Suharto as model for Russia's coming financial collapse.

The financial world has seen this before. 

Political scientists have studied the political consequences of financial crises. In my 2009 book on the Asian financial crisis, I wrote about what happened to Indonesian dictator Suharto when it became clear that Indonesia’s banks were insolvent and the currency was in free-fall. Suharto’s struggles in 1998 suggest that Putin may face real economic difficulties in the coming days.

Putin’s options for how to address this problem are limited, as were Suharto’s. His choices boil down to the following: print lots of money on demand to cover all withdrawals; raise interest rates really high; or implement currency controls of some sort.

The first option generates inflation. It also does not really help to address the core problem: High inflation will give people with rubles an incentive to convert those rubles into dollars, gold or something else with a more stable value. That would push the value of the ruble even lower.

The second option seeks to keep money in banks (and rubles in Russia) by offering much more attractive returns for people holding ruble savings. But this is unattractive for many other reasons. With luck, it may eliminate inflation, but it may also put a sharp halt on spending and investment within Russia. It may avoid financial crisis, at the cost of a full-blown recession.

The third option would seem to be the most attractive. Indeed, this is an option that Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad followed during Malaysia’s economic crisis in 1998. But it was very unpopular among Malaysia’s most wealthy elites, who were no longer able to move their savings and investments across borders. Moreover, in Russia today, such controls would have to be paired with controls on bank withdrawals to shore up the domestic financial system itself. Russia’s central bank is proclaiming that its financial system is liquid precisely to avoid having to do this.

It is hard to see how Russia’s domestic financial turmoil will end. The next 24 hours will be some of the most grimly interesting financial politics that Russia has seen since its two most recent financial crises, one of which (in 1998) ultimately paved the way for Putin’s rise to power.

In the meantime, however, Ukraine’s supporters in the international community may be thinking about how to leverage the threat of Russia’s financial collapse to their benefit. Giving oligarchs an exit option might provide the leverage they want to restrain Putin’s aggressive and destructive international behavior, by showing him its domestic consequences.

New Drilling Tech Could Be a Game-changer

A new drilling technology benefitting from fusion energy research shows promise for geothermal energy.

gyrotrons capable of generating continuous energy beams over a megawatt in power are now becoming available, and that's amazing news for deep drillers. "The scientific basis, technical feasibility, and economic potential of directed energy millimeter wave rock drilling at frequencies of 30 to 300 GHz are strong," wrote Ogilvy. "It avoids Rayleigh scattering and can couple/transfer energy to a rock surface 10¹²X more efficiently than laser sources in the presence of a small particle extraction plume. Continuous megawatt power millimeter-waves can also be efficiently (>90 percent) guided to great distances (>10 km) using a variety of modes and waveguide (pipes) systems, including the potential of using smooth bore coiled and jointed/ joined tubing."

"Thermodynamic calculations," he continued, "suggest a penetration rate of 70 meters/hour (230 ft/hour) is possible in 5 cm (1.97 in) bores with a 1-MW gyrotron that couples to the rock with 100 percent efficiency. Use of lower or higher powered sources (e.g. 100 kW to 2 MW) would allow changes in bore size and/or penetration rate."

Quaise plans to drill holes up to 20 km (12.4 miles) deep, significantly deeper than the Kola Superdeep Borehole – but where the Kola team took nearly 20 years to reach their limit, Quaise expects its gyrotron-enhanced process to take just 100 days. And that's assuming a 1-MW gyrotron.

At these depths, Quaise expects to find temperatures around 500 °C (932 °F), which is well past the point where geothermal energy takes a massive leap in efficiency. "Water is a supercritical fluid at pressures above 22 MPa and temperatures higher than 374 °C (705 °F)," said Quaise. "A power plant that uses supercritical water as the working fluid can extract up to 10 times more useful energy from each drop when compared to non-supercritical plants. Aiming for supercritical conditions is key to attaining power densities consistent with fossil fuels."

