register for Bart Wilson and me talking human cooperation; David Bromwich on campus protests, then and now; Inquisitive Bird on the need for prisons; Ed West and Noah Smith on Europe and neoliberalism
Yes, prison seems to do a pretty good job of this. Another type of revenge/retaliation is against criminals that people tend to want to be treated "the same" as other criminals. Here I'm thinking white collar and maybe some non-violent types. I'd be entirely against prison for these types (at least first time offenders) except I give some weight to deterrence.
I haven't read the Foundations essay but the strengths and weaknesses of the British economy derive from deep seated and intractactable aspects of its economic history that are not going to be changed by any new bits of political tinkering....(any more than they were by all the previous ones). The Ed West post about it actually displayed a poor understanding of that economic history.
Britain’s decline as an economic behemoth did not – as the analysis contended – start after WW2 (although it did accelerate then). It started way back in the late 19th c. – as soon in fact as better adapted nations (particularly USA, Germany and Japan) started to compete with it. The reasons are complex but none of the principal ones were flagged in that post. Principal reasons included:
1) the peculiar resilience of the British class system meant that manufacturing enterprise (‘trade’) was always looked down on and the 2nd generation of its great manufacturing dynasties got out of it as soon as possible. Hence Britain became a place brimful of lawyers and ‘what we would now call ‘creative & media people’ but woefully lacking in technologists and nuts and bolts engineers.
2) The Empire masked (and partly caused) Britain’s uncompetitiveness for many decades because it had a captive market for its lack-lustre products.
One way to look at Graham's stats is that by 1900 a lot of British coal and steel production tech was at least one if not two generations outdated, and it got worse with the nationalizations that began during the Great War and were held over after the Second. Replacing physical plant is expensive and often disruptive of current production, and the Brits were deeply in debt after a half century of war so unable to finance either the rebuilding or the imports needed to replace production while they retooled.
I'm not very good at remembering the names of America's titans and their right-hand men, but it doesn't seem to me that their descendants notably continue "in trade". Some no doubt work in finance, or become doctors or academics, or venture capitalists or whatnot - but whole funds exist just for the forever maintenance of descendants of some of the old fortunes. Nelson Rockefeller (government) and David Rockefeller (running Chase, I think?) seem to me the last of the ambitious inheritors; neither was an industrialist.
Some of the Waltons are on the board of Wal-mart? But that seems a far cry from their progenitor's work. Alice Walton is the one I know of the most, and she wasted no time in making her business collecting horses and Audubon folios, just as if she was to the manor born.
There's a whole book about what the scions of Texas oilmen do - "The Big Rich". Now it's true these are going to be, ah, a very different class of people from successful Yankees. But the tales of their excess and scandal have basically kept "Texas Monthly" afloat all these years. Hard work is not a signature of these stories.
Busch family had a pretty good run. Yuengling continues. As for multi-generation dynasties, the real question is why we would expect them. Freakonomics Radio did a piece on the unlikelihood of a CEO's son being a good CEO. Japan gets around this by literally adopting an adult son to be CEO.
Yes you make agood point. Sometimes one comes up against the limitations of short-sharp comments on threads like this when really to make your case you would need an essay. But the general thrust of my comment is true nevertheless. America, Germany, Japan, France and Italy as cultures, all continued (at least until recently) to value and accord high status to engineers, technocrats, and factory managers whereas Britain basically never did. It's a difficult case to definitively prove but many eminent economists (who typical opinion journalists never read) have made it. Ralf Darendorf is one that springs to mind.
1) I don't know what's going through the heads of Brits but the country has a history of trade and manufacturing. If there was good money to be made, I have a hard time believing that would be looked down on.
2) I'm skeptical of blaming the current situation on the past empire. Plenty of countries have gone from lack-lustre products to competitive long after the Empire was gone.
Note: if you said old money resulting from the empire caused their situation I'd still be skeptical but maybe it's more likely.
For example: In mid-19th c. Britain's coal and steel production (pointers to wider industrial strength) dwarfed all others in the world. By the turn of the century Britain had already been overtaken by Germany and the USA). Britain's 150-year relative decline is not something 'going through my head'. It's just a plain fact.....but one that has been obscured by a vast British sentmentality about itself as a great manufactuting nation. It has (and continues to have) a great history as a free-trading nation....but that is a different thing.
Maybe the realistic position was that Britain was destined to be a "toy nation" by virtue of its size and its bedrock rural character and the very real value (I think?) of tourism?
ETA: perhaps when America wraps up in a few decades, it will be seen as having been an extension of Britain.
Surely you are smart enough to know I wasn't referring to (or say) in your head.
