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IS SWEDEN REALLY WORSE OFF THAN MISSISSIPPI?


Other countries have public policies different from ours. They also have different results. It's tempting to try to attribute the differences in results to the differences in policies, but the temptation should usually be resisted. Conditions also differ in ways that have little to do with policy, and different policies are likely to be optimal under different sets of conditions. (When asked whether the United States should embrace Dutch drug policies, I'm always inclined to reply, "Yes, as soon as we have a Dutch population to try them out on.")

All of this is by way of comment on the latest storm in the blogosphere about conditions in Sweden. It has always been an article of faith among the American right that Sweden is about to finally collapse under the horrible weight of all that socialism, and the tendency among some social democrats to imagine it as the America-that-ought-to-be just contributes to the problem. The latest brouhaha seems to have started with Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, who reacted to Eric Alterman's comment that Sweden was "a beacon of light" by pointing out that Sweden

...collaborated with the Nazis in World War Two, and despite its moralistic posturing in the postWar era was not especially admirable then, either. Nor, being poorer than Mississippi, but with more crime than America, are they much of a model domestically.

Let's give the foreign policy stuff a pass, shall we? -- World War II was a while ago -- and look at the domestic facts.

First, the economy. Sweden has a lower GDP per capita than the United States; compared to the rest of Western Europe, it's been slipping, but still counts as a thoroughly rich country. Like other Western Europeans, Swedes work hundreds of hours per year less than do Americans; a fair comparison would attribute some value to the added leisure. Swedish income is more equally distributed than ours, and more of it is spent on publicly funded services (and correspondingly less on private consumption) than is the case here.

So if you compare Swedish after-tax income with U.S. after-tax income, ignore leisure, and don't add anything back in for, e.g., a national health care system, Swedes start to look pretty poor compared to Americans, even Mississippians. Swedes also have much smaller median household sizes, so a comparison based on household incomes makes them look especially bad. Reynolds cites a "Swedish study" on this point, but that turns out to be an anti-tax press release from the Swedish equivalent of the Chamber of Commerce. Admirably, Reynolds provides a link to Jason McCulloch's clearly laid out debunking of the study, but Renolds gives no basis for his conclusion that the critique is unconvincing.

There's further back-and-forth on poverty rates; Sweden's is lower than ours, Reynolds admits, but he asserts the difference is only because the average Swede is poorer than the average American, pushing Sweden's poverty
line down. That turns out to be wrong; if the standard of poverty is set at 30% of the US median family income, Americans are about twice as likely as Swedes to be counted as poor (6-and-change percent v. 3-and-change percent).

Overall, then, the claim that Sweden is poorer than Mississippi is just about as silly as it sounded the first time you heard it. A glance at other measures of well-being, such as reading levels and life expectancies, confirms the view that Sweden is still doing pretty well for itself. That doesn't, of course, mean that Swedish economic policies are admirable, or that ours should come to resemble theirs.

All the above is second-hand analyisis; economic policy isn't my field. Now to the crime rate, which I actually know something about. After the huge crime wave of the 1960s and early 1970s, our total crime rates were higher
than European crime rates, and our violent crime rates were enormously higher. Then our crime rates leveled off (and started to fall in the 1990s), while European rates soared. In crimes like auto theft and burglary, most of Western Europe now has higher rates than the US. But if you look at violent crime, we still hold an unfortunate lead: for homicide,
our rates are three to five times as high as comparable European rates.

But overall crime statistics -- counts of total crimes, or total number of people victimized in a year --are dominated by property crime, most of it relatively petty. Unless you really think that a murder and a purse-snatching are equivalent events, comparing totals doesn't really tell you much. So the statement that "Sweden has more crime than the United States" represents something less than half the truth.

Occasionally someone asserts, based on Interpol statistics, that someplace in Western Europe has a higher murder rate than the US. Barry McCaffrey, while he was drug czar, claimed that about the Netherlands, as "proof" that being soft on drugs leads to crime. (Ironically, he made the comment in Stockholm, as part of a speech praising the draconian Swedish approach to drug control by comparison with the milder Dutch approach.)