The next step is commercial genius: Quaise plans to take advantage of existing infrastructure like coal-fired power plants, which will eventually be mothballed as emissions restrictions become ever tighter. These facilities already have enormous capacities to convert steam into electricity, as well as established commercial operators and experienced workforces, and they come conveniently pre-connected to the power grid. Quaise will simply replace their current fossil fuel heat sources with enough supercritical geothermal energy to keep the turbines spinning indefinitely without ever needing another lump of coal or puff of methane.

Quaise expects to re-power its first fossil-fired plant in 2028, and then go on to refine and replicate the process all over the world, since the heat should be available absolutely anywhere on Earth with this drilling technology. There are somewhere upwards of 8,500 coal-fired power plants around the world, totaling over 2,000 gigawatts of capacity, and they'll all have to find something else to do by 2050, so the opportunity is clearly mammoth.

if this technology works as expected (and the crust doesn't find new ways to fight back against our intrusions), and the economics stack up, this new use for gyrotrons could ironically end up putting fusion reactors out of a job.

Importantly, it'll take up almost no space on the surface, in contrast to industrial-scale solar and wind. It'll also precipitate a global geopolitical shift, since every country will have equal access to its own virtually inexhaustible energy source, and it sure will be nice when big countries don't have to "liberate" the populations of smaller ones to gain access to energy resources.

Predictive Musings

 Has Putin just handed Congress to the Democrats as so many GOP players praise him? 

Can Doug White get more traction as Loren praises Trump because of Trump's love for Putin?

Looks like the COVID assault is waning. What adjustments to the world order are required now that Putin has resurrected the Cold War?

Minecraft in Education

It turns out you can use Minecraft to teach almost anything.

according to many millions of users, including some Concordia faculty and students, Minecraft's malleability is its strength. Free from constraints and easily modifiable, the game can be used in countless ways, including as a game-based teaching method. In a period when classrooms have had to pivot online with little warning or prep time, the realm of Minecraft has provided educators with a massive sandbox in which to play, experiment and teach.

Darren Wershler, professor of English, and Bart Simon, associate professor of sociology and director of Concordia's Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology, describes how Wershler used Minecraft to teach a class on the history and culture of modernity. The course was based entirely within the game server, with instructions, in-class communication and course work almost exclusively carried out within the Minecraft world and over the messaging app Discord. This new pedagogical framework presented the researchers with the opportunity to see how the students used the game to achieve academic goals.

He admits to being happily surprised with how well his students adapted to the parameters of the course he co-designed along with a dozen other interdisciplinary researchers at Concordia. Wershler has been using Minecraft in his course since 2014, but he realized this approach created a scaffold for a new style of teaching.

"Educators at the high school, college and university levels can use these principles and tools to teach a whole variety of subjects within the game," he says. "There is no reason why we could not do this with architecture, design, engineering, computer science as well as history, cultural studies or sociology. There are countless ways to structure this to make it work."

Russia's Achilles Heel

Paul Krugman points out that laundered money held overseas could really hurt Russia.

the world’s advanced democracies have another powerful financial weapon against the Putin regime, if they’re willing to use it: They can go after the vast overseas wealth of the oligarchs who surround Putin and help him stay in power.

Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman have pointed out that Russia has run huge trade surpluses every year since the early 1990s, which should have led to a large accumulation of overseas assets. Yet official statistics show Russia with only moderately more assets than liabilities abroad. How is that possible? The obvious explanation is that wealthy Russians have been skimming off large sums and parking them abroad.

The sums involved are mind-boggling. Novokmet et al. estimate that in 2015 the hidden foreign wealth of rich Russians amounted to around 85 percent of Russia’s G.D.P.

Another paper co-written by Zucman found that in Russia, “the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore.” As far as I can tell, the overseas exposure of Russia’s elite has no precedent in history — and it creates a huge vulnerability that the West can exploit.

the legal basis is already there, for example in the Countering America’s Enemies Through Sanctions Act, and so is the technical ability. Indeed, Britain froze the assets of three prominent Putin cronies earlier this week, and it could give many others the same treatment.

