Australia and Capital Punishment

March 19, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Australia killed the death penalty. Nobody had been executed in Australia since 1967, but a bill passed last week banned it permanently for all states and territories. It banned torture as well.
(A news story is here.)

In the US, the death penalty debate, when it does get to empirical questions, usually focuses on whether the death penalty has any impact on crime. The effect is probably stronger the other way round. Crime rates push the death penalty. In the US, crime rates began to climb steadily beginning in the early 1960s. Support for the death penalty started increasing about two years later. Crime rates started to decrease about 1991 and continued to fall dramatically. Starting in 1993, support for the death penalty declined from 80% to 65%.

Australia too has seen a decrease in murder.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

For some reason the chief government publication gives numbers not rates. Had it used rates, the drop would be somewhat more pronounced since the population during the period increased from about 17 million to about 21 million.

Other crimes have decreased as well.


At the risk of having the gunslingers descend again, I will mention that at one point during this period, Australia passed a stringent gun control law, chiefly in response to a mass shooting, the Port Arthur Massacre. Assault weapons were banned, the government bought back and then destroyed 650,000 guns, and stricter licensing and registration were required. If you don’t know when this happened, look at the graphs and see if you can guess which year.

(For the answer, and much more information on Australia’s gun laws, go here.)

A Shot of Ethnography

March 17, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

(Although this post is partly about drunkenness, its appearing on St. Patrick’s Day is purely coincidental and should not be construed in any way as related to ethnic stereotypes.)

I miss ethnography, an idle pursuit in my academic youth. Survey research results are more frequently cited, in the journals and even in the newspapers (as Contexts Crawler faithfully documents), maybe even a little snazzy graph in USA Today or elsewhere. Ethnographers less so it seems, though they might occasionally turn up on TV.* Or in a New York Times column.

Contexts Crawler missed it, but on Monday, “Our Towns,” by Peter Applebome reported on the ethnographic fieldwork of James Roberts (Sociology and Criminal Justice department, University of Scranton).

The field for his fieldwork was the bars of Hoboken. Dr. Roberts is a Jersey boy – degrees from Stockton and Rutgers – and he has tended bar down the shore. I haven’t read his work, but from the Times column I gather that it focuses on questions of how bar patrons become excessively drunk and violent. Who is responsible for feeding even more drinks to people who are far beyond three sheets to the wind? Not the bartenders, it turns out. I would also guess that Roberts is watching to see how some interactions escalate to violence, perhaps along lines of Luckenbill’s old research on scenarios that end in homicide.

Survey research shows the relation between variables. Ethnography tells you how things work. Ethnography is about knowing who the players are and how they think. I remember Robert Weiss saying that if you’re a survey researcher and you want to know about cars, you get a sample of cars, and you discover that a car has an average of 5.38 cylinders, 164.7 horsepower, etc. (this was so long ago that he also included something about carburetors). But if you’re an ethnographer, you get a car, you open the hood, and you try to figure out how all those parts fit together.

There are other differences, notably control of the data and the demands that the data make on the researcher. You can’t do ethnography on your own terms. If you want to do research on drunkenness in Hoboken bars, you have to go to Hoboken, even if you live in Scranton. And you have to do your research when people are going to be getting drunk, even if you usually go to bed after the 11:00 news.

*I myself was once on a morning show called “For Women Only” or maybe its later incarnation “Not For Women Only,” both distant ancestors of The View.

Brackets

March 15, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Everyone knows it’s NCAA time. The brackets have just been posted.

And everyone knows XKCD. Or as Luke Surl says:

A note to those who haven’t heard of xkcd: Hello. We call this planet “Earth”

But Ted McCagg does some great Internet cartoons, and one of his favorite themes is brackets.

(Click on the chart for a version large enough to actually read.)

That’s just the West Regional. Check out the full draw.

I wonder what sociology brackets would look like.

Marginally Revolting

March 15, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

This was posted a while ago at Marginal Revolution with the subject line “The Auction Begins.”


Marginal Revolution is an economics blog, but what the picture really illustrates is the limit of purely economic assumptions. Does anyone, even a classical economist, really believe that someone who found the iPod Touch would call the $51 number? Does anyone, even a classical economist, really believe that this is the start of an auction and that the author of the original sign will raise her offer?

Some of the comments at MR speculated on the marginal effects of offering different rewards. Elsewhere, the few comments that thought the $51 was serious found it revolting. Most people took the sign as a joke, though they did not specfically mention that it was poking fun at economics.

My thinking ran much more to wondering what characteristics of the rightful owner and of the finder would affect whether the finder returned the iPod Touch, and if so, whether he or she initially refused the reward.