Crime is still falling
The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years, a development that was considered puzzling partly because it ran counter to the prevailing expectation that crime would increase during a recession.
Kevin Drum beat me to the biological determinism podium
the cohort effects from lead abatement efforts and the introduction of unleaded gasoline probably continue to make themselves felt, so this might not be as mysterious as it seems.
Apropos of Adams early post: Maybe 15 years ago I was a hardcore Tabla Rasa supporter. There was no way I could imagined myself waking up, believing anything different.
Today, I frequently say: crime and poverty in the first world are biological diseases and one day they will have a biological cure. Our purpose right now is to ease the pain of all those afflicted.
Ironically, I think liberals tend to be less accepting of biological determinism, but it was my acceptance of it that led me to be increasingly in favor of efforts to help the first world poor.
If these are biological effects, genetic or environmental, then by what moral compass can we compound their suffering through our public policy.
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
Tuesday ~ May 24th, 2011 at 1:23 pm
Patrick
Determinism is a term of philosophical art, or at least that is how its career in the lexicon started. In philosophy it has a clear definition. Determinism is a feature of universes. At some time, t, there is a fact about the complete state of the universe at that time, S. A universe is deterministic if and only if, given two times, t and t+n, given S there is only one physically possible state of the world at t+n. In other words at any one time there is at most one physically possible future. Any future other than the physically possible one could only come about if the laws of nature are violated, or if the past is changed somehow. Since neither of these things can happen (keep in mind I am talking about the actual laws of nature and the actual past, not what we think the laws of nature are, or what we think the past was like. We will keep finding out that things we take to be laws are violated, and that just shows us that they aren’t laws.) the other ways S+n might be cannot come about.
That is determinism generally. What happens when you start talking about psychological determinism or biological determinism? I take it that what you are saying is that a complete biological specification of the world a t leaves only one physically possible biological specification of the world at t+n. But that is just obviously false. Events that would not make it into the biological specification can have effects on the stuff that does. So what else could be meant by ‘biological determinism’ here? I take it that what you and Drum are going for is that the decrease of lead in the environment caused the decrease in crime. That seems plausible, given lead’s affects on human development. But it has nothing to do with determinism. The decrease incidence of lead exposure could lower the odds of a given individual committing a crime from, for example, 45% to 15%. If it does this for enough individuals the results will be significant and show up in the crime studies. But if the odds for the person committing a crime with the higher level of lead were less than 100%, or if the odds of their committing the crime with the lower level of lead was more than 0% than we are just not talking about determinism here, of any variety. We are talking about the fact that biology can explain human behavior, which is patently obvious. We are not talking about the complete explanation of behavior in the terms of biological science. You can give the explanation Drum is giving without getting into the facile and empty debate over biological determinism.
Wednesday ~ May 25th, 2011 at 2:14 am
A clinical analysis to warm the hearts of colder types « Entitled to an Opinion
[...] Karl Smith writes “crime and poverty in the first world are biological diseases and one day they will have a biological cure”. Public policy is applied zoology. [...]
Wednesday ~ May 25th, 2011 at 6:58 am
OGT
I think genetic and developmental effects have potentially very different political implications. Genetic inferiority can be taken (manipulated) to suggest less than humanness of poor people with all sort of nasty racist and eugenic undertones.
Developmental issues, such as lead abatement, on the other hand are politically consistent with both targeted interventions, such as discouraging pollutants like lead and early childhood education, and broader support measures for income support for unlucky individuals.
If the current research on the dramatic effects of early childhood environment on lifetime prospects were more widely understood, the environment/nature debate could be left largely behind and I would expect that the political debate would be steered in a much more child friendly direction, as this paper shows:
ftp://repec.iza.org/RePEc/Discussionpaper/dp1675.pdf
Wednesday ~ May 25th, 2011 at 1:38 pm
Sister Y
Karl, you previously expressed interest and difficulty with that paper of Bryan Caplan’s about behavioral economics results leading to conclusions of irrationality, especially about poor people.
I wonder if you’ve seen this unpublished thing from Posner & Becker in 2004. It proposes that people who commit suicide, AS WELL AS people who do stuff like join gangs, play lotteries, marry in haste, commit crime, and a bunch of other stuff are acting completely rationally, but have a truncated utility function because they are effectively suicidal.
That is, they just don’t respond at all to the expectation of extreme losses (don’t demand to be compensated for extra death risk, for example) because they have an effective welfare floor provided by the possibility of suicide. They will take “unfair gambles,” ones with even a tiny possibility of a large gain coupled with a huge possibility of bad consequences. This is not due to irrationality, but due to their utility functions being effectively “cut off” at 0 by the possibility of suicide.
I think this demonstrates that people don’t value life as much as e.g. Caplan and Hanson always assume.
Posner explains why his model is a better fit for various data than other models, but it’s a bit long to relate here.
Wednesday ~ May 25th, 2011 at 2:34 pm
Lead Exposure: A Bane for HBD? « Gucci Little Piggy
[...] first saw this argument at Steve Sailer’s place and see that it is being tossed around by Karl Smith of Modeled Behavior who is channeling Kevin Drum of Mother Jones. Drum links to a piece about [...]