Cheering for Death

September 11, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
About my previous post – the one about Republicans applauding the high number of executions in Texas under Gov. Rick Perry:  Despite a New Year’s resolution to reduce the amount of snark I dump into this blog, that crowd reaction did set me off.  I wasn’t the only one.  Many non-Republicans (and I hope some Republicans too) were surprised if not appalled. 

It’s one thing to be in favor of capital punishment.  It’s quite another to cheer for it.  Imagine a liberal forum where a question begins, “Mayor Bloomberg, in New York last year there were more than 80,000 abortions . . .” and the audience breaks into applause.  It wouldn’t happen, of course.  Most pro-choice people see abortion, the termination of an unwanted pregnancy, as an unfortunate, regrettable event* – that’s why they also support contraception and sex education since these too can reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and thus reduce the number of abortions.  If an audience did applaud high numbers of abortions, we would be right to wonder about the moral compass of those who cheered.

But for those cheering Republicans Wednesday, when it comes to killing the convicted, apparently the more the better.  In a way, this conservative enthusiasm for execution is puzzling.  The Republicans, let’s remember, are the folks who think that government can’t do anything right.  But when it comes to executing people, the government, in Republican eyes, somehow becomes infallible.  (In contrast to this belief, the government in death penalty cases is indeed fallible.  At least one of those 234 executed, Cameron Todd Willingham, was almost certainly innocent.  And the government would have executed several other innocent people had it not been for the efforts of independent groups like the Innocence Project.)

Conservatives rail against government and want to reduce its power – the power to provide education or to protect workers, consumers, and the environment.  Yet when it comes to the power to take life – they lead the cheers.  That power – the power of legitimate killing – is the greatest government power of all.  In fact, execution is a good indicator of repressive government power.  Page through history or look around the globe today at the countries that execute the most people; these are not the governments that let freedom ring.

My guess is that underlying the avid support for death is a tendency towards cognitive simplicity.**  This simplicity (often euphemized as “moral clarity”), divides the world in two  – Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, and most basically Us and Them.  That Us/Them distinction explains how support for death penalty squares with “Thou shalt not kill,” for the commandment carries an unstated specification: Thou shalt not kill one of ours.  That’s what it meant to the Hebrews of the Bible, and that’s what it means to the Christians of Texas.  They too wrap their rationale in a tribal Us-vs.-Them imagery.  We are killing Them.  For example, to hear Gov. Perry on Wednesday, you would think that only non-Texans commit crimes that warrant execution.   “If you come into our state and you kill one of our children . . . you will be executed.” The problem is not Us; it’s all these homicidal outsiders coming into our state.

This is of a piece with a more general view that seems more characteristic of the right than of the left.  To be a conservative is to live in a world in which We are under constant threat from Them.  Them is the government, especially a distant government like the government of the nation, taking our money and giving it to “those people.”  Them is immigrants coming into our country, our neighborhood.  Them is non-Christians, and some of Them are trying to impose their Sharia law on Us.  Them is the Obama voters who took Our country from Us.  And of course Them is the criminals – the ones we have to protect ourselves against by walking around fully armed, the ones we have to show who’s boss by levying the most Draconian punishments.  So when we do kill one or two or 234 of Them, that’s something to be cheered.

------------

* Gloria Steinem used to say that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

** An earlier post on this is here.

Executions and Audiences

September 10, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

When you are executing people, as with any performance, you have to know your audience.

When the Sirjan [Iran] town authorities tried to hang two men convicted of robbery on the morning of Dec. 22, protestors threw stones at the police and members of the court carrying out the execution. . .  the protestors also shot at officers with handguns.
Amidst the chaos, the protestors managed to cut down the convicts, who were still alive a minute after the attempted hanging  (Story here, but do not go there if you are troubled by pictures and videos of this sort of thing.)

The hangmen misjudged their audience.  They could have played to a much more receptive crowd – the Republicans who showed up for the candidates’ debate Wednesday. 

Brian Williams began a question to Gov. Rick Perry, “Your state has executed 234 death row inmates more than any other governor in modern times . . .”  But before Williams could finish, the Republican faithful, on hearing that number, broke into applause.  Listen to the enthusiasm.

)

We don’t know how long the applause would have continued if Brian Williams hadn’t interrupted to continue his question.

Oh my, those Republicans.  They sure do love them some executions.*  The applause wasn’t thunderous – the deaths under Perry work out to a measly two a month, barely one-tenth of what Iran generates.  But Texas currently has more than 300 people on death row.  Imagine the Republican audience reaction if Gov. Perry can manage to get most of those 300 executed before the next debate.  An O for sure.  With 500 executions under his belt next time, not 234, there’s gonna be a lot of love in that room.  

