I Heart Economists
Economists Say Movie Violence Might Temper the Real Thing
A paper presented by two researchers over the weekend to the annual meeting of the American Economic Association here challenges the conventional wisdom, concluding that violent films prevent violent crime by attracting would-be assailants and keeping them cloistered in darkened, alcohol-free environs.
“Economics is about choice,” Professor Dahl said. “What would these people have done if they had not chosen to go and see a movie? Whatever they would have done would have had a greater tendency to involve alcohol. If you can incapacitate a large group of potentially violent people, that’s a good thing.”
Professor DellaVigna added, “It’s not as if these people watching violent movies would otherwise be home reading a book.”
Well, in my case….
It’s an interesting argument and a reflection of the fact that sometimes reality can be counter-intuitive.
Is Sex by Fraud Rape?
The Massachusetts supreme court says “no.” The case involved a man who had sex with his brother’s girlfriend by entering her bedroom with the lights out, pretending to be his brother. The court decided that the law has “for two centuries defined rape as sexual intercourse by force and against one’s will and that it is not rape when consent is obtained through fraud.” The court said the legislature would need to change to the definition of rape. Given that the same court found there is a right to gay marriage without awaiting legislative change, this reasoning strikes me as rather inconsistent.
My view is that, whether it is called rape or not, obtaining sex through fraud is a serious crime. Perhaps it is not as bad as using force, just as swindling someone is not as bad as directly using violence to obtain money, but it still deprives the person of the ability to make her own choices.
Although justice was not served, it is possible the court was correct insofar as having its hands tied by the legislature. Under our system the “lawmakers” in the legislature are supposed to be the source of law, so if they haven’t made the law, then it doesn’t exist.
This case illustrates the uselessness of the legislature. The legitimate function of courts is to discern justice, with justice seen as existing independently of any one person or group’s viewpoint. Having to rely on the legislature to create good law (and avoid creating bad law) impedes the courts’ ability to do justice.
The obvious objection is that we need a division of power; we do not want judges to have total discretion in deciding law. That is a good objection, but it would be a non-sequitur to infer a legislature is needed to supply the courts with law. Eliminate the legislature and establish competition between courts, so that judges must be fair, impartial, and respectful of people’s rights in order to protect their reputations.
Technorati Tags: law, philosophy, rape
Brazilian Anarcho-capitalism
Good link from Jesse Walker at Hit & Run showing how private militias have developed in Brazil to protect the poor, since the state has failed to deliver in this regard. Quoting:
Startling transformations like Roquete Pinto’s are increasingly visible across Rio, as for-profit “militias” made up of active and former police officers, private security guards, off-duty prison guards and firefighters evict drug gangs from slums where violence used to be out of control….
In this city of 6 million people, one of the world’s most violent, “the police provide security for the rich” and “the militias are the security of the poor,” said Marina Maggessi, a congresswoman and a former senior drug-control official. She has mixed feelings about the militias, saying they represent the “collapse of the state.”
First gaining strength in 2003 as an alternative to ineffective, often corrupt police, the illegal security forces have mushroomed since late last year and now control about 90 of Rio’s 600 “favelas,” Maggessi said. Success in slums like Roquete Pinto, meanwhile, fuels their expansion into others.
I of course do not have the “mixed feelings” Ms. Maggessi expresses.
It’s common for leftist critics of anarcho-capitalism to object the poor would be left out to dry. Yet it’s an equally common observation, perhaps by some of those same critics, that the state favors the rich and politically connected over the poor. These two points seem to contradict: if the state does such a bad job protecting the poor, why would would it be so bad to remove it from the equation? A critic could resolve the contradiction by arguing that even if the state does a bad job protecting the poor, protection would be even worse, or non-existent, under anarcho-capitalism. Yet Jesse Walker’s example shows that not only can private protection develop in the slums, it can do for profit. The market works for the poor just as it does for the rich.
Another misconception about anarcho-capitalism is that protection organizations would just go to war against each other until one emerged as ruler. Quoting from the original article:
The surprise is that the gangs aren’t fighting to hold their turf. In the few known cases where they did, militia gunfire turned them back.