That claim was false about the Netherlands, and it's false about Sweden. The Interpol numbers track crimes as described by each country's own laws. In some European countries, including the Netherlands (and, it appears, Sweden) attempted murder is covered by the same crime-code section as completed murder. So the Dutch have twice our "homicide rate" as measured by the Interpol numbers, but only one-fifth as much actual homicide. Sweden's actual murder rate is somewhat higher than that, but still only about a third of ours. Murder is a fairly good measure, though not a perfect one, of serious violent crime generally. And it's serious violent crime, not larceny, that threatens a society's viability.

The actual losses sustained by property-crime victims are more than annoying, but they don't really constitute a huge social problem. (Even murder, simply considered as a source of sudden death, is a much smaller problem than, for example, auto accidents, which no one considers a primary measure of social welfare.) The truly horrible thing about crime is that it is deliberate rather than accidental, and therefore spreads fear and poisons social relationships. "Even a dog," said Justice Holmes, "knows the difference between being tripped over and being kicked."

Moreover, it's possible to avoid crime by taking precautions, such as moving to a safer neighborhood, and those precautions impose costs on the people who take them and on the people around them. When a storeowner closes early
for fear of robbery, that deprives the people in the surrounding neighborhood of both services and employement opportunities. The contribution of poverty to crime is a well-known issue, but the contribution of crime to poverty is at least as powerful.

The aggregate costs incurred by crime avoidance measures, plus the residual fear, are overwhelmingly more important than the aggregate costs of property crime itself. (The average residential burglary costs the homeowner about $1200; the impact on housing prices of burglary rates is all out of proportion to that.)

That Western European property crime rates have soared certainly tells us that something's going wrong there. It may also presage a nasty turn in their politics, as the crime wave here did in ours, especially if European violence rates continue to rise as well. But right now, crime -- violent crime -- remains a society-threatening problem for us, and not for them.

Again, that doesn't tell you whose policies are to be preferred. Maybe if we sent Bill Bratton to Stockholm he could get the burglary rate down, and then again maybe he couldn't. (I hear he and Bob Wasserman are doing a great job on crime in the London Underground.) But I doubt we can learn much about the advantages of higher marginal tax rates or more generous income maintenance programs by studying crime in Sweden.

It would no doubt be useful if American policy discussions made more, and better, use of the experience of other places, but we are in some ways quite exceptional, and that will always limit the applicability of comparative studies. Be that as it may, using fuzzy statistics as ideological missles really just wastes everyone's time.

UPDATE

This topic continues to generate more controversy than it deserves. John Ray , for example, the Grand Inquisitor of the leftist heresy, defends GDP per capita as an "objective" measure of well-being.

A few points in summary:

1. As measured by GDP per capita, Sweden is indeed poorer than the US, though richer than France, Britain, or Germany.

2. Anyone who has visited both Sweden and Mississippi will doubt that the latter is in any meaningful sense richer.

3. Even comparing to the US as a whole, Swedes are, on average, better-educated and longer-lived; these are crude and partial, but still significant, measures of overall well-being.

4. GDP per capita is, as Ray says, an accounting measure of total market-traded or tax-financed economic activity. It was not designed as a measure of net welfare, even net material welfare.

5. Leisure, clean air, safe and comfortable working conditions, personal security from criminal victimization, high educational standards, and highway safety are all aspects of material well-being omitted from the GDP measure. GDP also fails to account for resource depletion, whether of the forests in Brazil or the water table under Phoenix, Arizona.

6. It's true that any specific adjustment to the GDP measure will involve judgments that are in some sense political. But that does not make GDP an "objective" measure of welfare. Using it that way implies a judgment that the value of leisure hours is zero. That isn't political: it's simply wrong.

The whole controversy has been, I submit, silly from its inception. Only the desperate need of some conservatives and libertarians to believe that Sweden, which pursues policies they condemn, must therefore be in terrible shape, explains it. After all, it would have been equally true to say, "After a decade of Thatcherite rule, Britain was poorer than Mississippi," or "The disastrous policies of the Berlusconi regime have made Italy poorer than Mississippi," or "The Austrian flirtation with a neo-Nazi government has left it poorer than Mississippi," since Sweden is richer, on a GDP per capita basis, than Britain, Italy, or Austria. But of course saying any of those things would have been foolish.



posted by Mark Kleiman at 4:30 PM

 
The Rule of the Chicken Hawks: Base Canard, or Fair Comment?

