By the end of the Civil War, a quarter of the white Southern men of military age were dead.
I’m a little bit of a Lincoln/Civil War buff (with more interest in the politics than in the military history), but here’s a fact I didn’t know until reading James McPherson’s collection of essays, Lincoln and the Second American Revolution: the Civil War took the lives of one-quarter of the Southern white men of military age. That’s a higher death toll than WWI imposed on any of the combatant nations. It seems like a pretty basic statistic, and helps make sense of the revanchisme that has actuated so much of Southern white politics ever since.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
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