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Eric Reinhart, a "public health & safety research who has spent a decade working as an ethnographer on Chicago's South and West Sides," had a very long Twitter thread about crime, punishment, and public safety. The thread generally advances the view that policing and incarceration are not effective for reducing violent crime, and, in some sense, it is myopic to focus on violent crime in the first place. Without using the term specifically, he appears to be gesturing at the idea of social murder as being a more pressing problem than, and potentially a leading cause of, literal murder. Some quotes from the thread:
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When debating things with friends of mine who have very different politics from me, one of the points that I always find myself trying to make is that the state has limited resources to bring to bear on any problem--limited fiscal and physical resources of course, but also that mere attention to/awareness of a problem is a limited resource. Thus, focusing on any one society-wide problem necessarily comes at the cost of not focusing on some other(s), and, consequently, we have a duty to focus on the largest problems first.
Now, I tend to think that violent crime is a pretty big problem. But what if my focus on violent crime is self-contradictory? After all, Eric points out that there are problems that are many times bigger than murder that I don't care too much to solve.
Ultimately, I think that Eric and I agree that we ought be trying to support happiness and well-being, but that we disagree about what constitutes well-being and therefore also about what things pose the most important threats thereto. In my mind, Eric's view is unrealistically holistic--I think he weights as evenly important to well-being things which I would claim ought be weighted very disparately. For example, if two processes (e.g. murder and air pollution) were both to reduce life expectancy by exactly x years, I think he would weight them as equally important. I think they are not equally important because I claim that life-expectancy is merely a mesa-objective for happiness and well-being, and that being or knowing someone who is a victim of murder affects happiness and well-being directly in ways unrelated to and much larger than murder's effect on life expectancy.
I'm interested to know to what extent people agree that (a) the goal of society should be to increase happiness, and that (b) for that goal, achieving a very low level of violent crime and holding it there is probably more important than tackling air pollution, even if air pollution kills many more people.
I guess one way to assess this is to ask: would you rather live in (1) a society where your life expectancy is 80, but your lifetime risk of being murdered, mugged, or raped is 90%, or (2) a society where your life expectancy is 70, but your lifetime risk of being murdered, mugged, or raped is 10%? (As one data point, a 1987 article from the Bureau of Justice Statistics entitled "Lifetime Likelihood of Victimization" reported that the average American had an 83% chance of being a victim of violent crime at some time in their life. There is some debate about the methodology but tbh I did not spend any time trying to figure it out).
P.S. I have sometimes seen top-level posters criticized for not engaging with responses. I don't get notifications and sometimes only come here every few days, so I apologize in advance if I'm unresponsive.
So I think that your point of view accurately describes how many people perceive risk, but this usually leads to a mistaken perception of how actions and policy affect "happiness and well-being." The effects of e.g. air pollution are very downstream from the air pollution itself, and often manifest as an increase in some condition that already existed, so you cannot identify any specific person as dying because of air pollution. These deaths are also often going to be slow and uninteresting, while murder is big, breaking news that you can put pictures of on the front page of the paper. It's similar to the dilemma the FDA faces, where anyone who dies from an approved drug can be pointed to as a victim of their failure to be strict enough, while no one person who dies from a heart attack while waiting for beta-blockers to be approved can be definitively chalked up to the FDA's overly-strict behavior. So the incentive is for them to be extremely cautious and conservative. However, the effects are still real, and preventing 1,000 deaths from side-effects but causing 10,000 from heart attacks will definitely cause happiness and well-being to go down.
A death from murder and a death from air pollution or a work accident are not exactly the same, sure. People feel differently about them. But to what extent is that a result of fallacious reasoning, like if the news over-reports murder compared to accidents and people take that at face value? Or because people don't know that air pollution can even cause deaths, and so automatically chalk all of those deaths up as tragic but unpreventable happenings of life?
The badeconomics subreddit has a rule:
In other words, you cannot ask about the effects of some price changing without establishing why the price changed, because the price is determined by external factors. That underlying cause will determine the effects. For example, you can't say, "if the price of gas goes down, people will buy fewer electric vehicles." Maybe the reason why gas prices went down is because someone discovered an alternative energy source that is way cheaper than gasoline, and people will rush to buy electric vehicles because they're practically free to fuel up. Or maybe they discovered a ton of oil, and electric vehicle sales will decline. You can't even say whether the equilibrium quantity of gas sold will change, for the same reasons.
I have a similar feeling here. Why, if crime plummeted, did my life expectancy drop? There must be some cause, some other cause of death that went up. Is that cause of death painful or painless? And ideally, why did that cause of death change? Is crime low because I'm living in a 1600s puritan-like regressive culture where enjoying anything means I'm probably sinning, and life expectancy is low because we don't have medical technology or expertise? Or do we live in a futuristic utopia, but a lot of people have unsafe hobbies like BASE jumping?
Thanks for this reply. I started to compose a response that basically argued that "ackshually, feels > reals". Basically, I was going to say that governments need cater to people's fallacy-addled appraisals of their life circumstances instead of the objective reality of those circumstances, because the way that people feel is what actually determines how they act (although, to be fair, any policy that affects one is very likely also to affect the other, so even by optimizing for "feels", "reals" would sometimes incidentally improve). Thus I was going to say that things like murders--being very potent insults to people's felt reality--are more important than things like air pollution. I was going to argue that despite vast improvements in material conditions, people are today either no happier or perhaps much less happy than they were 70 years ago, so it seems like as a society we've been optimizing for the wrong things.
But I realized that that response is garbage for at least one major reason, and possibly many others. The one major reason is that such a reply is a full-throated, shouting endorsement of a lot of "woke" claims that I strongly deny. As such it represents a very deep contradiction that encroaches into my foundational beliefs, so I'll need to do some thinking on that.
I appreciate your open-minded and transparent response!
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