Many of you have written in and asked what I think of president Bukele throwing all those Gang Members (and possibly others) in jail without much due process.  I do hope to learn more about this, including possibly with a trip to El Salvador later this year.  In the meantime, I say let’s put aside the moralizing — in either direction — and try to think of this in terms of what is the appropriate economic model.

In one view, Supply is highly elastic, so if government tries to restrict the supply of a good or service, production responds accordingly.  For instance, many gun buyback programs fail for this reason.  Guns come out of the woodwork, but they are not really the guns you want to be bought up.  In the longer run, perhaps more guns are imported into the country, whether to be sold to the government or the replace the sold guns.

So if the government of El Salvador throws 60,000 gang members into jail, is this supply elastic?  Do replacements step forward, like villains in a Batman movie and its sequels?  Or is the distribution bimodal, I for instance would not become an El Salvadoran gang member for any amount of money.  I genuinely do not know the answer to this question.

Furthermore, what would the new supply look like?  Presumably the new gang members would have to be “more invisible,” otherwise they would get tossed in jail too.  So the new gang members could not sport tattoos and the like, and they would find it harder to coordinate with each other.

If you think this year is definitely the year to visit El Salvador, perhaps you fear some medium-term elasticity of supply.  After all, we do know that El Salvador is currently one of the safest countries in Latin America, for how long I cannot say.

What variable might we try to measure or estimate to address this question?

On Twitter, Chris Blattman suggested that the imprisonments will not work, as organized crime will reemerge in El Salvador.  He mentioned further that organized crime would reemerge in a more centralized and politicized fashion.  I do not disagree (am genuinely agnostic), but what exactly is the underlying model?  That the government can crack down on little guys but not big players?  And also that a new big player can emerge with so many of the little guys in jail?

Is the best case scenario for the Bukele policy one of “El Salvador as transmission belt to the U.S.”?  And so if the critical mass of Salvadoran intermediaries disappears, the bad guy drug lords find other routes and carriers in other countries, and El Salvador sets off along its new, merrier, path-dependent way?

How might we test prospectively whether that is likely to be true?

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