You need better examples than coal and steel. German and US steel production has also been overtaken by other countries. Is it because it was looked down on? Might coal production in Britain have wained for a similar reason?
It was a much stronger general indicator in 1900 than it would be a hundred years later by which time manufacturing formed a much smaller proportion of advanced economies.
"Instead of trying to centralize EU policymaking in every possible domain, what if Europe instead rewarded individual member states for boosting growth (while also adhering to environmental and social goals)?"
Wonderful if it can be made to work. I really worry that the parenthetical will eat up all that precedes it. "Oh, that new policy to boost growth? It conflicts with our environmental goals. It conflicts with our social goals." It uses more energy, or it increases inequality, so many possibilities.
You are correct to be skeptical- all Smith, and those like him, are trying to do is slip the socialism in through the back door without getting the pushback from the anti-EU population.
How does the EU reward member states for boosting growth without it being a big government mess of intended consequences that does nothing close to what was intended?
Re: "Prison is inhumane. And I don’t think that deterrence or rehabilitation are successful enough to warrant prison. But incapacitation does work, and it is important. If we had more humane methods of incapacitation (24-hour monitoring of convicts using electronic means?), then we might use them more willingly and reduce crime more effectively."
Arnold's issue is pointless inhumanity towards the convict. New tech might achieve incapacitation — prevent new crimes in the wild — without prison.
The elephant in the room is another, fundamental rationale of punishment: Retribution to restore a balance. Arnold's three "goals for prison" — incapacitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation — are forward-looking. Retribution reckons with the past. Institutions that ignore this basic psychology of justice will lack legitimacy.
In a liberal society retribution is constrained by strictures against cruel and unusual punishment. I have a deeper worry than failures of these strictures to protect convicts. Criminal justice is tragic insofar as it necessarily imposes collateral damage on innocents entangled in social relations with offenders. For example, if an offender who has dependent children is incarcerated, then the children, too, suffer by the punishment. Justice is a harsh virtue. Perhaps surveillance tech (as a substitute for prison) would reduce such collateral damage, but there would still be need for retribution, at least for some kinds of crime.
Yet another purpose of prison is social communication to express how wrong a crime is. Criminal sentences are a scalar, cardinal expression: A sentence of ten years of incarceration for rape, and a sentence of five years for armed robbery, communicate that the former crime is in some sense twice as heinous as the latter. Prison as social communication is distinct from deterrence. The prevalence of strategic (corrupt?) plea-bargaining undermines communicative justice.
Although the duration of a prison sentence might express how wrong a specific crime is, it cannot express how a crime is wrong. This is why Dante's Inferno speaks to our imagination. Sinners there are imprisoned in metaphors of their characteristic sins. Punishments in Inferno, unlike mere 'doing time,' are qualitative. They vividly evoke each crime, because they fit the crime.
Individual deterrence has its limits. Compare the philosophical, matter-of-fact confession of love-triangle murder in the song, Kill Bill (SZA, 2022):
I think Becker would say that "pointlessly inhumane" is not a valid concept when one is taking about deterrence. How come the criminal doesn't think the extra inhumanity is harsh enough to frighten him into adjusting his behavior. Don Corleone, Hunan Behavior Management Expert, PhD called, and said you have no idea how much more inhumane one can get, and that yeah, it always has non-zero marginal rate of transformation. Does the crime supply curve become totally inelastic and suddenly stop decreasing when saturated at some level of inhumanity? Should we go Full Tabarrok and say that at some point, low by historical standards, the slope actually reverses? (Rhetorical, you never go Full Tabarrok.)
The valid way to put it is that we don't like how inhumane we have to be, or more accurately, "Humanity requires inhumanity."
When the Ukraine-Russia war started, I read some commentary that either partially attributed the invasion to Russia's lackluster economic development, or else claimed that because of this the Russians couldn't keep the war going for long. These writers asked the rhetorical question, "After all, when's the last time you bought something with a label, 'Made In Russia'?" My reply was, "When's the last time for you for "Made in the UK?" Of course one can say the same thing for most countries, there are a relatively small number of countries where most US consumer market items are manufactured, but still, it doesn't make much of a point about Russia in particular, which at least is known for producing and exporting a lot of fuel and weapons, unlike the UK, now known only to have one major export - its best native people.
I am completely at odds with you about prison. For one thing, there's a give-a-mouse-a-cookie effect, which you start rolling with the idea of not incarcerating people. For another, though, I think sometimes it is funny - no, not exactly funny haha - this business of the rogue DAs and judges colluding to send people straight back into the community, uncharged or if charged, with a trial 7 years hence. Because I think - this guy just stabbed his relative. How badly do the relatives want to see that guy come home, in the name of restorative justice or whatever the Soros idea is called? Would you? And then when he goes off and gets collected for raping or shooting somebody, are his family, so glad that we had Joe at home, so glad we had these times together. So glad he was free to accumulate further charges than those initial ones.