There are two uncomfortable facts here. First, a number of influential people, both in business and in politics, are deeply financially enmeshed with Russian kleptocrats. This is especially true in Britain. Second, it will be hard to go after laundered Russian money without making life harder for all money launderers, wherever they come from — and while Russian plutocrats may be the world champions in that sport, they’re hardly unique: Ultrawealthy people all over the world have money hidden in offshore accounts.

What this means is that taking effective action against Putin’s greatest vulnerability will require facing up to and overcoming the West’s own corruption.

Can the democratic world rise to this challenge? We’ll find out over the next few months.

When is it too soon?

Making a tough call. When is it too soon to relax pandemic protocols?

There has to be a better way out of the rubble of the past two years. What would it mean to move into a future in which a common fate mattered as much as our own? It would mean no one was disposable.

The lesson of the AIDS pandemic is that it’s easy to leave people behind, even if it is at the cost of our collective peril. Coronavirus variants can develop in people with weakened immune systems who struggle to clear infections on their own, like those with untreated H.I.V. Think of the home we’ve then made for viruses like SARS-CoV-2 by impeding access to vaccines and by allowing millions to go without AIDS treatment even now. Variants can emerge because of our desire to put it all behind us. No one is truly safe until we all are. Yet might we act to save millions of people not just in the interest of self-preservation but also simply because it’s the right thing to do? That would be a signal that this pandemic has changed us. For good.

Mixtures of chemicals and pregnancy

A new study shows that we need to look at the total chemical load rather than just specific offenders. When looked at in this way, pregnant women are getting way too much exposure to problematic substances.

By linking human population studies with experiments in cell and animal models, researchers have provided evidence that complex mixtures of endocrine disrupting chemicals impact children's brain development and language acquisition. With their novel approach, the scientists show that up to 54 per cent of pregnant women were exposed to experimentally defined levels of concern. While current risk assessment tackles chemicals one at a time, these findings show the need to take mixtures into account for future risk assessment approaches.

A solution exists

Researchers now have a material that can convert CO2 directly to CO with solar energy alone. CO is a good feedstock to produce fuel and other essential chemicals.

 The researchers have studied a porous organic material called COF -- covalent organic framework. The material is known for absorbing sunlight very efficiently. By adding a so-called catalytic complex to COF, they succeeded, without any additional energy, in converting carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide.

Vax messaging that works

Studies have found that there is a vaccination message that works. It's interesting that different messages worked better in different countries. Furthermore, it seems those who were profoundly risk-averse were also the one who were most strongly vaccination-averse. Potential side-effects of the vaccine loomed larger in their mind than the actual risk of the disease.

A new study by Vincent Pons at the Harvard Business School and Vincenzo Galasso and Paola Profeta at Bocconi University in Milan may help explain why. They found that people can in fact be persuaded by the right message, offering new evidence about the best ways to reach skeptics. Separate analyses have identified other factors, such as seeing other people be safely vaccinated and hearing about the benefits of vaccines from doctors and loved ones.

their most interesting findings concerned the most ardent vaccine refusers. Six months later, one-third of the people who had rated themselves 0 in December had gotten vaccinated.

So what happened? What convinced them?

Some of it was circumstances. Among those who had put themselves between 0 and 3 on getting vaccinated, those who were older (and therefore at higher risk of serious illness) and concerned with their health risks were more likely to get vaccinated in spite of their skepticism. So did the people who anticipated indirect exposure to Covid-19 through their friends or relatives. People who consumed more traditional media and who had more trust in scientists were also more likely to come around

The researchers experimented with four messages in December to see how they would move people’s intentions then and their actual behavior six months later:

1. Self-Protection (If you get vaccinated, you could avoid getting infected)
2. Protecting Others (If you get vaccinated, you could avoid passing the virus to others)
3. Protecting Health (If you get vaccinated, it can help protect the health of people in your country)
4. Protecting the Economy (If you get vaccinated, it can help a return to economic activity and reduce unemployment)

The same pattern bore out six months later in behavior, though there was some variation across countries. Protecting Health ended up most effective in the EU, while Protecting Others or the Economy proved more persuasive in the US and UK. The researchers argued that, because this line of questioning reflected people’s actual decisions, not only their intentions, it should be less susceptible to social desirability bias (i.e., people saying what they think they are supposed to say).

