Value Competition

Why the US and Canadian Crime Decline in the 1990s?

I recently finished The Great American Crime Decline by criminologist Franklin Zimring.  It's a judicious discussion of possible reasons for the 1990s decline in crime that pays considerable attention to the famous Levitt/Donohue idea that the availability of abortion post Roe v. Wade led to lower crime rates years later as a generation of wanted children came of age.  Zimring is skeptical, partly because examination of pre and post Roe data shows increases rather than declines in categories, such as the proportion of babies born to unwed teenage mothers, that would logically be associated with unwanted children.  He's also skeptical because in Canada, which had a crime decline in the 1990s similar to the US (despite not increasing its incarceration or policing levels), there wasn't the US tilt toward crime rates going down especially fast among younger offenders that Levitt and Donohue use to support their claim.

I'm sympathetic to Zimring's conclusion that both purely demographic explanations (a lower proportion of young males) and rational choice explanations like incapacitation, general deterrence, policing quality and quantity, and Levitt and Donohue's leave a great deal of the 1990s crime decline unexplained.   I'm less than sure, though, about his claim that the 1990s decline occurred without a substantial change in the social fabric of American big cities, in which the decline was especially striking. 

My candidate, unmentioned by Zimring, for a significant demographic plus cultural explanation for 1990s US and Canadian crime declines, especially in certain big cities, is large-scale, ongoing immigration to both the US and Canada over the past several decades.  Contrary to a rational choice analysis, which would all else equal expect high immigration to create more crime among low-SES native-born residents of US and Canadian cities who compete with new immigrants for jobs, I think there is a value competition story to tell about how the arrival of waves of immigrants to the US from the 1970s on has enabled the growth over time of a working-class culture of pride and disdain among low-SES native-born Americans and Canadians ("we play by the rules instead of coming illegally; we know the language; we don't wait on the street for work; we're real Americans/Canadians" ) that was not possible when there was no large-scale new immigration to US and Canadian cities from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa.   To put it in VC-speak: It's worth developing and trying to test the hypothesis that egoistic values encouraging deferral of immediate gratification for long-term gain and altruistic values encouraging adherence to the rules of criminal law have gained some ground among low-SES, non-immigrant Americans and Canadians.  A poor young black man in New York, Chicago, or Compton, California whose family has been in the U.S. for centuries and who has come of age from around 1990 to the present has grown up in a group that lacks the clear bottom-of-the-totem-pole position that applied to his father's generation of poor black Americans, and that has plausibly made a positive difference in fostering working-class values over crime.  For new immigrants themselves, there is a very plausible rational choice story about a desire to avoid criminal problems that could result in deportation; for them, too, though, one could tell a value competition story about their having their own combination of pride and disdain relative to low-SES native-born Americans and Canadians ("we work hard; our families stay together; our women are honored") that is also conducive to the avoidance of criminal behavior.

To test the VC hypothesis just suggested, it would be interesting to have longitudinal attitudinal data, including ethnographies as well as surveys; an updated version of Talley's Corner, Elliot Liebow's 1968 study of lower class black men in Washington, D.C. would be extremely interesting.

One easy thing to do: It's interesting to take Table 1.1 in Zimring's first chapter, which shows the ranking of the fifteen biggest U.S. cities in reducing crime in the 1990s, and relate it to the proportion of foreign-born residents in the city in 2000, which I calculated from the census website:

1.  New York City  .36   2.  San Diego  .26   3.  San Francisco   .37   4.  Dallas  .24    5.  Los Angeles  .41    6.  Houston  .26   7.  San Antonio  .12   8.  San Jose .37    9.  Chicago  .22   10.  Indianapolis .05   11.  Phoenix .19    12.  Detroit  .05   13. Columbus .07   14.  Philadephia  .09   15. Baltimore  .05

Like most social science relationships, it's not an air-tight one, but it's pretty strong.  For each 10% increase in its foreign born population, a big city is expected to do 2.7 ranks better in its level of crime decline; the correlation between % foreign born and excelling in crime decline is .79, so over 60% of the variance is explained.  Obviously, a more thorough analysis would need to control for other factors (e.g., whether cities with higher foreign born populations also have higher economic growth, and what proportion of greater crime declines in high foreign born cities is associated with low crime among the new immigrants themselves), but the quick and dirty analysis suggests that the effect of immigration on crime by old-timers as well as newcomers is at the very least worth looking into further.  That project can be carried out with or without a value competition focus; a value competition emphasis on a possible growth of egoistic and altruistic values among low-SES native-born Americans and Canadians in response to an influx of new immigrants is one way, but of course not the only way, to interpret the data.

