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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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I hope this isn't too shallow for a top-level comment, but I wanted to share a personal observation about shifts in political views. Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime. Part of this is probably me getting older (damn kids, stop cycling on the sidewalk!), but I'd single out two main factors.

(1) A big part of it has been related to noticing shifting views on the issue among city-dwelling liberals (that's my in-group, whether I like it or not). I regularly visit a bunch of US cities for work, and I subscribe to their relevant subreddits, and there's been an incredible shift from "defund-the-police is a solid principle albeit the details need to be worked out" to "lock up the bums now". And similarly, several real life liberal friends who were traditionally pretty anti-police have become much more authoritarian of late, complaining about how e.g. the NYC subway used to be incredibly safe but has now become a creepy unpleasant space to inhabit, and something needs to be done.

(2) I've also had a lot more professional dealings with academic criminologists lately, and damn, it's been a wake-up call. It seems to be one of the most activist domains of academia I've ever encountered (and I deal with sociologists and social psychologists on a regular basis!). Over a few different conferences and dinners, I've chatted with criminologists who were pretty explicit about how they saw their role, namely speaking up for oppressed criminals; empirics or the rights of the wider populace barely came into the conversation. On top of this, there have been some spectacular scandals in academic criminology that have helped confirm my impression of the field. Suddenly, all those papers I happily cited about how prison doesn't work etc. seemed incredibly fragile.

I'm going to add two quick personal longstanding reasons why I'm inclined to be quite authoritarian on crime -

(i) Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat; I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority: if public schools become known as a magnet for drugs and gang violence, then middle-class parents will pull their kids out and send them to private schools, and won't give their votes or (more importantly) their organising energy to maintaining school quality. If subways become excessively creepy and weird and violent, the middle classes will get Ubers, and vote for candidates who defund public transit. In short, if the middle classes (who have options) decide not to make use of public options, then public options will die their democratic death. Speaking as someone who likes public options, I think it's essential that fairly strong state authority is exerted in public utilities to ensure that they are seen as viable by the middle class.

(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.

Obviously lots more to be said here, but I'll save my follow-ups for the comments. Curious what others think.

These trends come in waves. Liberals in the 1960s and 1970s also lost control and then turned sharply towards the center during the 1980s and 1990s. Biden used to brag about passing the most draconian anti-crime bills in the 1990s until the optics changed and it became a liability. Perhaps he will now remind voters yet again in 2024?

I think the turnaround on crime is simply an outgrowth of "everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face" theory that was proposed by Mike Tyson and which I subscribe to. The plan was defund the police and getting hit in the face part is what followed. Will liberals learn? History shouldn't make us optimistic given that we've seen these patterns before.

A major rule I have to the 'bad upbringing' of criminal actors is the more immediate a person experiences antisocial behavior, the less the opponents story matters. It's easy to read about horrible crimes and violence committed against a perceived person and go 'the decision to incapacitate someone in xyz manner was wrong and should be punished' and give the underdog a sympathetic story. However, it's funny when these people are immediately put on the spot their politics change abruptly. However, when an aggressive drug addict or homeless individual gets in your face the most important thing is to get away safely, not think "oh, the person had a poor upbringing, it isn't their fault," Now that police enforcement (which was successfully keeping away aggressive behaviors) is kneecapped, suddenly people are changing their tune because they're directly experiencing the negative behaviors police were experiencing and successfully repressing every day. It's easy to be sympathetic to someone or something that happens to you far away. It's much harder when it's on your doorstep.

To quote the old saying, "hard men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times create hard men'

hard men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times create hard men

I think this phrase is mostly BS, but here it seems appropriate, at least insofar as "hard men" = "tough on crime" and vice versa. This issue seems alarmingly cyclical.

I’ve often been at least somewhat a fan of the idea of restorative justice. The idea being that you have to pay back or otherwise make whole those people you’ve victimized. I don’t think this is incompatible with some retribution and certainly not against jail time. But I think having the person earn money in jail to pay back the damages done by theft, or to fund the drug rehabilitation programs that are needed because they’re dealing drugs. I think it helps to educate a person on the consequences of their actions.

Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime.

I don't think supporting a crackdown on crime is authoritarian. Rather, I see my libertarianism and support for incarcerating criminals as two sides of the same coin. I think government should be in the business of protecting people's right to life, liberty, and property. I oppose government trying to take these away, and I oppose criminals trying to take them away.

I think government should be in the business of protecting people's right to life, liberty, and property. I oppose government trying to take these away, and I oppose criminals trying to take them away.

The trouble with this is that when the government stops criminals doing it (in modern times, anyways) there's usually scope creep in terms of what's considered a 'criminal'.

The solution that could work looks more like reverse anarcho-tyranny -- don't put the government in charge of punishing subway screamers, because they will inevitably end up going after people selling loose smokes (or vapes, probably), but punish the Pennys of the world lightly if at all.

If acting nuts on the subway is likely to end with you getting beaten or dead, the nuts on the subway will be less likely to act it out.

I've been all up and down the thread saying yea charge penny for manslaughter because extrajudicial killing is a slippery as fuck slope, but I also don't give a shit about neely at all.

Obviously dude should have gotten help; not his fault his brain blew a fuse. The solution to him not getting help because there are no resources or because he doesn't want it isn't to throw up our hands or start lynching people; it's to provide resources and enforce their use.

But then we're back at your dude getting institutionalized for smokes somehow instead of for having an episode.

So I am one of those weirdos that thinks that under certain circumstances a society with just the anarcho- and no tyranny could work in a way that's superior to what we have now -- but if we are going to have anarcho-tyranny, wouldn't it be better for the anarcho-privilege to apply to the vast majority of folks who aren't out there starting shit and making everyone else's life worse, rather than the tiny minority that are a pain in the ass to the world at large?

I think Penny should be penalized -- you are correct IMO that manslaughter is appropriate under current law, based on what we've seen so far. Reduce the penalty a bit for justifiable violence, and you pretty well have what I'm suggesting. I'd personally reduce the penalty a lot for anything that looks like consentual violence, and "yelling at people and throwing trash at them on the train" would count as consent. If Neely hadn't died, in my world him and Penny would both be up on some sort of disturbing the peace misdemeanor -- and if the jury lets Penny walk for New York reasons, so be it.

Since he did in fact die, manslaughter is what it is -- this is a risk in any street fight. So maybe Penny is both a hero and guilty of manslaughter? Killing a bum doesn't make you a hero, but showing the other bums that people are willing to shut them down whatever the consequences maybe does. Pour encourager les autres and all that.

but showing the other bums that people are willing to shut them down whatever the consequences maybe does

This is the big if for me.

If leading one mentally ill guy onto the chakmool and choking him to death appeases Tlaloc and cures all ills, then it was obviously worth it. We already live in omelas; making it more obvious is just owning up to it.

I just don't thing the type of people ready to throw down on the subway because the voices were too loud that day are going to be convinced by incentives; IMO they need to be cured or segragated.

But, oh fuck oh shit, there's that fucking tyranny problem you brought up AGAIN and we are institutionalizing randos like it's 1950 AGAIN.

It's that fucking lockian hobbsian all the way back to whoever was in charge of the first farming village problem AGAIN.

The Templo Mayor was a government based solution -- I am suggesting a social one.

Humans are really good at responding to social pressure, even when they are fuckin crazy.

If they aren't, they are still animals -- and the way to train animals through negative reinforcement is to make sure that the reinforcement is swift and sure -- not necessarily severe.

This is not possible for a government to do without a very resource intensive police state -- but citizens can provide it very very well, if you leave interpersonal violence on the table.

Indeed, I wanted to make a similar point but forgot. Punishing violations of and defections from the non-aggression principle is entirely consistent with libertarianism—if not one of its defining aspects—and a function a limited government can still provide.

Five more years and you'll be talking like our resident belle juive.

If you want to live in the first world, you either get Singapore or America. Humans are a variable species, and some will have lower intelligence, time preference, and inhibition. The stupid will always be with us. They can be controlled, for their benefit and for ours, by authoritarianism (both cultural and legal), like they are in East Asia. The schools are safe, the streets are clean, and there's no innovation.

Or we can have America. The uninhibited and unintelligent are allowed to express their nature, to the detriment of themselves and those around them. In return, there is no ceiling on the most productive among us.

If I lived in a city-state, Singapore would be the only tenable solution. I don't, however, I live in the suburbs, which seems to be a great arbitrage opportunity. I get all the benefits of the incredible creativity of America while living in peace and safety, and in return, blue tribers get mugged and have their stuff stolen.

Sounds great to me.

Yeah I've definitely moved further into the let's sacrifice innovation camp. If the most productive or ambitious or idiosyncratic feel kneecapped, so be it, for the sake of public order and a general ethos that supports regular people's dispositions.

It seems to me that many places outside of East Asia, mostly but not exclusively in the Anglosphere and Northern Europe, had within living memory (and in quite a lot of them still have, as a matter of fact) safe schools, clean streets, and as much innovation as there ever has been. The greatest advances in science and technology took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time with a much more restrictive social order than we have today, and I remain unconvinced that the removal of these restrictions through successive waves of progressivism and liberalization over the past century has done anything to make us more innovative in engineering, literature, etc. One would be better off making arguments for those changes on deontological grounds than by any utilitarian calculation of scientific or artistic output.

I too am thoroughly unconvinced that progressive shibboleth tolerance, etc drives innovation and economic development.

I’ll go one better. Removal of those norms and expectations has stymied progress as people must put more and more effort into stop-gap work arounds for things that just worked in previous decades. It also creates a situation where kids don’t get to learn to be independent as they need to be under the watchful eyes of adults because bad things can happen if you just let a kid wander around.

I don't see how it follows that allowing drug addicts people to harass strangers and push them in front of subway trains allows for greater innovation. If anything, it would seem to be the opposite. What's the mechanism here? Is the thought that someone like Kanye West would be jailed in Taiwan? I'm not sure that's true. I'm also not sure that there is no innovation in East Asia.

