Cost Plus Drugs

James Bailey1 Comment

A new online pharmacy funded by Mark Cuban promises to sell prescription drugs at a fixed markup, 15% over cost plus a $3 flat fee. What’s the catch?

As far as I can tell, there are two- they only sell generics, and they don’t take insurance. But I think this will still save many people a lot of money.

The most expensive drugs get that way because they are sold by monopolies, almost always because they were invented less than 20 years ago and are still on-patent. But it’s still possible for older drugs to be sold at huge markups, as Martin Shkreli could tell you now that he’s out of prison (Shkreli’s case is supposedly what inspired Dr. Alex Oshmyansky to start this pharmacy). Sometimes you can still blame these markups on monopolies, just induced by the FDA instead of patents. But even for generic drugs with competitive manufacturing, you still sometimes see large and variable markups at the pharmacy level. So I think there’s still huge value in a pharmacy offering a low and stable markup on generics.

What about not taking insurance? First of all, lower cash prices obviously still benefit the 28 million Americans who don’t have health insurance. But even for those with insurance, it’s surprisingly common throughout health care to find cash prices lower than their copay. I have relatively good insurance but when I checked Cost Plus Drugs for the last two prescriptions my family got, I found that one was 80% cheaper than our copay (the other was about the same as our copay, so we’d only come out even, though we’d presumably save our insurer a lot).

Cost Plus Drugs originally wanted to also work through insurance as a Pharmacy Benefit Manager, but seems to have pivoted to being an “unPBM” that just offers generics to employers to supplement their existing plans. They also want to manufacture some of their own drugs, which seems on track to happen. They were started as a Public Benefit Corporation, so while they are for-profit this lends credibility to the idea that they really do want to keep prices down, not just start with low prices to make a name for themselves. Anyway, this seems like a worthy experiment and I encourage anyone with an expensive prescription to see if you can get it cheaper here.

Sick of high drug prices? Try some low-price anti-nausea mediation

Violence, Guns, and Policy in the United States

Jeremy Horpedahl12 Comments

The United States is a uniquely violent country among high-income democracies. And by the best available data on homicides, the US has always been more violent. Homicides are useful to look at because we generally have the best data on these (murders are the most likely crime to be reported) and it’s the most serious of all violent crimes.

Just how much more violent is the US than other high-income democracies? As measured by the homicide rate, about 6-7 times as violent. We can see this first by comparing the US to several European countries (and a few groupings of similar countries).

Let me make a few things clear about this chart. First, this is data for homicides, which are typically defined as interpersonal violence. Thus, it excludes deaths on the battlefield, genocides, acts of terrorism (generally speaking), and other deaths of this nature. That’s how it is defined. If we plotted a chart of battlefield deaths, it would look quite different, but there’s not much good reason to combine these different forms of violent death.

On the specifics of the chart, prior to 1990 these data are averages from multiple observations over multi-year timespans (generally 25 or 50 years). The data on European countries comes from a paper by Eisner on long-term crime trends (Table 1). The countries chosen are from this paper, as are the years chosen. Remember that historical data is always imperfect, but these are some of the best estimates available. For the US, I used Figure 5 from this paper by Tcherni-Buzzeo, and did my best to make the timeframes comparable to the Eisner data. The data are not perfect, but I think they are about as close as we can get to long-run comparisons. For the data from 1990 forward, I use the IHME Global Burden of Disease study, and the death rates from interpersonal violence (to match Eisner, I average across grouped countries).

When we average across all the European countries in the first chart and compare the US to Europe, we can see that the US has always been more violent, though the 20th century onwards does seem to show even more violence in the US relative to Europe. (These charts are slightly different from some that I posted on Twitter recently, especially the pre-1990 data as I tried to more carefully use the same periods for the averages — still only take this a rough guide).

And what is the main form by which this violence is carried out? In the US, it is undeniably clear: firearms. Between 1999 and 2020, there were almost 400,000 homicides in the US (using CDC data). Over 275,000 of these, or about 70%, were carried out with firearms. The next largest category is murder with a knife or other sharp object, with about 10% of murders. And homicides have become even more gun-focused in recent years: about 80% of murders in 2020-21 were committed with guns.

So, there’s the data. But the important social scientific question is: Can we do anything about it? Are there any public policies, either about guns or other things, that will reduce gun violence? Could restrictions on gun use actually increase homicides, since no doubt guns are also used defensively?