---------------

* They also have a curious fondness for torture.  See my earlier post here.

New York Sports

September 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Cities provide all sorts of free amenities and diversions for those who live and visit there.  But New York offers free Foosball.  Can other cities make that statement? These tables are only a block from Madison Square Garden, so you have a choice: Foosball or the Knicks. 

 

That Uncertain Feeling

September 5. 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

(A shorter version of this is posted at Sociological Images) 

Long before the Freakonomics guys hit the best seller list by casting their economic net in sociological waters, there was Gary Becker.  If you want to explain why people (some people) commit crimes or get married and have babies, Becker argued, just assume that people are economically rational.  Follow the money and look at the bottom line.  You don’t need concepts like culture or socialization, which in any case are vague and hard to measure.*

Becker wrote no best-sellers, but he did win a Nobel.  His acceptance speech: “The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior.” 

In a Wall Streeet Journal op-ed Friday about the recession, Becker started off Labor Day weekend weighing in on unemployment and the stalled recovery.  His explanation:  in a word, uncertainty.

These laws [financial regulation, consumer protection] and the continuing calls for additional regulations and taxes have broadened the uncertainty about the economic environment facing businesses and consumers. This uncertainty decreased the incentives to invest in long-lived producer and consumer goods. Particularly discouraged was the creation of small businesses, which are a major source of new hires.

It’s the standard right-wing, anti-government line, and Becker has impeccable conservative credentials, so I shouldn’t be surprised.  Still there’s something curious about it.  He pushes uncertainty to the front of the line-up and says not a word about the usual economic suspects – sales, costs, customers, demand.  It’s all about the psychology of those people in small business, their perceptions and feelings of uncertainty,  Not only are these vague and hard to measure, but as far as I know, we do not have any real data about them.  Becker provides no references.  The closest thing I could find was a small business survey from last year, and it showed that people in small business were far more worried about too little demand than about too much regulation.

Compared with Regulation, twice as many cited Sales as the number one problem.  (My posts on uncertainty from earlier this summer are here and here.)

Desperate for data, I looked at unemployment rates.  Which sectors should be most plagued by uncertainty?  I turned to Becker:

political leaders wanted to reformulate antitrust policies away from efficiency, slow the movement by the U.S. toward freer trade, add many additional regulations in the medical-care sector, levy big taxes on energy emissions, and cut opportunities to drill for oil and other fossil fuels.

OK, got it. The financial sector, medical care, and mining/fuel-extraction.  That’s where we find the greatest threat of government interference, so that’s where we should find the highest uncertainty. So those are the sectors where unemployment should be highest.   

And here are the rates as reported in the BLS August report. 

The three most uncertain sectors are also the three that are suffering the lowest rates of unemployment. 

If financial regulation has Wall Street shaking in its boots with uncertainty, that trepidation doesn’t show up in the employment numbers.  As David Weidner writes in the WSJ (here)

The securities industry still employs about 800,000 people nationwide, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. That is only 7.8% fewer than the all-time high, and roughly the same as in 2006, when Bear Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. still roamed the earth.

As for other businesses, with both taxes and interest rates at an all-time low, the time to invest and hire should be now.

[The uncertainty-about-taxes-and-regulation argument] would make more sense if, say, taxes were already high and might be going higher or regulatory burdens were heavy and might be getting heavier. But when taxes are at a 60-year low and the regulations are pretty much the same as they were in the 1990s boom, the argument makes no sense at all.  (Mark Thoma quoting an e-mail from Gary Burtless. )

Surely there must be some data showing the importance of uncertainty.  This is the US economy, not a Bob Hope movie.  I can’t imagine that a Nobelist like Becker would pull unsupported ideas out of the air.  

Personal note: As I mentioned in an earlier post, my family is trying to sell a condo in Pittsburgh.  We could put more money into fixing the place up – hiring workers to trim the garden, fix the loose tiles, replaster and paint that moldy spot on the wall where the leak was.  This hiring would be our own small contribution to economic recovery.  But when we’ve discussed it, none of us has ever mentioned uncertainty about Pennsylvania taxes or regulations.  Instead, we talk about the demand, specifically the demand for truly elegant, spacious, ideally situated condos in Shadyside.

UPDATE, Sept. 10:  A day after I posted this, Greg Ip had much better post on this topic at The Economist.

------------
* This is an oversimplified version, but it will do for present purposes.