One thing I'm fairly certain of is that innovation in the United States now is lower than it was pre-1970 when crime and decay was much lower than today.

My hypothesis would be that the same degeneration which causes drug addiction and crime also lowers our creative capacity.

Well the libertarian ethos that has defended wealthy weirdos and their right to innovate and Do Their Own Thing is certainly wedded to the uncomfortable subway person in spirit.

And America's love of rags to riches stories also suggests that the uncomfortable subway person may one day be a startup founder!

In libertarian utopia, drug shops would be on every corner, and so would be gun shops.

In libertarian utopia, everyone would be packing, and when drug addicts start making problems, sober citizens will not need "cops" or "marines" to save them, sober citizens will draw faster, fire more accurately and solve their problems themselves once and for all.

(at least, this is what the theory says)

In short, this subway situation would be impossible in libertarian world, and no way could be blamed on "libertarian ethos".

I see. You're doing the No True Scotsman redefining of libertarianism to the stricter anarcho-capitalism only

Correct, to get the subway situation you need anarcho-tyranny. The state claims a monopoly on force, then fails to enforce it against crazy homeless drug addicts, but comes down like a ton of bricks on anyone who tries to handle said crazy homeless drug addicts themselves.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Kind of like the alcoholic's belief that their heavy drinking is somehow making them more interesting. Possible in some cases I suppose, but mostly it's just bad storytelling and cope from people who want to believe that there must be some reason that bad things happen.

I live in the suburbs, which seems to be a great arbitrage opportunity. I get all the benefits of the incredible creativity of America while living in peace and safety, and in return, blue tribers get mugged and have their stuff stolen.

Sure… but while you’re basking in schadenfreude, many of the blue tribers you mock are hard at work advocating for low-income housing to be brought to your neighborhoods and diversity to your children’s schools, which would likely be downers upon your suburban bliss. So I wouldn’t get too comfortable resting on my laurels.

The solution to that would be something like modern day Texas, Georgia, or Florida, wouldn't it- blue tribers still control the major cities but don't have influence over the rest of the state.

I’ve had the same shift and it’s coincided with me becoming, in chronological order, someone with a hard but well-paid job, a homeowner, a husband, and a father. None of that is easy, and it takes takes basically all of my time and mental energy to keep the whole thing standing up. Of course it is very satisfying and rewarding too.

In little breaks I have in my otherwise full schedule of carefully tending my garden, I notice that most people around me are just like me, showing up, working hard, earnestly trying to do their best. They’re all types, from the banker to the software engineer to the plumber to the Mexican immigrant lining up outside Home Depot looking for work while his wife works in the nail salon. Life is hard but most people show up and do their best, and end up doing okay.

And then you see the few people who at best just don’t give a fuck and can’t be bothered, or at worst actively make things worse for everybody else. In any sane society, these are the Bad Guys and would be treated like the Bad Guys. We’d be taking these people off the streets, we’d be keeping them away from our communities, and we’d be screaming at them for their absurd anti-social behavior.

But instead, especially in coastal big blue cities like where I live, society and government is entirely, 100% engaged in excusing and enabling them, while me and the banker and the plumber and the immigrant day laborer pay for it and told to smile while we do it. The only time we can get law enforcement to do anything is when their anti-social behavior is bad enough that it could hypothetically harm them (they don’t have any property, so property crime isn’t punishable).

Everybody else is out there busting their ass and it feels like the government always takes the other guy’s side. It’s so frustrating and absurd.

I teach at a big university. Class compositions are always like: 15% of students are awesome and are thrilled to be there and go above and beyond. 70% are good and do the work. 15% don’t give a shit. It’s hard to strike a balance between giving the best students more challenging and enriching material and keeping the worst students on track with the basics. In particular, you’re worried about leaving behind an earnest try-hard who just happens to kind of suck or be behind for reasons beyond his control.

My senior colleagues gave me the following advice which I’ve realized is absolutely right: conduct the class 100% for the benefit of the best students. They want to be in the class. They’ll benefit the most. And guess what, there are basically zero earnest try-hards who land in the bottom 15%.

I don’t know why we can run society in the same way. Run society for the benefit of the people who choose to participate productively in society. I know there’s this mythical class of people who would love to participate in productive society but their circumstances have done them wrong; if only they got the right social worker they could turn things around. But more and more I become convinced that almost all people who are out there shitting on other people’s lawns are just going to be lawn shitters no matter what we do and we need to get them as far away from our lawns, and my family, as possible.

I know there’s this mythical class of people who would love to participate in productive society but their circumstances have done them wrong; if only they got the right social worker they could turn things around.

I blame Hollywood for that, people are too stupid to avoid being influenced by movies (Good Will Hunting et al). For another example we have the case of silencers in guns.

I don’t know why we can['t] run society in the same way. Run society for the benefit of the people who choose to participate productively in society.

"Social Justice" is why. If you run society for the benefit of the productive people, there will be some people who don't or can't contribute. To put it as mildly as possible, advocates for those who don't or can't contribute would strongly object to removing those people from society. Take a look at graphs showing lifetime net consumption of government benefits. Any government policy has to account for the fact that the bottom 15% of the population is functionally incapable of participating in civil society.

all people who are out there shitting on other people’s lawns are just going to be lawn shitters no matter what we do and we need to get them as far away from our lawns, and my family, as possible.

Yes.

What subject do you teach to get that level of participation post-Covid?

You might be interested in this CS Lewis article where he expresses similar views on crime and punishment. http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ResJud/1954/30.pdf

I'm hopping in off this due to the shoplifting comment, where one of the points is to put up kiosks where the - hmm, can't call them perpetrators or criminals, I suppose "unfortunate victims of systemic racism"? - can be connected with social services.

Guy with a knife is threatening "open the till or I'll cut your throat" - send in the social workers! They (or more likely, "she" as one will be sent on their own) will talk him down! He will regret his life choices and become compliant once a sympathetic shoulder to cry on is presented!

Yeah, sure. Even the most bleeding-heart social worker is going to want police backup in the scenario of "armed criminal/crazy guy being violent". Is it any surprise that when faced with the concrete results of policies, people switch to "maybe we do need the cops after all"?

I'm not against compassionate policies and there are people who need help due to bad life circumstances or mental illness. But not when it comes to gangs of professional thieves who are career criminals doing this as a job, and not when it's down to comfortably middle-class DAs and prosecutors more interested in virtue signalling and being part of the network of the NGOs who are making careers out of this than in actually helping anyone. 'Revolving door arrests' those guys, safe in the knowledge that you will never have to encounter them face-to-face in your daily life.

And this is why I do agree that criminals should lose the right to vote: they've demonstrated that they do not want to participate in civic life or be bound by the laws on all citizens, and that they have no perception of others as fellow-citizens or respect for their rights. When you put yourself outside the common life, you lose the rights of that common life. Come back in, demonstrate genuine reform, and then ask for your rights to be restored.

Suddenly, all those papers I happily cited about how prison doesn't work etc. seemed incredibly fragile.

Prison doesn't work if all that happens is you scoop someone up, dump them in there, do nothing about reform, then let them back out to resume their interrupted career once the sentence is served. There has to be real effort put into diverting young offenders off the path of crime and helping out guys who do want to reform but have few to no options if left on their own to go back where they came from.

But this is expensive and needs a lot of work, so it's easier to build prisons, fill them to bursting, then - when the inevitable failure occurs - turn on a dime and start releasing or not even arresting criminals in the first place. If you can't make people adhere to the terms of their bail, or their parole, or the programme for drugs they were sent on instead of serving jail time, then such things are toothless and do no good at all.

Apart from that, I have unhappily come to the conclusion that there are some people who will never change, no matter if you intervene when they're sixteen or if they're twenty or thirty. They don't care, they are only in it for themselves, they're just smart enough to be able to invoke the "pity poor little me, I had a hard life, it's not my fault" but they have no intention of changing. They want social services and the rights of unemployment assistance, social housing, etc. because they want anything and everything they can get for nothing, but they don't contribute, don't want to contribute, and think that ordinary people are suckers to be exploited. They want cheap drugs, easy sex, free money, no necessity to work or do anything, and no consequences. Knock that bitch up? Not my responsibility. Steal from my own family to get a fix? Not my responsibility. Slack off on training programme to get a job? Not my responsibility. Get fired from job after job because I show up late, don't work, and steal on the job? Not my responsibility.

Those are the hardcore who are the minority but do need to be treated differently, and yeah that is going to mean some form of "lock them up" or restrict them or harsher treatment. Because they will never change, and soft treatment just confirms their belief that "you are all suckers and sheep to be fleeced".

Prison doesn't work if all that happens is you scoop someone up, dump them in there, do nothing about reform, then let them back out to resume their interrupted career once the sentence is served.

This is not so. Men achieve peak of their criminal career between 16 and 30, after that they naturally become more placid. If you keep the worst offenders in prison during that time, you physically prevent majority of the crime they’d ever commit, even if you do absolutely nothing to rehabilitate them. In short, they do not exactly resume their career.

Not exactly the same career, but -- won't someone who spent most of their youth learning no skills that are not crime-related, socializing with nobody except other criminals, and is actively discouraged from finding non-criminal jobs and forming non-criminal social connections even after leaving prison, be rather unlikely to become a highly productive member of society, even if they strongly wish to?

I do not, in fact, care about them being highly productive members of society. I am not going for some sort of grand society improvement project. I just want them to stop committing crime.

Highly productive might be a stretch, but "noncriminal and employed" is probably doable.

I’m willing to try other ideas. For example, I’d be interested in adopting public beatings a la Singapore for first time non deadly (or non child related) felony crime.

But after that, I think jail serves the purpose of incapacitating the criminal. If you still commit crime after a public flogging, then you deserve to be removed from society.