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Economic Underpinnings of the Renaissance in Northern Italy

Scott Buchanan1 Comment

The Renaissance in northern Italy was a period between roughly 1350 and 1550 (definitions vary) when a proto-modern outlook and culture and economy replaced  feudal medieval society. We all know about the great artistic and literary and scientific advances made at this time and place. I got curious about the economics behind all this. It is clear that the cities of northern Italy, such as Florence, were extremely prosperous, otherwise they could not have funded all these artists and architects.

It has jokingly been said, “Ah, I don’t see what is so great about Shakespeare – – all he did was string together a bunch of famous quotes.”  Well, since I know little about all this, what I will do here is mainly string together a bunch of relevant quotes.  Let the citations begin….

This blurb from “helenlo-weebly” (?) gives a good overview, noting the  importance of trade and the shift from rural barter to an urban money economy:

Trade brought many new ideas and goods to Europe.  A bustling economy created prosperous cities and new classes of people who had enough money to support art and learning.  Italian city-states like Venice and Genoa were located on the trade routes that linked the rest of western Europe with the East.  Both these city-states became bustling trading centers.  Trading ships brought goods to England, Scandinavia, and present-day Russia.  Towns  along trading routes provided inns and other services for traveling merchants.

          The increase of trade led to a new kind of economy.  During the middle ages people traded goods for other goods.  During the Renaissance people began using coins to buy goods which created a money economy.  Moneychangers were needed to covert one type of currency into another.  Therefore, many craftspeople, merchants, and bankers became more important i society.  Crafts people produced goods that merchants traded all over Europe.  Bankers exchanged currency, loaned money, and financed their own business. 

         Some merchants and bankers grew very rich.  They could afford to help make their cities more beautiful.  Many became patrons and provided new buildings and art; they helped found universities.  This led many city-states to become a flourishing educational and cultural center.

Bartleby.com notes  technical advances in ship construction, and the rise of Florentine bankers:
Genoa and Venice also made advancements in shipbuilding allowing ships to sail all year long and the increased the volume of goods that could be transported (accelerated speed)…Florentine merchants and bankers acquired control of papal banking (acting as tax collectors).

Brewminate  notes the rise of modern commercial infrastructure (which depends on law and order, with contracts being honored) and the virtuous cycle of trade and urban craftsmanship promoting each other. Also, the economic and social impact of the Black Death (which is a huge topic of itself):

The Crusades had built lasting trade links to the Levant, and the Fourth Crusade had done much to destroy the Byzantine Empire as a commercial rival to Venice and Genoa. Thus, while northern Italy was not richer in resources than many other parts of Europe, its level of development, stimulated by trade, allowed it to prosper. Florence became one of the wealthiest cities of the region…

In the thirteenth century, Europe in general was experiencing an economic boom. The city-states of Italy expanded greatly during this period and grew in power to become de factofully independent of the Holy Roman Empire. During this period, the modern commercial infrastructure developed, with joint stock companies, an international banking system, a systematized foreign exchange market, insurance, and government debt. Florence became the center of this financial industry and the gold florin became the main currency of international trade.

The decline of feudalism and the rise of cities influenced each other; for example, the demand for luxury goods led to an increase in trade, which led to greater numbers of tradesmen becoming wealthy, who, in turn, demanded more luxury goods…

The Black Death [in the fourteen century] wiped out a third of Europe’s population, and the new smaller population was much wealthier, better fed, and had more surplus money to spend on luxury goods like art and architecture.

What motivated the newly rich urban elites to so assiduously patronize the arts? According to dailyhistory.org, it was largely a desire to assert one’s status and to curry favor with the local citizens:

The New Elites such as the De Medici used spectacles and display to assert themselves in society and to demonstrate their wealth. Wealthy members of the urban elite and the aristocracy were always keen to demonstrate their status. This need to publicize and affirm one’s status led to the patronage of great artists and writers to provide displays and exhibit the wealth and power of the elite. This need for others’ recognition was vital in the Renaissance, which led to the lavish patronage of the period. This led to a great deal of competition to patronize the best artists and writers.

And there you have it.

