Syrian refugees are near, the Cuban boatlift is far.
Construal level theory tells us that the further something is from us in time and space, the less likely we are to spot deformities, details, and defects. But with distance we are better able to identify patterns, shapes, and trends. My excellent friend Robin Hanson summarizes here, but also has a great deal more to say on the subject.
The 20th century (am I the only person who struggles mightily to resist capitalizing that?) is dismally full of refugee crises. A lot of them were African: Congo, Angola, Eritrea, Somalia, Liberia, Rwanda/Burundi, Sudan & al. These were tragic, but largely invisible to typical Americans, except perhaps as passing human interest stories, quickly forgotten in the noise of the celebrity scandal du jour. Some of them directly involved US concerns, as a great deal of displaced people ended up in the Land of the Free. Remember the Salvadoran Civil War spanning the Carter administration? Something like half a million Salvadorans ended up settling here. And that's just little itty-bitty El Salvador. The Mariel boatlift totaled over 100k Cubans over the course of 1980. Vietnamese refugees and their descendants following the end of the war account for roughly a million and a half of today's Americans. Khmer Rouge survivors stateside number roughly 300,000.
Are these regrettable? I was alive (though admittedly quite young, so my memory may be fuzzy) for several of these episodes, so I recall some of the contrary sentiment. In near mode, a refugee crisis sparks panic in recipient countries. How shall we feed them? Where shall we put them? What about medical care? Educating their kids? If anything, the opening act of Scarface (1983) didn't do sufficient justice to the dire living conditions of newly-arrived Cubans in Florida. 30+ years later, Cuban Americans are known a lot more for great music and the third-best sandwiches in the lower 48 than for crime-ridden encampments and Castro's nasty empty-the-prisons-and-put-'em-boats prank. I don't have the polling data, but I'd put money on the likelihood that a majority of Americans would have a favorable view of the US accepting Cuban refugees in retrospect.
Indeed, I suspect that the historical refugee crises most survey respondents would regret are the ones we turned away. How many European Jews might we have spared the grisliest of fates if we'd have opened the shores in 1939? What if in 1994 we'd have airlifted ethnic Tutsi here? It is indeed better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done, particularly when the latter is soaked in the blood of the innocent.
So up close, the challenges of accepting loads and loads of refugees look insurmountable. From a distance, they seem petty compared to the horrors of the alternatives. Which perspective is more accurate? Which is more useful? Which is better for ourselves and our humanity?
Fleeing violence is not nor has ever been euvoluntary. Heed well the type and severity of the ex post regret incurred when considering the sort of response you favor.
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Friday, March 13, 2015
The Seduction of the Sword
I am a sword. My blade is wrought from water-hardened F-type high-carbon tool steel. I am notable for my high tungsten content. My hilt is wrapped in pair-twisted, heat-treated bison sinew. My crossguard and pommel are molybdenum-rich A2 steel, and every troy ounce of my metallic components awoke to purpose in a tomb of brick, annealing in a soak slow enough to rid me of interstitial defects but fast enough to grow long, strong grains. I am strong. I am sharp.
I am seductive.
Touch me. Grip me. Feel my delicious heft, my perfect balance. Listen to the swoosh I make as I cleave the air. We were made for each other, you and I. I am your will made manifest, a forged exclamation point punctuating your every claim. Alone, I am inert metal. Alone, you have naught but the charm of your tongue. Or of your hips if you've been so blessed. Together, we need no quicksilver rhetoric, no slinking gyration. Together we impel. Together we command. We unite. And they obey. They obey or they perish on my point, driven true by your hand.
When all else fails, when your entreaties fall on stubborn ears, when your pleas go ignored, when you shout into an uncaring night, remember me. I'm here. I'll wait for you. I'll wait until I am but rust and scale. I'll wait until the last drop of blood has been spilled by those like me.
I love you.
You love me.
Let's go love the world.
I am seductive.
