jamesz

Of prostitutes, police and power

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Matt observes that some crimes are not worth reporting, and it is probably sub-optimal for the police to do anything about them if they are reported. The flipside of that is the cost to society of criminalising behaviour and then refusing to enforce the rules. Sudhir Venkatesh and Steven Levitt’s new paper on prostitution in Chicago finds that the power imbalance created by its criminality imposes large costs on the industry’s workers. Via Foreign Policy:

They estimate that roughly 3 percent of all tricks performed by prostitutes who aren’t working with pimps are freebies given to police to avoid arrest… leading the authors to conclude that “a prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one.”When freebies given to gang members are factored in, about one in 20 tricks go solely for protection and the “privilege” of plying their trade. When freebies given to gang members are factored in, about one in 20 tricks go solely for protection and the “privilege” of plying their trade.

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Matt Nolan

Is policing some crimes optimal?

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When someone gets robbed there are some direct costs and benefits. Firstly, the perpetrator receives the goods and or services, and may also derive some pleasure from the activity itself. Secondly the victim suffers the loss of goods and services, and is hurt by the fact they have become a victim.

If this crime is reported to the police and solved successfully then there are a number of losers. Society has to pay the police to solve the crime, the criminal loses any goods and has to pay/go to jail, and the victim loses a significant amount of time making statements etc. Most people that have a criminal case against them try to get a criminal defense lawyer, I suggest talking to Chambers Legal or the criminal lawyers Roanoke. In some cases, the time cost to the victim turns out to be greater than the benefit from having the crime solved (these are the people that regret having taken their case to the police). The folks at Liberty Bell Law criminal attorney Los Angeles CA, though, make it a point that crime is brought to books and justice delivered as quickly as possible.

In some cases, this type of outcome is quite common (eg for small traffic accidents), and the only reason people initially go to the police is because they don’t realise how large the effort and time cost will be (often as a result of mis-information). If this is the case, then everyone loses from a crime being reported and solved, implying that it would have been better if the crime was never reported.

However, this logic feels like it has something missing. Why would police be trained to under-sell the costs associated with reporting these crimes unless there was some good reason for it?

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Matt Nolan

Banning supermarket bags?

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Supposedly there is a plastic bag ban in China, and plans to introduce one in Australia. Now the reason these places want to ban plastic bags has to do with externalities associated with plastic bags (Aussie), both as a pollutant and in terms of the aesthetic appeal (China).

I’m not generally a fan of banning things that are currently not banned, especially in a situation where a pricing mechanism is easy to apply. Now I was pleased to see that the Green Party feels the same way, with Jeanette Fitzsimons stating that she was not in favour of an all-out ban and would support compulsory payment for bags.

If too many plastic bags are being consumed, we should make people pay for them. If we then set the price such that the benefit to the individual of a plastic bag equals the cost to society everything is fine.

However, then I realised that this was all too easy. If everyone already agrees with your point of view why say anything! So I’ve decided to try and make a case for why banning bags may be better than placing a price on them.

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jamesz

Return to sender

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Dwindling natural resources and increasing consumption are global problems that get plenty of airtime these days. So where do all the metals extracted and ‘consumed’ go? Well, apparently they end up in dumps in Japan:

Despite perception of Japan being short of natural resources, “urban mines” mean the country actually possesses world-leading amounts of rare metals such as gold, silver, lead and indium… in discarded items such as cars or electrical equipment. Japan’s urban mines contain about 61 percent of known natural indium reserves, 22 percent of natural silver reserves, 16 percent of natural gold reserves and 10 percent of natural lead reserves.

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jamesz

Biased impartiality in the media

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Half the internet seems to be talking about the US Presidential primaries at the moment, so Jeremy Burke’s work on media bias seems particularly pertinent. I might talk about his other papers another time but the one that’s captured my attention today addresses the myth that balanced media coverage is equivalent to fair coverage.

It is usually accepted that the media should provide unbiased coverage of events and issues. Unfortunately it is difficult for the reader to tell how biased the coverage is if they have no prior information about the issues being reported. In the absence of further information it can appear that coverage which reports both sides of a contentious issue is the least biased. In the competitive world of large media conglomerates a reputation for accurate, unbiased coverage is essential. The competition drives reporters to appear impartial by simply reporting the arguments provided on each side of a debate. Of course, providing both sides of an issue and reporting it in an unbiased fashion are not always the same thing.
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jamesz

Rational repression

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Perhaps it is apropos to start the new year’s blogging with a look back at history. A working paper reported at Vox examines Stalin’s gulags from an economic, rather than political, viewpoint. In Western capitalist economies it is the threat of losing one’s job that motivates effort in employment. If you shirk and are caught then you get fired. However, in a centrally planned economy there is no possibility of getting fired: everyone has a role to play and nobody is left out. How then is a dictator who’s done the hard yards planning out the lives of an entire country for five years to motivate his workforce? Miller and Smith suggest that Stalin used the gulags as a device to enforce discipline among workers. Read more