iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

On NJ transit, 2004-06, modal person was reading celebrity tabloids.

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Click to read Gabe Lenz on Substack. Launched a few seconds ago.

I’m writing a book about how the United States failed to protect black Americans from private violence, then subjected them disproportionately to state punishment. I’ll share one finding each week—what went wrong and what we can do about it: gabelenz.substack.com 4/4

gabelenz.substack.com

Gabe Lenz | Substack

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The prison population has fallen from its peak. But not nearly fast enough—and it rose in 2022 and 2023. At the 2023 level, every additional year means another 1.25 million years under prison authority. Other wealthy democracies imprison far fewer. We can too. 3/4

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Black prisoners lived 21 million of those years—43% of the total. 21 million years of birthdays, funerals, ordinary Tuesdays, and years with children missed. 2/4

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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 11/07/2026

I just added up the number of years Americans have spent in prison 1979-2021: 48.5 million. In the figure below, each square represents a million years spent in prison, an unfathomable number. 1/4

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Reposted by Gabe Lenz

I wonder what tends to happen when the leader of your constitutional republic, facing no invasion, decides to bring a large number of soldiers into the capital city. Lets look at the historical examples and oh good Lord...

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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 06/07/2026

Kudos for trying to get this critical point out there.

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Reposted by Gabe Lenz

Basic macroeconomics teaches us that increases in productivity do not necessarily lead to any increase in the unemployment rate. Believing that they do is a form of the "lump of labor fallacy." Here is Paul Kurgman's explanation of the concept. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of...

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For those interested, I'm writing Unprotected, a book about how governments deny people public protection, push them toward private defense, and then criminalize the violence state abandonment helps create. Book updates: www.gabriellenz.org

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As Alice's essay describes, we are so dependent on states suppressing male violence, especially violence against women. ..

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Early states often stamp out this practice internally. E.g., Genghis Khan's own wife had been kidnapped by another tribe, so it was one of the first aggressions he banned when he set up a state. ...

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A study by Dunn found 556 court records of women stealing from 1100 to 1500 in England. The state had more or less suppressed the practice in the 1400s. In Scotland, the last case I was able to find was much later, in the 1750s. ...

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His grandfather's family hid her while tempers cooled, then negotiated a payment, a common pattern. His family was from southern Mexico, but the pattern was ubiquitous everywhere before states stamped it out. ...

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Confining Insiders, Raping Outsiders

No one wants to remember just how common bridal kidnapping was before strong states. After covering it in class, an undergraduate told me his grandfather had kidnapped his grandmother from a neighboring village. Alice Evans' post just reminded me of that story. ... www.ggd.world/p/confining-...

ggd.world

VENI, RAPUI, GENUI

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Reposted by Gabe Lenz

Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

I understand the fear and anger. But also: 1) It is connected to the belief that AI is fake and going to vanish, which means that critics who should be helping shape AI use through policy and collective work are sitting it out 2) Lumping all AI criticism/talk into us vs. "tech bros" doesn't help

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It's amazing how much they got right.

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My wonderful co-authors and link to article: @mvinaes.bsky.social and @annamikk.bsky.social. 14/14 t.co/Ti0DdSOuwf

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Building trust in the efficacy and fairness of criminal justice institutions, which were absent or weak in these regions not long ago, may help reduce violent victimization. 13/

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My wonderful co-authors and link to article: @mvinaes.bsky.social and @annamikk.bsky.social. 14/14https://t.co/Ti0DdSOuwf

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We hope the article helps people realize that US violence may in part be a legacy of high-violence, weak-government regions like the Wild West, the Deep South, and the Appalachian Highlands. 12/

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People from historically violent places see the world as more dangerous, trust family over police and courts to handle violence, etc. I'll put more of the survey findings in another thread soon. You can explore our homicide findings on this website. 11/ homiciderisk.github.io

homiciderisk.github.io

Migration Risk Explorer

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To understand the mechanism, we conducted a large survey of internal white non-Hispanic. We find evidence consistent with the culture-of-honor explanation, a set of defensive strategies that kept people safe in dangerous places but put them at risk in safer ones. 10/

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Our analysis focuses on white internal US born migrants because we only have enough migrants with enough variation in their historical homicide rates for our within-county (and other FE) comparisons. But we think the patterns likely apply to other groups at least at times. 9/