Touch me. Grip me. Feel my delicious heft, my perfect balance. Listen to the swoosh I make as I cleave the air. We were made for each other, you and I. I am your will made manifest, a forged exclamation point punctuating your every claim. Alone, I am inert metal. Alone, you have naught but the charm of your tongue. Or of your hips if you've been so blessed. Together, we need no quicksilver rhetoric, no slinking gyration. Together we impel. Together we command. We unite. And they obey. They obey or they perish on my point, driven true by your hand.
When all else fails, when your entreaties fall on stubborn ears, when your pleas go ignored, when you shout into an uncaring night, remember me. I'm here. I'll wait for you. I'll wait until I am but rust and scale. I'll wait until the last drop of blood has been spilled by those like me.
I love you.
You love me.
Let's go love the world.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Vigilantes, Bond and Otherwise
A "bond vigilante" is an investor who sells off sovereign debt because of worries about inflation risk. Remember that Treasury securities, with the exception of 10-year inflation-protected bonds (TIPS), are all fixed-coupon, which means that holders earn a periodic nominal payment. If you add up all these payments (including how much you get for retiring the bond) over the life of the bond, applying a multiplier to each payment to correct for the opportunity cost of waiting for your money to come in, you obtain the present discounted value of it, which in a thick market, should be the price.
So it should be obvious why expected future inflation should make bonds cheaper: ten bucks is worth more in a future where it can buy you two burritos rather than a future where it gets you only one. So while all-a-tizzy, bond investors pay very close attention to the pronouncements of the Federal Reserve, as well as the many lending institutions that actually create money in circulation to estimate future inflation. If they smell it on the wind, they descend like a troop of howler monkeys, selling Treasurys enough to drop the price, which necessarily increases yield, which has the knock-on effect of increasing the cost of sovereign borrowing (if you're a buyer, you have no incentive to discriminate between a new-issue instrument and one on the secondary market). So quite naturally, those folks predisposed to commiserate with the Treasury have dubbed bond investors worried about inflation enough to put their fortunes at stake "vigilantes."
As an undergraduate, I found this choice of terms risible. Vigilantes are lawless, after all. Vigilantes are either an unruly mob, or a lunatic who takes the law into his own hands. Someone who sells off bonds when it's the sovereign who's been naughty is just a prudent investor.
Recent developments have encouraged me to revisit my prejudices.
When the law itself is lawless, vigilantism is the last refuge of the citizen to maintain the public order. When beat cops (to pick a fanciful example) disregard their duty to prosecute violent offenders in favor of harassing pedestrians, when state troopers pull over drivers with out-of-state plates in search of enough paraphernalia to justify an on-site takings, when vice cops rape street walkers in lieu of investigating coerced child prostitutes, then the principal-agent problem has ballooned out of control, and an arbitrage opportunity arises for law-and-order entrepreneurs. In the vernacular, we call these people "vigilantes," but try to ignore the connotation and focus instead on the actual deeds.
So the question of moral intuition: under what conditions would a randomly-selected constituent approve of vigilantism? How badly do the sovereign and his agents have to abdicate responsibility before citizens taking the law into their own hands is preferable? More to the point, isn't there a natural incentive to maximize institutionalized misconduct subject to the constraint of outright revolt? Isn't it in the natural interest of the Sovereign to abuse and exploit his subjects to encrease his dominion? If not, why not?
A vigilante is someone who challenges the state monopoly on violence. A bond vigilante is someone who challenges the state monopoly on the issuance of sovereign debt. Can a vigilante be euvoluntary? I suppose that depends on the alternatives.
So it should be obvious why expected future inflation should make bonds cheaper: ten bucks is worth more in a future where it can buy you two burritos rather than a future where it gets you only one. So while all-a-tizzy, bond investors pay very close attention to the pronouncements of the Federal Reserve, as well as the many lending institutions that actually create money in circulation to estimate future inflation. If they smell it on the wind, they descend like a troop of howler monkeys, selling Treasurys enough to drop the price, which necessarily increases yield, which has the knock-on effect of increasing the cost of sovereign borrowing (if you're a buyer, you have no incentive to discriminate between a new-issue instrument and one on the secondary market). So quite naturally, those folks predisposed to commiserate with the Treasury have dubbed bond investors worried about inflation enough to put their fortunes at stake "vigilantes."
