mobile artillery units, military helicopters, and fixed wing warplanes Russia has deployed in its invasion of Ukraine, but certainly, these losses are significant.

The Russian military as a whole has 2,840 main battle tanks, although it isn't clear how many have been deployed in this operation. Certainly, however, far, far less than its total fleet of tanks has been deployed to its invasion of the Ukraine, implying that far more than 5% of the tanks Russia has deployed have been neutralized in the first week of the war.

The Russian air force has 185 jet fighters designed for air to air combat and 415 ground attack warplanes, and it has been reported that it has about 300 fighter aircraft of both types combined (about half of its total air force resources) deployed close to Ukraine. Only a modest fraction of them appear to have flown missions into Ukraine. This implies that about 5% of Russia's fighter aircraft in the region, and a far greater percentage of the fighter aircraft that Russia that have flown sorties in Ukraine, have been shot down.

Russia's navy, worldwide, is rivaled only by that of the larger U.S. navy, and the comparable Chinese navy. It has one aircraft carrier, 4 near-battle ship class cruisers, 11 destroyers, and 15 frigates, as well as 49 armed submarines.

Only a few of Russia's surface warships are in the Black Sea. There are probably no Russian armed submarines in the Black Sea. These Russian navy ships fired a few of the missiles in the opening salvo of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, and overwhelmed at least one, and probably several, Ukrainian border guard positions very early on. There have been no Russian navy military casualties.

Ukrainian Force Size And Military Casualties

Ukraine reportedly has about 100,000 fully trained and equipped soldiers, although another source stated that before the conflict that Ukraine has 209,000 active duty military personnel and 900,000 reserve troops.

In terms of major military systems, immediately prior to the conflict Ukraine reportedly had 858 main battle tanks, a navy with just one ship of frigate size or larger and no armed submarines, 71 air to air combat capable fighter aircraft, and 14 ground attack fighter aircraft. Some of Ukraine's navy was destroyed in connection with the 2014 Russian military capture of Crimea. Ukraine's military budget is about $4.3 billion U.S. dollars equivalent per year. 

Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal to Russia when the Soviet Union broke up.

Ukraine also has another 100,000 hastily armed and fielded, but minimally trained, militia members. It militia is made up of ordinary (mostly) Ukrainian men and women. 

The Ukrainian militia forces have been far more effective in protecting their homeland than their counterpart Russian conscripts with little experience but full military training have been in invading it. Some of the over performance by Ukrainian militias may come from having life experience (and most adult Ukrainian men are military veterans due to long standing conscription requirements) than Russian conscripts do. Some of the over performance by Ukrainian militias may come from familiarity with the theater of battle which is their home which the Russian forces have mostly never encountered before. Some of the over performance by Ukrainian militias may come from the fact that they are volunteers in a life or death fight to preserve their homeland, while Russian conscripts don't want to be there and have no personal stake in the fight other than to survive it and hence have no incentive to take any avoidable risks.

I have seen almost no reports on Ukrainian military casualties or on destruction of Ukrainian major military systems, other than reports that Ukraine's early warning system radar have been destroyed, that many of Ukraine's surface to air missile batteries have been destroyed, and that runways at many of its air bases have been damaged. Presumably, significant numbers of Ukrainian aircraft were destroyed on the ground. Presumably, many Ukrainian tanks and armored personnel carries and artillery units have been destroyed.

Russia claims that it has killed more Ukrainian soldiers than they have killed Russian soldiers. This would be unsurprising, if true, but is hard to evaluate since Russia is not a credible source of information on this question and Ukraine isn't releasing information on the casualties that it has suffered to the public, presumably, in order to help preserve morale and for strategic military reasons. U.S. intelligence experts estimate that about 1,500 Ukrainian combatants have been killed.

If Russia has killed 3,000 to 6,000 Ukrainian soldiers and militia members, this would be 1.5%-3% of Ukrainian military personnel. If 1,500 have been killed, it would be less than 1% of the Ukrainian force, a lower percentage than the Russian force (in part, because not all of the Ukrainian force is located where combat has occurred so far).

Civilian Casualties and Refugees

The number of Ukrainian civilians reported killed so far has been on the order of 400 to 600, which intuitively seems as if it is probably greatly underreported given that the Russians have heavily shelled and bombed Ukraine's second largest city, Kharkiv, with highly inaccurate unguided artillery fire and aircraft dropped unguided bombs, and have engaged in significant rather indiscriminate shelling that has destroyed government offices and civilian facilities in the capital of Kyiv (including residential areas), and in northern, eastern, and southern Ukraine.

Honestly, I would be surprised if the number of civilian casualties to date in Ukraine doesn't turn out to have been in the thousands.

Property damage in Ukraine to infrastructure, government buildings, and civilian buildings has been immense, especially in Ukraine's second largest city.

It almost goes without saying, but there have, of course, been essentially no civilian Russian or Belorussian casualties, and essentially no military damage to Russian or Belorussian property, although global economic sanctions have had a catastrophic impact on the Russian economy.

More than 600,000 Ukrainians have fled to other countries and the number is expected to eventually exceed 4 million out of a population of 43.7 million people, mostly women and children. Prior to the buildup of Russian forces, about 2.6 million Ukrainians lived in Russia, and it isn't clear home many are still there.

More than 40% of Ukrainians have relatives in Russia, and many Russians have relatives in Ukraine.

Future Prospects

The overwhelming shock and awe show of force with which Russia's attack commenced, and the limited supplies of fuel, food, and precision munitions of the Russian forces suggest that Russia's "Plan A" had been to conquer and control Ukraine almost immediately before it had time to resist, and to install a puppet government, with its conquest a fait accompli by the time that Western powers had a chance to react.