As C.S. Lewis pointed out about his Screwtape Letters, sometimes it is the howls of outrage that show where a remark has really hit home. That seems to have been the case with Gen. Anthony Zinni's swipe at the war wimps in the Little Bush White House (led, of course, by the AWOL-in-Chief):

Here’s Zinni’s rude remark, as reported by CNN:

"Attacking Iraq now will cause a lot of problems," Zinni told members of the Florida Economic Club. "If you ask me my opinion, General Scowcroft, General Powell, General Schwarzkopf, General Zinni -- maybe all see this the same way.

"It might be interesting to wonder why all the generals see it in the same way, and all those, who never fired a shot in anger and really held back to go to war, see it in a different way. That's usually the way it is in history."

Eliot Cohen points out that civilians sometimes get it right when generals get it wrong. Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit) and Andrew Stuttaford of National Review Online accuse Zinni of "channelling" Robert Heinlein, whose Starship Troopers depicts what Heinlein’s narrator sees as an admirable society in which the elective franchise and officeholding, though not civil liberty, are restricted to military veterans (and veterans of comparably dangerous civilian pursuits).

But of course none of this addresses Zinni’s point. He wasn't challenging the qualifications of non-veterans to vote, or to hold office. He was asserting that, on a question of whether to go to war, the views of those with experience in actually leading troops in battle should be preferred to the views of those who had personally avoided fighting.

What Zinni really said was, therefore, much nastier than what his critics pretended to hear him saying. Phrased as it was, his remark didn’t just challenge the expertise of his opponents: it denigrated their physical courage. Zinni could, of course, be wrong, as well as rude. One might equally well attribute the opposition of old generals to new wars to a reluctance to give younger men a chance to replace them in the public esteem, or to an undue concern with the institutional health of the military machine, and the welfare of it members, as opposed to the national interest it is supposed to serve. That's part of the reason ad hominem arguments are so much fun; they're gloriously unselective.

So if an argument is both impolite and without much analytical force, perhaps it not ought to be offered at all? I’m not so sure.

Historically, one of the strongest forces on the side of proponents of war is the presumption that they embody courage, the manly virtue par excellance, and that their opponents are somehow effiminate. (See Harvey Mansfield’s reflections on the contemporary importance of andreia, which can mean either “courage” or “manliness.” ) Without endorsing in full what Mansfield calls a "patriarchial" view, it would be reasonable to note, with Machiavelli, that the management and defense of the state involves the exercise not only of coercion but of punishment, the deliberate infliction of harm on foreign enemies and domestic criminals. Someone greatly deficient in the willingness to inflict such harm may be a good person, but he (or she) will be, to the extent of that deficiency, a bad ruler.

And if the ruler's willingness to hurt is not accompanied by the willingness to expose him- or herself to being hurt, then we have rule by bullies. (Someone should remind some of our contemporary presidents that Theodore Roosevelt was using the Gay Nineties slang term “bully” (= fab, def, cool, neat, groovy) when he claimed the Presidency as a “bully pulpit”: he did not mean that it was a good pulpit for a bully to hold, or a good pulpit to be used for bullying.)

That analysis would seem to make personal courage what the law of employment discrimination calls a “bona fide occupational qualification” for a ruler. Putting one’s life and bodily integrity at risk for the defense of country is also, of course, a way to demonstrate one's willingness to place the public welfare over one’s own immediate good, another quality voters might reasonably look for in those they choose to bear temporary rule over them. Little as I find to admire in Joe Lieberman's public career, his freedom riding in the early 1960s, when white freedom riders were at risk of being beaten and even killed, struck me as a genuine character recommendation, and not entirely because of my admiration for what was then his cause.

[That military service is one good way to demonstrate the virtues of courage and commitment to the public good is one good reason, in my view, that it ought rightfully be open to all capable of performing it, without discrimination on grounds of gender or sexual orientation.]

Physical courage is also sometimes thought to be a sign of, or an aid to, moral courage, which is perhaps the greatest virtue required of a public servant, but although the virtues share a name and a common mechanism -- what Plato calls right opinion about what is truly to be feared -- I doubt they share much else, and there are so many counterexamples in both directions that it would be foolish to make any strong inference from a willingness to go in harm’s way on the battlefield to a willingness to displease one’s political supporters or defy the temporary public whim.