The authors summarized their findings like this (emphasis mine):

Our most striking result is that informational treatments provided in the first wave affected not only vaccination intentions expressed in the same survey but also actual vaccination rates recorded six months later. Our messages even increased vaccination among individuals who had initially expressed anti-vax attitudes. Overall, altruistic messages had the largest effect. The important differences in the relative effectiveness of our different treatments across countries indicate that future information campaigns should be tailored to the context to be most impactful.

Translation: People could be persuaded to get vaccinated. It is not a lost cause. But we should be mindful that different messages work best with different people and construct our communications campaigns accordingly.

One wrinkle that bears further exploration: Among those who were least likely to change their minds were the people who are generally more risk-averse. The study’s authors speculated that “these individuals may be more concerned about possible negative side effects of vaccination than about the risk of getting Covid-19.”

Freedom and Political Vandalism

 Does freedom mean the right to destroy?

startling, although not actually surprising, has been the embrace of economic vandalism and intimidation by much of the U.S. right — especially by people who ranted against demonstrations in favor of racial justice. What we’re getting here is an object lesson in what some people really mean when they talk about “law and order.”

this isn’t a grass-roots trucker uprising. It’s more like a slow-motion Jan. 6, a disruption caused by a relatively small number of activists, many of them right-wing extremists. At their peak, the demonstrations in Ottawa reportedly involved only around 8,000 people, while numbers at other locations have been much smaller.

Despite their lack of numbers, however, the protesters have been inflicting a remarkable amount of economic damage. The U.S. and Canadian economies are very closely integrated. In particular, North American manufacturing, especially but not only in the auto industry, relies on a constant flow of parts between factories on both sides of the border. As a result, the disruption of that flow has hobbled industry, forcing production cuts and even factory shutdowns.

it’s not hard to come up with numbers like $300 million or more per day; combine that with the disruption of Ottawa, and the “trucker” protests may already have inflicted a couple of billion dollars in economic damage.

That’s an interesting number, because it’s roughly comparable to insurance industry estimates of total losses associated with the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the killing of George Floyd — protests that seem to have involved more than 15 million people.

This comparison will no doubt surprise those who get their news from right-wing media, which portrayed B.L.M. as an orgy of arson and looting. I still receive mail from people who believe that much of New York City was reduced to smoking rubble. In fact, the demonstrations were remarkably nonviolent; vandalism happened in a few cases, but it was relatively rare, and the damage was small considering the huge size of the protests.

By contrast, causing economic damage was and is what the Canadian protests are all about — because blocking essential flows of goods, threatening people’s livelihoods, is every bit as destructive as smashing a store window. And unlike, say, a strike aimed at a particular company, this damage fell indiscriminately on anyone who had the misfortune to rely on unobstructed trade.

And to what end? The B.L.M. demonstrations were a reaction to police killings of innocent people; what’s going on in Canada is, on its face, about rejecting public health measures intended to save lives. Of course, even that is mainly an excuse: What it’s really about is an attempt to exploit pandemic weariness to boost the usual culture-war agenda.

As you might expect, the U.S. right is loving it. People who portrayed peaceful protests against police killings as an existential threat are delighted by the spectacle of right-wing activists breaking the law and destroying wealth. Fox News has devoted many hours to fawning coverage of the blockades and occupations. Senator Rand Paul, who called B.L.M. activists a “crazed mob,” called for Canada-style protests to “clog up cities” in the United States, specifically saying that he hoped to see truckers disrupt the Super Bowl (they didn’t).

I hope we won’t forget this moment — and in particular that we remember it the next time a politician or media figure talks about “law and order.”

Recent events have confirmed what many suspected: The right is perfectly fine, indeed enthusiastic, about illegal actions and disorder as long as they serve right-wing ends.

