“Murder is a reasonably good proxy for these things in the short-run because all crime and disorder tends to go together.”
That seems likely for earlier eras but I wonder how much property crime, rape, etc. have declined due to cameras being ubiquitous. Significantly I would bet.
You make some interesting observations. Some of this is definitely true- for example, the US does not have an unusually high rate of non-violent crime, compared to, say, Europe or the rest of the Anglosphere. It really *is* more violent, though, and this isn't just down to higher firearm availability; the US has more violent offences across the board.
But your key point is almost totally devoid of evidence; you don't actually have any good evidence that crime is rising. All statistics show that it has been broadly falling (with a few blips, of course, both for certain kinds of crime and in certain short periods) since the early-mid 90s, and this is not just murder rates. The only hard evidence in this article is the lethality rates graph, but that's obviously heavily confounded by reporting and categorisation; how do we know that an "aggravated assault" is the same thing in 1970 as now?
I personally do not believe that crime rates, either in general, or specifically violent, are many times higher today than they were in the early 20th century.
I was watching Public Enemies and it got me interested in the golden age of bank robbery. I noted that a pair of John Dillinger's accomplices were arrested, tried, and executed within *30 days total*.
I don't pretend to know the right criminal justice trade-offs but I have to think we go too easy on criminals in general.
It amazes me that criminals in the United States spend so many years on death row. It is shockingly cruel. If a country and it's citizens have made a democratic choice to retain the death penalty, the legal system should respect that decision and not prolong cases with endless bureaucracy and appeals. Once guilt is established beyond reasonable doubt, the law should be applied and the execution should be carried out without unnecessary delays.
Since the survival rate of victims of attempted murder has improved via better healthcare i.e. murder becomes attempdted murder, manslaughter ett, the data would be greatly supplemented with data on those 'near' murder data: trajectories.
There is a slight problem with simply multiplying a homicide rate to correct for better medical care: There are people who survive shootings, before finally becoming a homicide victim. But the maximum number of times they can die is just once.
A fascinating article. But it fails to mention, because it is almost completely unknown, that libertarian restitution is the optimal solution for all crime:
Typical pie-in-the-sky libertarian proposal. The hardened criminals that Arctotherium is discussing would not submit to restitution; they would ignore the court order and go on to commit their next scheduled crime. Or they would pay an occasional restitution from the proceeds of their later crimes, just to claim that they were in compliance. Not to mention that no amount of restitution can compensate for murder or disablement. Your "optimal" solution is not widely known because a minute's thought dismisses it as absurd.
Did you read the article he linked? It specifically calls out what we should do if criminals are unable/unwilling to pay.
Does that mean it is workable? I don't know, but you could at least deal with the argument directly, especially if you're going to dismiss it as absurd (even after an entire minute's worth of thought).
I did. I found the proposal complicated and more about avoiding State participation than about either justice or preventing crime. Both these ends, joined together, should be the basis of any rational system: Justice for society, which can be easily defined as minimal or no crime, and whatever is effective for that purpose for the criminal because he has made existential choices. The libertarian position wishes to make justice about only the interaction between criminal and victim, but society as a whole is a stakeholder because aggregate personal costs of avoiding crime are substantial. Another flaw in Lester's proposal is allowing the victim to be involved in setting the cost of retribution; that would invite intimidation of the victim by the criminal, or perhaps murder of the victim to solve the inconvenience he poses to the criminal's pursuit of happiness.
The article by Arctotherium was about radically reducing crime rates by putting career criminals where they can no longer harm innocents, either in permanent hard-labor or in the grave. Lester's touts his libertarian proposal as "optimal." It is only optimal if reducing the State's role in deterrence of crime is the overarching aim.
Draconian measures to reduce crime to the minimum would have the salutary evolutionary effect of reducing the frequency of genes that are correlated with criminality. Western Europe was "pacified" by such measures during the most recent thousand years. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470491501300114
I have known personally a couple of career criminals. Their mentation is totally unlike that of normal persons; they cannot be reasoned with. Libertarianism is premised on interactions between rational individuals, and so is not logically applicable to reducing crime to the absolute minimum, which can only be done by public choice and action.
In one sense the proposal is simpler than the plethora of state laws: enforceable full restitution from the perpetrator for all his property infractions. States are grossly inefficient at promoting justice or preventing crime; that is why avoiding them on these matters is so important. Presumably “rational” is intended to mean prudent or efficient: that is what full restitution is. There is no agent that is “society” which could have justice. A society is the interactions of individuals. Each of them needs justice. To the extent that people generally are negatively affected by crime in whatever ways, restitution is the most efficient way to internalise externalities.