Maybe I'm crazy? There's something I'm not getting. I lived my whole childhood with a family member I'd have preferred not to see come home so maybe I am projecting.
Imagine a device, inserted into the brain, that would detonate if that person ever committed a murder. Would you let murders out of jail if they got such a device?
If so, how do you prevent everyone from one “do a murder for free”?
I suspect that the preventative aspect of prison is underrated. Looting happens in American when people believe they can get away with it.
Ever since I became aware that the death penalty was controversial, I've heard/read its detractors, who are definitionally uninterested in justice, at least aver that its "keeping the public safe" aspect - at least the non-prison-dwelling public - can be solved by having life sentences. Now that's a long time I've been hearing that - but I don't hear it much or at all anymore. Would we say, during this period when capital punishment has been virtually eliminated for all practical purposes, that people are serving more/longer sentences? That people who kill people are more or likely to be out on the street than before? It's obvious to me.
So, congrats, us. You've gotten 99% of what you wanted wrt capital punishment - the google AI tells me 16 death row inmates were put to death last year (most of them probably decades after their offense, most of them probably having reached a greater age than their victims).
And it turned out - big surprise, rug pulled! - you didn't really want to incarcerate people either!
I made the mistake of reading a reddit thread among the youngsters about an execution which devolved into dreamy fantasies about how we might have rehabilitated Ted Bundy et al, especially if we had given them nice enough things in prison.
"And I don’t think that deterrence or rehabilitation are successful enough to warrant prison."
I agree incapacitation is the best reason for prison and I get that prison might not be the best option in many instances where it is the chosen punishment but I'd argue even short sentences have a pretty good deterrent and rehabilitative effect.
Deterrence - Look at how much shoplifting, car break-ins, and other street crime there is where these things aren't being prosecuted. What besides prison do you think is the deterrent where these things aren't rampant?
Rehabilitation - My wife did family practice at a federally funded health clinic. She often noted that the most polite and appreciative patients were immigrants (mostly or all here illegally) and ex-cons. While the record is far from perfect, I think you are mistaken not to think prison had a positive impact on future behavior of many who were incarcerated. (The difficulties of being a felon is a whole other issue that surely increases recidivism.)
Both the Ed West and the Foundations documents engage in a number of comparisons between the UK and France. Both have some interesting insights. I will attempt to augment that discussion with some additional observations regarding other possibly explanatory differences between the two nations.
First, the notion that the UK has fallen behind France seems generally not true in absolute terms, but mostly just in terms of relative rates of growth. Compared to France, the UK has higher GDP per capita and less debt per capita, as well as lower unemployment See: https://countryecoenomy.com/countries/compare/uk/france In addition, the UK outperformed France on the Human Development Index scoring 0.94 to 0.91 in 2024, ranked #5 versus #10 on the Solability Intellectual Capital Index, scored 70.82 to France’s 69.57 on the International Institute for Management’s World Competitiveness index, and, was ranked #5 versus #12 on the 2024 WIPO Global Innovation Index.
One statistic on which France outperforms the UK that stands out, at least to me, is that per the OECD, the annual disposable income per capita for France was $34,375 and $33,049 in the UK.
So, taken together these measures might suggest that perhaps a more dis-aggregated analysis may be appropriate. Each country has its strengths and weaknesses. The two areas in which the UK’s performance seems to be generating the most heat are energy and housing. France maintains about a 70% nuclear share of electrical generation. The UK has gone hog wild spending something like 45 billion pounds on wind yet not even managing to generate a third of the total and has less than 15% from nuclear. Mistake made. Lesson learned?
So let’s move on to housing. Abolish local government, the big brains’ knee-jerk answer to everything, might not be the best solution. West observes that in the UK:
“Then, in 1947, came the Town and Country Planning Act (TCPA), which removed the incentives for councils to give planning permission, since they no longer received much of the upside from local taxes.
‘The law also added a requirement to get permission from national government for any development, and to pay to the national government a tax of 100 percent on any value that resulted from permission being granted.’ The TCPA also granted powers to create green belts around cities, and private house building has never recovered.”
In contrast, the the first paragraph of Article I of the constitution of France requires decentralization: “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs. It shall be organised on a decentralized basis.” And indeed, Title XII “Territorial Communities” lays out a plan of organization for local governance through several articles, however, perhaps best represented by Article 72 which provides in part:
“Territorial communities may take decisions in all matters arising under powers that can best be exercised at their level.