The political damage done by lack of demonstrated personal courage is particularly grave when someone now holding a dovish position also previously chose not to fight when many others fighting, as in the case of Ted Sorenson's conscientious objection in World War II, which blocked his appointment as Director of Central Intelligence by Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton's legal, apparently conscience-driven, but still rather devious draft avoidance in the Vietnam era.

What's at least a little surprising is how little personal wimpiness damages hawks, or how little a good service record protects doves. Ronald Reagan fought World War II on a Hollywood sound stage, and it no more weakened his support among the "nuke 'em" crowd than his divorce weakened it among the "family values" crowd. By the same token, Lincoln's honorable service in the Black Hawk War didn't protect him from attacks on his patriotism for opposing the Mexican war (a precedent the anti-war forces of the 1960s could have used to some advantage, if so many of them hadn’t been carrying ideological baggage that made them despise both history in general and American heroes in particular).

Logically, of course, deciding not to serve in a conflict which one opposes on political or moral grounds casts less of a shadow on one’s personal courage than deciding not to serve in a conflict one supports. So it's much more legitimate to challenge the andreia of those who supported the War in Vietnam but, in Dick Cheney's lovely phrase, had "other priorities" at the time, than that of the anti-war draft avoiders.

Looking backward, I do not think it reasonable to have thought that a Northern-dominated Communist Government in South Vietnam was likely to produce greater happiness for the greater number in that country than the locally-based mix of feudalism, crony capitalism, military dictatorship, and rule by the Catholic minority that was the only practical alternative. But it was possible, then and now, to think that unification under Ho Chi Minh would have been the overwhelming winner in a free election, as agreed to in the 1954 peace treaty, and that respect for treaties and respect for self-determination ought, in some cases, to trump views from outside about the right forms of government for someone else’s country.

I’m less firm now in that rather Wilsonian view than I used to be -- I find that I love personal liberty and the victory over profound mass poverty more than I do government by elections, and I'm convinced that in the not-too-long run personally free and prosperous peoples will find a way to choose their own rulers -- but it still seems to me a quite defensible one. It was the view I held at the time of the Vietnam war, and it made my 4-F classification -- for a perfectly genuine case of profoundly flat feet -- a very welcome development. I was not aware of any particular visceral fear of fighting or objection to killing for the right reasons -- I would, I think, have volunteered to fight (e.g.) to free Southwest Africa from South African rule -- but I had at the time what seemed to me quite serious moral qualms about waging what I took to be aggressive war.

None of those complexities kept the pro-war forces from, largely successfully, challenging the manliness and the patriotism of the anti-war forces. If it's sauce for the goose, it's sauce for the gander. And, as I say, the imputation of lack of personal courage to, e.g., little Bush and Cheney based on their war (non)-records is not entirely unfair. Now how relevant that lack of personal virtue is to holding public office is a different question, but that's not really a question the party that just spent eight years assaulting Bill Clinton's personal character, and the twenty years before that doing the same to Ted Kennedy’s, has any right to raise.

It would be interesting to see the results if a the Democrats were to run a retired general, or at least a real war hero -- Zinni, Wesley Clark, John Kerry -- against a President who never managed to find his way back to the Texas Air National Guard unit in which he was sitting out the Vietnam campaign after taking a transfer to another Guard unit in Alabama so he could work on his father's friend's senate campaign.

It was a great mistake for the Democratic left to allow the Republican right to appropriate the American flag as a political symbol in the late 1960s. People who wear uniforms and carry guns -- the military and the police -- do an indispensible job, and enough of the public feels that fact deeply that the half-heartedness of many liberals about acknowledging it represents a real source of political weakness for the left. The Oklahoma City bombing -- clearly an attack by a part of the Far Right against the American government qua American government -- provided an opportunity for the Democrats to try to take the flag back, but the project either was never considered, or it was thought too hard to bring off, or the use of the flag as a right-wing symbol had so poisoned it for the liberal Boomers around the Clinton White House that they couldn't find it in their hearts to even try to reclaim it. However that was, questions about patriotism and courage certainly contribute to the Democrats’ relative weakness among males, and especially among Southern and rural working-class males.