By putting off its fall by a week already, Ukraine has given the international community time to impose unprecedented economic sanctions upon Russia and has convinced its international allies that the fight for Ukraine's independence is not futile. The longer Ukraine can continue to fight, the better the prospects are for Russia to accomplish fewer of its goals.

Even if Russia were to seize and hold Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, it is increasingly unlikely that it could secure control of Ukraine as a whole. Instead, it would face an insurgency across Ukraine from a population that has recently been flooded with military grade weapons by its government and has support from most of the other countries in Europe.

Russia has plenty of experience fighting counterinsurgency actions, but none on this scale where the regime in force is so well armed and its regime, if installed in the capital, would have so little legitimacy and voluntary compliance with its orders. Certainly, the force Russia has currently assembled to invade Ukraine isn't enough for it to maintain control of Ukraine with sheer military force in the vast areas that don't have Russian ethic majorities. 

While the international community may be cowed by Russia's threat to use nuclear weapons against any outside country that intervenes, Russia has shown no likelihood of using strategic nuclear weapons in Ukraine so far to respond to Ukraine's own self-defense efforts, to respond to the global economic sanctions it is facing, or to respond to Western efforts to supply Ukraine with advanced military weapons systems. It also isn't entirely clear that lower level Russian military forces in charge of Russia's nuclear arsenal would obey Putin's orders to fire strategic nuclear weapons for only that provocation if Putin did issue those orders.

One plausible reading of the situation, that assumes that the Russian military is not quite as incompetent as it seems, is that Putin's plan was to give a "good college try" at a quick takeover of Ukraine as a whole, if it could secure a quick surrender, but that this was not the main plan. 

Instead, Putin's primary plan may have been to "bloody the nose" of Ukraine enough in a basically futile effort to take over the whole country, that Russian could secure a treaty in which it is awarded international recognition for its annexation of Crimea and occupation of some portion of Eastern Ukraine with Russian ethnic majorities, and perhaps a few other concessions, in exchange from withdrawing from the rest of Ukraine and ceasing hostilities. Some variation of this outcome still seems like a likely endgame in this conflict.

It makes more sense that Russia would not be putting forward its "A game", if Putin had assumed from the outset that the odds that its invasion would not be successful in securing control of the whole of Ukraine were great, and instead, merely intended to use the threat of doing so as a bargaining chip in diplomatic negotiations.

Putin may not have foreseen, however, the impact that a half-hearted invasion effort would have on the international perception of its military competence and hence its credibility in military power influenced negotiations going forward, or the magnitude of the international response, in the form of economic sanctions, to its actions. 

Putin may also not have foreseen the extent to which its invasion, and the economic pain that international sanctions will bring with it, will foment domestic opposition and harm Russia.

Footnote on Language and Spelling

Until 2022, it was almost universal practice, at least in American English, to describe the country called Ukraine as "the Ukraine" with a definite article, even though that is not something that is done outside the English language. But in this conflict this odd exception to the general rule for describing countries that applied to Ukraine has been dropped for some reason and I am following suit.

Also, until 2022, the style guides in most media sources referred to the capital city of Ukraine with the historic English language spelling of "Kiev." But, for some reason, media sources in this conflict have started using the Ukrainian spellings (romanized rather than in Cyrillic script) for cities in Ukraine, including its capital, which is now usually spelled "Kyiv." I am also following this practice now.

A Natural Experiment Demonstrating Alcohol's Downsides

Prohibition didn't work. But its proponents weren't crazy. 

The societal downsides of widespread alcohol consumption are real, especially in the case of heavy drinkers, as a recent "natural experiment" in South Africa when liquor stores were shut down due to COVID demonstrated:

This paper evaluates the impact of a sudden and unexpected nation-wide alcohol sales ban in South Africa. We find that this policy causally reduced injury-induced mortality in the country by at least 14% during the five weeks of the ban. We argue that this estimate constitutes a lower bound on the true impact of alcohol on injury-induced mortality. We also document a sharp drop in violent crimes, indicating a tight link between alcohol and aggressive behavior in society. Our results underscore the severe harm that alcohol can cause and point towards a role for policy measures that target the heaviest drinkers in society.

From here.

The body text provides background:

The sudden and unexpected ban on the sale of alcohol in South Africa on July 13, 2020 provides a rare opportunity to understand how alcohol consumption influences behavior and outcomes at a societal level.3 Research by health scientists has identified alcohol consumption as a major risk factor for injury-related deaths globally.4 This suggests that reducing alcohol consumption in an entire country could lead to a large reduction in injury-related mortality. It is therefore of key importance to test these predictions by assessing how mortality is actually affected when a policy that drastically reduces alcohol consumption is introduced. 

This paper uses the exogenous variation provided by a natural experiment in the form of a sudden alcohol sales ban to study the causal impact of alcohol on mortality due to unnatural causes at a societal level.5

We also present evidence on one key potential mechanism behind this relationship by evaluating the impact that the ban had on aggressive behavior in society (e.g., homicides, assaults, reported rape cases). This is valuable as it provides policy-makers with robust evidence about the harm that alcohol consumption generates in society and informs our understanding of whether reducing alcohol consumption is an effective way to save lives and alleviate interpersonal violence. It therefore contributes evidence towards the larger discussion regarding the aggregate costs and benefits of alcohol consumption for society. . . . 

Our main result is that the alcohol ban reduced the number of people dying from unnatural causes in South Africa by at least 120 per week. This reflects the lowest estimate of the effect size that we obtain across a range of different empirical specifications. It represents a substantial reduction in mortality due to unnatural causes, since it implies a 14% reduction in all unnatural deaths in the country when compared to the average level during the five weeks immediately preceding the July Alcohol Ban. In the analysis below, we show that this reduction in mortality is almost entirely confined to men. This is not entirely surprising since, in South Africa, men are far more likely to die of unnatural causes than women (approximately 78% of the over 150 000 deaths from unnatural causes recorded in our dataset between 2017 and 2019 were males).7

This pattern is not unique to South Africa. For example, Gawryszewski and Rodrigues (2006) describe the gender distribution of injury-related mortality in Brazil in 2003 and show that 84.3% of the people that died from injury-related causes (e.g., homicides, suicides, transport-related deaths) were men. Furthermore, as in many countries around the world (e.g., Brazil, Russia), in South Africa men are far more likely than women to engage in heavy drinking.