Agree with the public beatings. Have medical professionals see if the individual in question is able to endure it: it would suck to have a criminal with brittle bones or something.

There has to be real effort put into diverting young offenders off the path of crime and helping out guys who do want to reform but have few to no options if left on their own to go back where they came from.

Either (A) we have no idea how to do that or (B) there aren't actually all that many people falling only in that category. So we should do what we can -- put more criminals in prison, building more if necessary. Perhaps if (A) is true we should work on how to do it, but not unless we're willing to reject ideas that don't work. Personally I suspect it is possible in theory, but possibly not in practice -- it would involve catching minor criminals far more often and punishing them swiftly with unpleasant but short stays in jail. But that's only a theory and even if implementable may not actually work.

Either (A) we have no idea how to do that or (B) there aren't actually all that many people falling only in that category.

There's the old idea of "bad company" or "going astray". There are young people who are weak-willed (and maybe weak-minded) who get into 'the wrong crowd' who happily use them as catspaws - I can think of two examples off the bat from the school where I worked.

One was a teenage guy who was the only child of elderly parents. He had 'educational problems' (meaning intellectual disabilities) but he was bigger and stronger than his parents who had no means of keeping him under control; there was no way the dad could lock him in his room or threaten him because the kid would just be violent in return. He came to notice because he had spending money without having a job. Strong suspicion that he was being used for petty crime because, to be blunt, he was big and dumb and easily influenced. If he got caught, no problem - he didn't know enough and wasn't smart enough to turn in the guys in the gang and he'd be the one ending up doing time while they found another patsy.

Second was a girl from a broken home, again easily led and not that smart (no diagnosis of learning disabilities). Again got into "bad company", ended up habitually truant, eventually dropping out of school and ending up on that early school leavers' programme I mentioned. Hard to track down because she kept moving around couch-surfing with 'friends', said friends introduced her to weed and other 'harmless' fun substances. Eventually she ends up on heroin, a single mother, and doing time in jail for stabbing another girl in the stomach at a house party. I'd followed her 'career progression' from the time she was in school with poor attendance, but basically okay, to reading the reports on her file about where she ended up (prison) due to the various jobs I'd worked in, and it was depressing.

These two weren't naturally criminal, they were weak and got led down the wrong path. If there were a robust system of intervention (i.e. if you could do anything other than 'now Johnny, that's naughty' and have to let them go under the guidance of an over-worked social worker who can't handle the workload they already have and will probably be switched out for somebody new and the whole process repeat itself) then there is a good chance of keeping them off the path of crime and jail. They maybe won't be the most productive members of society but you can divert them off the track that leads to a baby, a heroin habit, and jail.

But that requires going back to the bad old days of discipline and industrial schools and the rest of the things that nice, middle-class, university graduates protest about and work to do away with. The activists that, as they get older, move seamlessly from student socialist protests while in college to professional careers, nice middle-class well-off neighbourhoods, and the concerns of that set.

EDIT: Actually, there's a third example comes to mind. Another kid on the early school leavers' programme whose career I had followed from school onwards; he had anger management problems and suffered from being spoiled by his single-parent mother whose reaction to every disciplinary action by the school was to turn up and scream about "why are you picking on my son?" Mommy gets pregnant again, drops everything (including son) to dote on the new baby, kid is left adrift since Mommy no longer cares a damn about him and ends up on the programme, where another kid who definitely was on the path to prison (and deserved to end up there because he was one of the habitual losers who don't want to reform) used him again as a tool. Jailbait doesn't want to sit through a full class trying to teach him something he might use to get a job? He winds up Angry Kid who can reliably be set off like a hand grenade, who starts throwing chairs etc. and the rest of the morning goes on calming down Angry Kid and dealing with the aftermath of the meltdown. Jailbait sits there smirking and going "I didn't do anything, I only said X" (where X is on the surface innocent but will push Angry Kid's buttons).

Jailbait deserves to end up doing time, I don't know if he did because I moved to different job and lost track of him. Angry Kid again needs intervention (including taking him away from Mommy who did nothing to help him because she was using him as an extension of herself) but is likely to end up involved in petty crime. That's the difference.

I really like the additional block about Angry Kid and his interaction with jailbait because it illustrates a pernicious part of the problem that is both underappreciated and extremely hard to remedy...

A very small percentage of true sociopaths / anti-social personalities can destroy entire communities, especially if those communities are already fragile, and this can be done without the sociopath's overt attempt (i.e. "all I said was x").

Raphael Mangual talks about this in his book Criminal Injustice and, if memory serves, Roland Fryer had a paper that analyzed the disastrous effects of even a single murder on a neighborhood in (again, going off memory here) St. Louis.

I think the short, mid, and long term solution is more cops. A HELL of a lot more cops. First, this would be to simply dissuade crime. Yes, the sociopaths don't care, but the young "hoppers" who are just getting acquainted with crime will still avoid a purse snatch, or a hand-to-hand deal, etc. if there's a police cruiser within line of sight. Second, more seasoned cops can be freed up to perform Community Policing (don't worry, TollBooth hasn't go Prog on y'all) .... what I mean is acting as intelligence agents ... without calling it that ... because something something constitution.

You want the veteran cops creating detailed reports of the network of crime in a given area, with special attention paid to those sociopaths. That attention could be quite obvious - meaning that the "target" ought to know the Cops are watching him or her closely. Optimistically, this would hopefully have the same impact as incarceration. That is, creating a "dead zone" for the sociopath's criminal capabilities. At the very least, the second the target commits a violent crime, the arrest could be swift.

I sort of think that America has an over-incarceration problem, but not because we're just chucking all the kids with joints into prison. Again, reading Criminal Injustice, your average prison (not jail) inmate has over a dozen arrests and more than a handful of felony charges. We give our Junior Varsity criminals a lot of time to practice and then get serious with them after they do some Big League crime. The solution, IMHO, is to over-emphasize the front of the funnel; more arrests more frequently, more visible police presence always.

It sounds like one very effective way to protect people like A, B, and C in your story would be to more rapidly and permanently incarcerate the genuine bad eggs around them, as well as making opiate drugs less widely available. The state can’t ensure that feckless weak-willed people are exposed to healthy friendship circles or overcome their natural deficits in decision-making. However, it can intervene to ensure that there are fewer bad actors around to exploit them.

Indeed, particularly in the case of B- has there ever been any society which has had success in keeping stupid but not actually literally mentally disabled teenaged girls from broken homes from getting taken advantage of until they wind up in a bad spot in a way that can't be fixed, like ever in the history of the world- some of these people will never have good outcomes, but you can probably make their outcomes less bad just by removing the worst aspects from society.

Girls knew that if they got pregnant out of marriage, terrible things (and I mean, really terrible things) would happen, so they did not get pregnant. This was barbaric in some ways, but it shows that teen girls, even when dumb, respond to incentives.

Did they do everything but have sex, the Mormon way, or were they actually chaste?

Did they do everything but have sex, the Mormon way, or were they actually chaste?

Oral sex was practiced by those in the know, perhaps less than 5%, but the complete lack of sex education meant that most people learned about the mechanics of sex from farmers' kids. Farmers understand a lot about breeding but are focussed almost entirely on cattle in Ireland, and the insights do not transfer quite as easily as you might think.

I would guess that most girls did not understand the basic physics of sex when they graduated high school. I have witnessed people explaining to young grooms what was expected on their wedding night. It is possible that boys were even less adroit, but they at least knew about erections.

The girls were chaste for the most part out of fear. The guys were chaste out of a complete lack of options and strangely, religious reasons. John B. Keane has a play, the Chastitute, written in 1981, that captured the zeitgeist well:

'A Chastitute is a person without holy orders who has never lain down with a woman . . . rustic celibate by force of circumstance.' John Bosco, who 'hasn't the makings of a dacent sin in him', is a chastitute, a bachelor farmer and all he is searching for is a plain decent woman to share his life. He nearly got there a thousand times but nearly never bulled a cow'. This play tells of his many endeavours to find a mate and the end result.

There’s also option C- we have a very good idea of how to do it such that any retired cop in a diner could tell you how, but for some reason that probably has to do with civil rights or non discrimination society has decided it’s against the rules.

What, exactly, are you alluding to?

The Constitution, and hundreds of years of precedent after it (so, precedent relative to today), prevents arrest without clearing what is the highest barrier for evidence and evidence collection in the Western World.

The "retired cop in a diner" would say something like "Every Cop knows that Bad Leroy Brown is running the drug market on the South Side. But he's never actually in the room with drugs, or on phones, and no one will testify against him, so we can't indict."

This is actually a major recurring theme in The Wire. Where the kingpins generally are so far removed from the street that indicting them is a long term game of cat and mouse. Meanwhile ,the chaos that results from their empires destroys a city and then only "high visibility" solution is to "rip and run" - i.e. engage in low level arrests of minor players in an effort to clean up the streets.

The civil liberties slippery slope is real. We can't, as a society, just start making exceptions because "everybody says Leroy Brown is the big man around the way."

Interesting. Do you know how, say, an English or Australian policeman would handle Bad Leroy Brown, the local drug kingpin?

I can't say with a lot of specific certainty as I don't know those policing systems much at all.

I know that the concept of civil liberties and privacy are fundamentally weaker. For instance, I know that there has been at least an official police visit to folks who have posted offensive language on twitter. Not an arrest, per se, but an official sanctioned visit to the domicile. The threshold for what would take a warrant in the USA is much lower. I believe the language is "vital to an ongoing investigation" at the discretion of the police themselves - no judge needed.

So, assuming I'm not wildly off base with my statements above (which are, admittedly, fuzzy at best) ... A constable in the UK would hear that Leroy Brown is a bad dude from the local toughs and then, presumably, launch and official investigation. This would allow Constable Fish-N-Chips to surveil Mr. Brown and search his domicile (again, I think) with near impunity. No such thing as off-limits or 'non-pertinent' information. It's a 24/7 (or as much time as the cops feel like) surveillance and waiting game until Mr. Brown somehow commits a crime with prosecuting.