Any moral hazards that might be involved with a victim’s participation in the process of restitution are more likely to be better dealt with by the various competing private protection agencies than by a procrustean state monopoly. As full restitution is explicitly explained to include such possibilities as “putting career criminals where they can no longer harm innocents, either in permanent hard-labor or in the grave”, no distinction is being offered. However, competing private agencies are more likely to catch the criminals. Criminals are not assumed to be prudent in any long-term sense. But full restitution is likely to be something they readily comprehend and fear. There is no such thing as “public choice” in the sense that the public is an agent that can choose.
There is a clear example of the State drastically reducing crime: El Salvador. Public choice was manifested there, otherwise Nayib Bukele would not have been reelected by the highest margin in the country's history. Bukele is smart. He knew before beginning his crackdown that it would be approved by the public.
El Salvador shows that by draconian measures the State can reduce crime to levels lower than typical Western countries. There are many reasons to object to the State (government waste, crony capitalism, military adventurism), but it is the single organization that can in a virtual instant lower crime rates. "Competing private agencies" would sow chaos by the tendency to fudge the facts of who committed a specific crime in favor of raking in fees. In your libertarian scheme, there would have to be a massive parallel police and justice system to regulate the private agencies.
Long sentences at hard labor would reduce crime more effectively than full restitution, even if the meaning of "full" could be agreed upon.
I believe the State has only four morally valid functions: Prevent conquest by a foreign power, prevent crime by draconian means, protect the natural patrimony from total devastation, and prevent economic monopolies. It would be much more feasible to restrict current State powers to those than it would be to institute a libertarian or anarchic form of society.
This is really interesting and one of your four valid functions is worded in a way that I'd like to unwind. I'm NOT an argumentative absolutist and always try to gain from these kinds of exchanges, so here goes...
"...protect the natural patrimony from total devastation..."
I'm thinking that this refers to how the State allows one generation to pass any accumulated assets to its heirs. As a person who has been obsessed for the last 40 years about how I might be able to give my heirs survival/success advantages as possible, I've thought long and hard about this and have some current positions on it.
Can you further expand upon what you mean by your mention of "natural patrimony"?
This is a very interesting article which provides a lot to think about. As a westerner living in Singapore, the low crime rate really is an excellent part of living here. And have no doubt, the crime rate is low because the system is harsh. It's not just harsher criminal penalties, Singapore police face fewer limits on their powers and are generally successful in getting convictions. One thing that I would add is that parents in Singapore are much stricter than Western parents. They make a big effort to teach their children how to behave and this has a positive impact on the education system and society in general. Most Singaporean parents use corporal punishment and all Singapore government schools use caning to punish male students who commit serious offences like smoking, vaping or skipping class. Contrast this to the west. If a teacher finds a 15 year old boy in possession of a cigarette vape, they call the police who will come into school, question the kid and find out who supplied it to them. The parents will be informed and the police will prosecute (usually successfully) whoever supplied the cigarette or vape. The boy will then be caned in school, teaching him a valuable lesson about the consequences of rule breaking. Depending on the parents, he may well be caned again when he gets home. In Singapore, all of this is considered normal. Woke academics claim that corporal punishment is counterproductive, but Singapore shows that it works, at least when it is fair and not excessive. Singapore has lower youth crime, less gang membership, better behaviour in schools and more impressive educational outcomes than just about anywhere. Strict teachers and strict parents are a major factor in Singapore's success.
Just to add to this - the western countries that had lower crime rates in the past didn't just have stricter legal systems, they had stricter parenting too - just like low-crime Singapore does now. Young males commit the majority of crimes. Back in the 1950s, western parents prioritised teaching boys to behave well, respect authority figures and follow the rules.
Just like Singaporean parents today, almost all western parents in that era knew that spanking was an effective way to teach young males that their actions have consequences. Some people claim that spanking children is cruel. But while spanking is painful (and the pain is a feature not a bug) it is certainly far less cruel than failing to teach children how to behave in society and subjecting kids to chaotic, disorderly schools where poor behaviour is rife.
The first country to ban spanking was Sweden, and it is no surprise to me that despite it being a very wealthy developed country, Sweden now has a huge problem with violent youth crime.
The problem is that with corporal punishment, children never learn *why* their behavior merited such an intense response. Instead, inevitably they see that "good" behavior is only earned through fear of the capriciousness of supposedly mature adults with unreasonably low regard for their ability to "read between the lines" and synthesize what they observe and learn.