We find that the ban on alcohol reduced the number of men dying due to unnatural causes by at least 120 per week, but find no evidence that it had a statistically significant effect on the mortality of women in the population as a whole. (Importantly, this does not imply that the absence of alcohol had no impact on other outcomes for women, such as gender-based violence, which often does not result in death.) 

Further, we provide evidence that approximately half of the observed reduction in mortality is found amongst young men aged 15-34. To provide support for the validity of these main results, we conduct several robustness exercises. These include running placebo regressions, varying the window size around the policy change used for our analysis, and relaxing the assumptions made on the error structure. We also address two key concerns regarding the quality of the natural experiment and the assumptions underlying our ability to use it to identify the impact of alcohol on mortality.8 . . . 

We document evidence suggesting that the alcohol ban resulted in a sharp drop in all of these outcomes, with at least 77 fewer homicides, 790 fewer assaults and 105 fewer rape cases reported per week during the alcohol ban period in comparison to the preceding five weeks. These constitute a drop in each outcome of 21%, 33% and 19% respectively.

To illustrate the dynamic effects of the alcohol ban over time, we also report the results from event study analyses considering the evolution in unnatural mortality and also the three violent crime outcomes.The general pattern that emerges is that the effect of the ban appears to have been strongest in the first few weeks. A speculative possible reason for this is that black market trade and production started to reduce the effectiveness of the ban. Overall, the results provide compelling evidence that alcohol is causally responsible for inducing aggressive behavior in society at a significant scale, resulting in substantial harm.

What lessons can be drawn from these results?

First, these findings are highly informative for policy discussions within South Africa as they provide clear causal evidence of a strong relationship between alcohol consumption and both interpersonal violence and unnatural mortality. This evidence therefore helps to support the conclusions drawn from comparative risk assessment (CRA) analyses by health scientists.

Second, this paper provides a valuable contribution to the collective global effort to better understand the relationship between alcohol, violence and injury-related outcomes more generally. This is an extremely important endeavour, since alcohol is estimated to have been responsible for 5.3% of all deaths worldwide in 2016 (3 million), with 0.9 million of those being injury-related deaths. In addition, alcohol is implicated in many more incidents of violence and non-lethal injuries and was the leading risk factor for premature death in individuals 15-49 years old worldwide in 2016. 

While it is essential to acknowledge that any evidence collected within a single country relates to behavior that occurs within a particular societal context, collecting rigorous evidence across a range of contexts makes it possible to aggregate the evidence and identify which alcohol-driven relationships occur systematically across contexts, and which are context-specific (i.e., mediated by an interaction between alcohol consumption and other societal factors). The evidence presented here is particularly useful for this exercise since South Africa is part of a class of countries: (i) for which alcohol is estimated to be responsible for a large number of injury-related deaths, and (ii) that make up a large part of the world’s population, but tend to be underrepresented as the focus of academic research relative to more developed nations due partially to constraints on the availability of highly detailed data. 

In South Africa a minority of individuals drink (31% of individuals aged 15 years and older, 43.2% of men and 19.4% of women). However, those who do drink, tend to drink heavily: six out of every ten drinkers (59%) engage in heavy episodic drinking (HED), which corresponds to 18.3% of the population over 15 years of age, or 30.6% of men and 6.5% of women.9 South Africa is also a country that suffers from a relatively high rate of mortality due to unnatural causes (e.g., interpersonal violence, road traffic collisions, and suicide), with approximately 50.000 injury-rated deaths recorded per year between 1997 and 2012, and also between 2015 and 2019 (own calculations).10

Therefore, this evidence on the impact of alcohol from South Africa provides an informative benchmark for countries characterised by high levels of injury-related deaths, a sizable fraction of the population that drinks excessively, a strong asymmetry in drinking patterns between men and women, and high levels of poverty and inequality. This set of characteristics is reflective of several countries in Eastern Europe and South America, such as Brazil (where 32.6% of men and 6.9% of women were HEDs in 2016, which is nearly identical to the pattern in South Africa) and Russia (where 48.4% of men and 24.2% of women were HEDs in 2016). Both countries also share many other structural similarities with South Africa that could interact with alcohol consumption in influencing behavior, such as suffering from social issues including poverty, inequality and high levels of violence. Both countries are also characterized by a strong gender asymmetry in unnatural deaths, like South Africa.

Third, our results provide a society-level demonstration of the way in which alcohol can act as a catalyst in inducing violence. While contextual factors in different countries may shape the way in which excessive alcohol consumption manifests in behavior, the growing body of evidence of a deep link between excessive alcohol consumption and aggressive behavior is important for all countries. The evidence discussed in this paper complements a large body of existing work showing that there is a strong association between alcohol consumption and aggressive behavior across a range of domains. More specifically, our causal evidence contributes to the existing literature that documents a strong association between homicides and alcohol, finding that a high fraction of homicide offenders (and victims) were under the influence of alcohol at the time of the offence.

For example, Kuhns et al. (2011) reports that from over 70,000 toxicology test results from 13 countries (predominantly from the United States), 48% of homicide victims tested positive for alcohol, while Kuhns et al. (2014) reports that from almost 30 000 homicide offenders across 9 countries (mostly Australia, the United States and Europe), 48% were reported to be under the influence of alcohol.12 

The presence of a link between alcohol and aggression has also been demonstrated in the laboratory by experimentally varying the alcohol present in an individuals’ system as they complete a task that involves administering electric shocks to a fictitious opponent. The authors found a strong link between the dosage of alcohol in an individual’s system and the aggression they showed in administering the electric shocks.