I'm not alluding to anything in particular, just pointing out that it's entirely possible in the society we have that the solution is both known and politically impossible because it has bad optics or a disproportionate impact or something.

Yeah. I would suspect that "catch and flog/beat petty criminals" might be it, or at least part of it.

Can you explain what you mean by "quite authoritarian on crime"? The only concrete example you give is your friends "complaining about how e.g. the NYC subway used to be incredibly safe but has now become a creepy unpleasant space to inhabit,* and something needs to be done," which is not what I would describe as "authoritarian," let alone "quite authoritarian."

I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. . . . I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes.

I don't understand this. You can be believe that "wrongdoers deserve to be punished, in proportion to their crimes, as a matter of justice or right" (the definition in your link) while simultaneously supporting rehabilitation, addressing social conditions which are conducive to crime, etc. If you are saying that you think that punishment should solely be a function of the crime, rather than partly a function of the criminal (eg, potential mitigating or aggravating circumstances such as age, prior record, etc), then isn't that tantamount to treating them as cattle, rather than as individuals?

*As I have mentioned here before, I am very skeptical of this sort of claim, because I ride the NYC subway every day, and have friends who do so, and have never heard such complaints.

Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat

I don't think your views on crime, though I personally wouldn't subscribe to all of them, are at all in tension with social democracy, indeed if one considers policing to be a public service which it surely is, then ample police funding is surely the 'more' social democratic perspective. Hence why in Britain, where policing has not been caught up in culture wars as it has in the US, even Corbyn attacked the Tories for cutting police funding.

Those views fall outside of Sociel Democracy as practiced as a social scene, wherein all cops are bastards etcetera.

That's not really social democracy, as commonly understood, anywhere.

Or that there's a perception police in th UK spend more time policing people saying mean things to or about alphabet people on the internet than investigating and disrupting asian grooming gangs raping kids.

This is just not the case. Every now and again such a case (like the recent gollywogs one) will come around and the usual suspects will have a (sometimes justified) moan, but when Starmer or whoever talks about crime they always focus on the impact of austerity on serious crimes.

Isn't that the only positive narrative available?

If he talked about austerity impacting officers assigned to police alphabet internet mean words or not having sufficient officers to raid a pub to remove offensive dolls, that's not really a narrative that is going to perform well.

5 police seized 15 dolls from the pub in Essex. That doesn't sound like an under-resourced force. If that was the best use of officers on that day I would think there is no serious crime in Essex.

The big upending of the British legal system over the past few years has been dedicated to sending police to harass otherwise law-abiding citizens for activities such as organising a judo class for children and having a coffee while walking with a friend. It's not merely a funding thing. There are obvious incentives for police to harass the harmless rather than confront the difficult and dangerous, and the UK is already long down the road of anarcho-tyranny.

propensity to violent criminality is almost entirely genetic

That's a tough one. You do get families where they are criminals for generations. But you also get families where there is one "bad apple" even though the rest of the family are living in the same circumstances, and trying to cope with that 'bad seed'.

The problem with the genetic propensity theory is that in practice it becomes imposed on the poor. Rich family has a fuck-up kid? They can afford high-class lawyers, rely on contacts, and pay off to have the kid put in rehab.

Look at that case of the rich family in South Carolina, where digging into the original murders brought forth all kinds of dirty laundry. The son was one such fuck-up kid who had killed someone in a boating accident and got it all covered up by the parents. I guess you could indeed say this proves the genetic propensity case because dear old dad later went on the family murder spree and apparently had been involved in theft and embezzlement for years preceding, but had it not been for that, the son of the rich family would have gone on with his life and presumably, in time, got the career and money that went with it, while the son of a poor family in similar case would be in jail and marked out for life.

Unless and until we can ensure justice in how the genetic propensity is punished, it's better not to make policies on that theory, because it will only result in "you can get away with literal murder if you have money, and go on to keep committing crimes and getting away with them". If someone is an habitual criminal, we want them put away, not allowed to go on committing crimes.

That's a tough one. You do get families where they are criminals for generations. But you also get families where there is one "bad apple" even though the rest of the family are living in the same circumstances, and trying to cope with that 'bad seed'.

I think almost entirely genetic is overstated even for something like IQ. And - 'genetic' doesn't just mean 'inherited', it means 'anything from genes', including idiosyncratic non-additive genetic effects, and random effects from crossover during meiosis (random half of your mother and father's dna).

Also think that violent crime is much less genetic than IQ. I'm, like, 99% sure that, if you took existing black children with really bad genes, modified the genes for physical features to make them 'look white', and swapped them with white babies, the resulting children and adults wouldn't commit crime at anywhere the rate blacks do. Sure, lower-iq on average, maybe (but haven't seen any convincing arguments here) have different temperament, but 'black crime' is clearly propagated by cultural practices and institutions.

The problem with the genetic propensity theory is that in practice it becomes imposed on the poor.

That's not a problem for the theory. The theory's truth value is not affected by its consequences.

Rich family has a fuck-up kid? They can afford high-class lawyers, rely on contacts, and pay off to have the kid put in rehab.

As long as the fuck-up is kept away from the rest of us, that they're in a place more comfy than a prison seems a minor issue.

Unless and until we can ensure justice in how the genetic propensity is punished, it's better not to make policies on that theory, because it will only result in "you can get away with literal murder if you have money, and go on to keep committing crimes and getting away with them".

If you make policies based on falsehoods and fail to make policies based on accurate theories, your policies are going to fail. It is true that it is definitionally hard to impose consequences on the powerful (under any policy), but that's no reason to reject any particular theory.

If it's only the poor get punished and the rich get away with it, then the whole idea of "punishment for crime, because we want to prevent crime" becomes warped into "punishment for being poor" and then activism gets its rationale for coming into being, and we end up with the whole "don't punish Johnny for his life circumstances" stuff which leads us to where we are today.

If both Johnny and Jonathan get punished, and there is no option for Jonathan to end up in cushy private rehab while Johnny goes to jail - if both go to jail and it doesn't matter a flying damn if Daddy knows the Governor - then we get an equal society and people will back "tough on crime" policies, because they can see it really is tough on crime and not 'tough on not being able to pay off the judge'.

If it's only the poor get punished and the rich get away with it, then the whole idea of "punishment for crime, because we want to prevent crime" becomes warped into "punishment for being poor"

No, it becomes "punishment for being poor and criminal". Which is indeed bad, but solving the problem by letting the poor off for being criminal doesn't help. That just leads to the poor not being punished because they're poor, the sufficiently rich not being punished because they are powerful, and the bulk of the productive people of society being both over-policed and preyed on by criminals.

If both Johnny and Jonathan get punished, and there is no option for Jonathan to end up in cushy private rehab while Johnny goes to jail - if both go to jail and it doesn't matter a flying damn if Daddy knows the Governor

We're never going to get that. The Hunter Bidens of this world will always be able to get away with things unless their parents happen to be extremely unusually morally upstanding. But that we can't get justice against Hunter doesn't mean we need to allow the Jordan Neelys of this world free reign.

Pure speculation, but I wonder if the bad seed is the result of paternity fraud. Perhaps there are four kids and three are great and a like and then you have the one “bad boy.” Maybe mom Stepped out with a bad boy one night?

No, those kinds of families are respectable and at their wit's end trying to deal with the kid causing trouble. Where Mommy is likely to be stepping out with bad boys, there is no Daddy and the other three kids all have different bad-boy dads and the environment is different such that it's no surprise at least one kid is known to the law.

Sometimes you roll the genetic dice and the result comes up losing throw.

Do most failsons cause trouble? I'm under the impression that the median failson doesn't really do anything- he mooches, maybe becomes an alcoholic or permastoned or something, and never winds up doing much of anything at all.

Certainly even working class failsons(which I am more familiar with) mostly are not serious criminals, they're charity cases who spend "help" on substances of various kinds while never holding down a job, and may have been in the mental health system at some point but probably aren't anymore because either they don't like it or they're just bad at using the resources available to them to get help. Since crime is pretty correlated with class, I would assume that upper middle class failsons are even more likely to just smoke pot in their parents' basement and fail classes at the local community college.

Although I’m always open to a “these hoes ain’t loyal” hypothesis, Razib has discussed before how the false paternity rate is likely “only” about 2 to 3%. I say “only” because 2-3% is still horrifying; imagine if hospitals switched babies around 2-3% of the time. Women certainly wouldn’t tolerate it.

I would venture that false paternity rates covary with SES, and that the rate is much lower among families successful enough where the concept of a failson is a thing.

If you have a bunch of trees each with a bunch of apples, chances are an apple will eventually fall and roll far from its tree.

That’s probably right.

There's lots of obviously-genetically-related (e.g. by appearance) failsons. Even if we assume everything's genetic, nobody's genes are all aces, and sometime some zygote will roll a bad combination.

Agreed not one for one. But I wouldn’t be shocked if paternity fraud plays a role.

Black family formation was higher pre-civil rights too.

While there's certainly some cultural component. The eschewing of academic success, standard English grammar or glorification of criminal behavior seems to lead to poor outcomes. There do not appear to be interventions that reliably counter these 'cultural' disadvantages in the wider black community. Especially now that so many useful traits or features for success are labeled as white or white supremacist.

Members of black communities in Europe and international black students at US universities are more likely to have been recently selected for admission to. These selections are likely to pull disproportionately from cohorts already performing in the top quintiles for many measures. Lingering selection effects for American black populations whose constituents were not selected from top quintiles likely also play a role.

Following the civil rights era and the sexual revolutions many types of social pressure were abandoned or lessened. Stigmas against divorce, illegitimate children, pre-marital sex, sloth, malingering, criminality, etc. Absent the overt and covert pressure against many of the antisocial behaviors by their in-group, wider society, police, combined with the glorification of many has lead to increasingly poor outcomes for these communities.