In the conditions provided for by statute, these communities shall be self-governing through elected councils and shall have power to make regulations for matters coming within their jurisdiction.
In the manner provided for by an Institutional Act, except where the essential conditions for the exercise of public freedoms or of a right guaranteed by the Constitution are affected, territorial communities or associations thereof may, where provision is made by statute or regulation, as the case may be, derogate on an experimental basis for limited purposes and duration from provisions laid down by statute or regulation governing the exercise of their powers.
No territorial community may exercise authority over another. However, where the exercising of a power requires the combined action of several territorial communities, one of those communities or one of their associations may be authorized by statute to organize such combined action.”
This has been operationally translated to mean “The principle of freedom of administration by local authorities is explicitly enshrined in the Constitution, and is completed by the principle of financial autonomy of the local, intermediate and regional authorities. Local, intermediate and regional authorities (LRAs) have general competence for the exercise of their functions. As a result, shared competences are the rule. There is no hierarchy between regional, intermediate and local government.”
The sharing of competencies:
“The mayor (maire), as a representative of the State, has competence in the fields of:
Registry;
Electoral issues;
Social welfare (complementary action to that of the Departments);
Education, including primary schools and pre-school classes;
Local roads;
Town planning, and
Protection of public order.
The Municipalities, as decentralised authorities, have competence in the field of:
Municipal transport, including school transport, yacht harbours, civil airports, non-autonomous harbours;
Culture, including teaching schools (écoles maternelles et primaires), archives, museums, libraries;
Public health (vaccination);
Economic development (complementary to that of the Region);
Environment, specifically water and waste, and
Housing.”
And as West and the Foundations document demonstrate, France outperforms on housing. Greater local autonomy rather than less can work to everyone’s advantage. Crushing local governance, on the other hand, as has happened in California, results in prevailing rates law in housing construction, rooftop solar requirements, mandatory electrical vehicle requirements, and general immiseration.
If you are going to use France for comparison purposes, please do consider the whole lesson of what she teaches, not just what she might offer to rationalize your narrative.
"The UK could use some good old-fashioned neoliberal free-market policies."
What country coud NOT? :) Well, except the perversion of cutting taxes for the rich an running up deficits. Actually we need some good new fashioned Neo-Social Democracy whose bumper sticker is:
"We demand more mutually beneficial market transactions between consenting adults that do not create any untaxed/unsubsidized negative/positive externalities (with some exceptions for transactions in addictive substances and services) and for some of the income generated from those mutually beneficial transactions taxed with a progressive consumption taxes and revenues used for redistribution and for purchase of public goods whose expenditures pass an NPV>0 test when inputs and outputs are valued at Pigou tax/subsidy inclusive marginals costs and revenues."
"Well, except the perversion of cutting taxes for the rich"
Who/what are you referring to? European countir s that cut confiscatory rates on ultra rich because they were leaving? Surely you don't mean the Trump cuts that were pretty even across income levels. Have you been brainwashed by MSM and leftists? Lol.
We should not be "pro" or "anti" incarcelaration, but cost benefit-ish about it as part of being cost-benefit-ish about good policing to deter crime by increasing the probability of arrest and prosecution. Crime just like immigration should bean economic issue.
That would be great except in both cases random controlled trials haven't provide much info so there is immense disagreement on what the best cost-benefit is. Besides that, many of the costs and benefits are non-monetary so quantifying them is highly subjective.
One good aspect of prisons as currently implemented is that they take the decision out of the hands of politicals and bureaucrats, for a bit at least. Once someone is sentenced they are there till parole and the like come up, without constant decisions to keep them there.
Compare that to a leg monitor where people have to constantly watch and surveil the convict to ensure they don’t commit further crime. Are they always going to be on top of that, never getting distracted or choosing to let a borderline situation go? Seems unlikely.
I would think amother goal of prison is revenge: the State meets out revenge so the (family of) the victim won’t retaliate.
Yes, prison seems to do a pretty good job of this. Another type of revenge/retaliation is against criminals that people tend to want to be treated "the same" as other criminals. Here I'm thinking white collar and maybe some non-violent types. I'd be entirely against prison for these types (at least first time offenders) except I give some weight to deterrence.
I haven't read the Foundations essay but the strengths and weaknesses of the British economy derive from deep seated and intractactable aspects of its economic history that are not going to be changed by any new bits of political tinkering....(any more than they were by all the previous ones). The Ed West post about it actually displayed a poor understanding of that economic history.