Taken together, this body of work on the underlying psychological mechanism relating alcohol to aggression indicates that it is also important for countries that differ substantially from South Africa, such as high-income countries, to pay attention to the evidence in this paper showing how large an impact alcohol can have on behavior at a societal level, since: (i) heavy episodic drinking is substantially more prevalent in many higher income countries, such as the USA, UK, Germany and France, than it is in South Africa, (ii) in these countries, the aggression triggered by excessive alcohol consumption may manifest in harmful behaviors that result in harder-to-detect outcomes, such as sexual and gender-based violence, child abuse and emotional abuse, and (iii) it is not common to observe a societal level source of exogenous variation in alcohol consumption, which makes it challenging to evaluate the effect of alcohol in society even when the data on the relevant outcomes is available.13 . . . 

This paper contributes to several strands of the literature. It relates most closely to the body of work that studies the short-run relationship between alcohol and harmful behavior, such as violence, suicide and crime, risky sexual behavior, and outcomes such as mortality and morbidity. There are two main empirical approaches that have been employed in this literature to provide this type of causal evidence: (i) using changes in underage drunk driving laws or minimum drinking age laws, or (ii) using changes in the alcohol trading hour regulations.14

Each of these approaches generates valuable insights regarding the influence of an important alcohol control policy margin (i.e., restrictions on young adults on the verge of legal adulthood, or restrictions on late-night on-premise drinking or late-night purchases). 

Collectively, this evidence points towards alcohol control policies being effective in reducing short-run social harms on these margins. 

To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to document causal evidence of the short-run impact that alcohol consumption has at a societal level in contemporary times. In this, our paper joins a long history of research trying to understand the relationship between alcohol and mortality and morbidity more broadly. This work emanates from the contentious social debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in many Western societies, including the United States, about whether allowing alcohol consumption is good for society. A set of more recent studies have tried to estimate the effect that state and federal prohibition statutes enacted in the United States during the early decades of the twentieth century had on mortality and morbidity. 

This literature portrays a highly ambiguous picture regarding the health and safety impacts of alcohol prohibition. However, in a recent contribution, Law and Marks (2020) argue that they overcome several empirical challenges faced by the prior work and conclude that early prohibition laws enacted between 1900 and 1920 significantly reduced mortality rates in the United States.15

Our results are in line with the conclusions of Law and Marks (2020). However, our study differs from the research examining the United States Prohibition era in several important ways. The Prohibition research typically considers a substantially longer time horizon, often using yearly data. This implies that it is evaluating the composite effect of prohibition laws, along with all the social changes that occur as society shifts to a new equilibrium. 

Additionally, the following considerations suggest that these evaluations are likely to be measuring the influence of alcohol together with other social changes: (i) endogenous community characteristics influenced where dry laws were passed prior to 1920, and the degree to which they were enforced after National Prohibition came into force in 1920, (ii) the first decades of the twentieth century constituted a period of substantial turbulence in the prevailing social norms regarding alcohol, and (iii) the gap between prohibition laws being enacted and becoming effective was up to two years.

In contrast, we use daily mortality data to study the impact of an immediate and unanticipated five-week drop in alcohol consumption. Therefore, the interpretation of our results is complementary but different: our results examine the short-run influence of alcohol on mortality in society as it currently is, rather than the influence of alcohol prohibition policies on medium and long-run mortality after adjusting to the new equilibrium. In addition, society has changed in the last hundred years, which makes it useful to document modern evidence.

Footnotes

1 Alcohol consumption may also lead individuals to harm themselves—intoxication can reduce self-control, inducing myopic behavior that the individual would avoid if sober.

2 The causal evidence that does exist typically focuses on specific segments of society, with evaluations of the impact of changes to the minimum legal drinking age providing the main example of this.

3 This five-week long ban was the second ban on alcohol sales implemented by the South African government in 2020, but unlike the earlier ban it did not occur amid the initial upheaval caused by COVID-19 in which many new regulations were introduced and individuals were rapidly changing their everyday behavior.

4 For example, the WHO (2019) estimates that alcohol was responsible for 0.9 million of the 5.9 million global injury-related deaths in 2016, while Probst et al. (2018) use a comparative risk assessment approach to estimate that over 12 000 of the approximately 50 000 injury-related deaths in South Africa in 2015 were attributable to alcohol consumption.

5 In the paper we use the terms “injury-induced mortality” and “unnatural mortality” interchangeably. We do this because we find the former to provide a more natural terminology, and is therefore more suitable for an interdisciplinary readership, but the latter corresponds to the designation of these deaths in the National Population Register dataset and on abbreviated death certificates in South Africa. Deaths due to unnatural causes include deaths with an external cause, such as homicide, traffic injuries and suicide, while natural deaths pertain to conditions resulting from aging and illness.

6 The July Alcohol Ban was in force between July 13, 2020 and August 17, 2020. It therefore divides the Level 3 period, which spanned June 1, 2020 to August 17, 2020, neatly in half. It is worth noting that there were 5 Levels of policy response, such that Level 3 involved intermediate restrictions that were far lighter than the Level 5 restrictions.

7While detailed cause-of-death data is not yet available in South Africa for 2020, Matzopoulos et al. (2015) report that for 2009, the three leading causes of unnatural mortality in South Africa were homicides, road-traffic injuries and suicide. Homicides constituted 36% of unnatural deaths, with 86% of these being male deaths. Road-traffic injuries resulted in 33% of unnatural deaths, with 76% of these being male deaths. Suicides made up 12.3% of unnatural deaths, with 82% of these being male deaths.