The Political Economy of Crazy

mdmakowsky1 Comment

The Ohio State House of Representative has passed an absolutely insane law granting adults the option to challenge the gender of children participating in youth sports. This thread has the details, read at your own emotional peril:

Now, let’s keep a few things in mind. First, it hasn’t passed the Senate yet, which won’t make a decision until November. Second, there is no guarantee the governor would sign it into law if it passes the Senate. Third, the likelihood that such a law would hold up in court seems slim, though I’m certainly not a legal expert. Fourth, it strikes me as extremely unlikely the Republican party has any interest in having the legally prescribed violation of children as something they have to defend in subsequent elections.

So then what the hell just happened? Why have state houses of representatives become places where the lunatic fringe not only can get an institutional toehold, but actually push legislation through?

Let me answer my own question with a different question.

Can you name your state house representative? Name you name any representative from your state house? Can you name anyone who has been a representative in your state house that didn’t subsequently gain fame in national politics?

I can’t either.

The simple fact seems to be that voters don’t pay much attention to state representatives. Voter turnout is dependent on the draw of elections for national offices, and subsequent voter decisions largely leverage party brand. But that doesn’t mean candidates don’t have options. There are, of course, brands within parties (progressive Democrats, Trumpist Republicans, etc), which are particularly important in primaries. There are campaign platform choices that may resonate with informed voters, as well. The notion that informed voters can swing an election depends depends on the Miracle of Aggregation and the Law of Large Numbers. Simply put, if the voter errors are random, then completely ignorant voters should cancel out, leaving the outcome to be determined by the minority of informed voters.

What happens with a vanishingly thing number of people are informed, though? Candidates could inform them, but this is a state house election. Candidates don’t have any campaign money to inform them with. What they need is free campaign advertising. What they need is attention.

You know what gets attention? Crazy. Crazy gets attention.

Proposing and passing legislation to allow strangers to demand that children be physically inspected to determine their gender, that will get attention. That the “legitimacy” of a childs physical appearance be publicly brought into doubt, in front of peers and a crowd of peers. The shock, the tears, they chumming of the waters for the angriest parents and the most unhinged theories, that gets people to write articles and tweets. Articles and tweets that might include a candidate’s name. And if people know a candidate’s name, they might check their box come election time.

Social media gives the impression that everyone is paying attention to everything, but I suspect it is exactly the oppositve. We’ve never bored anymore, which means that the price of grabbing our attenion is higher than ever. For shoestring campaigns, the only way to get over the top is to offer somethings so irresistible that voters will be compelled to grant them a moment’s thought. Which isn’t to say that all of this insanity is pure pantomime. Sure, there are incentives to acting crazy. But causality can go the other way as well. The less we pay attenion to state politics, the more that elections will select for crazy.

This is all a long way of saying that I don’t see any reason it won’t keep getting even dumber.

No in-group bias from financial choices in latest experiment

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

“How Dictators Use Information about Recipients” is my new project with Laura Razzolini. A working paper is up at SSRN. We use the Dictator Game to measure if people are generous toward others who made a similar choice.

In the first stage of the experiment, every player gets to make their own choice about whether or not to invest in a risky option (called Option B). Players can pick Option A if they do not want to invest.

In the second stage, participants get to decide if they will send any money to another anonymous player. If a “dictator” (the person who determines the final allocation of money) decided to take the risk on Option B in stage 1, would they be more generous toward a counterpart if they know that person also picked Option B?

We explain in our paper why the literature indicates such a form of favoritism could be expected.

Social identity theory is the psychological basis for intergroup discrimination. Economic experiments have created feelings of group identity in various ways, leading to significant effects on behavior. Chen & Li (2009) demonstrate that group identity formation can affect social preferences.

Chen and Li (2009) started by having subjects review paintings by two different modern artists. The subjects were divided into two groups, based on their reported painting preferences. Subjects were informed about their group membership by the experimenter.

The Chen and Li paper has been cited almost 2000 times. Group identity is a topic of interest. Several experimental papers demonstrate that strangers can have team feelings induced quickly with the right procedures. Those team loyalties affect behavior in incentivized tasks.

Group feelings artificially induced in the lab by Eckel & Grossman (2005) influence levels of cooperation and contributions to public goods. Pan & Houser (2013)  induce group identities by asking subjects to complete tasks in groups.  Pan & Houser (2019) found that investors trust in-group members more. The in-group has been induced in several different ways in lab experiments. In this paper, we investigate whether in-group effects arise from making a common financial decision in the first stage of the experiment.