Britain’s decline as an economic behemoth did not – as the analysis contended – start after WW2 (although it did accelerate then). It started way back in the late 19th c. – as soon in fact as better adapted nations (particularly USA, Germany and Japan) started to compete with it. The reasons are complex but none of the principal ones were flagged in that post. Principal reasons included:
1) the peculiar resilience of the British class system meant that manufacturing enterprise (‘trade’) was always looked down on and the 2nd generation of its great manufacturing dynasties got out of it as soon as possible. Hence Britain became a place brimful of lawyers and ‘what we would now call ‘creative & media people’ but woefully lacking in technologists and nuts and bolts engineers.
2) The Empire masked (and partly caused) Britain’s uncompetitiveness for many decades because it had a captive market for its lack-lustre products.
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/thinkpieces/the-consequences-of-economic-ignorance
One way to look at Graham's stats is that by 1900 a lot of British coal and steel production tech was at least one if not two generations outdated, and it got worse with the nationalizations that began during the Great War and were held over after the Second. Replacing physical plant is expensive and often disruptive of current production, and the Brits were deeply in debt after a half century of war so unable to finance either the rebuilding or the imports needed to replace production while they retooled.
I'm not very good at remembering the names of America's titans and their right-hand men, but it doesn't seem to me that their descendants notably continue "in trade". Some no doubt work in finance, or become doctors or academics, or venture capitalists or whatnot - but whole funds exist just for the forever maintenance of descendants of some of the old fortunes. Nelson Rockefeller (government) and David Rockefeller (running Chase, I think?) seem to me the last of the ambitious inheritors; neither was an industrialist.
Some of the Waltons are on the board of Wal-mart? But that seems a far cry from their progenitor's work. Alice Walton is the one I know of the most, and she wasted no time in making her business collecting horses and Audubon folios, just as if she was to the manor born.
There's a whole book about what the scions of Texas oilmen do - "The Big Rich". Now it's true these are going to be, ah, a very different class of people from successful Yankees. But the tales of their excess and scandal have basically kept "Texas Monthly" afloat all these years. Hard work is not a signature of these stories.
Busch family had a pretty good run. Yuengling continues. As for multi-generation dynasties, the real question is why we would expect them. Freakonomics Radio did a piece on the unlikelihood of a CEO's son being a good CEO. Japan gets around this by literally adopting an adult son to be CEO.
And maybe it's something they imbibe from the wealth-making forefathers:
"I didn't work this hard so that you would live within 50 miles of a Wal-mart!"
Yes you make agood point. Sometimes one comes up against the limitations of short-sharp comments on threads like this when really to make your case you would need an essay. But the general thrust of my comment is true nevertheless. America, Germany, Japan, France and Italy as cultures, all continued (at least until recently) to value and accord high status to engineers, technocrats, and factory managers whereas Britain basically never did. It's a difficult case to definitively prove but many eminent economists (who typical opinion journalists never read) have made it. Ralf Darendorf is one that springs to mind.
So much for Whig history then!
1) I don't know what's going through the heads of Brits but the country has a history of trade and manufacturing. If there was good money to be made, I have a hard time believing that would be looked down on.
2) I'm skeptical of blaming the current situation on the past empire. Plenty of countries have gone from lack-lustre products to competitive long after the Empire was gone.
Note: if you said old money resulting from the empire caused their situation I'd still be skeptical but maybe it's more likely.
For example: In mid-19th c. Britain's coal and steel production (pointers to wider industrial strength) dwarfed all others in the world. By the turn of the century Britain had already been overtaken by Germany and the USA). Britain's 150-year relative decline is not something 'going through my head'. It's just a plain fact.....but one that has been obscured by a vast British sentmentality about itself as a great manufactuting nation. It has (and continues to have) a great history as a free-trading nation....but that is a different thing.
Maybe coal production declined because it lost importance. The last coal fired power plant was turned off today.
Switzerland and Scandinavian country aren't much known for industrial strength. Are they economically weak as a result?
Maybe the realistic position was that Britain was destined to be a "toy nation" by virtue of its size and its bedrock rural character and the very real value (I think?) of tourism?
ETA: perhaps when America wraps up in a few decades, it will be seen as having been an extension of Britain.
Toy nation? 60 million people?
What country are you positive about when America wraps up?
Surely you are smart enough to know I wasn't referring to (or say) in your head.
You need better examples than coal and steel. German and US steel production has also been overtaken by other countries. Is it because it was looked down on? Might coal production in Britain have wained for a similar reason?
It was a much stronger general indicator in 1900 than it would be a hundred years later by which time manufacturing formed a much smaller proportion of advanced economies.
Sure. Seems contrary to your original premise(s).
"Instead of trying to centralize EU policymaking in every possible domain, what if Europe instead rewarded individual member states for boosting growth (while also adhering to environmental and social goals)?"