My parents spanked me many times when I was very young, and it most certainly did not have the desired effect - quite the opposite, in fact. Instead, how I learned prosocial behavior, morals, a sense of right and wrong, whatever one wants to call it, was seeing them model such behavior and explaining it to me in age-appropriate ways. This had the effect of trusting my parents more and having a closer relationship with them than if they had stuck with the "To Train Up a Child"-lite approach. Yes, n = 1, anecdotes aren't data, etc. etc. But I'm willing to go out on a proverbial limb and say my experiences are not uncommon - not to mention how often people who say things like, "My parents spanked me when I was young and I turned out fine!", well, didn't.
I'm all for quicker, longer sentences for incorrigible offenders but it will boost our incarcerated population to 3 million and dent our prestige by drawing attention to the upstream causes.
Our national profile is already pretty ragged and, sooner or later, some spoilsport will notice that our incarceration rate 400% higher and our recidivism rate is 650% higher than China's.
Are you counting Uyghurs in concentration camps? What is the extent of Tibetan suppression? America individualistic social control has costs, but mind the alternative: solving collective problems by collective punishment…
"I'm all for quicker, longer sentences for incorrigible offenders but it will boost our incarcerated population to 3 million and dent our prestige by drawing attention to the upstream causes."
What prestige would that be? That is long gone. That was squandered on avariciousness and megalomania.
You say that there is no reason Western Europe shouldn’t be as safe now as it was post-War. One big difference seems to be physical mobility (there is more of it) and lower social control by communities of people that knew each other. It feels like a massive change - could it be a factor?
“Murder is a reasonably good proxy for these things in the short-run because all crime and disorder tends to go together.”
That seems likely for earlier eras but I wonder how much property crime, rape, etc. have declined due to cameras being ubiquitous. Significantly I would bet.
You make some interesting observations. Some of this is definitely true- for example, the US does not have an unusually high rate of non-violent crime, compared to, say, Europe or the rest of the Anglosphere. It really *is* more violent, though, and this isn't just down to higher firearm availability; the US has more violent offences across the board.
But your key point is almost totally devoid of evidence; you don't actually have any good evidence that crime is rising. All statistics show that it has been broadly falling (with a few blips, of course, both for certain kinds of crime and in certain short periods) since the early-mid 90s, and this is not just murder rates. The only hard evidence in this article is the lethality rates graph, but that's obviously heavily confounded by reporting and categorisation; how do we know that an "aggravated assault" is the same thing in 1970 as now?
I personally do not believe that crime rates, either in general, or specifically violent, are many times higher today than they were in the early 20th century.
I was watching Public Enemies and it got me interested in the golden age of bank robbery. I noted that a pair of John Dillinger's accomplices were arrested, tried, and executed within *30 days total*.
I don't pretend to know the right criminal justice trade-offs but I have to think we go too easy on criminals in general.
It amazes me that criminals in the United States spend so many years on death row. It is shockingly cruel. If a country and it's citizens have made a democratic choice to retain the death penalty, the legal system should respect that decision and not prolong cases with endless bureaucracy and appeals. Once guilt is established beyond reasonable doubt, the law should be applied and the execution should be carried out without unnecessary delays.
Since the survival rate of victims of attempted murder has improved via better healthcare i.e. murder becomes attempdted murder, manslaughter ett, the data would be greatly supplemented with data on those 'near' murder data: trajectories.
There is a slight problem with simply multiplying a homicide rate to correct for better medical care: There are people who survive shootings, before finally becoming a homicide victim. But the maximum number of times they can die is just once.
A fascinating article. But it fails to mention, because it is almost completely unknown, that libertarian restitution is the optimal solution for all crime:
https://jclester.substack.com/p/libertarian-restitution-just-humane?utm_source=publication-search
You might be interested in this proposal from a libertarian-leaning economist: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/who-vouches-for-youhtml
Thank you. Brief comment and link now also added there.
Typical pie-in-the-sky libertarian proposal. The hardened criminals that Arctotherium is discussing would not submit to restitution; they would ignore the court order and go on to commit their next scheduled crime. Or they would pay an occasional restitution from the proceeds of their later crimes, just to claim that they were in compliance. Not to mention that no amount of restitution can compensate for murder or disablement. Your "optimal" solution is not widely known because a minute's thought dismisses it as absurd.
Did you read the article he linked? It specifically calls out what we should do if criminals are unable/unwilling to pay.