Education needs help too

Why are so many people leaving?

as we enter the pandemic’s third year, America’s public schools are at risk of defaulting on their moral obligation to millions of children. Teachers, aides, principals, bus drivers, school lunch workers, custodians and other school staff are leaving in droves or are out of service due to illness. A dearth of substitutes and backup workers means day-to-day decisions about whether a school can remain open are the norm.

The pandemic has accelerated our staffing challenges, but this concerning trend has been at our doorstep for the better part of a decade. Fewer recent college graduates are choosing teaching, and a 2021 survey showed that nearly one-third of America’s teachers were thinking about leaving teaching earlier than they’d planned.

Once seen as a stable career that came with the potential to make a significant positive impact on a community, teaching can no longer compete with positions offering more flexibility and higher pay. We need solutions to school staffing that go beyond what any one city or state can provide. Our state and federal government partners must work with us.

First, to avoid a mass exodus of exhausted educators, we must offer retention bonuses that reward educators for staying in public schools. America’s teachers have weathered some of the worst of the logistical and cultural battles of covid-19, and they’ve earned this recognition. Retention bonuses would also help build a deeper bench of young teachers.

We need to recognize that choosing a career in teaching is as important as joining the military; both are critical to our national security and economic sustainability. We should offer free college tuition to students who commit to public education careers and loan forgiveness to current teachers who remain in the profession for 10 years. Let’s also set a national minimum starting salary for teachers of $75,000 per year. And let’s eliminate fees for teacher’s licenses, tests and fingerprinting.

the federal Education Department should create a national teacher licensing system. Such licensing would help create uniformly high standards from state to state and allow teachers to easily transfer their credentials when they move. And, as we ramp up our efforts to rebuild our teaching corps, we should create incentives to welcome back recently retired teachers who can fill gaps without reducing their pensions.

The Boys Are Not Alright

 Andrew Yang shares his thoughts.

The data are clear. Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; are five times as likely to spend time in juvenile detention; and are less likely to finish high school.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t get better when boys become adults. Men now make up only 40.5 percent of college students. Male community college enrollment declined by 14.7 percent in 2020 alone, compared with 6.8 percent for women. Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners.

Yes, men have long had societal advantages over women and in some ways continue to be treated favorably. But male achievement — alongside that of women — is a condition for a healthy society. And male failure begets male failure, to society’s detriment. Our media, institutions and public leadership have failed to address this crisis, framing boys and men as the problem themselves rather than as people requiring help.

This needs to change. Helping boys and men succeed should be a priority for all our society’s institutions. Schools that have succeeded in keeping boys on track should be expanded, by both increasing the number of students they serve and exporting their methods to other schools. Vocational education and opportunities should be redoubled; the nation’s public school system should start the process for early age groups, and apprenticeship programs should be supported by the federal government. Nonprofits helping boys and men — such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and the YMCA — should receive more investment.

Resources that keep families together when they want to stay together, such as marriage counseling, should be subsidized by the government — a much more cost-efficient approach than dealing with the downstream effects. The enhanced child tax credit should be renewed, helping stabilize families.

On a cultural level, we must stop defining masculinity as necessarily toxic and start promoting positive masculinity. Strong, healthy, fulfilled men are more likely to treat women well.

The above is, of course, a prodigious undertaking. But I see the need around me all the time.

Here’s the simple truth I’ve heard from many men: We need to be needed. We imagine ourselves as builders, soldiers, workers, brothers — part of something bigger than ourselves. We deal with idleness terribly.

“A man … with no means of filling up time,” George Orwell wrote, is “as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain.” Left to our own devices, many of us will fail. And from our failure, terrible things result for the country, well beyond any individual self-destruction.

Basic Recovery Economics

We have seen this demonstrated in real life. 