Wonderful if it can be made to work. I really worry that the parenthetical will eat up all that precedes it. "Oh, that new policy to boost growth? It conflicts with our environmental goals. It conflicts with our social goals." It uses more energy, or it increases inequality, so many possibilities.
You are correct to be skeptical- all Smith, and those like him, are trying to do is slip the socialism in through the back door without getting the pushback from the anti-EU population.
How does the EU reward member states for boosting growth without it being a big government mess of intended consequences that does nothing close to what was intended?
Re: "Prison is inhumane. And I don’t think that deterrence or rehabilitation are successful enough to warrant prison. But incapacitation does work, and it is important. If we had more humane methods of incapacitation (24-hour monitoring of convicts using electronic means?), then we might use them more willingly and reduce crime more effectively."
Arnold's issue is pointless inhumanity towards the convict. New tech might achieve incapacitation — prevent new crimes in the wild — without prison.
The elephant in the room is another, fundamental rationale of punishment: Retribution to restore a balance. Arnold's three "goals for prison" — incapacitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation — are forward-looking. Retribution reckons with the past. Institutions that ignore this basic psychology of justice will lack legitimacy.
In a liberal society retribution is constrained by strictures against cruel and unusual punishment. I have a deeper worry than failures of these strictures to protect convicts. Criminal justice is tragic insofar as it necessarily imposes collateral damage on innocents entangled in social relations with offenders. For example, if an offender who has dependent children is incarcerated, then the children, too, suffer by the punishment. Justice is a harsh virtue. Perhaps surveillance tech (as a substitute for prison) would reduce such collateral damage, but there would still be need for retribution, at least for some kinds of crime.
Yet another purpose of prison is social communication to express how wrong a crime is. Criminal sentences are a scalar, cardinal expression: A sentence of ten years of incarceration for rape, and a sentence of five years for armed robbery, communicate that the former crime is in some sense twice as heinous as the latter. Prison as social communication is distinct from deterrence. The prevalence of strategic (corrupt?) plea-bargaining undermines communicative justice.
Although the duration of a prison sentence might express how wrong a specific crime is, it cannot express how a crime is wrong. This is why Dante's Inferno speaks to our imagination. Sinners there are imprisoned in metaphors of their characteristic sins. Punishments in Inferno, unlike mere 'doing time,' are qualitative. They vividly evoke each crime, because they fit the crime.
Individual deterrence has its limits. Compare the philosophical, matter-of-fact confession of love-triangle murder in the song, Kill Bill (SZA, 2022):
“I did it all for love.
I did it all of this on no drugs.
I did it all of this sober.
Don't you know I did it all for us?
Oh, I just killed my ex, not the best idea.
Killed his girlfriend next, how'd I get here?
I just killed my ex, I still love him, though.
Rather be in hell than alone.”
I think Becker would say that "pointlessly inhumane" is not a valid concept when one is taking about deterrence. How come the criminal doesn't think the extra inhumanity is harsh enough to frighten him into adjusting his behavior. Don Corleone, Hunan Behavior Management Expert, PhD called, and said you have no idea how much more inhumane one can get, and that yeah, it always has non-zero marginal rate of transformation. Does the crime supply curve become totally inelastic and suddenly stop decreasing when saturated at some level of inhumanity? Should we go Full Tabarrok and say that at some point, low by historical standards, the slope actually reverses? (Rhetorical, you never go Full Tabarrok.)
The valid way to put it is that we don't like how inhumane we have to be, or more accurately, "Humanity requires inhumanity."
A more
When the Ukraine-Russia war started, I read some commentary that either partially attributed the invasion to Russia's lackluster economic development, or else claimed that because of this the Russians couldn't keep the war going for long. These writers asked the rhetorical question, "After all, when's the last time you bought something with a label, 'Made In Russia'?" My reply was, "When's the last time for you for "Made in the UK?" Of course one can say the same thing for most countries, there are a relatively small number of countries where most US consumer market items are manufactured, but still, it doesn't make much of a point about Russia in particular, which at least is known for producing and exporting a lot of fuel and weapons, unlike the UK, now known only to have one major export - its best native people.
Given that Russia is china’s ally, “made in China” probably should have been the metric
I am completely at odds with you about prison. For one thing, there's a give-a-mouse-a-cookie effect, which you start rolling with the idea of not incarcerating people. For another, though, I think sometimes it is funny - no, not exactly funny haha - this business of the rogue DAs and judges colluding to send people straight back into the community, uncharged or if charged, with a trial 7 years hence. Because I think - this guy just stabbed his relative. How badly do the relatives want to see that guy come home, in the name of restorative justice or whatever the Soros idea is called? Would you? And then when he goes off and gets collected for raping or shooting somebody, are his family, so glad that we had Joe at home, so glad we had these times together. So glad he was free to accumulate further charges than those initial ones.
