As you may recall, Scott Alexander recently argued that seemingly silly crime prevention policies could have great – and cheap – effects. I say his mechanism, though theoretically sound, is empirically irrelevant. Along the way, though, Scott helped me see a theoretically sound way to end all crime at near-zero cost.
Here’s my proposed panacea:
Step 1: Credibly announce that all levels of government will mercilessly prosecute the first crime committed in the nation each day.
Step 2: There is no Step 2.
What makes this crime policy so effective? Simple: Once you adopt it, no one wants to commit the first crime of the day. After all, with the resources of an entire nation arrayed against you, you’re almost sure to be caught and harshly punished. And if every potential criminal sits around waiting for someone else to commit the first crime of the day, the first crime of the day never happens. This in turn means that the second crime of the day never happens, the third crime of the day never happens, and so on. Welcome to your crime-free nation!
On reflection, of course, it would be better to switch to an even cheaper panacea:
Step 1′: Credibly announce that all levels of government will mercilessly prosecute the first crime committed in the nation each year.
Step 2′: There is no Step 2′.
Which quickly leads us to the cheapest panacea of all:
Step 1”: Credibly announce that all levels of government will mercilessly prosecute the next crime committed in the nation.
Step 2”: There is no Step 2”.
Now I’m the first to admit that this approach wouldn’t work in practice, for all the reasons I previously mentioned. But if you think Scott’s magic bullet in the War on Crime is good, mine’s bulletproof.
HT: My idea is inspired by this passage in David Friedman’s micro textbook:
You are a hero with a broken sword (Conan, Boromir, or your favorite Dungeons and Dragons character) being chased by a troop of bad guys (bandits, orcs, . . .). Fortunately you are on a horse and they are not. Unfortunately your horse is tired and they will eventually run you down. Fortunately you have a bow. Unfortunately you have only ten arrows. Fortunately, being a hero, you never miss. Unfortunately there are 40 bad guys…
Problem: Use economics to get away.
David’s solution:
The solution is to shoot the bad guy in front. Then shoot the bad guy in front. Then shoot the bad guy in front. Then the bad guys start competing to see who can run slowest.
READER COMMENTS
TMC
Jun 28 2018 at 4:49pm
I have a similar idea about stop and go traffic. There’s always a time when traffic is moving fine, there there has to be a first guy who stops. If we all just get out and beat the crap out of him, we’ll never have stop and go traffic again.
MK
Jun 28 2018 at 5:54pm
Are you saying that under this scheme a 2nd crime would never happen? Surely you jest. People do silly things all the time (thinking they have the perfect plan), they make errors (thinking that the 1st crime of the day had occurred for example), and they can be coerced. Motivated humans will find a way.
Josh S
Jun 29 2018 at 1:11am
Step 1: exploit some poor schmo who is irrational/insane/incapable of understanding the consequences to commit the first crime.
Step 2: pursue your own criminal career as usual.
Panacea’ and panacea” are even easier with this strategy.
Imbarus
Jun 29 2018 at 4:46am
Isn’t the irony in this post obvious?
It’s just banter, guys, chill. Good one at that.
A
Jun 29 2018 at 5:17am
I don’t see a coherent relationship between the linked response to Scott Alexander and this post. In the SA response, vividness and herding are not independent of the magnitude and likelihood of “moral energy”. This scenario assumes that a given capacity to act, independent of incidence. This unearned assumption is further confused by Caplan’s belief, as stated in the SA response, that sexual harassment is not obviously better or worse than other forms of workplace abuse. Fair enough as a personal statement of preference, but not obviously imputable for the rest of society. Variations in preference might interact with targeted outrage such that moral outrage is heightened in more leverageable areas. For example, a rise in educated women and female income potential might increase the value sexual harassment as an indignation point.
Ray Sun
Jun 29 2018 at 10:00am
In order to credibly announce that the first crime committed after some arbitrary point in time T will be mercilessly prosecuted, the state must appear to have the ability to detect the first crime committed after T. That ability implies the ability to detect literally all crime at all times. The state cannot credibly claim to have this ability, so it cannot credibly make Caplan’s Step 1 announcement.
But if the state actually had this ability, Caplan’s proposal might actually work to deter all deterrable crime! As previous commenters point out, some crime is undeterrable, because the perpetrators are irrational, unable to control themselves, have imperfect information, or any of the wide variety of familiar reasons that rational actor models fail generally. But deterrence policy shouldn’t be worried about those people, whose behavior it has no chance of affecting anyway.
Phil H
Jun 30 2018 at 1:07am
But this is exactly how social conventions do work! As someone pointed out above, the problem with this mechanism lies entirely in the word “credibly”. A social convention works because the first person to break it will suffer a terrible punishment – being alone in the outgroup. The punishment for subsequent offenders is negligible because they’ll find a new group ready to receive them. But conventions hold, as that first person won’t take the first step.
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