Voluntary militias and defense firms do not (usually) go to war against each other because of simple economics: warfare will drive up costs and damage a firm’s reputation, making it less attractive to customers relative to its competitors. The hard problem for anarchism is the start-up problem: how to initiate a situation where such a peaceful equilibrium exists. If the market develops with too few competitors there is potential for a cartel or monopoly to form. A related and even bigger problem is how to start up when the state is still going strong — obviously the case in Brazil. It will be interesting to see how things unfold there.
Technorati Tags: crime, libertarianism
Mass Murderers, a Dime a Dozen
April 16 was only a slightly extraordinary for me, as there was a power failure at my office when I arrived (big spring nor’easter in New England). For more than two dozen families in Virginia I’m sure it was the worst day of their lives.
In trying to gauge my reaction I find myself with an odd sense of apathy. I’ve barely read anything about it, other than noticing the initial reports. Everyone’s talking about it, making me think myself odd for not wanting to know. But I have a sense of having been down this road before: the incessant analyzing, condemning, and deploring the actions of a madman, at least until the next one comes along.
Though I know little about this particular case, it seems to me a central goal of such a crime is to make oneself the center of attention, to make oneself significant after a life of insignificance. In lieu of doing something creative that inspires other people, do something to shock and horrify. Perhaps, in one twisted sense, a killing spree is a form of creativity, insofar as it creates a very visible change from one state to another. But it is so not original.
I was shocked after Columbine, very shocked after 9/11, utterly revolted after Daniel Pearl, but seemingly after Pearl’s murder I’m no longer surprised by the extent to which human beings will brutalize one another.
After Columbine I became very interested in the lives of Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold — I still remember their names (less sure about the spelling). I wondered what made them tick, what made them want to go out in an orgy of bloodshed. I could even relate to their feelings of alienation at school, though I could never condone their response. I was angry at them, but also, in large part, bemused.
Then came 9/11, and I was pretty damned angry about that, too, but I still wanted to understand the mindset of the hijackers, to imagine what they were doing and thinking in the hours leading up to a terrorist attack.
Then came Daniel Pearl’s murder (I was going to write, aptly, senseless murder, but it is just too cliche). Despite being revolted by the crime, I remember not caring very much at all who did it, or why.
The killers are all pretty much the same, all having some demented, half-baked rationalization for killing innocents, or not even bothering with the rationalization but just taking their anger out on the easiest targets available. Since I’m a news junkie I’m sure it won’t be long before I come across reports and analysis explaining the motivations of this particular lunatic, but for the moment I’ll relish in the bliss of ignorance, neither knowing nor caring about him.
It makes me wonder, in not caring, if I should worry I’m becoming cold just like killers are, dehumanizing them as a class, but the difference is judgment: I judge them, in observing their actions as individuals; they don’t judge, but kill anyone in a category they hate, or anyone at all.
So fuck ‘em. Fuck this killer, and fuck the next one. They’re all about the same.
Technorati Tags: mass murder, crime, Virginia Tech
Guns & Power
From the Times:
Interpreting the Second Amendment broadly, a federal appeals court in Washington yesterday struck down a gun control law in the District of Columbia that bars residents from keeping handguns in their homes.
This is certainly welcome news to me, though it is just a small step in in the right direction, still short of concealed carry. Several years ago some family members of mine were mugged on a DC street, just going out for a walk in their neighborhood, because a few outlaws with guns – imagine that! — could be pretty confident everyone they saw was disarmed and decided to take advantage of that fact.
One point I don’t see stressed very often is that we need not just gun freedom, but a more universal gun culture supportive of that freedom. It seems to me that gun culture is a fringe sub-culture in the so-called blue states, and is more closely associated with southern states and especially rural culture, with gun control being more prevalent in cities.
These cultural differences result in wide disparities in gun laws between different jurisdictions, DC and Virginia being a key example. This, in turn, results in power imbalances with people in some jurisdictions being disarmed and powerless, and others not.
Supporters of gun control often seem to accept this argument, if obliquely, blaming gun crime occurring within gun-controlled districts on the supply of guns emanating from other, pro-gun jurisdictions. The logical conclusion for their argument is that gun control must be universal, which would eliminate the external availability of guns for criminals to take advantage of.