As an undergraduate, I found this choice of terms risible. Vigilantes are lawless, after all. Vigilantes are either an unruly mob, or a lunatic who takes the law into his own hands. Someone who sells off bonds when it's the sovereign who's been naughty is just a prudent investor.
Recent developments have encouraged me to revisit my prejudices.
When the law itself is lawless, vigilantism is the last refuge of the citizen to maintain the public order. When beat cops (to pick a fanciful example) disregard their duty to prosecute violent offenders in favor of harassing pedestrians, when state troopers pull over drivers with out-of-state plates in search of enough paraphernalia to justify an on-site takings, when vice cops rape street walkers in lieu of investigating coerced child prostitutes, then the principal-agent problem has ballooned out of control, and an arbitrage opportunity arises for law-and-order entrepreneurs. In the vernacular, we call these people "vigilantes," but try to ignore the connotation and focus instead on the actual deeds.
So the question of moral intuition: under what conditions would a randomly-selected constituent approve of vigilantism? How badly do the sovereign and his agents have to abdicate responsibility before citizens taking the law into their own hands is preferable? More to the point, isn't there a natural incentive to maximize institutionalized misconduct subject to the constraint of outright revolt? Isn't it in the natural interest of the Sovereign to abuse and exploit his subjects to encrease his dominion? If not, why not?
A vigilante is someone who challenges the state monopoly on violence. A bond vigilante is someone who challenges the state monopoly on the issuance of sovereign debt. Can a vigilante be euvoluntary? I suppose that depends on the alternatives.
Monday, November 17, 2014
Title 32 in Missouri
Requiem.
Peaceful, euvoluntary exchange is mutually felicitous. Force executed on behalf of ambitious (or scared) political elites is not.
I am not convinced that there is a peaceful solution to civil unrest in Ferguson, but I am convinced that the institutional underpinnings of the ongoing drama there can be eradicated. End the War on Drugs, overturn civil asset forfeiture protocols. Assign police to their original charter as guardians of law and order. It may not even be too late for Missouri.
Yikes, you guys. Yikes.
I further order, pursuant to Section 41.480, RSMo, the Adjutant General of the State of Missouri, or his designee, to forthwith call and order into active service such portions of the organized militia as he deems necessary to protect life and property and assist civilian authorities and it is further directed that the Adjutant General or his designee, and through him, the commanding officer of any unit or other organization of such organized militia so called into active service take such action and employ such equipment as may be necessary to carry out requests processed through the Missouri State Highway Patrol and ordered by the Governor of the state to protect life and property and support civilian authorities.What do you do when a little violence isn't getting the job done? Produce more violence.
Peaceful, euvoluntary exchange is mutually felicitous. Force executed on behalf of ambitious (or scared) political elites is not.
I am not convinced that there is a peaceful solution to civil unrest in Ferguson, but I am convinced that the institutional underpinnings of the ongoing drama there can be eradicated. End the War on Drugs, overturn civil asset forfeiture protocols. Assign police to their original charter as guardians of law and order. It may not even be too late for Missouri.
Yikes, you guys. Yikes.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
404: RITUAL NOT FOUND
In a post I haven't yet roused myself to critique, Double-D identifies the activating element of the sacred spaces among us. 'Tis ritual. Even with the priest and the congregation assembled inside the church, the assembly is incomplete without the Eucharist.
Yesterday, the United States held its annual Mass dedicated to Veterans, living and dead. I urge you to recall that what we in the US call Veterans' Day is referred elsewhere in the Anglophone world as either Remembrance Day or Armistice Day, a day to remind citizens of the horrors of the Great War, the War to End All Wars, known retrospectively as World War I. Poppies are laid out row on row outside the Tower of London, a grim reminder of the oceans of blood spilt to slake the vanity and lust of long-dead political elites. These displays of public humility constitute a solemn ritual to remind the constituency of the costs of war, specifically the war that saw the rise of mechanization and the unspeakable horrors of Better Killing Through Chemistry.
