Category: Law

Here is a new way of organizing peer groups and your Friday evening out:

The ability to track the locations of people has a lot of other applications of course. As the tracking devices become smaller and cheaper expect to see parents putting them in their children both to protect their children from kidnapping and also simply to find out what trouble the kids are getting themselves into.

Another possible interesting application would be to manage affinity groups. Imagine a traveller who is cruising down a road trying to decide which night club to try out. If people registered with an affinity tracking service then a traveller could choose a club or restaurant whose currently present patrons fit some desired demographic profile. One obvious problem with such a service is that just because one person likes a particular type of person doesn’t mean that most who fit a desired profile will like that person in return. Look at celebrities for example. They are loved by all sorts of people who the celebrities would very much like to avoid. So a service would need to develop eligibility criteria that require matching of preferences in both directions before that person driving down the street would get a flashing light on their car LCD pointing them to a particular bar or night club.

That’s from Randall Parker, read his longer discussion, which focuses on GPS monitoring of criminals.

Serious and violent crimes dropped more than forty percent during the 1990s, more than can be explained by demographic shifts. One reason for the crime drop has been the shrinking trade in crack cocaine, here is one account and a more detailed treatment. For whatever reasons, crack has turned out to be a one-generation drug. As crack fell in popularity, crime rates have fallen in turn.

Richard Rosenfeld, writing in the February Scientific American, raises but does not answer the question why crack markets have bred so much violence compared, say, to marijuana markets. I have thought of several possible and related hypotheses:

1. Cocaine supply, which requires processing in Colombia labs, is more centralized in nature. Centralization leads to monopoly profits and thus a greater incentive for violence to protect territory. There will be mobs and mafias at the top of the supply chain. They will feel threatened if anyone invades their turf, and the tendencies for violence work their way down to the retail level.

2. Marijuana is closer to a constant cost supply drug. You can always grow some in your backyard. The power of mobs is limited correspondingly and the incentive to invest in marketing and addicting your customers is weaker.

3. Marijuana is more of a depressant than is crack. Users are less likely to turn violent when deprived of the drug. Marijuana is less addictive in the sense of inducing total desperation.

4. Crack, which was essentially a new drug, required greater marketing than did marijuana. Marketing led to fights over turf and to violence.

5. Marijuana is used by many members of the middle and upper middle classes. Crack has been more popular in ghettos and with lower income groups, in part because it is potent and cheap. The reasons for the violence differential are found in the nature of the respective clienteles, rather than in the nature of the drugs per se. For instance, when drug carriers walk through a ghetto to supply their customers, they are at greater risk, more likely to carry a gun, more likely to meet with a gang, and so on.

Further ideas from readers are welcome.

The bottom line: When it comes to crime, it matters a great deal which drugs people are taking. Furthermore, if we are able to legalize some but not all drugs, we should consider legalizing the most objectionable drugs, not the tamest ones. Legalizing marijuana, whatever its merits and demerits, would not make a huge dent in the crime rate.

Addendum: Ed Lopez adds the following:

1. Crack is split up a lot more than marijuana so it has (had) far higher markup once it hit the street.

2. The early profiteers were the street distributors who discovered how to multiply the number of doses from the uncut cocaine. That gave suppliers higher up the chain something to grab at.

I think a lot of the violence question boils down to risk-takers competing for rents that weren’t protected by contract.

3. Crack is more ephemeral than pot and used with greater frequency, so users are more prone to commit crimes to acquire additioanl doses.

A theme in writings about SUV’s (see here for a recent New Yorker article) is that consumers tend to overestimate SUV safety and grossly misunderstand the factors behind auto safety. The basic point is that safety comes from avoiding risky situations and quickly responding to danger. It turns out SUV’s tend to lull drivers into a false sense of safety and they respond more slowly to danger (e.g., SUV’s come to a complete stop much more slowly than many other popular types of cars). Because SUV’s are cosmetically altered trucks, they don’t have many basic safety features now standard in small cars or minivans, so you are more likely to die in an SUV accident than in another car (an anti-SUV site collects some Insurance industry reports). Consumer Reports has for many years argued that SUV’s are quite likely to tip over.

One response I’ve seen is to avidly defend consumer choice (see here for Car and Driver’s Brock Yate’s defense, or here for Peter Klein’s comment), or to minimize the SUV’s dangerous design. I think this misses a basic point. When events are infrequent (like fatal auto crashes), or when cause and effect are hard to link, people can opt to believe anything they want. All economics tells us is that markets are extremely good at responding to possibly erroneous consumer beliefs.

My take on this entire issue is that the central issue is liability. In general, you can’t hold someone accountable for the fatalities created by the use of a car with less then optimal safety features, any more than you can hold somebody accountable for the extra risk created by using a less than best bicycle, motorcycle or other device. In short, there is not much people can do about SUV safety because some people will always want to make the trade-off between safety and other product features.

Since the insurance industry is still willing to insure SUV’s, I wonder if the risk associated with them is tolerable given our current legal and economic standards. I invite knowledgable readers to email me information about how much more it costs to insure SUV vs. other vehicles.