Do We Already Have a Science of Value Competition?

An off-the-cuff ranking of how much existing work within the big five social science disciplines focuses on differences among people in norms/values and whether those differences are helpful or not:

1) Political sc ience: Madisonian checks and balances and pluralism are both typically couched in terms of interests rather than values.  But both are readily expressed in value competition terms.  There is an especially close fit between VC and the subfield of pluralism devoted to cross-cutting cleavages (e.g., religion and language in Switzerland, where both French and German speakers are divided into Catholics and Protestants); one way to summarize the VC model for politics is to say that left-right ideology in an optimal system is the cross-cutting cleavage for class/status.  Also, formal political science from Downs on, although it has not focused on efficiency with the clarity typical of economics, contains within it a significant body of work, including Downs' own, that makes assertions about the efficacy or inefficacy of party competition.

2)  Psychology: Personality psychology seems to me highly oriented toward the position that different rather than identical temperaments are useful; some aspects of evolutionary psychology (e.g., the utility of having a certain proportion of homosexuals) have a like tilt.  Although divided self approaches like Freud''s may not be efficiency-oriented, they offer another point of connection with VC.

3) Anthropology: Levi-Strauss seems to me to be postulating structural oppositions within consciousness that are simultaneously irrational and useful; reading The Savage Mind or rereading Tristes Tropiques or The Raw and the Cooked would clarify my thinking on that point.  Other anthropologists?...not much I recall on this from my memories of Margaret Mead or Ruth Benedict...likely need to read more stuff.

4)  Sociology: Weber's split between the rationality of means and of ends comes to mind.  My general sense is of a field that laments the class/status differences that are its central subject; perhaps, though, I'm missing more interesting work in sociology than either implict or explicit denunciations of class/status, or endorsements of it as functional.  Need to check that out...

5) Economics: Modeling that features agents of different types, with the differences in types either leading to or thwarting optimality, would be on point.  Divided selves work like Schelling's is relevant.  Formal political science like Buchanan and Tullock that is also economics is also relevant.  Overall, though, my sense is that the VC framework, with its assumption of conflicting values within people as well as across people, is more problematic for economics than it is for the other social sciences.

Class/Status Politics

 A nice semi-recent post from my favorite among the liberal bloggers, Matt Yglesias (http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/03/a_center_right_nation_forever.php):

"A Center-Right Nation Forever"

"James Joyner, surveying some data about the demographic shifts threatening conservative politics, concludes “We’ll always have a strong “conservative” movement. It’s just that Ronald Reagan and Alex P. Keaton wouldn’t quite recognize it.”

I would go stronger than that, actually, and posit that American politics in the future will mostly be dominated by a center-right political coalition just as it always has. This is just how things work. A political coalition grounded in the social mores of the ethno-sectarian majority and the ideas of the business class has overwhelming intrinsic advantages against contrary movements grounded in the complaints of minority groups and the economic claims of the lower orders. It’s a little bit hard to even know what a permanent progressive governing majority would mean, and harder to know how you would sustain it. When you think about how different countries wind up where they are, it’s never because the political left secures some kind of decisive victory over the political right. Instead, things the left puts in place during moments of victory manage to secure mainstream acceptance and survive periods of center-right electoral victory. That’s the National Health Service under Thatcher, Social Security under Eisenhower, the Civil Rights Act under Nixon, or Medicare under Reagan. The dominant position of the Democratic Party for much of the 20th Century was achieved through the strange method of the Democratic Party containing a lot of very very very very conservative politicians. The actual periods of major progressive legislation were brief—but they had lasting impact.

If we succeed in achieving major progressive reforms in 2009 and 2010, we’re going to create a situation in which the existence of a workable national health care system deprives the Democrats of a winning electoral issue. A certain number of voters who have conservative views on some other topics but who liked progressive ideas on health care will vote for more Republicans. If progressives succeed in increasing economic mobility and decreasing inequality, that will probably increase the number of middle- and upper-class Hispanics who decide they want tax cuts. The goal, however, is to achieve the goal of a more just society, not to win a bunch of elections."

I disagree with this in a variety of ways—assuming imperfect information and a desirable mix of egoistic and altruistic values by the electorate, I think it's far far far far better to have victory-motivated politicians than “take as much for my side as possible and then rely on status-quo bias” ideologues, and I think the identification of the left with cultural as well as socioeconomic underdogs is wrong both as a matter of optimal alignment and as a matter of how things now work in the US and other wealthy democracies.