Virginia Postrel includes a chapter on the Glamour of War in her latest book. By the end of WWI, the pre-war glamour of courageous gentlemen fighting a just war against heathen enemies had largely worn thin. Both sides were threadbare, weary of sending its boys to die, choking in the cold mud. The Armistice and its remembrance bid fare thee well to the kayfabe-drenched lie that there was glory in the stubborn trenches at Ovillers-la-Boisselle. Now, it isn't that Veterans' Day is a cheery, breezy glee-filled romp, but the mood affiliation is much different. We remember the sacrifices our veterans have made, often with the rider that these sacrifices were for the common good, or to secure the blessings of liberty, a curious conceit not immediately evident in the experience all Americans. I report that my time in uniform has done precious little to stem the rise of abusive civil asset forfeiture practices, or to halt the self-evidently erroneous decision in Kelo or curb any of the other many tiny assaults against the Constitution I vowed to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic when I took my Oath of Service some 23 years ago.
Yikes. Has it really been that long? It is to sigh.
Recall your Hume. The sovereign who seeks to encrease his dominion abroad shall avail himself of whatever means he might pursue to obtain the service of the constituency. He will strip them of their luxury, he will wheedle their children, and he will ensorcel their patriots with the kayfabe of glory and honor. Armistice Day was the one day of ritual during which that the nation took to the ritual of breaking kayfabe, if only for one somber pass of the calendar. Schoolchildren recited In Flanders Fields, and the VFW sold poppies alongside their brothers-in-memory at the American Legion.
Then the tone changed in 1954.
Imagine what the year might look like if Congress would authorize separate days each year to commemorate the fallen in each of America's conflicts, to reflect on the dire toll paid on that august body's behalf by the blood and bone of America's sons and daughters. Imagine if you will, whether or not US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright might have uttered to General Colin Powell her infamous 2003 remark "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" in an America where we all partake in the ritual of reminding ourselves of the bloody cost of war. One day for each war. One day to scrape the veneer off the relentless glorification. One day to reflect. One day to remember.
One day to indulge justly-deserved, messily earned regret.
Yesterday, the United States held its annual Mass dedicated to Veterans, living and dead. I urge you to recall that what we in the US call Veterans' Day is referred elsewhere in the Anglophone world as either Remembrance Day or Armistice Day, a day to remind citizens of the horrors of the Great War, the War to End All Wars, known retrospectively as World War I. Poppies are laid out row on row outside the Tower of London, a grim reminder of the oceans of blood spilt to slake the vanity and lust of long-dead political elites. These displays of public humility constitute a solemn ritual to remind the constituency of the costs of war, specifically the war that saw the rise of mechanization and the unspeakable horrors of Better Killing Through Chemistry.
Virginia Postrel includes a chapter on the Glamour of War in her latest book. By the end of WWI, the pre-war glamour of courageous gentlemen fighting a just war against heathen enemies had largely worn thin. Both sides were threadbare, weary of sending its boys to die, choking in the cold mud. The Armistice and its remembrance bid fare thee well to the kayfabe-drenched lie that there was glory in the stubborn trenches at Ovillers-la-Boisselle. Now, it isn't that Veterans' Day is a cheery, breezy glee-filled romp, but the mood affiliation is much different. We remember the sacrifices our veterans have made, often with the rider that these sacrifices were for the common good, or to secure the blessings of liberty, a curious conceit not immediately evident in the experience all Americans. I report that my time in uniform has done precious little to stem the rise of abusive civil asset forfeiture practices, or to halt the self-evidently erroneous decision in Kelo or curb any of the other many tiny assaults against the Constitution I vowed to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic when I took my Oath of Service some 23 years ago.
Yikes. Has it really been that long? It is to sigh.
Recall your Hume. The sovereign who seeks to encrease his dominion abroad shall avail himself of whatever means he might pursue to obtain the service of the constituency. He will strip them of their luxury, he will wheedle their children, and he will ensorcel their patriots with the kayfabe of glory and honor. Armistice Day was the one day of ritual during which that the nation took to the ritual of breaking kayfabe, if only for one somber pass of the calendar. Schoolchildren recited In Flanders Fields, and the VFW sold poppies alongside their brothers-in-memory at the American Legion.
Then the tone changed in 1954.