8 In addition, using data from previous years (i.e. excluding 2020) we document systematic regularities in the pattern of unnatural deaths observed: (i) a weekly pattern: mortality due to unnatural causes follows a highly predictable weekly pattern, with an increase of over 50% in daily unnatural deaths on Saturdays and Sundays relative to weekdays, (ii) a monthly pattern: unnatural mortality is highest during the last and first few days of the month (over 30% higher), suggesting that this monthly pattern may be related to wage payment schedules. Our data allow us to control for these systematic mortality patterns in our analysis.

9 The average absolute amount of alcohol consumed per day by those who drink is 64.6 g or 5.4 standard drinks in South Africa. However, it is important to exercise caution in interpreting these consumption amounts that condition on being a drinker, especially in cross-country comparisons, since there is substantial heterogeneity across countries in the fraction of the population that drinks. Therefore, a country with a larger fraction of social drinkers will tend to have a lower conditional consumption amount, even if heavy drinking is present in society. For example, in Germany and France, the average daily consumption of alcohol conditional on drinking is 36.5 g and 36.1 g respectively. However, in these two countries, 79.4% and 73.3% of the population are classified as drinkers. This means that the individuals in the right-tail of the alcohol consumption distribution in these two countries are likely to drink substantially more than than 36.5 g or 36.1 g per day. In Germany, 34.2% of the population over 15 years of age are classified as heavy episodic drinkers (HEDs), while in France, this percentage is 31.2%, implying both countries have substantially more HEDs than the 18.3% in South Africa. 

10 The population of South Africa has grown from 43 million in 1997 to almost 58 million in 2018, implying a gradual reduction in the per capita rate.

11 In line with this, the WHO (2019) provides estimates for the age-standardized alcohol-attributable injury death rate in countries around the world. These estimates are high for the majority of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe (typically above 10.8 per 100 000 people), with South Africa in the interior of the range of estimates. Similarly, the prevalence of heavy episodic drinking amongst current drinkers is high in the same regions (Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe), with South Africa fairly typical in this.

12 In recent work that explores the causal role of alcohol in victimization more broadly, Bindler et al. (2021) show that obtaining increased access to alcohol at ages 16 and 18 in the Netherlands results in sharp discontinuous increases in the risk of being a crime victim.

13 One example of a recent paper that does manage to find an interesting source of exogenous variation is the work by Ivandic et al. (2021) that exploits the timing of football games to examine the effect of alcohol consumption on domestic abuse in the Greater Manchester area in the United Kingdom, finding that alcohol consumption results in an aggregate increase in domestic abuse.

14 An exception to this is Nakaguma and Restrepo (2018), who study the impact of a single-day alcohol sales ban during the 2012 municipal elections in Brazil and find that motor vehicle collisions and traffic-related hospitalizations were reduced by 19% and 17% respectively.

15 Bhattacharya et al. (2013) reach a similar conclusion in their insightful analysis of the 1985-1988 Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol campaign, showing that the campaign was associated with a marked reduction in mortality during the late 1980s, while the demise of the campaign saw increased mortality in the early 1990s. Interestingly, much of this effect was lagged due to the delayed effect of alcoholism on several health outcomes leading to mortality, e.g. liver cirrhosis and heart disease. Our paper complements their work by providing an analysis of the short-term behavioral impact.

The authors estimate that the alcohol ban caused a significant decline in homicides, assaults, reported rapes, and "unnatural mortality", defined so that it "includes deaths precipitated by road traffic injuries, interpersonal violence, and suicide, but excludes all deaths due to natural causes, such as illness (e.g., COVID-19)."

Note that the Y-axis does not have a zero baseline and thus visually exaggerates the effect observed somewhat.

The authors consider this a "lower bound" of an effect, but the allocation of the risk between staying at home more due to a lockdown and not consuming alcohol is a tricky one. They estimate the alcohol specific source by comparing results after the alcohol ban that was put in place ended but the curfew remained in place, to the time period when both were in place. In this regard, the paper states that:

(i) for individuals aged 14 or younger, we find no effect of the alcohol ban on mortality, (ii) for individuals between 35 and 54 years, we estimate that the alcohol ban resulted in 6.7 fewer male deaths per day, with a possible smaller reduction in the mortality of women by 1.3 deaths per day, (iii) for individuals over 55 years, we estimate that there were 2.5 fewer male deaths per day, and 1.6 additional female deaths per day during the alcohol ban period. 

Overall, the results indicate that most of the effect of the alcohol ban on unnatural mortality was concentrated amongst younger male adults, with a smaller, but still sizable, impact also observed amongst middle aged men. . . .

we note that when the July Alcohol Ban ended, the curfew remained in place and . . . that unnatural mortality increased sharply at this point in time and remained at pre-2020 levels despite the ongoing curfew. Second, we estimate the impact of a one hour reduction in the curfew length which occurred in the middle of the July Alcohol Ban period. We show that it did not have a statistically significant impact on unnatural mortality.

The Impact Of Sharing Compensation Information

Pay equity and individualized meritocracy in compensation work at cross-purposes. 

We find evidence that pay transparency causes significant increases in both the equity and equality of pay, and significant and sizeable reductions in the link between pay and individually measured performance.

From Nature Human Behavior.

Quote of the Day

Whoever has visions should go to the doctor.

- Helmut Schmidt, the former chancellor of West Germany (translated from German) via Tom McTague at The Atlantic in "What Volodomyr Zelensky's Courage Says About the West".

The quip was intended to criticize "visionary" politicians.

Bats Invented COVID

COVID's two original strains, A and B migrated from a particular species of bats to humans in China, in at least two separate incidents, no earlier than November of 2019. Samples from humans near the Hunan market were found by December of that year.