Do you think our manipulation in the beginning affected giving?

Nope. There was no effect. Dictators who chose Option B did not give more to recipients who also chose Option B.

Not every result in the paper is a null result. One piece of information caused a large increase in giving. If we inform the dictator that their counterpart started with less money in the first stage (due to bad luck) then the dictator would give more. Sympathy was inspired, as we predicted, by knowing if a recipient was “poor” in the experiment. Conversely, if dictators are informed that their counterpart is “rich” then they excused themselves from having to give up money to help.

Information about financial choices, at least in our sterile simple environment, neither polarized nor united the participants. The giving with only choice information was higher than giving to “rich” but lower than giving to “poor”. Lastly, we provided all of the information at once. With full information, dictators were still heavily influenced by the starting endowments and choices information had no effect.

Understanding polarization is important. Humans exhibit tribal instincts to not help those who are perceived as different. In our experiment we seem to have found one difference that that people are willing to tolerate or overlook.

See also my Works in Progress blog about polarization and a different experiment.  

References

Chen, Yan, and Sherry Xin Li. “Group Identity and Social Preferences.” American Economic Review 99, no. 1 (March 2009): 431–57.

Eckel, Catherine C., and Philip J. Grossman. “Managing Diversity by Creating Team Identity.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 58, no. 3 (2005): 371–92.

Pan, Xiaofei, and Daniel Houser. “Why Trust Out-Groups? The Role of Punishment under Uncertainty.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 158 (2019): 236–54.

Pan, Xiaofei Sophia, and Daniel Houser. “Cooperation during Cultural Group Formation Promotes Trust towards Members of Out-Groups.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280, no. 1762 (July 7, 2013): 20130606.

Post Pandemic Vacation Arbitrage

Zachary Bartsch1 Comment

My wife traveled to Ireland with a friend after she graduated with her bachelor’s degree. She had lived in Europe as a child and had travelled for mission trips. But travelling to the Irish Republic as a young adult, for the singular purpose of celebration and leisure, made a big impact on my eventual wife and she recounted it for years.

Remember pre-Covid when life was so easy? Many of us had planned trips, for business and leisure, that were interrupted. By now, the vast majority of people are back to ‘normal’ (I think?). Classes are in-person, masks are largely optional, and there is no more line stretching out down the sidewalk near the Trader Joe’s. With all this normalcy, one might ask:

Where’s your next vacation?

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Unfashionable Investing

James Bailey7 Comments

Investors such as mutual funds, index funds, and hedge funds tend to pick a particular strategy or asset type and stick with it. It’s what they know, it’s what they’re known for, and making major changes would often create legal difficulties; something marketed as a bond fund can’t suddenly switch to stocks even if they think stocks would do much better. Other types of investors like pension funds, endowments and individuals have more flexibility to change their strategies. These investors tend to chase performance, allocating to types of investments that have performed well recently. This can create fashions, types of investment strategies that become more popular for a few years.

These strategies might involve focus on a certain asset class (stocks / bonds / commodities / private equity / real estate / et c), a certain sector or region within an asset class, a certain factor (value, growth, momentum), et c. It seems like institutional incentives, trend chasing, and FOMO lead people and institutions to over-allocate to strategies that have been successful the last 1-5 years and under-allocate to those that haven’t. Everyone sees something has recently been successful, so they pile into it, which drives up prices and makes it look even more successful for a while; but eventually this drives things to be so clearly over-valued that there’s a crash, and the crash scares people away for years until it becomes clearly undervalued. Most recently 2020-2021 saw people pile into growth/tech stocks and alternatives like SPACs/crypto, but the beginning of Fed rate hikes was the signal that the party is over and people (over?)react by pulling out.