Imagine what the year might look like if Congress would authorize separate days each year to commemorate the fallen in each of America's conflicts, to reflect on the dire toll paid on that august body's behalf by the blood and bone of America's sons and daughters. Imagine if you will, whether or not US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright might have uttered to General Colin Powell her infamous 2003 remark "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" in an America where we all partake in the ritual of reminding ourselves of the bloody cost of war. One day for each war. One day to scrape the veneer off the relentless glorification. One day to reflect. One day to remember.
One day to indulge justly-deserved, messily earned regret.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
EE Goes to the Movies Ep. 3: Seven Samurai
Is it possible to have spoilers for a film that came out in 1954? Well, in case you haven't already seen what is probably in the top 5 most influential films of all time, spoilers ahead.
Like every other Kurosawa flick from the end of the war through maybe Yojimbo (and I'd be willing to consider an exception there too), Seven Samurai was foremost an allegory about the dysfunction in Japanese society that produced the Pyrrhic loss in 1945. Think of the last scene where Shimura looks over the village, half his fellows dead (including the brilliantly grotesque Toshiro Mifune) and remarks about how the miserly, miserable farmers were the victors in the conflict.
Now, this film was set prior to the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate (and I think it was even before Nobunaga's campaigns), which means that in the film's universe, regional warlords kept their territories locked down pretty tightly. Stuck in a grim manorial autarky, everyone in the lower feudal ranks enjoyed a lousy menu of alternatives. No voice, no exit. In the film, the titular samurai were scrabbling for work that just wasn't available. You get the sense that they were on the verge of eating their own shoes (a pretty common theme in a lot of Japanese period drama, even in those films made after the economy had recovered), but even they weren't as bad off as the villagers, who in one memorable scene, set to picking individual grains of millet off the dirt floor to avoid starvation. There's no sense that the choice to contract unemployed swords-for-hire is anything but a last resort for the desperate villagers. The poverty of the samurai suggests that what we see is desperate bargaining, not disparate bargaining.
Seen as cinematic penance for 13 Dec, 1937 (and yes, I agree that Rashomon is the better vehicle for this particular apologia), the film encourages a viewer sensitive in EE matters to question if honor, duty, or some bowdlerized version of bushido is a tacit term of any contract proposal. I've mentioned before what Adam Smith had to say about the common duties of a morally complete human towards preventing the suffering of others. This sort of moral impetus is tough to capture in quantifiable measurements. But it sure exists. Tithing is a thing that people do.
So does this mechanism expand or contract the sphere of euvoluntary exchange? Or is it more contextual than that? Does honor or duty make it more or less challenging to adjudge ex post regret from afar? Watch this clip to refresh your memory and tell me if Shimura's character regrets helping the village.
Watch the clip and tell me if Japanese conscripts regretted serving under Hideki Tojo.
It ain't that easy, is it? Now strip the context from a supposedly regrettable exchange and make a big ol' ex ante claim about the regrettability [sic] of terms of trade when non-pecuniary motives are lumpy and heterogeneous. Practical rational choice theory gets a whole lot tougher, especially when filtered through the curious incentives faced by career bureaucrats.
Like every other Kurosawa flick from the end of the war through maybe Yojimbo (and I'd be willing to consider an exception there too), Seven Samurai was foremost an allegory about the dysfunction in Japanese society that produced the Pyrrhic loss in 1945. Think of the last scene where Shimura looks over the village, half his fellows dead (including the brilliantly grotesque Toshiro Mifune) and remarks about how the miserly, miserable farmers were the victors in the conflict.
Now, this film was set prior to the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate (and I think it was even before Nobunaga's campaigns), which means that in the film's universe, regional warlords kept their territories locked down pretty tightly. Stuck in a grim manorial autarky, everyone in the lower feudal ranks enjoyed a lousy menu of alternatives. No voice, no exit. In the film, the titular samurai were scrabbling for work that just wasn't available. You get the sense that they were on the verge of eating their own shoes (a pretty common theme in a lot of Japanese period drama, even in those films made after the economy had recovered), but even they weren't as bad off as the villagers, who in one memorable scene, set to picking individual grains of millet off the dirt floor to avoid starvation. There's no sense that the choice to contract unemployed swords-for-hire is anything but a last resort for the desperate villagers. The poverty of the samurai suggests that what we see is desperate bargaining, not disparate bargaining.