According to IS-LM (which stands for investment-savings, liquidity-money), public policy normally has two tools it can use to fight an economic slump. Loosely speaking, the Fed can print more money to drive interest rates down, or the Treasury can engage in deficit spending to pump up demand. After a financial crisis, however, the economy gets so depressed that monetary policy hits a limit; interest rates can’t go below zero. So, large-scale deficit spending is the appropriate and necessary response.

But folk economics sees deficits as irresponsible and dangerous; if anything, many people have the instinctive feeling that governments should cut back in hard times, not spend more. And this instinct had a big, adverse effect on policy. True, the Obama administration did respond to the slump with fiscal stimulus, but it was underpowered in part because of unwarranted deficit fears. (This isn’t hindsight, and I was tearing my hair out at the time.) And by 2010, influential opinion — the opinion of what I used to call Very Serious People — had shifted around to the view that debt, not mass unemployment, was the most important problem facing the United States and other wealthy nations.

This wasn’t what conventional economics said, and there was no hint that investors were losing faith in U.S. debt. But deficit scaremongering came to dominate political and media discussions, and governments turned to austerity policies that slowed recovery from the Great Recession.

This time around, fiscal stimulus wasn’t underpowered, and there’s definitely a case to be made that excessive deficit spending in 2021 was a factor in rising inflation (although we can argue about how big a factor, since inflation is also up a lot in countries that didn’t engage in much stimulus). But now what?

As I said, the IS-LM model tells us that policymakers have two tools for managing the overall level of demand: fiscal and monetary policy. When you’re trying to boost a deeply depressed economy, monetary policy becomes unavailable, because you can’t push interest rates below zero. But if you’re trying to cool off an overheated economy, monetary policy is available: Interest rates can’t go down, but they can go up.

But the folk economics position — where by “folk,” I mainly mean Senator Joe Manchin — is that excessive government spending caused inflation, so now we have to call off any new spending, even if it’s more or less paid for with new revenue.

Well, that’s not what conventional economics says; on the contrary, the standard model says that the Fed can handle this while we deal with other priorities.

And while conventional economics isn’t always right, any people attacking it now should ask themselves whether they’re doing so in a constructive way. In particular, I’m seeing a lot of denigration of monetary policy from people who don’t seem to realize that they are, de facto, giving aid and comfort to politicians who don’t want to invest in America’s children and the fight against climate change.

New Fusion Record

Five seconds, 59 megajoules: A new record for tokamak fusion

 On Wednesday, the EUROfusion consortium announced that the Joint European Torus (JET), located near Oxford in the UK, had set a new record for released energy. Over the course of a five-second "pulse," 59 megajoules of energy were released, double the previous record for tokamak fusion set at JET in 1997

Despite the impressive numbers, the results are still well short of the break-even point where the fusion energy released would match the energy input required to trigger the fusion. Still, the work provides an important validation of the approach being taken at the next major fusion project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER.

Conspiracy Theories

Jeffrey Kluger explains the attraction of conspiracy theories and how to avoid it.

Occam's Razor (simplest explanations closest to truth). Conspiracy theories are not simple. People experiencing loss attracted to them. Emotional poultice, can't blame yourself so blame others. Attracts less well-educated and less affluent. Attracts those who want to be special or stand out from the crowd. The pop up when small things cause big changes. Hard to accept the disproportionate effects. Shared beliefs are like gang tattoos. You are not only special but the group you are in is special.

Can't change them by criticizing or mocking. It drives them deeper. Best to be non-judgmental an explore the consequences of the beliefs. A good education can inoculate the mind against conspiracy theories.

A 14th-century philosopher and Franciscan friar, William is celebrated for developing the “law of parsimony,” better known today as “Occam’s razor.” According to the razor principle, the simplest explanation for an event is almost always the best; shave away any extraneous assumptions, and what you’ve got left is usually the truth.

That’s not exactly the way conspiracy theorists think. Either Barack Obama was actually born in Hawaii, or an international plot unfolded over multiple decades to conceal his Kenyan birthplace and install him in the presidency. Either vaccines are safe and effective, or every major hospital and health organization in the world is covering up the fact that they actually cause autism. Never mind the razor — conspiracy theories are nothing but extraneous assumptions.