White, Asian and other successful communities have maintained more of these pressures via their in-group. This leads to improved outcomes.

This is a polite way of saying that black people in America are significantly more predisposed to violence

Is this a joke? I am legitimately unsure if you are just doing a bit or if this is what you actually believe.

I was going to write a more serious response to this but I don't want to put the effort in if it turns out that was just me missing some obvious sarcasm.

This is a polite way of saying that black people in America are significantly more predisposed to violence

This is a reframing of the original point in an uncharitable, unflattering way that makes thinking less clear and reduces understanding of the topic. Every single one of your objections was created by your poor understanding and misinterpretation of the point being made.

that doesn't explain why black communities pre-Civil rights were less violent

And it doesn't have to - when you remember that the actual statement is "propensity for criminal violence is heritable", then this problem disappears. At some point between then and now, something in the population and culture shifted in such a way as to reproductively reward genes which give a propensity for criminal violence.

why certain countries in Africa (e.g., Ghana) are significantly less violent

Africa has a huge variety of differing tribes, clans, people and ethnicities. Different populations and groups have differing selections of traits, and the genes which contribute to that violent criminal propensity are not evenly distributed between them. The Igbo people, for instance, are outliers on a number of traits as well - and this only becomes a problem with your uncharitable phrasing, not the original idea.

why "low-IQ countries" like Bosnia and Herzegovina have low homicide rates

This has nothing to do with the statement in question. The most straightforward response is that those countries simply do not have as many of those criminality-propensity-increasing genes - a low IQ is associated with criminality, but that's not what we're discussing here (and I think those two countries specifically have some interesting recent history which could definitely impact levels of violent tendencies in the remaining male population).

why US whites were more violent a hundred years ago

Genes which promoted a propensity for criminal violence were selected against among US white populations and so the level of expression of that gene was lowered as a result. Explained perfectly by the original claim, but not your rephrasing.

Black communities in Europe also have lower violent crime rates.

Black communities in Europe were selected in very different ways and from different populations (the Igbo are relevant again here) - the original statement provides explanatory value, your rephrasing obscures meaning and makes understanding harder.

I think there's a significant cultural component here.

Of course. That doesn't mean the genetic component doesn't exist.

  • white collar crime / ‘non violent crime’ can almost always be punished with alternatives to prison like asset seizure, wage garnishing, industry bans and so on.

If you define this are most offenders, sure. If you define it as most white collar crime in amount of money or amount of people affected then no. These people are very good at hiding assets and using patsies. Some people are just committed to building their life around being anti-social, whether that is through violence or white collar stuff,and punishments don't deter them but locking them away can prevent them from hurting others and society at large.

That is the point, they keep posing a threat. Industry bans, wage garnishing and asset siezures most often don't do anything to stop reoffenders.

What’s the incentive for this “smart person” to generate excess returns if they must surrender the vast majority to the state? Will they be jailed if their earnings fall below X?

Also what company would hire someone who publicly defrauded people? I wouldn’t want to keep my money with a firm that an alive Bernie Madoff is employed at. Would you?

Holmes is a aberration and not worth focusing a ton of energy on, I don't care what's being done with her, it doesn't matter.

I'm talking about organised white collar crime. People who build their careers embezzling money from corporations and states and (illegally) hide money for the rich. These people don't just work as accountants man whose licence you can take away and they stop.

Perhaps you think of these people as just organised crime but most of them literally only engage in white collar crime or indirectly as enablers for the literal mob to engage in white collar crime (which is far more lucrative than the drug trade). The policies you prescribe are well studied and understood as ineffective for those who reoffend.

Those kinds of white collar criminals should be treated similarly to, like, organized retail theft rings. If you rob a dozen stores without a gun, you still go to jail Both significantly disrupt the economic functioning of society for personal monetary gain, and that's the main thing prison is supposed to deter!

More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle.

I guess "stop regarding X as people" is sufficiently poorly defined that you can argue this (you can also claim "being against gay marriage is not regarding gay people as people", "not letting transwomen compete in female sports is not regarding transwomen as people", etc.) but it seems to require some incredible contortion to argue that Utilitarianism, which wants to treat criminals the exact same as everyone else is not treating criminals as people.

It seems to me that you're necessarily making the claim that Utilitarian doesn't treat anyone "as a person". Which, sure, poorly defined words let you say basically whatever you want (see: lots of philosophy). But then "Utilitarians stop regarding criminals as people" is a pretty misleading sentence when what you actually believe is that Utilitarians don't regard anyone as a person.

The plain version of your claim is

Punishing Alice because she wronged Bob is respectful to Alice

This makes it clear that "respectful" is being used in an extremely unusual way. And this wouldn't be too bad, except you clearly mean for "X is respectful" to imply "X is good" (or, at least, "X should be pursued via public policy").

I wish I had a name for this rhetorical trick -- where you convert a controversial word into a less controversial word, with the goal of claiming the original point. It's kind of a very specific form of Motte and Bailey.

Another example is that it's very controversial whether (e.g.) bats are conscious, so instead philosophers argue over whether bats have "qualia". To which I say: either "X is conscious iff X experiences qualia", in which case it's really unclear what value the concept of "qualia" is bringing to the discussion, or they're not equivalent, in which case claiming bats don't have qualia (and letting the shared valence finish the argument for you -- "bats aren't conscious") is bad (though effective) argumentation.

A third example is when politicians claim that "X deserves Y, and then letting "deserve" mutate into "good" in people's minds, so that people hear "giving Y to X is good policy".

Punishing Alice because she wronged Bob is respectful to Alice

This makes it clear that "respectful" is being used in an extremely unusual way.

Punishing someone who commits a wrong shows that you are treating Alice with agency which I agree is some measure of respect. Not punishing Alice ever when she wrongs someone implies the authority figure doesn't believe Alice is capable of making another decision.

We don't punish or show disappointment in an infant who poops their pants because they don't have any ability to control that action. Never punishing someone is the same thing morally.

There's a measure of respect inherent with punishment that the punished has the capacity to not do wrong.

There's a measure of respect inherent with punishment that the punished has the capacity to not do wrong.

That's still a motte and bailey because the original phrasing was "doing them a disservice". Normally, punishing someone is doing them a disservice.

Interesting, from my background punishment was something done out of love or at least concern for the punished person's future, I suppose that's limited to punishments short of death penalties. Not a pleasant or enjoyable experience but a necessary one like learning to eat healthy foods or exercise.

"Has a minor element of X" is not the same as "is for X".

Even if it's not the death penalty, part of the reason for the punishment is disabling the criminal (he can't rob you if he's locked up) and deterring other criminals. These can't reasonably be described as being done out of love, except in the Spanish Inquisition sense of "we kill you out of love".

As Margaret Thatcher once said - The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.

This could also be said for modern liberal - the problem is that you eventually run out of other people's safety. All the policies people support with no consideration - usually someone else pays the price. Southern border collapsing - problem for Texas and Arizona. Defund the police, lenient DAs, ignore homelessness and theft - in the start the chaos is in the working class places, but eventually chickens come home to roost and problems start showing up in the good and gentrified places.

So for the first time they have what is called skin in the game.

Physical safety in society is paramount. People value it highly. To fix this - you must make punishments for rational people inevitable (not necessarily that high) and to lock the irrational away from the society.

To fix this - you must make punishments for rational people inevitable (not necessarily that high) and to lock the irrational away from the society.

You also need the punishments to be significant enough that it isn't rational for anyone to defect. As it is, it frequently is rational to do so even if you're caught. And you need to accept that there is going to be collateral damage.

(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.

Yes, the reductio ad absurdums of the alternative theories of punishment are very persuasive to me. If you go down the deterrence road, you end up with something like Gary Becker's approach: punish harshly but monitor laxly, since this is more cost-efficient as a way of deterring crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Becker#Crime_and_punishment

If you go down the rehabiliation road, then it's hard to explain what's wrong with a Clockwork Orange view of crime: neuter the capacity of the criminal to commit crimes, even if they want to do so. If you say, "They need to appreciate why their crime was wrong," then this goes beyond rehabilitationism, and introduces an abstract concept of justice that is more appropriate in a view like retributivism.

Finally, there is expressivism (punishment is an expression of society's disapproval of the criminal act) but that doesn't explain why we should punish criminals, rather than any group that society tends to dislike, e.g. Satanists or Morris dancers.

If you go down the deterrence road, you end up with something like Gary Becker's approach: punish harshly but monitor laxly, since this is more cost-efficient as a way of deterring crime.

I think that's not true, because it fails to consider the high time preference of the habitual criminal. So rather than deterring crime, that leads to anarcho-tyranny. Ordinary people are constantly on edge fearful they'll commit (or be falsely convicted of) some crime (like walking on the grass in that ST:TNG episode) and suffer a harsh punishment. Habitual criminals will just do what they want enjoying the lack of monitoring, and rarely will suffer the harsh punishment. It may be cheap but it's not effective.

How is that a time preference issue?

If a habitual criminal distinguishes between prob1(capture)*utility(punishment_1) = r and prob2(capture)*utility(punishment_2) = r, then they are irrational, since their expected utilities are the same in either case. By contrast, there is nothing intrinsically irrational about high time preference.

With more monitoring, a criminal will be caught sooner; the punishment is thus less far in the future and less discounted.

Ah, makes sense. I would definitely like to look more into this topic when I have time.

What’s wrong with cost-effective punishment? I think it’s clear we spend too much resources monitoring and judging crime, and not enough actually punishing (eg, people with a ludicrous amount of convictions still plying their trade in public). That sounds like something tough-on-crime politicians say constantly. The standard response would be that the certainty of punishment is more important than the amount of punishment. I think reality has disproven that notion.

Probably because most street criminals are bad out calculating expected values, and calibrate based on the simplistic heuristic “am I likely to be caught?”.

