Non-Disruptive Tactics of Suppression Are Superior in Countering Terrorism, Insurgency, and Financial Panics

BACKGROUND: Suppressing damaging aggregate behaviors such as insurgency, terrorism, and financial panics are important tasks of the state. Each outcome of these aggregate behaviors is an emergent property of a system in which each individual's action depends on a subset of others' actions, given by each individual's network of interactions. Yet there are few explicit comparisons of strategies for suppression, and none that fully incorporate the interdependence of individual behavior. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Here I show that suppression tactics that do not require the removal of individuals from networks of interactions are nearly always more effective than those that do. I find using simulation analysis of a general model of interdependent behavior that the degree to which such less disruptive suppression tactics are superior to more disruptive ones increases in the propensity of individuals to engage in the behavior in question. CONCLUSIONS: Thus, hearts-and-minds approaches are generally more effective than force in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, and partial insurance is usually a better tactic than gag rules in quelling financial panics. Differences between suppression tactics are greater when individual incentives to support terrorist or insurgent groups, or susceptibilities to financial panic, are higher. These conclusions have utility for policy-makers seeking to end bloody conflicts and prevent financial panics. As the model also applies to mass protest, its conclusions provide insight as well into the likely effects of different suppression strategies undertaken by authoritarian regimes seeking to hold on to power in the face of mass movements seeking to end them

Central banking and inequalities: taking off the blinders

What is the relation between monetary policy and inequalities in income and wealth? This question has received insufficient attention, especially in light of the unconventional policies introduced since the 2008 financial crisis. The article analyzes three ways in which the concern central banks show for inequalities in their official statements remains incomplete and underdeveloped. First, central banks tend to care about inequality for instrumental reasons only. When they do assign intrinsic value to containing inequalities, they shy away from trade-offs with the standard objectives of monetary policy that such a position entails. Second, central banks play down the causal impact monetary policy has on inequalities. When they do acknowledge it, they defend their actions by claiming that it is an unintended side effect, that it is temporary, and/or that any alternative policy would fare even worse. The article appeals to the doctrine of double effect to criticize these arguments. Third, even if one accepts that inequalities should be contained and that today’s monetary policies exacerbate them, is it both desirable and feasible to make containing inequalities part of the mandate of central banks? The article analyzes and rejects three attempts on the part of central banks to answer this question negatively

Regulation:Managing the Antinomies of Economic Vice and Virtue

In the quarter-century that SLS has been published, regulation has emerged as a new, and for many exciting, inter-disciplinary field. The concept itself requires a wider view of normativity than the narrow positivist one of law as command. It is certainly protean, ranging over many fundamental questions about the changing nature of the public sphere of politics and the state, and its interactions with the ‘private’ sphere of economic activity and social relations, as well as the mediation of these interactions, especially through law. This survey aims to outline and evaluate some of the main contours of the field as it has developed in this recent period, focusing on the regulation of economic activity. Regulation is seen as having emerged with the withdrawal by governments from direct provision of many economic and social services, to be replaced by corporatist bureaucracies and quasi-public agencies managing the complex public-private interactions of financialised capitalism. The arguments for ‘smart’ regulation have, in an era fixated on neo-liberalism, generally legitimised delegation of responsibility to big business. Its advocates, having been drawn into policy fields, have perhaps too often lost their critical edge, and allowed it to become instrumentalised, reflecting the technicist character of its practice

Overcoming the zero bound : Gesell vs. Eisler. Discussion of Mitsuhiro Fukao's "The effects of 'Gesell' (currency) taxes in promoting Japan's economic recovery"

Despite the zero lower bound on the short nominal interest rate in Japan having become a binding constraint, conventional monetary policy in Japan, in the form of generalised open market purchases of government securities of all maturities, has never been pushed to the limit where all outstanding government debt and all current and anticipated future government deficits are (or are confidently expected to be) monetised. Open market purchases of private securities can create serious governance problems. Two ways of overcoming the zero lower bound constraint have been proposed. The first is Gesell’s carry tax on currency. The second is Eisler’s proposal for the unbundling of the medium of exchange/means of payment function and the numéraire function of money through the creation of a parallel virtual currency. This raises the fundamental issue of who chooses or what determines the numéraire used in private wage and price contracts—an issue that is either not addressed in the literature or addressed incorrectly. On balance, Gesell’s proposal appears to be the more robust of the two