Seen as cinematic penance for 13 Dec, 1937 (and yes, I agree that Rashomon is the better vehicle for this particular apologia), the film encourages a viewer sensitive in EE matters to question if honor, duty, or some bowdlerized version of bushido is a tacit term of any contract proposal. I've mentioned before what Adam Smith had to say about the common duties of a morally complete human towards preventing the suffering of others. This sort of moral impetus is tough to capture in quantifiable measurements. But it sure exists. Tithing is a thing that people do.
So does this mechanism expand or contract the sphere of euvoluntary exchange? Or is it more contextual than that? Does honor or duty make it more or less challenging to adjudge ex post regret from afar? Watch this clip to refresh your memory and tell me if Shimura's character regrets helping the village.
Watch the clip and tell me if Japanese conscripts regretted serving under Hideki Tojo.
It ain't that easy, is it? Now strip the context from a supposedly regrettable exchange and make a big ol' ex ante claim about the regrettability [sic] of terms of trade when non-pecuniary motives are lumpy and heterogeneous. Practical rational choice theory gets a whole lot tougher, especially when filtered through the curious incentives faced by career bureaucrats.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Networks, Violence, Externalities, and Denominators: an Analytical Puzzle
Something recently occurred to me as I continue to slouch towards a finished dissertation. The modern, tech-savvy economist's eyes will twinkle as she tells you tales of network externalities, of how being embedded in ever vaster webs of personal connections and voluntary associations yields gloriously cheap transmission. The world is edging ever closer to the caricature of the Coase Theorem, where near-zero transaction costs imply a wildflowering of voluntary, personal conflict resolution. This could even be one way to (incorrectly, since it misapprehends his claim) stand athwart Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation thesis. More choice today includes more choice over whom to associate with. As a quick example, I am Facebook friends with Bill Leeb, Martin Atkins, cEvin Key, mc chris, and a smattering of other minor celebrities.
Hell, I blog here with Michael f'-omg-ing Munger! I have scores of friends I've never met in person, and thanks to knock-on effects of ever-denser social networks, I can solicit communication freely from the leading lights of my larger community. If you're old enough to remember typewritten post and wooden cabinets filled with 3x5 cards at the library, you'll recognize what a boon this is.
The unsung downshot of this is that even as GDP figures from the 1970s are probably drastically understated when piled next to today's figures, so are the per-capita violent crime statistics. The dis-utility of a violent crime event spreads wider and faster than it did 40 years ago.
And that's a feature, not a bug! It's good that murders, robberies, and assaults incidentally harm more folks per incident. Why? Because it gives folks a greater personal incentive to re-arrange the parameters of the crime and punishment game, particularly detection. By now, I'm sure you've heard tales of intrepid Internet sleuths hunting down bullies, thugs, hit-and-run drivers, and the like and hauling them to justice. The SPNE of this is... less crime.
So fleshy, broad networks are good not just because of the direct upside benefits, but perhaps also because they help mitigate downside risks. This makes them super-euvoluntary. This probably also suggests that to really reap the benefits of downside risk mitigation, legislators should avoid hobbling Web community-based police work.
At any rate, for those of us who work frequently with panel data on violent crime, I'd love to hear some ideas on how to attempt to control for this effect. It's something more than just time fixed effects, but I'm worried that it'll inevitably get captured as such. Maybe a natural experiment discontinuity regression around an ISP outage or something? Hm. It might be worth thinking about a little more.
Hell, I blog here with Michael f'-omg-ing Munger! I have scores of friends I've never met in person, and thanks to knock-on effects of ever-denser social networks, I can solicit communication freely from the leading lights of my larger community. If you're old enough to remember typewritten post and wooden cabinets filled with 3x5 cards at the library, you'll recognize what a boon this is.