This assumes that they have just enough time preference and rationality to understand the difference between likely and less likely punishment, but not enough to grasp the difference in severity. Somehow they’ve mastered probabilities, but the concrete difference between 1 year suspended and 5 years in prison eludes them.

At some point “bad at” equals “incapable”. If they are incapable of controlling themselves at all (and some undoubtedly aren’t) , it’s a waste of resources.

This assumes that they have just enough time preference and rationality to understand the difference between likely and less likely punishment, but not enough to grasp the difference in severity.

Yes, that's what high time preference means.

On a high enough time preference, the value of the future drops to zero. Today’s crime spree fun will always be more valuable than tomorrow’s freedom.

Yes, at a high enough time preference punishment doesn't matter at all. If someone has a time preference that's higher than your average puppy, deterrence simply won't work and incapacitation is all there is. I think even most habitual criminals aren't that bad, though perhaps the raving homeless drug addicts are.

They possess a high score on what we might call ‘Pikeman’s z’ that makes them behave irrationnally and criminally, and a component of that factor is their high time preference T. But the z factor has other components, like an inability to accurately estimate the likelihood of something happening L (like getting caught). The plan is to give them a purely L test in the hope that they’d do well on that at least, but sadly T and L are largely correlated and they are way below average in L too.

Well the law is complex. There are approx a million gradients for simple crimes.

What’s wrong with cost-effective punishment?

From a deterrent perspective, nothing, but a lot of people think it's unjust to deliberately have fewer convictions and harsher sentences. One more fundamental reason to think that's undesirable is that it increases the element of luck in the legal system, whereas it seems like having a legal system that is less based on luck is more just.

It's an iterative game. Law of large numbers, they'll get their due.

The cost of lower surveillance is exactly that it is less likely that criminals will get their due, even in iterative games. After all, if a criminal is caught for one crime in a long criminal career, it doesn't follow that they will be punished proportionately for their past crimes.

I think it’s clear we spend too much resources monitoring and judging crime, and not enough actually punishing

In addition to what @HaroldWilson said, which is a correct summary of the literature, this seems to be factually incorrect; we apparently spend relatively a lot on punishing, and relatively little on policing:

It stands to reason that a society with ~1 homicide / 100,000 needs to spend proportionnally less on prisons than the one with 6/100,000.

Note that, because the United States is more violent than the EU, you might expect that the US would have a higher level of spending — but it wouldn’t obviously suggest there should be a different mix between police and prison.

I beg to differ. You need police for traffic violations and murder, but you can’t send people to prison for parking tickets.

But surely that doesn't explain much of the discrepancy. While murder carries relativity long sentences, few people are in jail for homicide.

And, my point is NOT that current spending is unreasonable. Rather, I am making an empirical claim. Note also that the US apparently has a pretty low number of police per capita, compared to most Western European countries outside Scandinavia. So, I don’t see much evidence that the US spends too much on policing and not enough on punishment.

Re that block quote, is it from the linked article?

Realize that “Homicide” and “parking tickets “ are representative of heavier and lighter forms of criminal behaviour respectively.

The data is all over the place on this police/prison ratio. If you go by homicide rate, the US is not spending nearly enough on prison.

One thing missing in this discussion is the cost of judging them, which are major costs the ‘catch a few and pound’ strategy is supposed to alleviate. Seems pointless to go through the trouble of making sure they’re guilty if they’re not going to be punished/incapacitated anyway. ‘if it weren’t for the lawyers, old boy, we wouldn’t need lawyers’.

Re that block quote, is it from the linked article?

Don't you have ways of figuring that out? The answer is Yes.

The data is all over the place on this police/prison ratio.

What data are you referring to?

If you go by homicide rate, the US is not spending nearly enough on prison.

I am really not sure what you are trying to say. What, precisely, are you saying the US should spend more money on, and why?

One thing missing in this discussion is the cost of judging them, which are major costs the ‘catch a few and pound’ strategy is supposed to alleviate.

But isn't "catch a few and pound" precisely what you are advocating when you say, "it’s clear we spend too much resources monitoring and judging crime, and not enough actually punishing"? And I am skeptical that, in a system in which something like 98% of convictions are via plea bargains, the cost of judicial proceedings is all that high.

More murders (higher homicide rate) should equal more time spent in prison (therefore higher prison costs, in a rich society squeamish about the death penalty). Accordingly, all else equal the US should spend 6 times more of its gdp on incarceration than western europe (instead of 0.5% : 0.2%, 2.5 : 1). Policing is a separate issue. I am arguing for longer sentences, which does not require more police. As Gary Becker says: “maximize the fine and minimize surveillance. “

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Because most of the literature points in the direction that a high chance of being caught and effective is by far the most important factor in determining deterrence rather than severity of punishment. Criminals are not paragons of rationality, breaking out their calculator to work out the expected returns before committing the offence. Quick and reliable punishment creates a much stronger link between offence and punishment in the mind than the occasional criminal being caught and spending years in the slammer. Which it to say that you cannot simply assume that in practice deterrence is sentence length x chance of conviction.

Even if those studies weren't suspect, it's not just about deterrence, is it? Incapacitation and retribution are impaired by these almost nominal punishments.

The original comment here though was saying that it would be a better use of resources to catch fewer criminals but give them harsher sentences, which hardly seems like it would be a good thing for incapacitation. The point is where is the marginal dollar or pound currently best spent, and I think the evidence indicates policing rather than prisons at the moment.

The original comment here though was saying that it would be a better use of resources to catch fewer criminals but give them harsher sentences, which hardly seems like it would be a good thing for incapacitation.

Yes it would be. I'm saying the length of the sentences matters more than getting caught. If I have 100 hardened criminals, and I give half of them a 10 years sentence, that's 500 years' worth of incapacitation. Catch and release them all after 1 year provides only 100 years of incapacitation (for greater monitoring and judging costs).

If subways become excessively creepy and weird and violent, the middle classes will get Ubers, and vote for candidates who defund public transit. In short, if the middle classes (who have options) decide not to make use of public options, then public options will die their democratic death.

To put this in perspective, I live in an extremely densely populated city (Hong Kong) that would be unlivable as a car city. However, if the buses or metro became dangerous, then the middle classes could switch to the taxis, which aren't that much more expensive due to ultra-cheap labour.

The metro is uncomfortable and noisy - most carriages have TVs playing news and advertising - but crime on the trains is inconceivable. The only "offence" that I have seen is someone taking a surreptitious drink of water on a hot day, since eating and drinking anything is banned on the metro or in the paid areas of metro stations.

If I were a criminologist, I would spent my career studying how HK has eliminated most forms of crime, without usually feeling like a "police state". To what extent is it cultural? Institutional? Economic? Selection (so much of this city of made up of immigrants like myself, who were indirectly selected for conscientiousness)?

The only "offence" that I have seen is someone taking a surreptitious drink of water on a hot day, since eating and drinking anything is banned on the metro or in the paid areas of metro stations.

The worst “offence” that I’ve witnessed on the MTR (back when I was still in Hong Kong) were obvious mainlanders taking a leak in a carriage, though it was pretty rare, and I think incidents of that sort have dropped off a fair bit with mainland Chinese visitors developing more of a modern city culture. I haven’t been back since before covid, though.

Yes, I've only smelt piss once on the MTR, and given that it was on an extremely crowded day, I think that it was just a child or an old person being incontinent.

If I were a criminologist, I would spent my career studying how HK has eliminated most forms of crime, without usually feeling like a "police state"

The problem is they already know and hate the answer to this: to make a city with Kong Kong levels of crime in the US, all you need to do is get 99.2% of the non-Asians (and 100% of the blacks) to move out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hong_Kong

~100%, though the overwhelming majority of black people in Hong Kong are African or Caribbean rather than from the US, and selected for conscientiousness and IQ e.g. students and skilled workers. There are some asylum seekers, but not enough to cause problems - the troublesome minorities, in my experience, are Middle Eastern and South Asians, who beg (generally illegal) and sell drugs (extremely illegal, the government even has a public health campaign right now about the dangers of even moderate drinking for cancer etc.).

It’s possible that would require Hong Kong demographics, but I think most people would be satisfied if things returned to the way they where in 2005-2010, which is obviously achievable in the us when there are better incentives.

Perhaps. But then study Guiliani era NYC, not Hong Kong.

I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority

Do many people disagree with the goal of free high quality education, healthcare and public transport? Well, I suppose there's the issue of 'free' in that someone eventually has to pay for it. But in principle, these things genuinely are supposed to be investments. Not investments in the 'doubling down for the tenth time on this shitcoin that's constantly reaching new bottoms like ICP or California High Speed Rail' sense, actual investments that deliver returns. Public transport is supposed to be economical, it's energetically efficient at least. If construction costs are low it makes a lot of sense. Good infrastructure is important for industry too. Education is supposed to improve the quality of the workforce in economic terms, produce sensible, virtuous citizens. Same with healthcare.

Everyone wants those things, they just have a bunch of other goals as well. For instance, it's impossible to have a high-quality public transport system if it's full of drug addicts, or if you bog everything down in so many environmental reviews that nobody can build anything efficiently.

In Australia, about 11% of 5-7 year old boys (and 5% of 5-7 year old girls) are now on the NDIS disability scheme (for things like 'developmental delay' or autism). My source is paywalled. Costs are out of control, 14% annual growth, 35 Billion AUD this year. I fully expect we're causing considerable damage to perfectly normal boys by medicalizing what could easily be ignored. But people (especially the newish Labor government) don't want to look like they're stripping 'care' from people, they don't want some parent of disabled children sobbing on national media. So their response is to chair an independent report that'll come back in October, aiming to reduce cost growth to a mere 8% per year. If I'm reading the article correctly, the minister involved also wants to spend another $730 million AUD on 'capacity building' to reduce costs in the long run. I have very low expectations.