At the same time, I believe it is entirely right to relate the left-right cleavage to class/status. As I've worked on the political model, I've seen myself as reacting to a “left underdogs-right overdogs” model of politics like the one Yglesias expresses. But the model also signs on to a class/status view of society, not as an essential truth about human beings but as a device assumed to be useful to get opinions aligned on a single axis and overcome the Arrovian nightmare of cycling and the Olsonian nightmare of politics as endless special interest deals. The specific elite-majority twist—that you want have the left incarnate the middle class on culture and the working class on economics and the right do the reverse--is important, I think, but doesn't obviate the point that the model uses the class-status axis to organize the sides. The recognition that the model is one of class/status politics suggests two avenues for further work: first, formalizing the value of class/status politics compared to random and special interest politics, rather than simply citing Arrow, Olson, etc; second, thinking about debts to and continuities with class-oriented approaches like Marx's rather than simply viewing those ways of thinking about the world as misbegotten.

A Fourth Dichotomy?

In going through papers in management (especially papers in practitioner-oriented as opposed to academic management), I could pigeonhole many of them them according to their positions on the calculation/culture dichotomy.  (I could and did classify all of them according to their positions on the positive/normative dichotomy, but since that involves a forced choice, I don't think too much of that as a result.)  With papers on business ethics, calculation/culture didn't have such power, though it was quite salient.   To cover enough papers, as well as for other reasons, I added the self-other and left-right dichotomies.

Now I'm considering a similar analysis of history papers with Deirdre Collier, and wondering whether those three dichotomies will cover the waterfront pretty well, or whether a dimension relating to moral relativism/moral realism, or possibly something else, is called for.  My outsider's sense--perhaps overly influenced by the 1980s and the heyday of "theory"--is that the humanities have been roiled to a considerably greater degree than the social sciences or the applied disciplines by "what can we know" issues.   But I'm loath to add another dichotomy unless it fits into an overall theoretical scheme. 

One thought on how relativism/realism might connect with an overall value competition framework: To make the basic individual and political models of choice work, there need to be norms of varying intensity within people (at time A I'm mild-mannered on issue x, at time B I'm fierce on issue x) as well as across people.  The presence internally and externally of the relativism/realism pole could be modeled in terms of the optimality of norms varying not only by direction (altruism-egoism), mode of justification (calculation-culture), and status or class (left-right), but also by intensity.   Assuming varying intensities of norms within individuals as well as socially are called for, intensity-dampening "relativism" as well as intensity-enhancing "realism" could serve that purpose. 

Mr. Posner, Meet Mr. Kennedy

Within living memory, American law schools were the site of an academic battle of sorts between two rising jurisprudential approaches: law and economics, epitomized by Richard Posner, and critical legal studies, epitomized by Duncan Kennedy.  Back in the 1990s, I argued in an encyclopedia article for a mini-movement of cls l&e that would be a kind of fusion of the two movements http://encyclo.findlaw.com/0660book.pdf, and I'm now inclined to take up that cause again.  The argument would parallel the one in my recent business ethics paper: 1) cls claimed/claims that law is ideological; 2) test the claim, using legal academic work and judicial opinions (examining the calculation/culture and self/other dichotomies as well); 3) make an l&e case for the value of ideological competition; 4) contend that the l&e case for norms competition and the cls case for ideological contradiction share common elements; and 5) suggest that the l&e and cls positions combined can yield insights on ideological splits and other kinds of splits within law.

Two Ways to Counter Strategic Behavior in the Brain

A feedback mechanism in the brain that affects which center of the brain has control is subject to being gamed by the voting units.  A unit that favors side X would like to stuff the ballot box on behalf of X.   Two possible ways to control that tendency: a) the brain has a one unit-one vote system, with only a certain predetermined number of voting units; or b) brain units are randomly pushed either in the direction of stronger support for their pre-existing preference ("egoism") or against their pre-existing preference ("altruism"). 

If "egoism" and "altruism" are assumed--the second case--and it is further assumed that the units are "aware" of their being pushed in egoistic and altruistic directions but not of their underlying preference, units do not have an incentive to stuff the ballot box by intensifying their post-push preference.  The reason is that the unit "knows" that its underlying pre-push preference is just as likely to lie in the direction of lesser intensity as it is to lie in the direction of greater intensity.

If one unit-one vote applies, brain elections can be modelled in a fashion directly parallel to the modeling of political elections, with "egoism" and "altruism" introduced to solve problems of intensity and participation costs.   Thus in this case as in the second case, egoism and altruism--which here can be interpreted in a mechanistic, trip a switch fashion--play a useful role.  

Values in the Brain as a Counter to Strategic Behavior

1)  Assume competing control centers in the brain and a feedback mechanism for evaluating their performance and affecting their continued control. 