Does that mean it is workable? I don't know, but you could at least deal with the argument directly, especially if you're going to dismiss it as absurd (even after an entire minute's worth of thought).
I did. I found the proposal complicated and more about avoiding State participation than about either justice or preventing crime. Both these ends, joined together, should be the basis of any rational system: Justice for society, which can be easily defined as minimal or no crime, and whatever is effective for that purpose for the criminal because he has made existential choices. The libertarian position wishes to make justice about only the interaction between criminal and victim, but society as a whole is a stakeholder because aggregate personal costs of avoiding crime are substantial. Another flaw in Lester's proposal is allowing the victim to be involved in setting the cost of retribution; that would invite intimidation of the victim by the criminal, or perhaps murder of the victim to solve the inconvenience he poses to the criminal's pursuit of happiness.
The article by Arctotherium was about radically reducing crime rates by putting career criminals where they can no longer harm innocents, either in permanent hard-labor or in the grave. Lester's touts his libertarian proposal as "optimal." It is only optimal if reducing the State's role in deterrence of crime is the overarching aim.
Draconian measures to reduce crime to the minimum would have the salutary evolutionary effect of reducing the frequency of genes that are correlated with criminality. Western Europe was "pacified" by such measures during the most recent thousand years. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470491501300114
I have known personally a couple of career criminals. Their mentation is totally unlike that of normal persons; they cannot be reasoned with. Libertarianism is premised on interactions between rational individuals, and so is not logically applicable to reducing crime to the absolute minimum, which can only be done by public choice and action.
In one sense the proposal is simpler than the plethora of state laws: enforceable full restitution from the perpetrator for all his property infractions. States are grossly inefficient at promoting justice or preventing crime; that is why avoiding them on these matters is so important. Presumably “rational” is intended to mean prudent or efficient: that is what full restitution is. There is no agent that is “society” which could have justice. A society is the interactions of individuals. Each of them needs justice. To the extent that people generally are negatively affected by crime in whatever ways, restitution is the most efficient way to internalise externalities.
Any moral hazards that might be involved with a victim’s participation in the process of restitution are more likely to be better dealt with by the various competing private protection agencies than by a procrustean state monopoly. As full restitution is explicitly explained to include such possibilities as “putting career criminals where they can no longer harm innocents, either in permanent hard-labor or in the grave”, no distinction is being offered. However, competing private agencies are more likely to catch the criminals. Criminals are not assumed to be prudent in any long-term sense. But full restitution is likely to be something they readily comprehend and fear. There is no such thing as “public choice” in the sense that the public is an agent that can choose.
There is a clear example of the State drastically reducing crime: El Salvador. Public choice was manifested there, otherwise Nayib Bukele would not have been reelected by the highest margin in the country's history. Bukele is smart. He knew before beginning his crackdown that it would be approved by the public.
El Salvador shows that by draconian measures the State can reduce crime to levels lower than typical Western countries. There are many reasons to object to the State (government waste, crony capitalism, military adventurism), but it is the single organization that can in a virtual instant lower crime rates. "Competing private agencies" would sow chaos by the tendency to fudge the facts of who committed a specific crime in favor of raking in fees. In your libertarian scheme, there would have to be a massive parallel police and justice system to regulate the private agencies.
Long sentences at hard labor would reduce crime more effectively than full restitution, even if the meaning of "full" could be agreed upon.
I believe the State has only four morally valid functions: Prevent conquest by a foreign power, prevent crime by draconian means, protect the natural patrimony from total devastation, and prevent economic monopolies. It would be much more feasible to restrict current State powers to those than it would be to institute a libertarian or anarchic form of society.
This is more about the economics of libertarian law rather than the philosophy. On the economics David Friedman’s arguments are more useful:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_Chapter_20/PThy_Chapter_20.html
This is really interesting and one of your four valid functions is worded in a way that I'd like to unwind. I'm NOT an argumentative absolutist and always try to gain from these kinds of exchanges, so here goes...
"...protect the natural patrimony from total devastation..."
I'm thinking that this refers to how the State allows one generation to pass any accumulated assets to its heirs. As a person who has been obsessed for the last 40 years about how I might be able to give my heirs survival/success advantages as possible, I've thought long and hard about this and have some current positions on it.
Can you further expand upon what you mean by your mention of "natural patrimony"?
Some immigrant groups also bring higher levels of crime.