I can think of worthier ways of dealing with this problem than making fun of the fair-weather patriotism of those now urging us to go to war with Iraq, but not necessarily more effective ones. The usual epithet for hawkish draft-avoiders used to be "war wimps." But given the overtones of assertions of, and challenges to, virility that underlie this whole rather disgusting line of debate, I prefer the more forceful "chicken hawks," which in addition to its obvious meaning in context can also mean older men with a sexual taste for teenaged boys. If you're going to be nasty, why stop half-way? As Mr. Dooley said (but perhaps Mrs. Dooley didn’t fully agree?) politics ain't beanbag.

posted by Mark Kleiman at 11:33 PM

 

Some Inconclusive Thoughts about the Death Penalty

As an abstract question in moral philosophy, I think I’m for capital punishment, on two grounds. First, if we punish petty theft with a little time behind bars and aggravated assault with somewhat more time behind bars, arguably there are some crimes -- and I’m not at all sure that homicide is alone -- that ought to be punished in some way not reducible to the less-time/more-time dimension, precisely because we want to mark them out as “capital” -- i.e., “chief” -- offenses. Second, the real suffering created by a relatively humane execution may be much less, integrating over time, than the suffering created by a long prison term, both for the offender and for his intimates, and yet the fear of death appears to be such that most offenders (not all) prefer any non-capital sentence to death. As John Stuart Mill pointed out, the ideal punishment is the one that combines the maximum of terror with the minimum of actual suffering. [That argument would be more persuasive, of course, if the gap between sentence and execution were shorter; even if killing someone is less cruel than locking him in a cage for the rest of his life, forcing him to spend a decade waiting to be killed may not be. The same applies to the suffering of his intimates.]

Moreover, I’m not at all comfortable with life in prison without parole, or even with very long sentences short of that, because I don’t think that the 60-year-old we’re keeping in prison is, in the relevant sense, “the same person” as the 20-year-old who committed that murder forty years ago.

And the risk of executing someone innocent is a strong argument against capital punishment only if death is in fact a much worse penalty than long imprisonment. I’d love to see procedural changes, starting out with much stronger charges to juries about the meaning of “proof beyond reasonable doubt,” to make it less likely that innocent people get convicted, because I’m convinced that the we now have literally tens of thousands of innocents behind bars. But the abolition of the death penalty wouldn’t change that concern at all. (There is, apparently, evidence to support the common-sense proposition that “death-qualified” juries -- those from which jurors unwilling to convict in capital cases have been excluded -- are more conviction-prone than ordinary juries, but that problem could be overcome by having a non-death-qualified jury consider guilt, without being told whether the case is a capital one or not, and a death-qualified jury consider the penalty.)

It’s also more than possible, though not proven, that the threat of execution changes the behavior of some offenders in the right direction. Putting the econometric evidence aside, as I'm inclined to do on topics this complex, there are accounts of bank robbery gangs in the 1930s who went into banks with unloaded weapons precisely to avoid the risk that someone would be killed and the robbers therefore subject to execution. I believe it is also the case that kidnappers-for-ransom of that era were reluctant to kill their victims -- otherwise presumably a risk-reducing step -- for the same reason. Of course the opposite effect is also possible: perhaps some people commit crimes precisely so as to be executed, or find that the commission of a capital offense adds to the thrill. The empirical question -- or quasi-empirical, if as a practical matter we can’t convincingly disentangle all the evidence -- is whether the net effect is positive or negative. (And of course the answer to that might not be the same in all times and places.)

In my moral calculus, saving the lives of victims outweighs saving the lives of aggressors, at least if the numbers are even, and possibly even if they aren’t. The distinction between aggressors and victims seems to me to trump the action/omission argument that it’s not in general justified to cause a death directly in order to prevent a larger number of deaths. The cases used to make that argument tend to involve innocent parties on both sides, which is not the case here.

I recall an essay, though I’ve forgotten the title and author [Can any reader supply?] which makes the general moral case for the practice of criminal punishment on the following argument: If a situation arises in which it necessary that either A or B be injured, and if that situation arises due to the action of A, then it is A who should suffer. Insofar as that argument is valid, it greatly weakens the force of the argument from the act/omission distinction.

All that said, I have no trouble understanding, and sympathizing with, the position of those who regard capital punishment as the last vestige of human sacrifice and are aggrieved at being made complicit in it as taxpayers and voters. (If I were a Christian, I think I would regard the account of the woman taken in adultery [John 8 1-11] as reflecting a clear judgment against the practice.) When pro- and anti-death penalty demonstrators shout at one another outside a prison where someone is being killed, I know which group I’d rather go out to a meal with afterwards.