2) A significant problem with a brain vote would be efforts by parts of the system to game the outcome by flooding the system with feedback.  In political democracy, that problem can be alleviated by giving each person only one vote, but a similar mechanism to define the size of the electorate and give each unit only one vote is harder to imagine for the brain than for the state.

3) An alternative possibility for avoiding gaming the system involves feedback units in the brain being affected by egoistic and altruistic norms/values/signals/mechanisms that push the unit semi-randomly away from the feedback it would otherwise provide.   Just as individuals in an electorate perceive their party values as theirs, so too would brain units.  By pushing them in different directions, such values/signals could reduce or perhaps eliminate their incentive for units to game the system by providing extra feedback for their side and repressing the vote of the other side.

It Would Be NIce If...

a model of individual choice called for the same kind of egoistic and altruistic norms called for by the elite-majority bargain model.   One reasonable objection to the model of collective choice is, "Yes, you've shown that it would be nice if people had their underlying preferences affected by norms in the way that you describe.  But given that such norms make it harder rather than easier for the individual who has them to get his or her way under your model compared to an individual who lacks such norms, I don't see the plausibility of such values arising and flourishing."  A nice response would be: "But note that the same kind of values are also useful within the brain...here's how that works...so the combination of egoistic and altruitic values, and/or the capacity for such values, is not an artifact of the political model but is also a feature of the psychological model of individual choice..."

The Value of Class Conflict

The model in my paper with Deirdre Collier can be interpreted either in general majority-minority terms or in class-oriented (or status-oriented) terms.  The model's assumptions about useful reinforcing and cross-cutting norms, though, make considerably more intuitive sense in relation to overall class or status divides in society--for which it's reasonably plausible that a strong set of altruistic and egoistic values could develop--than they do in relation to any and all majority-minority divisions.   

To hook this back to the issue of modeling the natural state of elite deals and the utility of class-oriented, egoistic values in opening up that state:  As an outsider in the natural state, my immediate concern is getting in on an elite bargain that I'm currently excluded from as an outsider.   The intensity of my concern to enter the inner circle may be very high indeed, and in some cases will lead to my success.  But it represents no threat to the structure of suboptimal elite bargains that makes up the natural state.  

  

A Sketch of a Model of Useful Class Conflict

1.  Assume a "natural state" of many suboptimal, anti-competitive elite bargains;

2.  Assume a universal franchise;

3.  Assume that voters are rational, defined as acting according to their preferences rather than according to egoistic or altruistic norms;

4.  Assume that a majority of the electorate consists of outsiders who are not part of the system of elite bargains;

5.  Results of initial assumptions (need to work on how these results are generated): The rational majority of outsiders will support candidates who espouse populist policies (e.g., subsidized food) and ending special privileges for at least some elites, but will not engage in (nonrational) monitoring of the elites they elect to determine whether elite privileges have in fact been curtailed.  Further, no elite will arise to do that monitoring that has credibility with a majority of outsiders.  The outcome is that the natural state continues under democracy. 

6.  Assumptions about values/norms (need to work on not making these too strong and thus assuming the conclusion):  a) It is not possible to imbue a sufficient number of outsiders in a natural state with pro-market norms that will overcome their rational unwillingness to monitor; b) It is possible to imbue a clear majority of the educated, affluent elite in a natural state with pro-market norms, but only in response to a threat of the overthrow of elite bargains in favor of something worse for that elite than competitive markets; c) It is possible only under specific circumstances (need to be detailed) for advocacy of the overthrow of existing elite bargains and elite rule in favor of the abolition of existing elites and rule on behalf of outsiders to be a credible threat to the elites of the natural state; d) It is possible to imbue close to or slightly over half of the educated, affluent elite in favor of pro-market norms on either economics or culture, along with pro-natural state norms on the other domain.

7.  Results-implications (lot of work needed here): a) The transition of Western Europe from natural states to open states can be understood in terms of a credible threat posed by outsider revolution/communism/socialism to elite bargains; that threat led to majorities or significant portions of elites opting for pro-market, competitive norms; b) Changed historical circumstances associated with the debacles of outsider anti-market revolutions make the threat of outsider revolution not credible currently, which means it is unlikely that current natural states can follow the Western European path to becoming open states; c) A more plausible contemporary trajectory for transition from the natural state to the open state involves the breaking up of natural state elites through a significant fraction of culturally traditionalist, nationalist elites becoming committed to market norms on economics while remaining culturally traditionalist and nationalist (e.g., Chile, South Korea); by comparison, classically liberal elites who favor competition on both dimensions are likely to be ineffective as change agents in natural states, partly because they will be perceived as tools of the US and the West.