As Russian political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky has quite rightly said, one should not consider the five-thousand-plus sanctions imposed against the Russian Federation as of this writing as sanctions in the normal diplomatic and economic sense.

One of my areas of research in institutional economics is the social behavior of people under different political regimes, what Thomas Schelling called micromotives and macrobehavior. Of course, this topic is directly related to many disciplines, from behavioral economics and political theory to the neurobiology of decision-making and the theory of biological markets.

The combination of covid lockdowns, money pumping, and attempts to force a new green economy are taking their toll. This is not going away any time soon.