Links to Consider, 9/30

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

You can register for a one-hour zoom with Bart Wilson and me, discussing Nichola Raihani’s book on human cooperation. October 29, 1 PM New York time. Register here

David Bromwich writes,

A wrong lesson has been learned from an airbrushed memory of the 1960s. The antiwar protests of that time may have begun in college teach-ins, but they went on to organized marches in big cities. Disrupting the universities became part of the program only in a later and decadent phase; and even as the narrowest of tactics, it never made sense. The truth is that “shut-it-down” campus protests were the path of least resistance, the method closest to home, but they pushed against the necessary ethic of a university because they involved an element of coercion.

Inquisitive Bird writes,

Incapacitation prevents crime—that is, the crimes they would otherwise have committed in the incarceration period had they been free. Recall that persistent offenders will often commit many offenses in a single year. Beyond that, an additional minor benefit is people age while in prisons, reducing recidivism rates.¹

These points not only make intuitive sense, they are also empirically well-established.

We have three goals for prisons. The one that they clearly accomplish is incapacitation—prisoners are kept from committing more crimes. A second one is deterrence—people might decide that they do not want to go to prison, so they won’t commit crimes. A third is rehabilitation—using the prison experience to turn someone away from a life of crime.

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.

But incapacitation that society views as more humane would alter the equilibrium in many ways. For example, officials would be even more tempted to try to criminalize opposition.

Ed West writes,

the fundamental reasons for why Britain has fallen behind are strangely absent in the national debate; indeed, most politicians aren’t even that interested in the subject.

Perhaps that will change, with the ground-breaking essay, Foundations, written by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman. ..

The theme running through the essay is that the British system makes it very hard to invest and extremely expensive and legally difficult to build, making housing and energy costs prohibitive. 

In the substacks that I read, the Foundations essay is getting a lot of play. It argues that the British economy is sclerotic by choice. The UK could use some good old-fashioned neoliberal free-market policies.

Eurosclerosis is also the subject of a report spearheaded by Mario Draghi. Noah Smith likes much of its neoliberalism, but thinks there could be more.

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)? And what if EU institutions focused more on disseminating best practice from successful member states? This would be conceptually similar to the federalist approaches that have worked for China and the U.S. in the past.

substacks referenced above:@

Four thoughts on Eurosclerosis

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Why is Britain poor?

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The case for prisons

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Reflections on the New Encampment Culture