More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed

The issue here is that they're not making use of all the options to achieve utilitarian goals. For instance, a utilitarian might very well come to the conclusion that they should just shoot a certain subset of criminals. Drug Dealer Adam might enjoy dealing drugs, doing drugs, robbing stores, driving stolen cars in street races, exploiting Drug Addict Bella and Catherine for sex and molesting their children, fighting turf wars, doing drive by shootings... But all those things are bad for everyone else. Given that there's no 'turn him into a normal person' gun, a utilitarian might say 'shoot him dead', especially if prison is expensive. But what you see as an excessive utilitarian would always ask for more rehabilitation, more programs, more education, or avoid the subject by talking about 'root causes' and then frame them in utilitarian logic. Unless they have a time machine, addressing root causes won't change fully-formed parasitic criminals.

As it intrudes more on them personally, people get less tolerant of crime (consider the San Fran women who are warming to my preferred cut-them-down approach). I think we'd be better off if decisionmakers had more skin in the game. If there was anything in Stalin's Russia like California High Speed Rail, the NKVD would be shooting and torturing wreckers for weeks. While massive purges have various negative externalities, is there no way to punish people for collectively squandering tens of billions of dollars? Prison, a fine? And what about some rewards if things go well? We could even tack a prediction market on here, make politicians buy bonds that pay off if their policy succeeds to show their sincerity.

I conclude with three beliefs:

  1. If you pay for something, you get more of it.

  2. Defeating enemies is a useful alternative to deterring them, especially if they're weak.

  3. Decision-makers and overseers must have an incentive to get things done efficiently and correctly

Do many people disagree with the goal of free high quality education, healthcare and public transport?

Yes. For the second two, most of the right plus libertarians. For the first, mostly only libertarians at least until you get to post-secondary, which I suppose doesn't count as "many".

Drug Dealer Adam might enjoy dealing drugs, doing drugs, robbing stores, driving stolen cars in street races, exploiting Drug Addict Bella and Catherine for sex and molesting their children, fighting turf wars, doing drive by shootings... But all those things are bad for everyone else.

Drug Dealer Adam is a utility monster, so it's okay.

Do many people disagree with the goal of free high quality education, healthcare and public transport?

They should, because the first doesn't exist, and the latter two are always expensive.

Education was better and significantly cheaper some 70 years ago, before the educationalists and administrators started multiplying. Have you seen that CATO graph of how spending per pupil rose 250% in the US since about 1970, inflation adjusted? Outcomes did not change at all. It's clearly possible to do much better, for much less. I can't find the CATO graph but this is just as good: https://housingtoday.org/animated-chart-of-the-day-public-school-enrollment-staff-and-inflation-adjusted-cost-per-pupil-1970-to-2018/

Japan does healthcare and public transport pretty well. I know their demographics are very different to US demographics. But it is possible in principle to have an efficient, effective health and transport system. It just depends on what other priorities policymakers are prepared to sacrifice.

One of the main drivers of the increased cost and reduction in efficiency in education is progressive sentiments of expanding education access. Most of the students progressives care the most about should be dumped into the workforce at 13. Not being willing to do that drives cost and other stupid trends in education like grade inflation and the reduced value of a HS diploma.

Significantly reducing the school leaving age specifically for the lowest IQ and least functional students seems like it has easily foreseeable and terrible social engineering effects. The thing about kids who are not future engineers because they aren't college material which everyone seems to forget, including politically incorrect HBD enthusiasts, is that they're people who aren't future engineers because they aren't college material. 80 IQ teens with bad values having less supervision and more freedom is in fact a bad thing, and sure that's a little bit unfair to 120 IQ teens who could easily be done with secondary school at 15 or 16 but have to drag out highschool by another two years, but warehousing bright teens unnecessarily causes a lot less damage than having unsocialized dumb adolescents entering their peak criminality years with nothing to do.

If we lived in a world where even poor people mostly had intact families teaching good values in a culture that supported that kind of thing it might be different, but we don't and no one seems to know how to get there on a societal level. 80 IQ single moms are by and large not going to suddenly become fundamentalist Christians raising their kids with the beliefs that hard work is a sacred value from God, honesty and rule following bring rewards, sexual promiscuity is immoral and low status, drugs are evil, etc. And fundamentalist Christianity is more or less the only subculture in America today that has any success with low IQ people, so it's not as if I picked an absurd example.

So, on one hand you are admitting its basically just a prison of sorts, but on the other you want to concentrate the lil inmates there and also subject their brighter peers to forced interaction with them.

You are assuming that a 15 year old who's pushed out of school necessarily gets a job and a career, and I'm not so sure that's true. We live in a broken society and it seems like lots of these kids would just do drugs and hang around gangs.

Yes there's lots of not-terribly-bright but not actually bad kids around, and lots of them would benefit immensely from expanded school to work programs or Germany-style tracking into apprenticeships. But you'll notice those are well supervised situations where they don't have unlimited freedom to make their own decisions, because making their own decisions and handling freedom is not something teenagers tend to be good at.

that a 15 year old who's pushed out of school necessarily gets a job and a career

This was a widespread course of action 60 years ago. We decided that it was more cost-effective to farm out the job that cohort did to other countries while warehousing them for a few more years- missing that developmental milestone has consequences, but ones that have been successfully privatized (it costs society nothing to have them sit in their parents' basements and lie relatively flat instead).

is not something teenagers tend to be good at

>gives [demographic] zero chances to develop a trait to the point they're actively discouraged from doing so

>complains that [demographic] don't exhibit that trait

>claims it's immutable biological fact of [demographic]'s inherent inferiority even though history of every time period outside of the last 40 years conclusively proves otherwise

>confused_nick_young.jpg

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Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat; I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit.

And this is the problem. You won't update; nobody ever does. No matter how many times it turns out the obvious problems those on the right claimed would occur actually did occur, no one who has bought into the leftist view will reject the premises which said they wouldn't. It's a trapdoor epistemology.

Hardly. YIMBYism is gaining steam and as doglatine points out, it sure seems like the pendulum is swinging back towards law and order among the left. Perhaps there's a lack of self-awareness in failing to say 'wait a minute, wasn't there a group of people telling us 20 years ago that restricting housing supply/being lax on crime was a bad idea?'

But the question in my mind is, what does updating look like to you? There are no more leftists as we come to Jesus and everyone updates to your narrow slice of the overton window? Do we just set up a new political spectrum shifted far to the right? Or do we update by discarding failed policies while keeping the gestalt intact?

Do we just set up a new political spectrum shifted far to the right? Or do we update by discarding failed policies while keeping the gestalt intact?

Shifting to the right would be an update. Setting aside failed policies while continuing to rely on the gestalt which implied they would work is not. Especially when those failed policies will come back as soon as people forget enough about the last time.

That conservatives frequently fill the role of Cassandra doesn't cause anyone to update because of their filter bubble, not because they're incapable of updating.

It's not just their filter bubble. They see the conservatives predict bad things, they see the bad things happen, and they lament that the bad things make it appear that the conservatives have a point. They have all the information and demonstrate their awareness of it but reject the conclusions.

"Conservatives Pounce"

Why would you update on any non-crime/policing issue on the basis of policing issue question?

Logic. If premise X implies things about policy A, policy A is implemented and those things are shown false, then premise X is also false. Now when premise X is used to claim things about policy B, one should not believe premise X actually provides evidence for those things.

Except eventually one would have to reject ideas like "all people are equal" in order to update, and that's a fundamental problem as it is the anchor of the overton window in western societies.

"all people are equal"

Not to beat a dead horse again but for that and just that belief alone (sufficient, not necessary), western society deserves to be replaced.

Equality does not square well with the human condition, no different to how communism does not square well with it.

The more people that reject such ideas and update, the more the Overton window shifts.

Hence the forever War on Noticing things like racial IQ gaps or crime statistics—spaces like Reddit banning wrong-think, chatbots getting hate facts reinforcement learning’d out of them, the UK policing supposed online hate crime, the FBI focusing on racial or involuntary celibate extremist terms like “based,” “red pilled,” “Chad,” “Stacy,” or “looksmaxxing”.

Only the overton window of elite discourse and opinion matters with regard to changing policies. Voters just don't matter and pretending, or even giving lip service or respect to the absurb and empty pretence that they do, requires mastering such cognitive dissonance that I just can't do it anymore. Sorry.

Nobody except a few extreme ivory-tower types acts like they believe "all people are equal". The idea is absurd and should be rejected. (note rejecting it doesn't require HBD; you can believe that all people are born exactly equal -- also absurd -- and still not believe "all people are equal")

Some do believe it, and for the others it may be a signal, a, not the, pilot light to enable distributed identification of friend/foe and spontaneous cooperation.

In a similar way to how noone really believes in speed limits. If it says 50, I know my car car physically exceed that and even a few mph over it won't necessarily result in a fine or stop, even if directly measured. It does, however, act as signal to enable spontaneous cooperation of a certain type and in a certain direction, in tbis analogies case to not go too much faster than 50 mph (perhaps even a 10% tolerance for measurement error, depending on country and jurisdiction).

Professing all.people to be equal is, I think, similar to this. Both a havels greengrocer flag in the window, and an anchor of the overton window, and it's ideological internal counterpart, to enable apontnaous cooperation of a certain type, to drive actions in a certain direction likely to give results with, use methods accepted or liked by, etc to those who might profess the, known false, belief in equality.

You are also correct about equality not necessarily requiring HBD or invalidating. One could can add "epicycles" galore and still have a self consistent model, contact with reality notwithstanding.

Policing is entangled with other issues. If you favor more policing in situations like this, you need to give up disparate impact, for instance, and that's used by the left in a lot of contexts outside policing.

I'm curious what you think "disparate impact" means in this context.

That policing is bad, because the criminals caught are disproportionately black.

I meant re the nonpolicing issues you mentioned.

That other things are bad because they disproportionately include or exclude black people. Surely you're aware of the idea as applied to schools, jobs, or even national parks.