Understanding the circumstances that lead to pandemics is critical to their prevention. Here, we analyze the pattern and origin of genomic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 early in the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that the SARS-CoV-2 genomic diversity prior to February 2020 comprised only two distinct viral lineages—denoted A and B—with no transitional haplotypes. Novel phylodynamic rooting methods, coupled with epidemic simulations, indicate that these two lineages were the result of at least two separate cross-species transmission events into humans. The first zoonotic transmission likely involved lineage B viruses and occurred in late-November/early-December 2019 and no earlier than the beginning of November 2019, while the introduction of lineage A likely occurred within weeks of the first event. These findings define the narrow window between when SARS-CoV-2 first jumped into humans and when the first cases of COVID-19 were reported. Hence, as with SARS-CoV-1 in 2002 and 2003, SARS-CoV-2 emergence likely resulted from multiple zoonotic events.

Pekar, et al., "SARS-CoV-2 emergence very likely resulted from at least two zoonotic events" (February 26, 2022).

The introduction to the paper explains:

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is responsible for the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic that has caused more than 5 million confirmed deaths in the two years since its detection at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market (hereafter the ‘Huanan market’) in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. 

As the original outbreak spread to other countries, the diversity of SARS-CoV-2 quickly increased and led to the emergence and identification of multiple variants of concern, but the beginning of the pandemic was marked by two major lineages denoted ‘A’ and ‘B’. 

Lineage B has been the most common throughout the pandemic and includes all sequenced genomes from humans directly associated with the Huanan market, including the earliest sampled genome, Wuhan/IPBCAMS-WH-01/2019, and the reference genome, Wuhan/Hu-1/2019 (hereafter ‘Hu-1’), sampled on 24 and 26 December 2019, respectively. All published sequences from environmental samples taken at Huanan Market also fall in lineage B. 

The earliest lineage A viruses, Wuhan/IME-WH01/2019 and Wuhan/WH04/2020, were sampled on 30 December 2019 and 5 January 2020, respectively, and they differ from lineage B by two nucleotide substitutions: C8782T and T28144C. Notably, the nucleotides at these two positions in lineage A are identical to related viruses of Rhinolophus bats, which are presumed to represent the ultimate host reservoir. . . . 

The earliest lineage A genomes lack a direct epidemiological connection to the Huanan market, but, importantly, were sampled from individuals who lived or had recently stayed close to the market. 

Despite the availability of these data, three central questions remain: if lineage B viruses are more distantly related to sarbecoviruses from Rhinolophus bats, (i) why were they detected earlier than lineage A viruses, (ii) why were only lineage B viruses found in humans at the Huanan market, and (iii) why did lineage B predominate early in the pandemic? 

Paramount to answering these questions is determining the ancestral haplotype: the genomic sequence characteristics of the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) at the root of the SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny. Although the root has often been inferred with Bayesian and maximum likelihood methods to fall on the branch leading to IPBCAMS-WH-01 (Lineage B) or other early genomes, reanalysis of sequence data from the earliest sampled viruses found that three previously reported mutations in IPBCAMS-WH-01 were spurious, and the genome was, in fact, identical to the Hu-1 reference genome. Other early genomes were also found to have spurious mutations, thereby decreasing the overall genetic diversity of early SARS-CoV-2 sequence data. This decreased diversity suggests that prior studies, including our own, may have incorrectly rooted the SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny. 

Alternatively, it has been suggested that multiple SARS-CoV-2 introductions from an intermediate host led to separate origins of lineages A and B and that the MRCA of SARS-CoV-2 existed in an animal reservoir, rather than in humans. 

In this study, we analyze the evolutionary and epidemiological dynamics at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. By combining genomic and epidemiological data, novel phylodynamic models, and epidemic simulations, we eliminate many of the haplotypes previously suggested as the MRCA of SARS-CoV-2 and show that the pandemic most likely began with at least two separate zoonotic transmissions starting no earlier than November 2019, with a lineage A virus jumping into humans after the introduction of a lineage B virus.

Government Sanctioned Murder In Plain Sight

The U.S. criminal justice system continues to be deeply and tragically flawed.

At least 228 people executed in the modern era — or more than one in every seven — were right too soon. That is, they had claims in their case that today would render their execution unconstitutional, but were killed because of a legal regime that arrived too late. 

Roughly 30% of our total include the children and persons with intellectual disability who were executed prior to Roper v. Simmons and Atkins v. Virginia, respectively. 

But the great majority of the people identified in our study raised claims based on doctrine that had already been clearly established by the Supreme Court. If the lower courts had applied Supreme Court caselaw correctly, these people would have gotten relief. Yet the lower courts resisted the doctrine and for years the Supreme Court did nothing to correct them. 

This resistance was particularly egregious in Texas and Florida. In Texas, at least 108 people were executed after the Supreme Court had already established the relevant basis for relief, and in Florida, the total is at least 36. 

At least when it comes to the death penalty, the lower courts seem especially unwilling to follow Supreme Court doctrine that would save a person from execution. The result is a system that routinely kills people even when they are right.

Joseph Margulies, John Blume and Sheri Lynn Johnson, "Dead Right: A Cautionary Capital Punishment Tale" 53(1) Columbia Human Rights Law Review (2021).

Where To Use Airships

A few niches in which airships make sense:

(1) intercontinental shipping point to point without the ship to truck/train transition bottleneck, 

(2) shipping in areas with low quality and/or bandit infested road/train networks, 

(3) transportation of people and freight between islands in island chains like Hawaii, Aleutians, Oceania, Island SE Asia, and Pacific NW, 

(4) making point site development in roadless areas viable and making it viable to make areas where roads are hard to maintain roadless especially in Alaska, 

(5) tourism in roadless areas including rain forests and glaciers, 

(6) scientific observation platform in fragile environments, 

(7) temporary communications hub/surveillance in disaster areas (like low altitude satellites), 

(8) for small drone ones good for coverage of high school/college/pro sports events or for news reporting or traffic management, 

(9) sky billboards, and 

(10) resupply of ships (cruise ships, freighters, yachts, military, etc.) and sea bases (e.g., oil rigs).