The most common theories are the ones that follow the eddies of politics. As a broad rule, a party or group that’s out of power will be more inclined to believe in conspiracies than a group that’s in power.

“Conspiracy theories are for losers,” says Joseph Uscinski, associate professor of political science at the University of Miami and co-author of the 2014 book American Conspiracy Theories. Uscinski stresses that he uses the term literally, not pejoratively. “People who have lost an election, money or influence look for something to explain that loss.”

A lot also depends on demographics, with belief in the theories generally inversely related to education and wealth. One survey showed that about 42% of people without a high school education believe in at least one conspiracy theory, compared to 23% of people with a post-graduate degree. A 2017 study found a household income average of $47,193 among people who were inclined to believe in conspiracy theories and $63,824 among those who weren’t.

“In this case, conspiracy theories can be like emotional poultices,” says Joseph Parent, a professor of political science at Notre Dame University and Uscinski’s co-author. “You don’t want to blame yourself for things you may lack, so you blame anonymous forces instead.”

subjects either took a survey designed to measure their desire for uniqueness or wrote an essay on the importance of independent thought. By significant margins, those who tested high on the need to be special or were primed to feel that way by writing the essay were also more inclined to believe in various conspiracy theories.

“A small part in motivating the endorsement of…irrational beliefs,” the researchers wrote, “is the desire to stick out from the crowd.”

That partly explains why evidence that refutes the theories rarely changes any conspiracy theorists’ minds, since surrendering the belief means surrendering the specialness too.

In some cases, the very nonsense of conspiracy theories may actually be an attempt to make the world make more sense. After a national trauma — the assassination of President Kennedy, say — something called the “proportionality bias” may take hold, as the mind recoils at the idea of small causes leading to such massive effects. So the fiction of a CIA or Mafia conspiracy takes the place of a lone gunman who was able to get to the President. The more people who join the circle of believers, the less likely any one of them is to break away.

“Group affiliation becomes central,” says Parent, the Notre Dame professor. “The beliefs almost become like gang tattoos.”

Recent research suggests that the worst way to change the minds of the conspiracy crowd is to criticize or, worse, mock their beliefs. That only puts them on the defensive, making them less rather than more likely to change their minds. What may work better is non-judgmentally discussing the consequences of believing in conspiracy theories. In the case of vaccines, that can mean showing parents pictures of children with measles, or describing the deadly effects of preventable diseases.

Intervening early with facts can also make a difference. Children who learn the science behind vaccines or global warming are less likely to believe in conspiracies when they encounter them later in life. Catch the conspiracy bug first, and the infection can be hard to cure with even the heftiest later doses of science.

Stop Calling Them Accidents

Preventable injuries are preventable. But the rest of the story is that the poor have a much higher preventable death and injury rate than the affluent.

Since 1992, the rate has been rising. This is the aftereffect of President Ronald Reagan dismantling the social safety net, and him and every president who would follow defunding and defanging the regulatory agencies we created to keep us safe.

Tort lawsuits can help, although only after the worst has occurred. But they can prevent things from happening again and again. Accidental death rates in anesthesiology plummeted after hospitals were sued and changed their practices. The problem is, so-called tort reform has deeply disempowered individuals from suing. The effort to limit suits has gone way too far.

The workers’ compensation system has also helped. People used to die at work in truly insane numbers. In the past that only cost you as much as hiring a replacement. Now it costs them more to have a high accident rate.

I like the Swiss cheese model as a way to understand how risk leaks through. Each layer of protection has holes but if you have enough layers, nothing can get through. Some of our layers of safety depend on who we are. Which is why Black people are more likely to die in house fires. It comes down to what housing you have. That could be a hole in your Swiss cheese.

Angry About COVID Noncompliance?

You're not alone.