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The national toll may large. Between 2000-17, around 27K white interstate migrants were homicide victims. If every one of them had been born in Wisconsin—one of the safest states for white Americans in the 1930s—we estimate that about 6K of those people would still be alive. 8/

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We also find these homicide persistence patterns despite migrants being better educated and higher income than the people they leave behind and the people they live nearby. And we find it within migrant group education and income categoreis. 7/

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With fixed effects, we find homicide persistence among every group, including married women and the elderly. E.g. 70-year-olds from Kentucky are still at higher risk of homicide in say Illinois than Massachusetts born in 70-year-olds also living in Illinois. 6/

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Since we have individual-level death certificate data for millions, we examine whether this homicide persistence holds up with precise fixed effects to rule out alternative explanations, e.g., only comparing migrants within county and within age groups, sex, and marital status. Here are the Ns. 5/

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We find a similar pattern for 1979-1992 and 2000-2017. Here is the 2017 data. 4/

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Bivariate findings. Left: people who stayed put. Right: migrants wherever they ended up. Migrants from historically violent states remained at much higher risk even after moving. Kentuckians stand out. They remained at higher risk wherever they went (mainly the safer Midwest). 3/

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We measure state historical homicide rates, our independent variable, in the 1930s. Kentucky, the Deep South, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada stand out. Since we have state of birth on death certificates starting in '59, we can look at persistence of these high rates in later periods. 2/

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

New paper in PNAS: Your homicide risk follows you around the country. If you’re born in the historically violent Wild West, Appalachian Highlands, or Deep South, a higher risk of violent death trails you wherever you go. 🧵1/14

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Reposted by Gabe Lenz

Incredible parallels in this Berinsky & @gabelenz.bsky.social paper. Politicians didn't stand up to Joe McCarthy in large part because they incorrectly inferred McCarthy/ism was extremely popular. Not standing up to McCarthy was a kind of 1950s Popularism gated academic.oup.com/poq/article/...

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Gabe Lenz @gabelenz.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

Convince the other side you support democracy. They’ll be less likely to tolerate backsliding by their own side.

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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 11/09/2025

Research: Believing that the mass public in the opposing party supports undemocratic tactics leads people to be more supportive of undemocratic tactics themselves. Being assured that a majority of your opponents oppose such radical tactics increases support for democratic norms osf.io/my987/download

osf.io

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Gabe Lenz @gabelenz.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

Nice work. As always, Jon is a fountain of knowledge.

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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 10/07/2025

I went on Washington Journal to talk about Elon Musk and third parties. www.c-span.org/program/wash...

Picture of Jonathan Ladd on C-SPAN's Washington Journal.

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Randy Besco @randybesco.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Don’t trust an observational model with a bunch of arbitrary control variables @gabelenz.bsky.social @alexandersahn.bsky.social Lenz, Gabriel S., and Alexander Sahn. "Achieving statistical significance with control variables and without transparency." Political Analysis doi.org/10.1017/pan....

doi.org

Achieving Statistical Significance with Control Variables and Without Transparency | Political Analysis | Cambridge Core

Achieving Statistical Significance with Control Variables and Without Transparency - Volume 29 Issue 3

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Link to the paper link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691213453/the-bitter-end

Even though voters didn’t learn they were out of line with Trump, it’s likely that Trump lost out on the sustained increase in support that leaders around the world received in the first year or two of COVID merely, it seems, for taking the virus seriously, if ineffectively. See: t.co/2emeZLthLp

t.co

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Of course, this was a close election, and it’s very possible that those who did learn and defect were pivotal in Trump’s loss.

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So, will voters stand up for their policy views on Election Day? At least on this policy and for this candidate, the answer appears to be no, at least not in large numbers.

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The follow-the-leader tendency is largest for WHO membership. Among Trumpers who supported membership in Aug. 2020, and who never learned Trump’s stance on it, support remained near 100% after the election. By contrast, among those who learned Trump’s stance, support fell to 45%.

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Instead of punishing Trump, Trump supporters dramatically changed their views on these COVID policies. When they learned Trump’s policies, they followed the leader. :-)

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Did those voters defect when they learned? Since so few learned Trump’s stance, we lack the power to shed much light on this question, and it’s a hard causal one. Nevertheless, we don’t see much sign of defection among those who realized they were out of line with Trump.

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Despite billions spent on the campaign, Trumpers mostly didn’t learn that Trump was out of line with them on COVID. On mandatory masks in public, for example, the % saying Biden supported this more than Trump increased from 19% to only 40%.

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