The U.S. Should Declare War On Russia

Image from The Washington Post

Russia has launched an unprovoked all out attack on the Ukraine in an attack reminiscent of the invasions launched by Nazi Germany in advance of World War II.

This attack is an affront not just to Ukraine, but to the entire peaceful world order. It doesn't matter that the Ukraine is not a part of NATO. The scope of the attack has taken it far beyond any claim that Russia is merely seeking to protect the right of self-determination of ethnic Russians in a few areas where they gained de faco control in 2014.

The United States should immediately declare war on Russia, should encourage its NATO allies and other non-NATO European allies to join it, and should engage in full fledged conventional warfare to repel this attack and put an end once and for all to Russia's previously gradual campaign of military expansionism.

President Obama erred in not responding more forcefully to Russian military action in the Ukraine in 2014. Trump actively coddled Russia as a Russian puppet and continues to adhere to a pro-Russian stance. President Biden has not responded nearly forcefully enough.

The world needs leadership now. The United States is the only nation in the world with the means to adequately respond to this Russian aggression. We should respond forcefully not only to repel the Russian invasion, but to hand Russia a clear military defeat that undermines future militarism by Russian President Vladimir Putin or his successors.

The U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marines have the capacity to deploy air power that could profoundly undermine Russian forces in this attack, destroy the Russian naval forces in the region, and turn the tide that will otherwise be a prompt fait accompli crushing of the Ukraine, which is now especially since the 2014 annexation of Crimea and occupation of parts of two Eastern Ukrainian provinces, a solid member of the pro-Western faction in Europe. The U.S. should put troops on the ground to aid Ukraine and it should deliver the advanced weapons systems the Ukraine needs to repel Russia.

Non-military sanctions on Russia should be extreme. Freeze all Russian assets. Embargo all Russian trade - providing assistance to countries reliant upon that trade. Expel Russian diplomats from all of Europe. Detain all Russian government officials abroad.

Yes, Russia has nuclear weapons. And, the U.S. in a war with Russia should not go so far as to leave Russia no other option but to use them to preserve its existence. But this does not preclude vigorous use of conventional military force to push Russia out of the Ukraine, to push out of other breakaway regions of newly independent states like Moldova that it has embroiled itself in, and to cripple Russia's capacity to project power outside of its boundaries with its Navy and with foreign bases in places like Syria.

Yes, this is a risk. Yes, it will cost the U.S. in blood and treasure. But it will be harder to stop Russian aggression in the future than it is to do so now, and this moment absolutely justifies U.S. military action.

 

The U.S. Electrical Grid Sucks.

I read before that the U.S. electrical grid is much less stable than most other developed countries. Worse yet, it is becoming increasingly unreliable:

The U.S. power system is faltering just as millions of Americans are becoming more dependent on it—not just to light their homes, but increasingly to work remotely, charge their phones and cars, and cook their food—as more modern conveniences become electrified.

… Much of the transmission system, which carries high-voltage electricity over long distances, was constructed just after World War II, with some lines built well before that. The distribution system, the network of smaller wires that takes electricity to homes and businesses, is also decades old, and accounts for the majority of outages.

Self-reliance with batteries and generators is very inefficient and highly polluting compared to a good nationwide electrical grid. 

Private Self-Ordering Isn't Maximally Efficient

The tradeoffs between efficiency and inequality are long standing. This case study illustrates the inefficiency of private ordering, contrary to the prevailing lassiez-faire instinct of economics.

We use a dataset of the entire population of English Parliamentary enclosure acts between 1750 and 1830 to provide the first causal evidence of their impact. Exploiting a feature of the Parliamentary process that produced such legislation as a source of exogenous variation, we show that Parliamentary enclosures were associated with significantly higher crop yields, but also higher land inequality. Our results are in line with a literature going back to Arthur Young and Karl Marx on the effects of Parliamentary enclosure on productivity and inequality. They do not support the argument that informal systems of governance or “private orderings”, even in small, cohesive, and stable communities, were able to efficiently allocate commonly used and governed resources.

Leander Heldring, James A. Robinson & Sebastian Vollmer, "The Economic Effects of the English Parliamentary Enclosures" NBER WORKING PAPER 29772 (February 2022) DOI 10.3386/w29772

State Lines Matter

State lines strongly impact domestic migration. 

It isn't clear how much of this is due to occupational licensing and state specific regulatory knowledge (a huge factor for lawyers), how much is due to an incentive to remain part of the same public employee's retirement system, and how much of this is due to cultural factors (this article suggests that this is the main factor).

I document a new empirical pattern of internal mobility in the United States. Namely, county-to-county migration and commuting drop off discretely at state borders. People are three times as likely to move to a county 15 miles away, but in the same state, than to move to an equally distant county in a different state. 

These gaps remain even among neighboring counties or counties in the same commuting zone. This pattern is not explained by differences in county characteristics, is not driven by any particular demographic group, and is not explained by pecuniary costs such as differences in state occupational licensing, taxes, or transfer program generosity. 

However, county-to-county social connectedness (as measured by the number of Facebook linkages) follows a similar pattern. Although the patterns in social networks would be consistent with information frictions, nonpecuniary psychic costs, or behavioral biases such as a state identity or home bias, the data suggest that state identity and home bias play an outsized role. 

This empirical pattern has real economic impacts. Building on existing methods, I show that employment in border counties adjusts more slowly after local economic shocks relative to interior counties. These counties also exhibit less in-migration and in-commuting, suggesting the lack of mobility leads to slower labor market adjustment.

Riley Wilson, Isolated States of America: The Impact of State Borders on Mobility and Regional Labor Market Adjustments, Upjohn Institute Working Paper 21-358 (11 Feb 2022).