There has been remarkably little polling on how Americans who are acting responsibly view those who aren’t — the posturing and occasional violence of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers get all the headlines — but the available surveys suggest that during the Delta wave a majority of vaccinated Americans were frustrated or angry with the unvaccinated. I wouldn’t be surprised if those numbers grew under Omicron, so that Americans fed up with their compatriots who won’t do the right thing are now a silent majority.

think about the burden of proof here. You don’t have to have 100 percent faith in the experts to accept that flying without a mask or dining indoors while unvaccinated might well endanger other people — and for what? I know that some people in red America imagine that blue cities have become places of joyless tyranny, but the truth is that at this point New Yorkers with vaccine cards in their wallets and masks in their pockets can do pretty much whatever they want, at the cost of only slight inconvenience.

those who refuse to take basic Covid precautions are, at best, being selfish — ignoring the welfare and comfort of their fellow citizens. At worst, they’re engaged in deliberate aggression — putting others at risk to make a point. And the fact that some of the people around us are deliberately putting others at risk takes its own psychological toll. Tell me that it doesn’t bother you when the person sitting across the aisle or standing behind you in the checkout line ostentatiously goes maskless or keeps his or her mask pulled down.

America’s bad pandemic largely reflects a bet on the part of right-wing politicians and opinion leaders that they can reap benefits by making basic public health precautions part of the culture war.

I can’t see any reason not to go after politicians who encourage irresponsible behavior. Early indications are that Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s new governor, is already paying a price for his Covid policies relaxing past restrictions. Let’s hope we see more of that.

Ukraine Do-Over

What Biden learned last time.

That crisis has striking similarities to the one unfolding today, especially Biden’s role as foreign-policy problem-solver. Russia has mobilized more than 100,000 soldiers and threatens an attack on neighboring Ukraine, a larger deployment of troops than during its 2014 offensive.

That year, Obama’s team badly misjudged the ferocity of Russian President Vladimir Putin, it was naive about resetting relations with Russia, and it didn’t anticipate the pernicious tactics Russia would pursue against Ukraine and, ultimately, the United States. Those mistakes from eight years ago are informing the White House’s response now.

The Obama team was slow to rebuke Putin and sloppy in coordinating with European allies. “The 2014 crisis was one that sharpened a lot of minds,” said Max Bergmann, who was a State Department official at the time. “What I think you see now is the effort to get the ducks in a row right away, to send very clear messaging about what the cost would be to Russia.”

Blinken, about one year out of the Obama administration, said they had “misjudged” Putin, whom he ultimately concluded was a kleptocrat and rogue. By the time he invaded Crimea, “we really were in the zero-sum world where, from Moscow’s perspective, Russia’s strength was our weakness, and our gain was their loss,” said Blinken, who now serves as Biden’s secretary of state.

The Biden team learned that Putin will advance his goals with “asymmetric” tactics, or military and non-military approaches that operate within a gray zone, to trip up the United States. In 2014 and onward, Russia leaked a phone call to embarrass US diplomats, spread fake news, and sowed disinformation, which culminated in unprecedented attacks on the 2016 election in the US. It’s led Biden to grapple with “How to Stand Up to the Kremlin,” as was the title of a 2018 essay he co-authored for Foreign Affairs. He argued that the US must “impose meaningful costs on Russia when they discover evidence of its misdeeds.” He also said that, despite Russia’s belligerent tactics, “Washington needs to keep talking to Moscow,” to avoid unintended escalations of conflict.

Smith is now the US ambassador to NATO, and has focused on a united front in Europe. “I can’t remember a situation where we have seen such dogged diplomacy, day by day, almost hour by hour, to try to prevent a war in Ukraine. It really is all hands on deck,” said Charles Kupchan, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow who worked in the Obama White House from 2014 to 2017.

The Biden team internalized the lesson that allies count. Blinken in 2016 acknowledged that sanctions against Russia were more effective when “we rallied others” to participate.

Several former ambassadors to Europe told me that they were impressed by how quickly the Biden administration has employed old-fashioned diplomacy. “They have clearly inspired a purposeful, thorough, robust engagement with allies around this crisis that has already paid dividends,” said Dan Baer, an ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe from 2013 to 2017, who is at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.