Unfortunately, that still does not eliminate power imbalances. The major overlooked power imbalance is that between the citizens and government. A central but oft forgotten justification for the right to bear arms is that should the government become a tyranny, the citizens should be able to overturn it. That was, after all, how the US was formed.
I’ve seen this point ridiculed on the grounds that citizens armed with pistols and rifles are no match a modern military replete with tanks and bombers. Yet the insurgency in Iraq shows that a decentralized guerilla force possessing mostly small arms can make things difficult, perhaps impossible for a larger adversary. And, I should note, I favor allowing private citizens to own any of the same weapons the government can own, which might well be a much better way of making governments receptive to arms control!
Other power imbalances remain under universal gun control. Consider other weapons — knives, swords, clubs, tasers, chemical sprays, etc. If jurisdictions again vary in their treatment of these, it will again necessitate a universal ban to prevent permeation from more liberal to more restricted jurisdictions. The problem is that many everyday objects (vehicles, kitchen knives, or the good old pipe wrench) can become weapons, the regulation of which will be ever more costly, perhaps impossible to enforce, and require the state meddling in the lives of citizens in ever more authoritarian ways. This is already happening in Britain.
At the far end of the spectrum, even with no weapons anywhere, the strong can still physically dominate the weak with brute force. I’m not sure how the state could ban some from being stronger than others, though I’m sure the British will eventually tell us.
The answer is to go in the complete opposite direction, eliminating almost all restrictions on weapons. Some environments are tightly controlled by necessity, such as the entrance to a courthouse, or a commercial aircraft. There it would make sense to disarm people. Overall, however, we should strive for a universal gun culture, where the widespread disparities in gun ownership disappear, and with them the power imbalances that lead some to use their weapons for wrongful advantage.
That doesn’t mean guns are a panacea, or there are no costs to this strategy, or that everyone must be armed. But I’d like to get to the point where it is not considered unlawful, unusual, or threatening that any citizen, in any particular place, would choose to bear arms.
Rape & Punish
Ilya Somin adeptly addresses the prison rape problem, one which he says is widely agreed to be a problem but about which nothing is ever done. It is an institutional problem, he explains, arising from government’s inability or unwillingness to protect the politically weak.
Much as I found his post incisive, his response — ending the war on drugs (hence drastically reducing the number of prisoners at risk) and privatizing prisons — doesn’t go far enough. The whole model of punitive incarceration needs to change. It makes very little sense:
We should adopt a restitution-based model instead of all this. If someone commits a crime, force him to indemnify the victim, plus legal costs, plus a deterrence factor that takes into account the severity of the crime and the probability of getting caught. Many first-time offenders (and offenders deemed more trustworthy) would not even need incarceration; they could pay restitution to the victim and go on with their lives.
This involves rolling the criminal justice system into the tort system, considering crimes more like severe torts (but not exactly). A preponderance of evidence is too weak a standard to mete out punishment for murder, for example, so the changeover would have to import some legal standards and procedures from criminal law.
As many criminals are indigent or nearly so, prisons would be oriented to productive enterprises rather than holding bins, keeping the inmates under wraps until they have paid off their debt. This brings to mind the stereotypical inmate job: making license plates (or, perhaps more recently, telemarketing). But as the focus is on reaching an economic goal, rather than serving out a term, prisoners would have a much greater incentive to work hard, so they could get out sooner.
In fact, the prisoner could be given leighway to choose among various prisons that might best exploit his particular skillset. It’s important to recognize a separation between the prison and whomever the criminal owes his debt. Competition between prisons would create pressure to adopt humane policies; a prison known for turning a blind eye to rape would lose business to competitors that better protect their inmates. Conversely, inmates would have to compete to be accepted at more desirable prisons; “slacker” inmates would end up at the worst places.
While Somin does suggest privatization, it is not enough to continue with the current model but simply subcontracting the operation of prisons to private operators. At best, this might result in somewhat greater efficiency, but the larger institutional problems would remain. A complete revamp is needed, focusing on introducing competition to make prisons better protect inmates, while simultaneously forcing offenders to recompense their victims. Our current system primarily benefits the unions or private contractors operating the prisons, and the politicians who feed off of our fear and anger.
