Posts Tagged ‘peace’
“We all have our price, and mine’s a lot lower than that”*…
From Model Thinking, a modest proposal to end the war in Ukraine…
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused the loss of countless lives, hundreds of billions in damage and about $150bn financial and military aid from allies, primarily the United States and the Europe Union (EU).
One potential idea to end the conflict is to pay Russian soldiers, often unwilling combatants, to surrender. Indeed, the Ukrainian government, shortly after the invasion began, offered Russian soldiers 5 million roubles ($48,000), or four years’ salary for the average Russian, to do so.
More than a year later, the scheme has received very little public attention. At the time, Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, said the scheme would have limited effect because Russian soldiers considering it had to weigh it against three large costs, namely the risks of:
- Being shot for desertion by the Russian army
- Ukrainian soldiers disobeying international law and shooting any captured prisoners
- Them being returned to Russia in a peace deal where they would most likely face death or imprisonment for defecting.
Caplan suggests an improvement: offering not only payment but also EU citizenship for Russian soldiers and their families. This means that defecting soldiers and their families can both establish themselves and permanently enjoy an income several times higher than their previous life while facing little risk of forced repatriation. Although this scheme has attracted some interest elsewhere, no attempt has yet been made to model its impact.
In this post, we provide a simple model of the effect of such a policy. Conservatively, we conclude that if there is a <17% chance of death while trying to defect, a $100,000 payment is sufficient to incentivise the average Russian soldier to do so – meaning that it might cost as little as $20bn to end the war entirely…
A fascinating (if perhaps optimistic) analysis of how much Russian soldiers would need to be paid to defect if also offered EU citizenship: “Paying for Peace,” from @DuncanMcClement and @jasonhausenloy in @model_thinking.
* Your correspondent’s motto
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As we put the mercy in mercenary, we might recall that it was on this date in 1958 that the Peace Symbol made it’s public debut at the British nuclear disarmament movement’s march from Trafalgar Square to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire.
Designed by Gerald Holtom, it featured the super-imposition of the flag semaphore for the characters “N” and “D,” taken to stand for “nuclear disarmament.”
Breaking bread…
A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes
–– Wendell Berry
Food is our common ground, a universal experience
– James Beard
Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant [in Pittsburgh, PA] that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. The food is served out of a take-out style storefront that rotates identities every six months to highlight another country. Each iteration of the project is augmented by events, performances, and discussions that seek to expand the engagement the public has with the culture, politics, and issues at stake within the focus country. These events have included live international Skype dinner parties between citizens of Pittsburgh and young professionals in Tehran, Iran; documentary filmmakers in Kabul, Afghanistan; and community radio activists in Caracas, Venezuela…
More about Conflict Kitchen on their site.
Those who look to food as the apotheosis of another kind of aspirational experience would do well to heed the wisdom of the (much misunderstood) father of Epicureanism…
We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink…
– Epicurus
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As we lick our lips, we might pause to recall that this was the date, in 1917, that the “Third Battle of Ypres”– or “Passchendaele”– began in Flanders during the War to End All Wars, World War I. It lasted over three months, and cost over half a million lives – the Germans lost about 250,000, and the British and their Commonwealth allies, about the same. To put the scale of loss in perspective: the British death toll at Passchendaele far exceeds the combined death, casualty, and missing-in action toll on U.S. forces during the entire Vietnam War… and the world was of course smaller then: the young Commonwealth of Australia, with a population of fewer than five million at the time, lost 36,500 men.
Eventually, on November 12, the Canadians took the village of Passchendaele, or what was left of it, and the battle was finally over. In the end, the battle was of little import to the larger conflict. In his memoirs Lloyd George wrote, “Passchendaele was indeed one of the greatest disasters of the war…. No soldier of any intelligence now defends this senseless campaign…”
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