Maybe I'm crazy? There's something I'm not getting. I lived my whole childhood with a family member I'd have preferred not to see come home so maybe I am projecting.
Imagine a device, inserted into the brain, that would detonate if that person ever committed a murder. Would you let murders out of jail if they got such a device?
If so, how do you prevent everyone from one “do a murder for free”?
I suspect that the preventative aspect of prison is underrated. Looting happens in American when people believe they can get away with it.
Ever since I became aware that the death penalty was controversial, I've heard/read its detractors, who are definitionally uninterested in justice, at least aver that its "keeping the public safe" aspect - at least the non-prison-dwelling public - can be solved by having life sentences. Now that's a long time I've been hearing that - but I don't hear it much or at all anymore. Would we say, during this period when capital punishment has been virtually eliminated for all practical purposes, that people are serving more/longer sentences? That people who kill people are more or likely to be out on the street than before? It's obvious to me.
So, congrats, us. You've gotten 99% of what you wanted wrt capital punishment - the google AI tells me 16 death row inmates were put to death last year (most of them probably decades after their offense, most of them probably having reached a greater age than their victims).
And it turned out - big surprise, rug pulled! - you didn't really want to incarcerate people either!
I made the mistake of reading a reddit thread among the youngsters about an execution which devolved into dreamy fantasies about how we might have rehabilitated Ted Bundy et al, especially if we had given them nice enough things in prison.
"And I don’t think that deterrence or rehabilitation are successful enough to warrant prison."
I agree incapacitation is the best reason for prison and I get that prison might not be the best option in many instances where it is the chosen punishment but I'd argue even short sentences have a pretty good deterrent and rehabilitative effect.
Deterrence - Look at how much shoplifting, car break-ins, and other street crime there is where these things aren't being prosecuted. What besides prison do you think is the deterrent where these things aren't rampant?
Rehabilitation - My wife did family practice at a federally funded health clinic. She often noted that the most polite and appreciative patients were immigrants (mostly or all here illegally) and ex-cons. While the record is far from perfect, I think you are mistaken not to think prison had a positive impact on future behavior of many who were incarcerated. (The difficulties of being a felon is a whole other issue that surely increases recidivism.)
Both the Ed West and the Foundations documents engage in a number of comparisons between the UK and France. Both have some interesting insights. I will attempt to augment that discussion with some additional observations regarding other possibly explanatory differences between the two nations.
First, the notion that the UK has fallen behind France seems generally not true in absolute terms, but mostly just in terms of relative rates of growth. Compared to France, the UK has higher GDP per capita and less debt per capita, as well as lower unemployment See: https://countryecoenomy.com/countries/compare/uk/france In addition, the UK outperformed France on the Human Development Index scoring 0.94 to 0.91 in 2024, ranked #5 versus #10 on the Solability Intellectual Capital Index, scored 70.82 to France’s 69.57 on the International Institute for Management’s World Competitiveness index, and, was ranked #5 versus #12 on the 2024 WIPO Global Innovation Index.
One statistic on which France outperforms the UK that stands out, at least to me, is that per the OECD, the annual disposable income per capita for France was $34,375 and $33,049 in the UK.
Other areas in which France outperforms the UK, that I don’t believe either West or Foundations addressed, was national pride (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/05/05/5-national-pride-and-shame/ ), nor did they address perceptions of government legitimacy, in particular, the State Legitimacy Index, with France scoring 1.1 versus 3.3 for the UK (https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/state_legitimacy_index/ ) . In addition France has a substantially lower burden of business legal costs as share of revenue (https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/legal/acritas-legal-services-spending-study/ ). France outperforms the UK on the Solability Government Efficiency index ranking 25 to the UK’s 41, and on their Social Capital index France is ranked 21 to the UK’s 34.
So, taken together these measures might suggest that perhaps a more dis-aggregated analysis may be appropriate. Each country has its strengths and weaknesses. The two areas in which the UK’s performance seems to be generating the most heat are energy and housing. France maintains about a 70% nuclear share of electrical generation. The UK has gone hog wild spending something like 45 billion pounds on wind yet not even managing to generate a third of the total and has less than 15% from nuclear. Mistake made. Lesson learned?
So let’s move on to housing. Abolish local government, the big brains’ knee-jerk answer to everything, might not be the best solution. West observes that in the UK:
“Then, in 1947, came the Town and Country Planning Act (TCPA), which removed the incentives for councils to give planning permission, since they no longer received much of the upside from local taxes.
‘The law also added a requirement to get permission from national government for any development, and to pay to the national government a tax of 100 percent on any value that resulted from permission being granted.’ The TCPA also granted powers to create green belts around cities, and private house building has never recovered.”
