It Could Happen To You

May 20, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Conservatives discount or ignore the importance of social forces. Even those observers who like to think of themselves as closer to the center, like David Brooks, emphasize “character.” As you turn the dial further to the right, you hear more and more about “individual responsibility.”

Parents need to communicate basic principles about character development, honor and individual responsibility. Young people need to know that they are not victims of their hormones . . . .

That’s from the Website of Concerned Women for America, a right-wing Christian group. (If you can’t guess their agenda, see their core issues here .)

One of their allies in congress is Mark Souder, a Republican from Indiana and a strong family-values guy. But now he’s resigning after news leaked out that he’d been having an affair with a woman on his staff. (A video of her interviewing him about his pro-abstinence views has the Internet ironists LOL in Schadenfreude.)

For conservatives, when a friend like Souder goes astray, the old responsibility rap sounds discordant, and they have to change the playlist. Penny Spence is the head of CWFA, and here’s her take on the Souder affair:

I am deeply saddened by the news of Congressman Mark Souder’s fall into the temptation of an affair. . . . If Mark Souder is capable of sexual misconduct, it could happen to anyone.

Right. The affair was not something Souder did. It “happened to” him. That seems a bit passive even by my standards. But then Spence gets downright sociological.

The frat house environment on Capitol Hill does nothing to encourage accountability. Most Members do not live with their families while they are working in D.C. during the week and have even ditched common rules of etiquette that even major corporations follow such as office doors with windows or careful examination of employee/boss interaction.

Her keen attention to situational forces does not extend to suggestions for structural changes that might discourage adultery. Instead, she merely encourages lawmakers in DC “to guard their hearts and reputations and to live by higher standards.”

To me, the interesting question is not how a solid, family-values Christian could fall into temptation. As Spence says, anyone can slip and fall.* But apparently this affair had been going on for years. How did Souder manage it? Did he change is ideas to accommodate his behavior – ideas not just about adultery but about himself – and what was that process like? What is the “moral career” of the adulterer?

*The subject line of this post is a reference to the great Burke-VanHeusen standard. If you are among the few who saw Woody Allen’s “Anything Else,” you heard this brief version by Diana Krall. Listen to the lyrics, for they reflect what Spence probably has in mind. “Hide your heart from sight; lock your dreams at night; it could happen to you.” Miles recorded it with his 1956 quintet. My favorite version is by Keith Jarrett in the 1996 Tokyo concert.)

Scouting for Titles

May 19, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Tyler Cowen asks his readers to guess the best-selling book of all time (“And I mean the best-selling real book, not linked to either religion or communism?”)

Here is his answer:

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, two hundred million copies.
Next in line is Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts book and then Lord of the Rings.

Note that Tyler tactfully refers to Baden-Powell’s 1908 classic in the generic rather than by its actual title, which is so much more delightfully ambiguous: Scouting for Boys.



(Wikipedia has the full list.)

Blowback

May 17, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Unintended consequences.” The term comes from sociology – it was coined by Robert Merton 75 years ago – but it has of late has become a favorite weapon of free-market economists and other conservative and libertarian types. They use it for bashing liberals and their government programs designed to limit harm and promote the general welfare.

Conservative policies too may suffer from a similar effect. Anne Coulter famously announced, in the days following the 9/11 attacks, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” The National Review fired her for her intemperate comments, but the Bush Administration, in its policies, seemed to take her proposals to heart.* Well, two out of three ain’t bad. Invading countries and killing leaders proved not to be too difficult. But that third one:

Since the U.S. invasion, Iraq's Christians have been mostly driven out of the country by violence directed against them for their religion. . . Relentless waves of bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, extortions and rapes have triggered a mass exodus of Christians from Iraq over the past seven years. Since 2003, over half of the estimated 1.5 million . . . have fled

So writes Nina Shea at the Washington Post’s On Faith page. Ms. Shea is identified as “director, Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom.” The Hudson Institute is a neo-conservative think tank that, although Ms. Shea doesn’t mention it, strongly supported the invasion of Iraq. Surely the good conservatives there did not intend that their favored policy should wind up limiting religious freedom, certainly not the religious freedom of Christians. But that’s what happened.


* The Bushies even adopted Coulter’s view that it didn’t really much matter who “they” was. Any Muslim state would do. “This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. Those responsible include anyone anywhere in the world who smiled in response to the annihilation of patriots . . .”

Frisks and Risks

May 13, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

In New York, a city of roughly 8 million people, the police stopped and frisked over half a million people* last year. (The Times story is here.)

“We are saving lives, and we are preventing crime.” said the NYPD spokesman. If you don’t believe him, just look at this pie chart of the yield of weapons that the searches turned up.

(Click on the graph for a larger view, but you still won’t be able to see that line for guns.)

Guns are the thin red line, so thin that it’s all but invisible – with 762 guns out of 570,000 stops, it’s hard to make it look like any thicker. (A post last year had a pie chart showing the proportion of stops that led to any official action, a larger slice of the pie than the slivers representing guns and other weapons.)

We have known the number of stop-and-frisks only since 2003.** In the next two years, the number doubled. In 2009 police made nearly three times as many stops as they had in 2003. Has this dramatic increase taken a bite out of crime? Let’s ask the experts.

Heather Mac Donald, a research fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has spoken to police officials about the tactic, said there was no question it had an effect on crime.

Ms. Mac Donald is apparently the Times’s go-to conservative on crime issues,*** and she must know. After all, as the Times says, she has spoken with police officials. I don’t have any contacts among the NYPD brass, so I had to look at the available crime statistics. I chose murder. It’s the crime where statistics are the most accurate. It’s also the crime most likely to be reduced by the cops taking guns away from bad guys on the street. So I expected a sharp decrease in the years following 2003.


Hmm. The trend is downward, not dramatic but gradual, and it seems to be a continuation of a trend that started before the big increase in stop-and-frisks. There’s also that rise in murders in 2006, when the number of stop-and-frisks also increased by about 25%, roughly from 400,000 to 500,000. (For a line graph showing the rise in the number of stops, see the Times article)

My analysis is just a quick-and-dirty. To draw a credible conclusion, you’d have to take several other variables into account. A good multivariate model might find that the effect of stop-and-frisk was greater than it appears – maybe Ms. Mac Donald knows of such studies and even mentioned them to the reporter, and he just left them out of his story. Or maybe those high-quality studies, if they exist, found no effect. But just looking at the basic data on the two variables – stops and murder– makes it hard to say that “there was no question of a deterrent effect.”  But Ms. MacDonald said it anyway.

* Or rather they made 570,000 stop-and-frisk searches. Since the usual suspects may have had more than one such encounter, we don’t know how many individuals were stopped. But we do know that 490,000 of them were black or Hispanic, 53,000 were white. Those numbers, while they do not reflect the population of New Yorkers, may reflect the population of street criminals.

** The police agreed to make the data public as part of the settlement of a lawsuit. Four cops stopped a man and wound up firing 41 bullets at him, killing him. They thought he had a gun. In fact, he was unarmed and innocent of any crime. Needless to say, the victim was black, and now the cops have to keep records of stop-and-frisks, including the race of the stop-and-friskee.

*** This post cites her view of the salutary effects of harsh drug laws, a view she supports with evidence comparable to that mentioned in the current article.