Blockchain

Blockchain is wildly overhyped, and is almost never a good idea for business applications.

From here.

Video Evidence Can Trump False Witness Testimony In Colorado

An new important decision by the Colorado Court of Appeals in the case of People v. Liebler, 2022COA21 (February 17, 2022), has established a key limitation to the general rule that an appellate court must defer to the conclusions of a trial court jury on issues of witness credibility. The official syllabus of the case explains:

In this direct criminal appeal, a division of the court of appeals considers whether witness testimony that is indisputably contradicted by video evidence can nonetheless be sufficient to support a conclusion by a reasonable jury that the prosecution proved an element of the charged offense — here, the use of force element of attempted aggravated robbery. As a matter of first impression, and under the circumstances presented, the division concludes that it cannot.

This is clearly the right decision, but one that contradicts the general rules that a jury verdict may be upheld if there is any competent evidence in the record (such as admissible testimony from a witness under oath) that supports its ruling, and that the credibility of witnesses is solely for the jury to determine.

Will The Louisiana Supreme Court Uphold LWOP For Defendants Convicted With Non-Unanimous Verdicts?

The U.S. Supreme Court held in Ramos v. Louisiana (U.S. October 2019) that non-unanimous state court jury verdicts in felony cases, allowed under a procedurally quirky U.S. Supreme Court precedent from 1972 that only two U.S. states, Louisiana and Oregon, availed themselves of, were unconstitutional. This happened around the same time that Louisiana, one of the two states, amended its constitution to prohibit such verdicts based upon a ballot issue decided in the 2018 general election. 

But in a follow up case, Edwards v. Vannoy (U.S. 2020), the U.S. Supreme Court held, along the usual 6-3 conservative-liberal divide in the court, that this ruling was not retroactive to cases in which direct appeals had been exhausted already, because it was not a "watershed rule" of criminal procedure.

Now, the Louisiana Supreme Court has taken a case to decide, as a matter of state constitutional law independent of federal law and not subject to review by any other court, if the ban on non-unanimous verdicts will be applied retroactively. The defendant in the test case has currently served 29 years in prison of a life without possibility of parole sentence, based upon a 10-2 jury verdict that would have resulted in an immediate retrial in 48 other states and in the federal courts.

I have no idea how the Louisiana Supreme Court is likely to rule, and it makes sense that it would take up the case, even if it is planning to hold that the ruling is not retroactive, because this exactly clean and narrow legal issue is outcome determinative in so many cases.

About 1500 cases are affected by the ruling and would have to be retried if the law is applied retroactively to cases that are now cold. The defendants are mostly serving life possibility of parole sentences, because shorter sentences are either still eligible to benefit from the new law because they are still on direct appeal, or have been full served.

The Louisiana Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to decide if a ban on non-unanimous jury verdicts applies retroactively under the state constitution, as it considers the case of a man convicted of murder and sentenced to life for a 1993 slaying in Plaquemines Parish.

The case of Reginald Reddick, who was convicted by a 10-2 jury vote that is no longer allowed, sets up a decision by the state’s highest court that could affect as many as 1,500 Louisiana inmates, most of them serving life sentences without parole.

Convicted by split juries years ago, their appeals exhausted, those inmates missed a shot at new trials when the U.S. Supreme Court last year refused to make its 2020 ban on divided juries retroactive. Still, advocates have argued that the high court's ruling doesn't prevent the Louisiana Supreme Court from deciding that those older split verdicts violate the state's constitution and should be tossed.

From here. 

As previous coverage from the same newspaper noted:

In Louisiana, four in five of the 1,500-plus inmates serving time under split jury decisions are Black; more than one in four has served at least 20 years already. The longest-serving inmate known to have been convicted by a split jury has been incarcerated since 1967. . . . 

The roster includes more than 900 inmates who are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole -- a terminal sentence in which Louisiana, which incarcerates more people per-capita than any other state, easily leads the nation.

The older the case is, the less troubling to public safety a vacated conviction that is impracticable to retry would be, because the reality is that inmates who serve long sentences tend to "age out" of the time period where they are prone to commit crime and have low recidivism rates. 

This is balanced against the fact that more recent convictions, where the risk of recidivism if a defendant was rightfully convicted in a split verdict that would not have to have been retried before the defendant was convicted, are typically easier to retry.

Non-Unanimous Verdicts Produce More Wrongful Convictions

The risk of non-unanimous verdicts leading to wrongful convictions in Louisiana was real. In Louisiana, 40% of exonerated criminal defendants were found guilty by non-unanimous juries.

Jury verdicts aren't terribly accurate in the first place. As I've noted before, judges and juries agree on the verdict in roughly 78% of criminal jury trials. But judges are much less likely to acquit defendants than juries do (3% v. 19%+), and there are a small but significant number of wrongful convictions by juries (3.3% to 5% in death qualified capital murder-rape cases, and probably somewhat less in ordinary felony cases).

A very large percentage of criminal cases (95% would be typical), however, are resolved by plea bargains, which also sometimes result in wrongful convictions, although for mostly different reasons.

So, while the percentage of wrongful convictions in cases that actually go to trial is troubling high, the percentage of all cases that are wrongful convictions as a result of inaccurate jury verdicts is a much smaller share of criminal convictions (about one in 500).

Given that 18% of known exonerees pleaded guilty to crimes they didn’t commit, which suggest that the rate at which people plead guilty to crimes that they didn't commit is at least about one in 2,375, although this is surely an underestimate since not all people who plead guilty to crimes that they didn't commit are exonerated, in part, because there are stronger procedural bars to doing so, and in part, because people are less likely to challenge the often shorter sentence received as a result of a plea bargained conviction. (About 65% of 418 exonerees who pleaded guilty were people of color, and 83% of DNA exoneration plea cases resulted in identification of the alternate perpetrator.)