Remember that local government in the UK is subject to a hodge podge of laws, both centralized, and in each of Wales, Northern Ireland, England and Scotland, and the remit of any local jurisdiction is largely an arbitrary affair. The UK has no real tradition of subsidiarity and is top-heavy. (https://www.lgcplus.com/politics/devolution-and-economic-growth/simon-kaye-england-needs-universal-hyper-local-tier-of-government-13-08-2024/ )
In contrast, the the first paragraph of Article I of the constitution of France requires decentralization: “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs. It shall be organised on a decentralized basis.” And indeed, Title XII “Territorial Communities” lays out a plan of organization for local governance through several articles, however, perhaps best represented by Article 72 which provides in part:
“Territorial communities may take decisions in all matters arising under powers that can best be exercised at their level.
In the conditions provided for by statute, these communities shall be self-governing through elected councils and shall have power to make regulations for matters coming within their jurisdiction.
In the manner provided for by an Institutional Act, except where the essential conditions for the exercise of public freedoms or of a right guaranteed by the Constitution are affected, territorial communities or associations thereof may, where provision is made by statute or regulation, as the case may be, derogate on an experimental basis for limited purposes and duration from provisions laid down by statute or regulation governing the exercise of their powers.
No territorial community may exercise authority over another. However, where the exercising of a power requires the combined action of several territorial communities, one of those communities or one of their associations may be authorized by statute to organize such combined action.”
This has been operationally translated to mean “The principle of freedom of administration by local authorities is explicitly enshrined in the Constitution, and is completed by the principle of financial autonomy of the local, intermediate and regional authorities. Local, intermediate and regional authorities (LRAs) have general competence for the exercise of their functions. As a result, shared competences are the rule. There is no hierarchy between regional, intermediate and local government.”
The sharing of competencies:
“The mayor (maire), as a representative of the State, has competence in the fields of:
Registry;
Electoral issues;
Social welfare (complementary action to that of the Departments);
Education, including primary schools and pre-school classes;
Local roads;
Town planning, and
Protection of public order.
The Municipalities, as decentralised authorities, have competence in the field of:
Municipal transport, including school transport, yacht harbours, civil airports, non-autonomous harbours;
Culture, including teaching schools (écoles maternelles et primaires), archives, museums, libraries;
Public health (vaccination);
Economic development (complementary to that of the Region);
Environment, specifically water and waste, and
Housing.”
And as West and the Foundations document demonstrate, France outperforms on housing. Greater local autonomy rather than less can work to everyone’s advantage. Crushing local governance, on the other hand, as has happened in California, results in prevailing rates law in housing construction, rooftop solar requirements, mandatory electrical vehicle requirements, and general immiseration.
If you are going to use France for comparison purposes, please do consider the whole lesson of what she teaches, not just what she might offer to rationalize your narrative.
"The UK could use some good old-fashioned neoliberal free-market policies."
What country coud NOT? :) Well, except the perversion of cutting taxes for the rich an running up deficits. Actually we need some good new fashioned Neo-Social Democracy whose bumper sticker is:
"We demand more mutually beneficial market transactions between consenting adults that do not create any untaxed/unsubsidized negative/positive externalities (with some exceptions for transactions in addictive substances and services) and for some of the income generated from those mutually beneficial transactions taxed with a progressive consumption taxes and revenues used for redistribution and for purchase of public goods whose expenditures pass an NPV>0 test when inputs and outputs are valued at Pigou tax/subsidy inclusive marginals costs and revenues."
"Well, except the perversion of cutting taxes for the rich"
Who/what are you referring to? European countir s that cut confiscatory rates on ultra rich because they were leaving? Surely you don't mean the Trump cuts that were pretty even across income levels. Have you been brainwashed by MSM and leftists? Lol.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-average-federal-tax-rates-all-households
We should not be "pro" or "anti" incarcelaration, but cost benefit-ish about it as part of being cost-benefit-ish about good policing to deter crime by increasing the probability of arrest and prosecution. Crime just like immigration should bean economic issue.
That would be great except in both cases random controlled trials haven't provide much info so there is immense disagreement on what the best cost-benefit is. Besides that, many of the costs and benefits are non-monetary so quantifying them is highly subjective.
One good aspect of prisons as currently implemented is that they take the decision out of the hands of politicals and bureaucrats, for a bit at least. Once someone is sentenced they are there till parole and the like come up, without constant decisions to keep them there.
Compare that to a leg monitor where people have to constantly watch and surveil the convict to ensure they don’t commit further crime. Are they always going to be on top of that, never getting distracted or choosing to let a borderline situation go? Seems unlikely.