The unsung downshot of this is that even as GDP figures from the 1970s are probably drastically understated when piled next to today's figures, so are the per-capita violent crime statistics. The dis-utility of a violent crime event spreads wider and faster than it did 40 years ago.
And that's a feature, not a bug! It's good that murders, robberies, and assaults incidentally harm more folks per incident. Why? Because it gives folks a greater personal incentive to re-arrange the parameters of the crime and punishment game, particularly detection. By now, I'm sure you've heard tales of intrepid Internet sleuths hunting down bullies, thugs, hit-and-run drivers, and the like and hauling them to justice. The SPNE of this is... less crime.
So fleshy, broad networks are good not just because of the direct upside benefits, but perhaps also because they help mitigate downside risks. This makes them super-euvoluntary. This probably also suggests that to really reap the benefits of downside risk mitigation, legislators should avoid hobbling Web community-based police work.
At any rate, for those of us who work frequently with panel data on violent crime, I'd love to hear some ideas on how to attempt to control for this effect. It's something more than just time fixed effects, but I'm worried that it'll inevitably get captured as such. Maybe a natural experiment discontinuity regression around an ISP outage or something? Hm. It might be worth thinking about a little more.
Friday, August 2, 2013
Nails and Consequences
The AP reports on a scuffle in a nail salon. Proprietors resist state authorities there to enforce occupational licensing statutes.
The state is always ultimately violence. Resist and you'll inevitably end up on the wrong side of a truncheon.
And that's the danger of petitioning the state. It's an act of violence. Sometimes it's plausibly worth threatening others. But for nail polish? Is a manicure that non-euvoluntary?
Blessed are the tased.
The state is always ultimately violence. Resist and you'll inevitably end up on the wrong side of a truncheon.
And that's the danger of petitioning the state. It's an act of violence. Sometimes it's plausibly worth threatening others. But for nail polish? Is a manicure that non-euvoluntary?
Blessed are the tased.
Saturday, July 6, 2013
The "Code" in Bar Fights
Are people constrained in bar fights? That is, is there a voluntary component in the challenge / response to defend one's "honor"? Could someone who is challenged say no? Is fighting, within this framework, voluntary?
Peaceful Warriors: Codes for Violence among Adult Male Bar Fighters
Heith Copes, Andy Hochstetler & Craig Forsyth Criminology, forthcoming
Abstract: Considerable theoretical and empirical inquiry has focused on the role codes for violence play in generating crime. A large part of this work has examined the attitudes and codes condoning retaliation and violence as well as the prevalence of these among minorities residing in impoverished neighborhoods. Much about the nature of codes remains unknown, however, and this may in part reflect a narrow interest in beliefs about provocation and uses of violence among the inner-city poor. In this study, we elaborate on a code of violence as part of a system of order and honor as articulated by a network of White, working-class males in a southern U.S. city who participate in bar fights. The findings suggest that the code these men use prohibits predatory violence, puts exclusive limitations on situations that warrant violence, and constrains the level of violence in a fight. We detail the contours of this code (e.g., purpose of fighting, the rules of honorable fighting, and justifications for violating these rules) and discuss the code as both a cause and a consequence of behavior.
I expected one of the authors to be Scott de Marchi.
Peaceful Warriors: Codes for Violence among Adult Male Bar Fighters
Heith Copes, Andy Hochstetler & Craig Forsyth Criminology, forthcoming
Abstract: Considerable theoretical and empirical inquiry has focused on the role codes for violence play in generating crime. A large part of this work has examined the attitudes and codes condoning retaliation and violence as well as the prevalence of these among minorities residing in impoverished neighborhoods. Much about the nature of codes remains unknown, however, and this may in part reflect a narrow interest in beliefs about provocation and uses of violence among the inner-city poor. In this study, we elaborate on a code of violence as part of a system of order and honor as articulated by a network of White, working-class males in a southern U.S. city who participate in bar fights. The findings suggest that the code these men use prohibits predatory violence, puts exclusive limitations on situations that warrant violence, and constrains the level of violence in a fight. We detail the contours of this code (e.g., purpose of fighting, the rules of honorable fighting, and justifications for violating these rules) and discuss the code as both a cause and a consequence of behavior.
