12 September 2022. Russia | Phones
Understanding Russian opinion. // How mobile phones changed the drugs business
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1: Understanding Russian opinion
I’ve spent more time than I should have done making sense of the rapid advance of the Ukrainian army in the Kharkiv region. The best single explanation, perhaps unsurprisingly, comes from the military strategist Lawrence Freedman. I’m not going to go through his military descriptions here—you can read those for yourselves, and there’s also now coverage in the mainstream press. All the same, some of the Twitter coverage has been both moving—for example, the welcome the Ukranian troops got as they liberated Ukrainian villages.
What was more interesting about Freedman’s newsletter piece was the discussion of the military bloggers inside Russia:
Russian military bloggers are a patriotic group who are desperate for a Russian victory. Unlike the crude and increasingly risible propagandists, whose instructions are to show that all is well and that any apparent Ukraine advance has already turned into a disastrous failure, the bloggers assess the conflict with a degree of objectivity. They have no desire to praise the regime because they feel badly let down by its ineptitude, by its failure to prepare properly for a major war and also its refusal to put the country on a proper war-footing.
Obviously they feel let down, not least by the personnel and other losses suffered by the military, and the humiliation it has suffered, neither of which will be quickly repaired.
When it comes to explaining what went wrong the bloggers consider both the possible underestimation of the enemy as well as overestimation of Russian capabilities... They note that Ukrainian forces are benefitting from an inflow of advanced weaponry and have been influenced by Western tactical and operational concepts which they have been applying effectively. Here the bloggers have reported the competence of the Ukrainians in combined arms, synchronising the effects of armour, infantry and artillery, while avoiding unnecessary urban battles.
In sharp contrasts to the more propagandist bloggers, some of Russia’s military bloggers now consider that defeat is possible. That’s not going to happen any time soon, of course, and could prompt some dangerous military responses along the way. How it would play out in Russia is also not clear, given its deracinated civil society.
In turn, this reminded me of a piece a couple of months ago in Jacobin on public opinion in Russia. The magazine’s Loren Balhorn interviewed the Russian sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, still based in Moscow:
LOREN BALHORN
So, you don’t think the majority supports the war?
BORIS KAGARLITSKY
That’s the most interesting sociological and political problem: Russian people are neither for the war nor against it. They do not react to the war... As a sociologist, I can confirm that since the war, the number of people who agree to respond to opinion polls has collapsed to a level that is totally unrepresentative. Before the war it was below 30 percent, which is already very low. Now, it’s considered a big success when 10 percent agree to respond. Usually it’s 5 to 7 percent.
The conventional Western view of this is that public opinion in Russia has been cowed by the clear intimidation of people expressing different opinions—that people not expressing an opinion are likely to be against the war but are not willing to say so. Kagarlitsky says not:
(M)ost people don’t watch political programs on TV, nor do they watch oppositional media on the Internet. They are not interested in any kind of politics whatsoever. The whole spectrum of political opinion... represents maybe 15 to 20 percent of the population, probably less than 10 percent. The rest are totally apolitical. On the one hand, that’s a great advantage for the regime, but it’s also its biggest problem. Nobody moves against the government, but nobody moves in favor of it, either. That’s why the COVID vaccination campaign failed, and why Putin can’t announce a general mobilization.
Kagarlitsky sees the war as having been prompted by the local Russian politics of the problem of transition from Putin’s leadership, rather than the geo-political issues that are sometime discussed. This makes sense in that it helps to explain why the Ukraine invasion was poorly planned—and to British eyes, Russia wouldn’t be the only country in the world to have made a catastrophic strategic error because it was trying to deal with an internal issue within the ruling party.
This also helps to explain why Putin seems to have surrounded himself with a tiny team of confidants.
What remains behind Putin is mainly the police force, and a group of the most privileged oligarchs. It’s a very small group within the capitalist class, and that’s why I don’t think they’re going to survive for very long, because it contradicts the long-term logic of capitalist society. You need a broader base, at least within the ruling class, to rule the country....
LOREN BALHORN
What’s their plan? Is the goal an eventual settlement and reintegration with the West from a position of increased strength, or are we seeing the beginning of a long-term pivot toward Asia?
BORIS KAGARLITSKY
That’s exactly the problem: there is no plan. They know they made a terrible mistake and that it may be fatal, and that’s about it. The fact that there was a mistake is unacceptable for Putin and his team. The government never recognizes a failure publicly or even informally, but without recognizing there was a mistake you can’t move forward. No strategy can be developed.
2: How mobile phones changed the drugs business
It’s a couple of years old, but I was pointed towards a piece in Columbia magazine that argued first that the advent of mobile phones had transformed the way that drug dealing businesses worked, and that the effect of this had been a significant decline in inner city murder rates.
The main beneficiaries of this were young Hispanic and black men.
The article isn’t that long, although if you want to know more the full NBER paper is available as a pdf.
The researchers, Lena Edlund and Cecilia Machado, investigated the change in county-level murder rates as mobile phone masts were erected. They found that murder rates dropped after the masts went up.
(Image: Google Maps Drugs Deal’, by Chris Messina/flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Effectively, they say, mobile phones allowed dealers to arrange drugs hand-offs more discreetly, rather than having to control physical territory (think: The Wire) to manage the drugs business. This reduced the number of turf battles—the main cause of deaths and injuries:
“As drug dealing became less about defending physical territory and more about accumulating customers through private networks, more dealers could enter the market and it became less profitable and there was less to fight over,” says Edlund.
From a business point of view, this could be though of as needing less retail coverage, and replacing it with good customer management systems.
The researchers reckon that the advent of mobile phones reduced the number of murders by between 19% and 29%—there are other relevant factors, such as different policing approaches and lower unemployment that are also relevant. Given America’s heroic murder rates, that’s a big reduction—from about 25,000 a year to 15,000 a year.
This technology-enabled change has now changed the way the drugs market works for good:
“Our data suggest that the drop in drug-related homicides is permanent,” Edlund says. “The market for drugs has changed, and we’re not going back to the street business model.”
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