Given this, the ideal strategy is to show up right before the party starts, then leave right at the peak; but no one can time it that well. The possibly realistic alternative is to show up early when no one’s there, then leave right when the party’s getting good (Punchbowl Capital?). Timing and identifying which strategies are too hot and which cold enough (Glacier Capital? Cryo Capital?) is the biggest practical question in how to pull this off. The simplest/dumbest way to do it is to avoid timing decisions entirely and just invest fixed proportions into all strategies; when they’re over-valued your fixed investment doesn’t buy many shares, when they’re under-valued it buys lots. This actually sounds like a decent way to go, but its more buying into the Efficient Market Hypothesis than beating it, can we do better? Here are the types of meta-strategies I’m planning to look into:

  • How variable is the timing of strategy boom/busts? Could you possibly just use fixed numbers of months/years- if a strategy’s been hot this long get out, if its been cold this long get in?
  • Use market share numbers, get in when something gets below a certain % of the market and out when it gets above
  • Use valuation numbers like P/E ratios (seems to work well for the overall stock market, may be harder to measure for some strategies/classes)
  • Flow of funds- is there a rate of change that works as a trigger?
  • Proportion of major institutions allocating to each strategy
  • What looks promising right now along these lines (May 2022)? Without looking at the numbers, the perennial strategies that have been out-of-favor a few years seem like value, emerging markets, and commodities (though commodities might be too hot again just now). These (along with real estate; right now homes seem expensive but homebuilders are cheap and I think commercial is too) all did well after the 2000 tech crash

I’m obviously not the first person to think along these lines; the concepts of the commodity cycle and Shiller’s CAPE are related, and Global Macro and Multistrategy funds do some of this. In the latest AER: Insights, Xiao Yan and Zhang echo Robert Shiller and Paul Samuelson that predicting big things like this is actually easier than predicting little things like the valuation of a specific stock:

Samuelson’s Dictum refers to the conjecture that there is more informational inefficiency at the aggregate stock market level than at the individual stock level. Our paper recasts it in a global setup: there should be more informational inefficiency at the global level than at the country level. We find that sovereign CDS spreads can predict future stock market index returns, GDP, and PMI of their underlying countries. Consistent with the global version of Samuelson’s Dictum, the predictive power for both stock returns and macro variables is almost entirely from the global, rather than country-specific, information from the sovereign CDS market

Ungated version here

But I haven’t actually heard of any fund focused on “unfashionable investing” that considers all asset classes and strategies like this. What institution out there would be capable of saying in 2021 “growth stocks are at bubbly levels, we’re switching to commodities”, or saying in 2022 “commodities are high and growth stocks crashed, we’re switching back”? Please let me know if such an institution does exist, or what else to read along these lines.

If I Had 2 Million Dollars

Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

In July of 1992, the Barenaked Ladies released their debut studio album Gordon, which included one of their most popular songs: “If I Had $1000000.” Considering all the inflation we’ve had recently, you know that $1 million doesn’t buy as much as it did in 1992, but how much less? As measured by the Consumer Price Index in the US, prices have roughly doubled since 1992, meaning you would need about $2 million to buy the same amount of stuff as in 1992.

(Note: the Barenaked Ladies are Canadian, and prices in Canada haven’t quite doubled since 1992, but this song was included on early demo tapes in 1988 and 1989 released in Canada, and prices have roughly doubled there since then.)

So the value of a dollar that you held since 1992 has lost roughly half of its purchasing power. That’s bad. But how bad is it? What’s the normal US experience for how long it takes for prices to double?

It turns out that even with the recent huge run-up in inflation, we just lived through the lowest period of inflation for anyone alive today.

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Mixed Messages on the World Economy from the 2022 Davos Meeting

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

Ah, Davos – – that yearly gathering of billionaires (some fresh from combusting unfathomable amounts of rocket fuel launching themselves into space for fun), flying in on their private jets and lecturing the rest of us about burning fossil fuels. That Swiss resort watering hole for elites who seemingly prefer to have the world run by unaccountable international corporations and NGO institutions rather than national governments elected by those pesky little people (“populism” is a dirty word). Here is the Wikipedia blurb on these meetings:

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. The foundation, which is mostly funded by its 1,000 member companies – typically global enterprises with more than five billion US dollars in turnover – as well as public subsidies, views its own mission as “improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas”.

The WEF is mostly known for its annual meeting at the end of January in Davos, a mountain resort in the eastern Alps region of Switzerland. The meeting brings together some 3,000 paying members and selected participants – among which are investors, business leaders, political leaders, economists, celebrities and journalists – for up to five days to discuss global issues across 500 sessions.

… The Forum suggests that a globalised world is best managed by a self-selected coalition of multinational corporations, governments and civil society organizations (CSOs), which it expresses through initiatives like the “Great Reset” and the “Global Redesign”. It sees periods of global instability – such as the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic – as windows of opportunity to intensify its programmatic efforts.