I expected one of the authors to be Scott de Marchi.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Higgamus Hoggamus
A while back, I wrote a little piece on the euvoluntarity of plural marriage. At the time, I wrote that objections to polygamy were an example of organized question-begging: polygamy is non-euvoluntary because it's not under the aegis of a conventional capacity for exchange, therefore it must remain illegal. Had I been a bit more thorough, I would have mentioned the downside risk of more young men missing out on the marriage market (in an overlapping-generations model, the median marriage age for men increases in a polygynous society; for polyandry, women delay nuptuals in equilibrium). It could be that packs of feral boys would destabilize the peace we've all come to cherish under a regime that permitted plural marriages.
It could be, but somehow, I don't think it's all that likely. There are lots of ways for unwed men to compete for mates. Depending on the prevailing attitudes towards status, competition could be vigorous participation in the labor market, expressions of creativity, hooliganism, political participation, whatever. The point is, simply assuming the worst in the face of proposed institutional change is insufficient. When political scientists say "assume anarchy", it's not a call for worst-first thinking, it's a plea for circumspection (circumspection Tony--get your mind out of the gutter). It's important that a proposed policy change include a survey of what the world looks like with and without the regulation.
In the case of polygamy, the anarchy condition has to recognize that in market societies, competition for mates is often quite peaceful, and can even be positive-sum. I think we'd also have to recognize that in the US anyway, polygamy would be practiced by a vanishingly small minority. If the harms are negligible and the rates of occurrence are statistically invisible, then I wonder who it is laws against polygamy are protecting? Indeed, it might well be the case that the abusive, child-bride instances of polygamy gone wrong are driven even further underground by uniformed officers of the law and the principals they represent.
Can we imagine a world that allows for plural marriage? Or is it so morally offensive that we dare not speak its name?
It could be, but somehow, I don't think it's all that likely. There are lots of ways for unwed men to compete for mates. Depending on the prevailing attitudes towards status, competition could be vigorous participation in the labor market, expressions of creativity, hooliganism, political participation, whatever. The point is, simply assuming the worst in the face of proposed institutional change is insufficient. When political scientists say "assume anarchy", it's not a call for worst-first thinking, it's a plea for circumspection (circumspection Tony--get your mind out of the gutter). It's important that a proposed policy change include a survey of what the world looks like with and without the regulation.
In the case of polygamy, the anarchy condition has to recognize that in market societies, competition for mates is often quite peaceful, and can even be positive-sum. I think we'd also have to recognize that in the US anyway, polygamy would be practiced by a vanishingly small minority. If the harms are negligible and the rates of occurrence are statistically invisible, then I wonder who it is laws against polygamy are protecting? Indeed, it might well be the case that the abusive, child-bride instances of polygamy gone wrong are driven even further underground by uniformed officers of the law and the principals they represent.
Can we imagine a world that allows for plural marriage? Or is it so morally offensive that we dare not speak its name?
Thursday, September 13, 2012
The Importance of Endowment in Exclusion
This post inspired by conversations with friends of EE Pam Stubbart, Daniel Lin, Austin Middleton, Blake Johnson and Zac Gochenour.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Art Carden
The Dub-MOE comes up pretty big. In Forbes.
Trade is a fundamentally peaceful undertaking that unites people who might even dislike one another. Government intervention is literally the imposition of someone willing to use force to prevent people from cooperating.
Well. Yes, yes it is. Robert Nozick said that regulation "prevents capitalist acts between consenting adults." Always works well to make it sound sexy, right?
So, if you have two people who want to have an agreement, and they are both competent, and there are no externalities, why in the world does anybody else care? And even if they do care, why do they get to use violence to prevent it?
Trade is a fundamentally peaceful undertaking that unites people who might even dislike one another. Government intervention is literally the imposition of someone willing to use force to prevent people from cooperating.
Well. Yes, yes it is. Robert Nozick said that regulation "prevents capitalist acts between consenting adults." Always works well to make it sound sexy, right?
So, if you have two people who want to have an agreement, and they are both competent, and there are no externalities, why in the world does anybody else care? And even if they do care, why do they get to use violence to prevent it?
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