IT'S NOT JUST PEOPLE SEEKING SEX IN BARS.

Killing barroom social networks kills innovation.  Those blue-collar aristocrats in Milwaukee probably talked a lot of shop over those schnapps.  Prohibition did its damage, as, more recently, the corona tyranny did.

Saloons were where the ideas that would define America were first hashed out, presumably via the kind of rowdy, unstructured conversation that tends to happen in bars. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that America was imagined, organized, and eventually built over booze consumed in saloons. Without saloons, America—or at least America as we know it—might not exist.

In the century and a half after the founding, saloons continued to be a key social institution, places of business, leisure, and community for many men—until Prohibition wiped them out, destroying in one fell stroke the cultural and economic infrastructure they had long provided.

The article continues,

The cost to innovation was just one of many associated with Prohibition, and it took nearly a century, and some unusually clever data gathering, to pin it down. That in turn provides a strong hint that the costs and consequences of the current pandemic are broader and deeper than we can currently measure or see. They may well take years to fully discover. To begin to understand them, we first have to understand America's long love affair with saloons.

In the tavern, the ideas also have sex.

The central idea of the saloon was that it was a productive social space—a hangout and a refuge, but also, in the days before Prohibition, a bank and a place to make deals, find work, and organize political campaigns. Yes, there were table games and drinks, but there were also informal or semiformal social functions: Saloonkeepers cashed checks and made loans, and many saloons catered to particular occupations.

No, seriously.

There was no such thing as Twitter or talk radio or Wikipedia. College education was a luxury for a tiny fraction of the population. Saloons were where ordinary men went to encounter and engage with ideas.

With prohibition, those third places, and the idea sharing that came with them, went away.

In the paper "Bar Talk: Informal Social Interactions, Alcohol Prohibition, and Invention," University of Maryland economist Michael Andrews looks at data about propensity to restrict alcohol around the time of Prohibition, comparing counties that expressed a clear desire to stay wet with counties that had shown a predisposition to go dry. He finds that "the imposition of Prohibition caused patenting to drop by 8–18% in counties that wanted to stay wet relative to consistently dry counties in the same state."

Andrews rules out most plausible alternative explanations for the drop in innovation, using statistical analysis to demonstrate that the drop in new patents can't be explained by, say, the era's general economic downturn or changing patterns in migration. He also finds that the decline wasn't a result of decreased alcohol consumption. Drinking may or may not aid in creativity—the research on that is mixed—but it was something else that dampened innovation during Prohibition.

Repeat inventors in counties affected by Prohibition, Andrews finds, collaborated less often with the people they had collaborated with prior to Prohibition. Even small changes in collaboration can have significant effects: Andrews points to a modern study that found researchers who lose a star collaborator to an unexpected death reduce their output by about 8 percent. And Prohibition disrupted collaborations all across the country.

Andrews attributes most of the drop in patent applications to the loss of "informal interactions"—the sort of unplanned, unstructured conversations that often happen at bars over drinks. He notes that at the time, America's patent applications "tended to come not from an aristocratic elite, but from skilled workers and craftsmen, the same types of individuals likely to meet in their local saloon."

The same sort of people who saw only the good in closing the bars are still around, seeing only the good in preventing human interaction, all in the name of public health.

How many times did we hear that staying home for a brief time was a small price to pay for saving some number of lives, that school closures represented no threat to student psyches or learning progress, that masks were an easy, low-cost measure, really just a form of basic politeness?

These responses were predicated on the notion that informal social interactions have little or no value, and thus that disrupting them has minimal costs. That wasn't true of the connections that happened in saloons before Prohibition, and it's not true now. Two years into the pandemic, it's already clear that the costs of COVID-era disruptions have been considerable. And as with Prohibition, we may not know the true toll for many years to come.

Indeed not. The research opportunities are there, for those who would pursue them.