The Davos meeting is usually held at the end of January, but this year was pushed back to May 22-72 because of the COVID surge last winter. How did last week’s globalization-fest fare?

From what I have read, the mood was less upbeat than usual. Douglas Sieg, managing partner of fund manager Lord, Abbett & Co., said: “It’s amazing that six months ago the world didn’t feel all that complicated and all of a sudden the last three months have been nothing but major issues.”    Obviously, the war in Ukraine is casting a pall over the world community and economy. Soldiers and civilians are being slaughtered on a scale not seen in Europe since WWII, and Europeans are realizing too late the folly of becoming so dependent on Russia for their energy supply. China’s saber-rattling over Taiwan is making other nations nervous about their heavy reliance on semiconductor chips fabricated in that island nation.

The wild orgy of 2020-2021 COVID-related deficit spending (especially in the U.S.) has predictably led to inflation; in response, the U.S. central bank is threatening to raise rates high enough to dampen demand, which means dampened (maybe negative) economic growth. A number of the non-business speakers worried aloud about these dark clouds gathering on the horizon:  

We have at least four crises, which are interwoven. We have high inflation … we have an energy crisis… we have food poverty, and we have a climate crisis. And we can’t solve the problems if we concentrate on only one of the crises…But if none of the problems are solved, I’m really afraid we’re running into a global recession with tremendous effect .. on global stability.

– German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck

Climate change got less attention than in previous years. Europe is starving for fossil fuels at the moment, so there is more focus on keeping factories running than on pushing costly new green agendas. Trends toward re-shoring vital production and away from hyper-globalization are expected to make supply chains less efficient and thus create more persistent cost pressures.

On the other hand, corporate CEOs, perhaps taking a shorter-term view, were more chipper, saying their businesses are doing just great:

George Oliver, chairman and CEO of heating and air-conditioning manufacturer Johnson Controls, is typical of the positive current business. “We’ve been doing very well,” he said. “We see robust demand…we’re obviously watching that closely.”

 “Here [in Davos] everybody’s pessimistic,” says Standard Chartered Chairman José Viñals. “But when I ask them how their business is doing, the picture is wonderful. It may be that the business reality catches up with the [very negative] macro-political reality.”

Time will tell how the global economic scenario actually plays out.

What Moved My Priors: Homicide in London

mdmakowsky2 Comments

I’ll write about violence and gun control at a later date, but I thought I’d share the moment that levered my position on gun control. It was about 5-6 years ago when I looked up crime statistics in London out of little more than curiousity.

London is a city of 9 million people, larger than any US city. It is an economically, religiously, and racially diverse city. Londoners struggle with soaring rents like people in most major cities. You will not be shocked to learn that London has crime rates commensurate with any other major city, including violent crime.

Except for homicide.

I spent the day looking up statistics trying to see if London had “solved” crime, but it certainly had not. It’s a crowded city full of people who are occasionally desperate and exhausted. Of course there is crime. Just not homicide. It’s one city, but it’s more than an anecdote. As far as comparisons go, it’s like someone made a synthetic control for US cities, but will strict gun control laws. And I don’t want to give the impression that I was staunchly laissez faire with regard to firearms only to have a few London statistics lift the scales from my eyes. But it was certainly a moment when a single set of sylized facts created a chain reaction in my mind, when things fell into place. It’s a complicated issue that I have deeper thoughts on, but there remains the fact that the citizens of London do not live in fear of their government or their neighbors for want of firearms, but they appear to be a lot safer for it.

Whether or not you personally want to own firearms is a different question. But limits on firearms does appear to have significant postive effects. London homicide is a fraction of the safest US city. The country as a whole has (I believe) not had a mass shooting since the tragedy that lead to nationwide gun restrictions 26 years ago. The US has had more mass shooting events in the last month than the UK has had in 26 years. And it’s not just mass shoootings. There’s a potentially coincidental, but nonetheless pronounced, drop in London violent crime since gun restrictions went into effect.

London violent crime since 1981

US citizens increasingly live under the watchful eye of armed professionals in our schools and places of business, with little or no positive effect save the knowledge that we are surrounded by firearms. I see little reason we are safer or more independent of government supervision for it. Conversely, places with less armed supervision, but also fewer firearms, are experiencing better outcomes. There are arguments to be had about what constitutes optimal firearm policy. But “firearms restrictions don’t work” simply doesn’t appear to be true.