I hope you do not mind and will appreciate the additional exposure to a population which would not normally read this due to language, but I noticed your article has been translated into french and published here https://resistancerepublicaine.com/2024/09/02/comment-la-medecine-a-masque-une-augmentation-colossale-de-la-criminalite-et-des-troubles-depuis-les-annees-1960/
(with attribution of course)
"After all, why would a society turning to crime admit it so?"
Robin Hanson's crime vouchers proposal would put a stop to judgement-proof supercriminals: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/who-vouches-for-youhtml
This is a very interesting article which provides a lot to think about. As a westerner living in Singapore, the low crime rate really is an excellent part of living here. And have no doubt, the crime rate is low because the system is harsh. It's not just harsher criminal penalties, Singapore police face fewer limits on their powers and are generally successful in getting convictions. One thing that I would add is that parents in Singapore are much stricter than Western parents. They make a big effort to teach their children how to behave and this has a positive impact on the education system and society in general. Most Singaporean parents use corporal punishment and all Singapore government schools use caning to punish male students who commit serious offences like smoking, vaping or skipping class. Contrast this to the west. If a teacher finds a 15 year old boy in possession of a cigarette vape, they call the police who will come into school, question the kid and find out who supplied it to them. The parents will be informed and the police will prosecute (usually successfully) whoever supplied the cigarette or vape. The boy will then be caned in school, teaching him a valuable lesson about the consequences of rule breaking. Depending on the parents, he may well be caned again when he gets home. In Singapore, all of this is considered normal. Woke academics claim that corporal punishment is counterproductive, but Singapore shows that it works, at least when it is fair and not excessive. Singapore has lower youth crime, less gang membership, better behaviour in schools and more impressive educational outcomes than just about anywhere. Strict teachers and strict parents are a major factor in Singapore's success.
Just to add to this - the western countries that had lower crime rates in the past didn't just have stricter legal systems, they had stricter parenting too - just like low-crime Singapore does now. Young males commit the majority of crimes. Back in the 1950s, western parents prioritised teaching boys to behave well, respect authority figures and follow the rules.
Just like Singaporean parents today, almost all western parents in that era knew that spanking was an effective way to teach young males that their actions have consequences. Some people claim that spanking children is cruel. But while spanking is painful (and the pain is a feature not a bug) it is certainly far less cruel than failing to teach children how to behave in society and subjecting kids to chaotic, disorderly schools where poor behaviour is rife.
The first country to ban spanking was Sweden, and it is no surprise to me that despite it being a very wealthy developed country, Sweden now has a huge problem with violent youth crime.
The problem is that with corporal punishment, children never learn *why* their behavior merited such an intense response. Instead, inevitably they see that "good" behavior is only earned through fear of the capriciousness of supposedly mature adults with unreasonably low regard for their ability to "read between the lines" and synthesize what they observe and learn.
My parents spanked me many times when I was very young, and it most certainly did not have the desired effect - quite the opposite, in fact. Instead, how I learned prosocial behavior, morals, a sense of right and wrong, whatever one wants to call it, was seeing them model such behavior and explaining it to me in age-appropriate ways. This had the effect of trusting my parents more and having a closer relationship with them than if they had stuck with the "To Train Up a Child"-lite approach. Yes, n = 1, anecdotes aren't data, etc. etc. But I'm willing to go out on a proverbial limb and say my experiences are not uncommon - not to mention how often people who say things like, "My parents spanked me when I was young and I turned out fine!", well, didn't.
Great piece. Very informative
I'm all for quicker, longer sentences for incorrigible offenders but it will boost our incarcerated population to 3 million and dent our prestige by drawing attention to the upstream causes.
Our national profile is already pretty ragged and, sooner or later, some spoilsport will notice that our incarceration rate 400% higher and our recidivism rate is 650% higher than China's.
Are you counting Uyghurs in concentration camps? What is the extent of Tibetan suppression? America individualistic social control has costs, but mind the alternative: solving collective problems by collective punishment…
Let the insurers figure out how to efficiently handle lawbreakers:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/who-vouches-for-youhtml
"I'm all for quicker, longer sentences for incorrigible offenders but it will boost our incarcerated population to 3 million and dent our prestige by drawing attention to the upstream causes."
What prestige would that be? That is long gone. That was squandered on avariciousness and megalomania.
You say that there is no reason Western Europe shouldn’t be as safe now as it was post-War. One big difference seems to be physical mobility (there is more of it) and lower social control by communities of people that knew each other. It feels like a massive change - could it be a factor?
"You say that there is no reason Western Europe shouldn’t be as safe now as it was post-War."
That is what happens when you encourage and allow low-IQ third-world sum into your country.