The Philosophy of the Gun

November 10, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Guns Galore. The name might be emblematic of the US as a whole, but it’s merely the name of the store where Maj. Hasan plunked down his $1,100 and walked out with his brand new
Hekstra FN Herstal 5.7mm and several 20-round magazines.


At first, I thought that gun control was irrelevant in this case because Maj. Hasan was member of the US Army, and no law could deny a gun to a member of that category. But I was wrong. The murder weapon was not an Army firearm. It was privately acquired. Maj. Hasan was able to get his gun because he was a member of another category for whom getting guns is rarely a problem: people in Texas (also a few dozen other states.)

Maj. Hasan may have been a Muslim first and an American second, he may have practiced an extreme form of a foreign religion, he may have been psychologically unstable. But in at least one way, he was as normal and American as Charlton Heston: he believed in the philosophy of the gun.

The philosophy of the gun is simple: if someone does something you don’t like, shoot them. If you can’t shoot that person, shoot someone like them.

If you don’t like abortions, shoot an abortion doctor . If you don’t like an anti-abortion protester , shoot him. If you feel wronged by people at work, go postal. If a woman has rejected you, shoot her. If you can’t find a woman who actually rejected you, shoot several women. Don’t like the kids in your school? Shoot them. Feel you’ve been dissed by someone from another gang, shoot them.

Gun advocates put this in terms of self-defense. If you have gun, you can defend yourself, your property, and your loved ones from people who are doing something you don’t like. Which is just another way of saying that if you don’t like what the person is doing, shoot them. The only difference is that such shootings might be legal.

The question is this: whose decision is it? Who gets to decide whether shooting the bad person is OK? Most societies restrict this decision to law enforcement, to agents of the state. If someone is doing something you think they shouldn’t be doing, something that should be stopped right now, you call the cops.* That’s true to a great extent in the US as well.

But distrust of the government is a theme that runs through US political culture. So we make it easy for any person to take that power literally into his (or her) own hands. The law might punish you afterwards, if you are still alive. But until then, you are the law, and the decision over the use of deadly force is yours. Gun manufacturers might just as well advertise: “We provide, you decide.”

Fortunately, most gun owners never shoot their guns at other people. The vast majority don’t use guns to express their anger or their religious and political beliefs. But for the small minority who do want to use guns in that way, wide open lies the door of Guns Galore.


* Police scholars will recognize this as Egon Bittner’s definition of the police.The title of his article “The Capacity to Use Force as the Core of the Police Role” states it formally. More colloquially, Bittner says that the police are who we call when “something ought not to be happening about which something ought to be done right NOW!”

Gemeinschaft and Ge-Sellout

November 7, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Gemeinschaft is usually translated as community. But, I tell my students, we use community in many ways that would have old Tönnies spinning (spönning?) in his grave. Sometimes it refers to the political boundaries of a town. It sounds better to talk about “the Hohokus community” than merely “people who live in Hohokus.” (Or does it? Maybe there’s nothing you can do with a name like Hohokus.)

We also use community to mean people who share some demographic characteristic. “The African American community.” Forty million people spread over the entire country hardly gets at the kind of Gemeinschaft Tönnies had in mind – a group based on mutual trust, on permanence, intimacy, personal involvement.

But what about this, taken from Friday’s New York Times story about an insider trading scheme? Traders used advance information on mergers and acquisitions to make millions of dollars. Some of the schemers were caught, pled guilty, and in turn sold out their former partners or employers. The arrests and charges are rolling in.

The charges, against 14 money managers, lawyers and other investors, followed the arrest last month of a hedge fund billionaire, Raj Rajaratnam, on charges that he had profited from inside information.

But here’s what caught my attention.

The complaints represent a significant expansion of a case that has gripped the hedge fund community.

What kind of community is this, I wondered, this hedge fund community?

Maybe it really is a Gemeinschaft-like world where everyone knows everyone else, like a family, like “Cheers.” What one person can say to another is determined by the individuals in the immediate situation, not by abstract, bureaucratic rules  – like the rules that prohibit insider tip-offs. Can we blame it on Gemeinschaft? I doubt it, but I haven’t searched the literature.

Are there any ethnographies of Hedgefundland?

Boinged

November 7, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

This blog has a small but select readership. I have data to back that up – at least the part about small. I use Google Analytics to track the number of visits. On Monday, the counter seemed to go haywire. When I checked it late in the afternoon, the number of visits was about 600,.

The mystery was soon solved since Google Analytics also shows where people had linked in from*. In this case it was Boing Boing. It had listed my post with the four charts on healthcare costs, and the hits just kept on coming. By day’s end, the total was nearly 2600. That’s what being Boinged will do.


The effect wears off quickly, though not as quickly as the euphoria.

*Google Analytics is not entirely trustworthy on this. It showed a dozens of referrals from a site for forums devoted exclusively to discussions of the Mazda Miata. Also several from a site which has items only about the making of wooden boats.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Meltdown

November 3, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.”

Calvin Trillin in an op-ed in the Times a couple of weeks ago, supposedly quoting some guy he meets in a bar. But Trillin was writing as a humorist, not a reporter (he does both very well), and I strongly suspect that his informant in the midtown bar was just something he made up for laughs, from the 1950s Brooks Brothers clothes to the theory about the financial debacle.

The theory goes like this: Wall Street used to be run by guys who got into decent schools because of family; they finished in the lower third of the class. Nice guys, not especially bright, and, by current standards, not especially greedy. (A certain ex-president comes to mind.) But when Wall Street started offering insanely high payoffs, the really smart guys got in – the math majors from MIT, physics Ph.D.s from CalTech.

“Did you ever hear the word ‘derivatives’?” he said. “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t have done the math.”

And how did that lead to calamity?

“Why do I get the feeling that there’s one more step in this scenario?” I said.

“Because there is,” he said. “When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Our guys! The lower third of the class! Guys who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. All our guys knew was that they were getting disgustingly rich, and they had gotten to like that. All of that easy money had eaten away at their sense of enoughness.”

Funny, right? It interrelates some stylized facts that aren’t really related – math geniuses replacing pleasant college grads; the spread of greed; Wall Street collapsing. That’s what humor writing often does – stretches the plausible till it becomes unrealistic. And besides, the theory fits only one instance – the current one.

Generally speaking, you don’t turn to NBER* papers for a good chuckle or for confirmation of humorous speculation. I doubt that Calvin Trillin has a stack of these papers on his nightstand. I certainly don’t. But via a link at Brad DeLong’s blog) I found this abstract of one published last December:

We use detailed information about wages, education and occupations to shed light on the evolution of the U.S. financial sector over the past century. We uncover a set of new, interrelated stylized facts: financial jobs were relatively skill intensive, complex, and highly paid until the 1930s and after the 1980s, but not in the interim period. We investigate the determinants of this evolution and find that financial deregulation and corporate activities linked to IPOs and credit risk increase the demand for skills in financial jobs. Computers and information technology play a more limited role. Our analysis also shows that wages in finance were excessively high around 1930 and from the mid 1990s until 2006. [emphasis added] --Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef, “Wages and Human Capital”

The same thing was going on in the 1920s too. Wall Street jobs were skill intensive, complex, and highly paid. And look what happened in 1929.  ’Taint funny McGee.

*National Bureau of Economic Research