What I’m pretty sure of is that, in purely practical terms, the death penalty doesn’t deserve the attention it gets from either side of the debate. With the annual execution count below 100 and the annual homicide count near 20,000, it seems to me perverse, in a world of limited resources, to worry about abolishing executions rather than preventing murders. But even if it were the case that the death penalty prevented homicide, as a practical matter we could never carry it out frequently enough to make a measurable difference. From the perspective of a generation ago, with rising crime rates and a scarcity of prison beds, it was not entirely irrational for voters -- many of them angry about crime, prepared to be cruel to criminals in order to stop it, and worried that elected and appointed officials might be unduly inclined toward mercy -- to use support for the death penalty as a simple test for a candidate’s willingness to be tough. But surely, with 2 million people behind bars, we’ve gotten tough enough.

I am, therefore, indifferent on the question of a moratorium on executions. But as someone professionally concerned with crime control, I’m a strong supporter of a moratorium on debating the subject; it’s a distraction from the work we really need to do.

posted by Mark Kleiman at 6:49 PM

 
WHEN IS A MURDER AN EXECUTION?

Consider, if you will, the following headline and text from today’s New York Times, in a story
about the killing, by a Palestinian terrorist group, of Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israeli authorities:


FOR ARAB INFORMERS, DEATH; FOR THE EXECUTIONERS, JUSTICE

[snip]

On Friday, the 43-year-old woman's 17-year-old daughter, Rajah Ibrahim, was shot dead as a collaborator by members of the militant Aksa Martyrs Brigades. Six days earlier, Ms. Ibrahim's sister, 35-year-old Ikhklas Khouli, was similarly killed. Six months earlier, Ms. Ibrahim's husband was executed.

In the street, there was no pity, no doubt that justice had been done.

Collaboration has always ranked as a heinous crime among the Palestinians. Dozens of men have been killed as collaborators, often publicly. Ms. Khouli and Ms. Ibrahim, however, had the distinction of being the first women executed in the current uprising, and their deaths attracted considerable attention.

Notice two curious features of the reporter’s choice of words. “Execute” and related forms are used; “murder” and related forms aren’t.

Presumably this reflects in part the reporter’s struggle to remain “objective.” (Overall, the story should please supporters of Israel and dismay those who sympathize with the intifada; it describes, among other things, the torture of a 17-year-old boy.) To call the killings “murders” might seem to cross the line that supposedly divides reportage from editorial commentary. (Though note also the use of the pejorative "informer" rather than the neutral-to-euphemistic "informant" to describe the victims.) But “execute” and “execution” are also routinely used as synonyms for “murder” in stories about organized crime and drug dealing, where the reporter makes no pretense of moral neutrality.

It’s not hard to trace the origin of this usage. Some killings in the course of organized criminal activity are ritualized, and are understood by those carrying them out, those hearing about them, and those subjected to them as carrying out a rule-based organizational judgment. They are acts of retribution for specific transgressions of known organizational rules. It was not far-fetched for police and reporters to refer to these as “execution-style” killings, and the shortening to “execution” was only natural.

[Presumably “execution” as a description of what the hangman does was originally euphemistic, but eventually, in accordance with John Kenneth Galbraith’s Iron Law of Euphemism, the bad meaning swallowed the good. (Recall that “depression,” in its macroeconomic sense, was originally a euphemism: We’re not in the midst of a panic, merely suffering from a temporary depression of economic activity.) The double sense of “execute” isn’t limited to English; Machiavelli advises his Prince to carry out “a memorable execution” early in his reign to discourage prospective opponents.]

But I wonder to what extent the acceptance of this usage reflects the views that reporters and editors hold about capital punishment.Literally, it equates the action of a public executioner to that of a hitman or a political assassin. And I wonder also whether the practice has any impact on public attitudes about the death penalty.

Now I don’t have a dog in the fight over capital punishment. Really. Honestly. (Here are some thoughts on the topic, for the truly curious.) But that leaves me free to notice things about how that fight works, without worrying too much about which side my observations favor.

posted by Mark Kleiman at 6:27 PM