That's where your argument breaks down. I know many people who are left of center who are skeptical of hiring processes that disproportionately affect black people for, arguably, no good reason (eg: jobs that require a college degree for no apparent reason) or spending on state parks in the wilderness instead of local parks, etc, but who have little problem with enforcing criminal law, because there is good reason. (And of course there is a distinction between enforcing criminal law and particular practices of the criminal justice, some of which might have disparate impact [possible example: the crack versus powder cocaine sentencing disparity]).

So, yes, it is perfectly possible to update re criminal enforcement without updating re schools, jobs, parks, etc.

The world had social democrats before anyone had dreamt up disparate impact, and it will have social democrats once people forget about such a concept too.

You won't update; nobody ever does.

I don't know, I think my political views have changed somewhat in recent years. Less than a decade ago (I am relatively young) I would describe myself not dissimilar to OP, as a social democrat, albeit I never was 'woke'.

However, I find myself nowdays identifying far more with Catholic social teaching and political theory (e.g. Chesterton and distributionism, at least as ideals). I guess means I have become more conservative, though it's a very specific kind of conservative that's heterodox in modern political discourse.

Nybbler is, as often the case, correct. Understanding the crime problem requires understanding and accepting that the progressive project failed, and cannot be redeemed. As is prominently mentioned in the OP, he still believes the state can provide, "high quality education, healthcare, and public transit" to all its citizens. These thoughts are at odds with the goal of fixing crime, or reality, or both.

  1. High quality education is just middling education given to talented students. Students make the school, teachers barely do anything.

  2. High quality healthcare is state of the art healthcare, this is always expensive, being state of the art. Thus it cannot be free. Nor does it matter much. Reliable plumbing is 10x+ as important for life expectancy. Most of current health problems are either lifestyle or the result of EXTREME age.

  3. Public transit cannot be for all and be good. This is the progressive crime problem remade. Everything good in society must exclude the bad people forcefully. Over and over.

Most of current health problems are either lifestyle or the result of EXTREME age.

Increasingly this is the issue of the modern healthcare system, though. Massive expenditure to keep somebody going for an extra 3-4 years with minimal Quality of Life, without which the whole system would be eminently more practical.

stupidpol/anti-idpol is a thing. Freddie deBoer's huge readership consists of a lot of disaffected liberals and leftists who reject the identity politics of the far-left, while still supporting social safety nets and so on consistent with the social democrat position

Communism didn't have a great track record before idpol either. As bad as they are I would rather leave the DEI brigade in charge than give Freddie the chance to try Real Socialism.

in fairness I think a lot of these people are not actual communist and just want to turn the dial back to the 90s or so. Social democrats are not the same as democratic socialists. but communism/socialism has a bad track record overall but there are some exceptions such as China's hybridized system.

Freddie deBoer calls himself a Marxist and the stupidpol subreddit has "A Marxist Critique of Essentialism" as it's header. I guess there could be liberals against DEI but the thought leaders of the movement are old school communists.

The group of people who want to turn the dial back to the 90s are called Republicans.

What would you call someone like Andrew Sullivan who is obviously not a republican but opposes the woke? Also consider the fact that almost reddit communities that used to be far right-wing are almost all gone, so this has led to many on the moderate or even far right adapting by appropriating more left-wing themes not because they necessarily want Marxism but to prevent being banned.

If the threat of being banned is enough to adopt themes incompatible with their principles, good riddance to them then.

There are plenty of real-world countries that successfully implement the kind of social system I’m endorsing, from Singapore to Denmark to Germany to Japan. What these countries have in common is either (a) a high degree of social conformity, and/or (b), a state willing to get authoritarian on people who don’t toe the line (plus wealth etc., but that's something the US has in spades). Where I’m shifting my priors, especially in relation to the US, is on the critical importance of (b).

And in a lot of those places nonconformism is either inconceivable or banned even for people who aren’t making anything worse.

I think health care is very fraught when subject to comparison. For example, the US regime is highly influenced and controlled by the government (be it for the actual regulations on medical practices, indirectly by prioritizing expensive insurance via the tax code, directly by imposing a lot of rules under Medicare). It is also true that other countries manage a “public” system like Singapore but those countries have a lot of actually free market like principles. Then it is all confounding that you have different populations.

Long story short, it might be difficult to tease out what is a good system.

I had a longer post I was going to write, but I don't have the energy or the morale.

I'm just going to say you're wrong in several respects. People do update, but turning into a rightist is not the only practical reaction to failures of liberal policy. Rightism has some pretty serious failure modes as well.

If the failures are in their face enough, they may oppose that particular policy temporarily. But they will draw no other conclusions about other policies based on the same premise. And, as soon as those failures are not in their face any more, they'll go right back to supporting the failed policies until they fail blatantly and obviously again.

The catchphrase to remember: "The worst thing about this incident is it makes it seem like the right has a point". Because the idea the right might actually have a point is anathema.

This is just a mirror of how rightists think - in exactly the same way.

You're not wrong, you're just not describing anything more than unreflective tribalism. Leftists do it, rightists do it.

Of course I understand the point you are trying to make is "Yeah, but we're right. If we abandoned leftist policies and embraced rightist policies, things would be better."

Okay. Years of watching both fail does not convince me.

The right wing hasn't been failing on crime for years. We had left wing, soft on crime policies in the 70s and 80s, epitomized by Willie Horton, and crime was high. In the 90s we moved towards right wing policies like 3 Strikes laws and crime rates improved rapidly. Now left wing cities are going soft on crime by electing activist DAs and they are becoming unlivable and stores are closing. Right wing, harsh on crime policies demonstrably work in the United States and they do so consistently.

Both sides think they're right but both sides don't have the same track record.

Sure, my own views on crime are pretty "right wing." (And to be honest, they've only moved a little bit lately; I've never been a good liberal, really.)

I'm not a right-winger because I disagree with their views on many other things (economic, social, moral). I know the common right-wing rejoinder is "Well, it all goes hand in hand, if you don't buy into trad morality and right-wing economics, you must inevitably accept leftist social policy in all things." It's just a hair removed from Christians who claim that no moral government is possible without believing in Jesus.

This is just a mirror of how rightists think - in exactly the same way.

It's a mirror of how some rightists thing. But it's modal thought on the other side. Many people, noting their local (R) government isn't solving the problems it said it would and they're actually getting worse, will vote (D) next time (e.g. Jacksonville, FL). But the other side will never do that, short of crime as high as it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s -- and even then they'll go back.

It's a mirror of how some rightists thing. But it's modal thought on the other side.

"Most of us are rational voters who will update our priors as necessary, but most of them are low-information NPCs."

Yes, I have been hearing this, from both sides, since I was old enough to vote.

If it were true, electoral politics would play out differently. In reality, we have solid red and blue areas which are never changing their (collective) votes, at least not in a timespan of less than a generation, and a lot of shades of purple. If Democrats were never motivated by the perceived failures of Democratic leadership to vote Republican, Trump would not have won.

If it were true, electoral politics would play out differently. In reality, we have solid red and blue areas which are never changing their (collective) votes

We have very large solid blue areas with not one Republican vote. We have no such large solid red areas. It might be very comforting to insist on symmetry, but it just isn't true. The Democrats are winning, and they're doing it largely because most of their base believes one Simply Does Not Vote Republican, so the former pattern of becoming more conservative as one ages (or at least staying still as the Democrats move left) no longer holds. Trump did manage to switch a bloc of Democrats (not as individuals, but as a group), but it appears that was the last one.

We have very large solid blue areas with not one Republican vote. We have no such large solid red areas.

Really? You think there is not a single Republican voter in Portland or San Francisco?

When polls indicate the population at large is pretty evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, it's impossible for Democrats to simultaneously have all blue areas locked down while no red areas are.

The Democrats are winning, and they're doing it largely because most of their base believes one Simply Does Not Vote Republican, so the former pattern of becoming more conservative as one ages (or at least staying still as the Democrats move left) no longer holds. Trump did manage to switch a bloc of Democrats (not as individuals, but as a group), but it appears that was the last one.

So I know that one of your ongoing themes is that the game is rigged, leftists have already won, and they're going to stomp on your face forever.

If Trump wins again (an event I consider unlikely but not impossible at this point), will that update your priors?

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There hasn't been a rightist government in Anglo countries in living memory as far as I am aware, so seeing right wing policies implimented and failing is a surprise. Can you outline where and when? - roughly, no need to detail specific if low on morale and energy, just gesture in the vague direction if posisble please :-)

I suspect this will devolve into "No true rightist..." ("True conservativism has never been tried?"). But Reagan and Thatcher, off the top of my head (and arguably both Bush administrations).

I know no true rightist blah blah, but those seem in hindsight to be incredibly liberal governments. As a rule of thumb I'd say moderate, center right, socially conservative positions would include E.g., reintroducing criminal penalties including imprisonment terms for buggery and related offences - said here not to spark debate about that issue, but to highlight just how far outside the realm of actual serious policy positions moderate right wing view is from "right wing" governments.

Economically sortof laissez faire, sometimes, does not make a right wing government and that's the core of my contention here.

Surely you know that no actual right-winger thinks that Reagan, Thatcher, and Bush were genuinely right-wing, right? Reagan, the guy who signed one of the largest illegal immigration amnesties in U.S. history? Bush, the guy who championed No Child Left Behind? These are your “failed right-wing governments*?

Surely you know that no actual right-winger thinks that Reagan, Thatcher, and Bush were genuinely right-wing, right?

Yes, I do know that. Hence my comment about "No true rightist." I know rightists also believe that Clinton and Obama were left-wing, despite many, many policies they executed which were not remotely leftist.

If you tell me no government to the left of Mussolini or Pinochet is actually right-wing, then of course you won't be able to find many "right-wing governments" in the Anglo-sphere in living memory.

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The worst thing about this incident is it makes it seem like the right has a point

Yes, but the actual worst thing is the prejudice that the incident causes:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cMyKGNy3CI4

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