The United States of Michael Vick or Taking Stock of Options' Futures

We'll see if I can keep this flowing and logical. I've been meaning to write about sanctions for a while, but I've been having some difficulty keeping a coherent argument.

First, to be clear, I don't like sanctions, and I don't think that they work. If you look at this list of current and recent sanctions, only Yugoslavia stands out as a country where sanctions may have done any good. Advocates of sanctions love to point out the popular ouster of Milosevic as an example of the way they are supposed to work: everyday people get fed up with the treatment they receive from their government and as a result of their government, so they get rid of it. Most importantly, sanctions are supposed to provide a middle ground of punishment, between doing nothing and instituting a bombing campaign, for example. But looking at the list again, it's not entirely clear what this middle option gains us: many of the countries now or previously under US sanctions have been invaded anyway (c.f. various Balkan states, Iraq, Afghanistan), and others have been threatened with this possibility of military intervention (Iran, North Korea, Sudan).

Game theorists tell us (for example in The Strategy of Conflict) that there are strategic advantages in bargaining to be gained by withholding or disallowing a middle option. Let's posit a situation in which sanctions are disallowed by official US policy. If Evil Dictator is faced with an ultimatum like "stop ethnic cleansing or we'll invade and remove you from power," and if this threat is credible, they have a reduced set of choices: concede or prepare for war. Given the power of the American military, the former seems more likely. Now consider this threat with sanctions a clear option; Evil Dictator is faced with a spectrum of possibilities. They often choose the hardest line that is unlikely to trigger immidiate invasion (*cough* Iran *cough*). Especially given the pressures of the international community, the US is unlikely to immidiately follow up on an ultimatum because they have a less harsh punishment available. A punishment that happens to target the wrong people at the wrong time and in the process give our Evil Dictator some great propaganda fodder.

See, the problem is that sanctions are not a clear punishment. Operant conditioning theory tells us that punishment (or reinforcement) should meet four conditions to be effective - it needs to be satiating, immidiate, contingent and sizeable. Sanctions tend to fail on several or even all of these lines. In the case of a country that is already poor, removing trade will simply make reductions in an already low standard of living. If sanctions are not universally imposed by a country's trading partners, it will simply substitute other options and see little real decline. It is only when sanctions will drop a country below a line of comfort or subsitance (and do we really want to do the latter?) that it meets the criterion of satation (or in the case of this type of negative punishment, whatever the removal of satiation is called). On the second point, sanctions are rarely imposed quickly enough to meet any sort of standard of immidiacy; sanctions usually follow substantial debate in national or international decision-making apperati. Furthermore, the effects of sanctions tend to aggregate over time, making them feel like cruelty or discrimination, rather than a contingent punishment. Really, sanctions are not contingent at all. Usually the people who feel the worst initial squeeze are small and medium businesses and consumers, while the higher-ups who make the real decisions are usually able to maintain their own living standards through personal connections and the black market. And finally, as addressed before, sanctions, espcially to those higher-ups, will not feel like a sizeable punishment, espeically given the threat of worse. Sanctions punish the wrong people for things their leaders did, generally with poor control over the size of the impact. A punishment lacking contingency and immidiacy is cruel and unusual and unsurprisingly ineffective.

Furthermore,reinforcement has been shown to be more effective when it is done over varied ratios. This means it is more effective to give a dog a treat on average every five times he sits (sometimes after two sits, sometimes after eight, sometimes after five...) than it is to reward him exactly every five times he sits. It is even more effective to reward a dog on average every five times than every time. This is why gambling is so addictive: lets see...I don't know about satiating (I guess that depends on how much you need the money), but the reward is immidiate, contingent, generally substantial and on a variable ratio schedule (if you bet at 5 to 1 odds, you don't know for sure that you will win every five times, but you will average a win every five times). Sanctions are on a fixed ratio because presumably a relatively fixed proportion of trade will be shut down. Again, not a very effective schedule of reinforcement.

Of course, sanctions are a punishment, not a reward, so they're a little different than sitting for a treat or betting on football. But punishments work a similar way. As I've mentioned before, the Gestapo were very effective because they used what is, in essence, a varied ratio punishment scheme. Not everyone got punished every time they did something wrong, but there was enough visibility of punishment with a fairly uniform, if random, distribution to make punishment an effective deterent. And of course the size of punishment was substantial. This is why Gestapo tactics were pretty effective at keeping the population under control but speeding tickets are not very effective at preventing speeding: the size of the fine is not a very effective deterent for most people, at least given their likelyhood of being pulled over. Of course, by the lines I have been arguing earlier, the possibility that a cop will let you off with a warning or a ticket for not buckling your seatbelt (a middle option, right Mike?) rather than a speeding ticket makes their bargaining position and their threat less tenable. And, as speeding tickets help us demonstrate, punishments tend to, at best, stop negative behavior rather than promoting positive behavior; at worst they just make people avoid getting caught. Even in animals, punishment is much more likely to create non-reinforced behavior. And again, speeding tickets and Gestapo arrests are contingent, immidiate and on a variable ratio schedule, making them that much more effective than sanctions.

So what am I proposing? Quite simply to take sanctions off the table. Cancel all existing sanctions and make a real commitment to not using them in the future, complete with a convincing mechanism to avoid opting out of the commitment. By limiting our bargaining position in terms of threats, we actually make it stronger. One of the (few) advantages of the Bush presidency, at least with respect to this, is that he has repeatedly made credible his threats to invade. If we remove our potential middle-ground, these threats gain more power. Of course the problem is that our military is already overtaxed and threats alone are not a very conveniant or friendly way to do foreign policy.

That's why we need more development aid. As Senator Shumer has stated with respect to Afghanistan, especially the opium poppy-Taliban connection, we need to give an alternative to negative behavior. Terror, the drug trade and street crime all thrive in environments where there are few opportunities. In Freakanomics we see that most drug dealers would much rather be janitors. Certainly poppy farmers would rather be almost anything else. So we need to give that opportunity. Investing in infrastructure, weather in the inner city or in Palestine or Afghanistan, gives people something better to do. It just makes sense to give replacement opportunities. When people become vegitarian, a common first step is to simply make the same meals while replacing meat. There exist dozens of different stop-smoking aids that replace cigarettes with another source of nicotine or another oral fixation. My best attempt to end my late-night snacking has been to replace it with late-night stretching. Replace poppies with another crop, replace black-market jobs with legitimate ones, replace terrorist-funded schools and hospitals.

So how does this all fit together? It's all about options. More positive options, less negative ones. Fewer options for punishment makes the threat of other punishments more credible. More options for development makes the possibility of change more real.

And a preview of next time, maybe: while we're replacing things: we need to stop thinking about world politics as a game for leaders. One of the fallacious roots of sanction theory is that citizens make a good proxy for their leaders. This is a bad assumption in a democracy and a worse one anywhere else. Whipping boys are not a good punishment for leaders lacking in compassion. And what's worse, by invoking sanctions, we fall into the leader's trap, we conflate him with the country. This is nothing more than a cult of personality. If we do want another punishment option, maybe this one makes sense: instead of sanctions (starving the whipping boy) or war (killing the whipping boy), why don't we ever consdier assassination? If we truly believe a leader singularly responsible for his country's ills, why not just take him out? If this doesn't make sense to you, maybe the assumption of leader as pied piper is a flawed one. Anyway, more on the leader/people fallicy next time, maybe...