Alex Tabarrok has said that increased police on the streets serve as a good solution for temporary crime spikes.
Here’s Montesque’s concern on the matter:
12. Of the Power of Punishments. Experience shows that in countries remarkable for the lenity of their laws the spirit of the inhabitants is as much affected by slight penalties as in other countries by severer punishments.
If an inconvenience or abuse arises in the state, a violent government endeavours suddenly to redress it; and instead of putting the old laws in execution, it establishes some cruel punishment, which instantly puts a stop to the evil. But the spring of government hereby loses its elasticity; the imagination grows accustomed to the severe as well as the milder punishment; and as the fear of the latter diminishes, they are soon obliged in every case to have recourse to the former. Robberies on the highway became common in some countries; in order to remedy this evil, they invented the punishment of breaking upon the wheel, the terror of which put a stop for a while to this mischievous practice. But soon after robberies on the highways became as common as ever.
Desertion in our days has grown to a very great height; in consequence of which it was judged proper to punish those delinquents with death; and yet their number did not diminish. The reason is very natural; a soldier, accustomed to venture his life, despises, or affects to despise, the danger of losing it. He is habituated to the fear of shame; it would have been therefore much better to have continued a punishment30 which branded him with infamy for life; the penalty was pretended to be increased, while it really diminished.
Mankind must not be governed with too much severity; we ought to make a prudent use of the means which nature has given us to conduct them. If we inquire into the cause of all human corruptions, we shall find that they proceed from the impunity of criminals, and not from the moderation of punishments.
Let us follow nature, who has given shame to man for his scourge; and let the heaviest part of the punishment be the infamy attending it.
But if there be some countries where shame is not a consequence of punishment, this must be owing to tyranny, which has inflicted the same penalties on villains and honest men.
And if there are others where men are deterred only by cruel punishments, we may be sure that this must, in a great measure, arise from the violence of the government which has used such penalties for slight transgressions.
It often happens that a legislator, desirous of remedying an abuse, thinks of nothing else; his eyes are open only to this object, and shut to its inconveniences. When the abuse is redressed, you see only the severity of the legislator; yet there remains an evil in the state that has sprung from this severity; the minds of the people are corrupted, and become habituated to despotism.
Lysander31 having obtained a victory over the Athenians, the prisoners were ordered to be tried, in consequence of an accusation brought against that nation of having thrown all the captives of two galleys down a precipice, and of having resolved in full assembly to cut off the hands of those whom they should chance to make prisoners. The Athenians were therefore all massacred, except Adymantes, who had opposed this decree. Lysander reproached Phylocles, before he was put to death, with having depraved the people’s minds, and given lessons of cruelty to all Greece.
“The Argives,” says Plutarch,32 “having put fifteen hundred of their citizens to death, the Athenians ordered sacrifices of expiation, that it might please the gods to turn the hearts of the Athenians from so cruel a thought.”
There are two sorts of corruptions — one when the people do not observe the laws; the other when they are corrupted by the laws: an incurable evil, because it is in the very remedy itself.

Back in September Phillip Johnson commented on the UK’s economic position and the likely criminal trends in the near future:

Most violence is caused by young men against young men, usually at night, when they are drunk. At a time of economic slowdown, fewer go to pubs and clubs, there are fewer clashes and violence falls.
Domestic violence, by contrast, tends to rise as unemployed men are at home, household finances come under strain, and there is greater tension within families.

The piece speaks to the obvious fact that crime goes up as times get tough but the fact that it is crime of particular types amongst particular people speaks to how dissatisfying poverty is as a fundamental cause of criminal behavior.
My first thought: much like Venkatesh has pointed out the counter-recession aspects of the oldest profession, I would guess less money spent on state law enforcement, less money on the drug war and thus less violence in the drug war to secure rents.

Before the bailout I was skeptical that the bailout would 1) work as it said it would and 2) that it would carry its own unintended consequences. Looks like we’re coming to those hard truths day by day as markets continue to resist being “stabilized.”
I was also trying to understand another perspective of the argument against the bailout. How bad of a recession are we talking about without the bailout? While a lot of comparisons get thrown around that these are “the worst financial times since the great depression,” I find it hard to believe that we should expect depression-like outcomes (food shortages, high unemployment, homelessness, etc) in today’s economy. Today’s economy is different from the 1930s, specifically with regard to the speed and flow of information. I doubt that large portions of the population would wander about desperately hoping to find jobs in a modern economy if only because there will be less waste and uncertainty as to where jobs are and are not available. Today’s recession and the trials it erupts, has the luxury of being facilitated and powered through by a society that is extremely well connected to one another via telecommunications devices, the world wide web, and digital banking.
Times are tough, I better let my friend know about this marginally better job offer that he’d be good for. Times are tough, I know my uncle has a stable income maybe I could borrow a small loan from him instead of the bank.
John Stossel mentions, Landsburg for writing,

“Banks don’t lend their own money; they lend other people’s (their depositors’ and their stockholders’). Just because the banks disappear doesn’t mean the lenders will. Borrowers will still want to borrow, and lenders will still want to lend. The only question is whether they’ll be able to find each other [A]s any user of Match.com can tell you, the technology for finding partners has improved since [the 1930s].”

I realize it sounds bizarre to say “we don’t need banks we’ll just use craigslist,” but at the right margins it makes a lot of sense. Much of the world uses informal enforcement devices to secure borrowing and lending contracts because the formal and governmental sectors are weak and or corrupt in those countries. We could develop similar lending devices provoked by financial turmoil rather than bad or corrupt institutions.
In turn one would expect these channels to build up and develop into stronger institutions more resilient to unforeseen dilemmas in the future. After time and tested lending through the currently informal sector one would expect those channels to be better suited at dealing with economic fluctuations down the line.

Hat tip to Pete at Austrian Economists. Here’s Chris at Notablog on A Crisis of Political Economy.

Not only a great crash course in recent financial regulatory history, not only a sound presentation of the insights of constitutional political economy, but also an enjoyable read digestible to the everyman.
A great thanks to Steve, for producing such a classic and relevant piece in such a timely manner. If you’re being asked by friends and family what you think, or what they should look at to learn more about the current financial crises, this is it.

Yesterday at Austrian Economists, Pete was puzzled how the political rhetoric behind the financial crisis managed to wind its way around the topic of executive rewards. Some people were using the platform to voice concerns about wealth, greed and inequality. Not only are these huge companies failing, not only do hundreds of thousands of Americans appear to be on shaky grounds with regard to their mortgages and financial assets, but executives at some of these firms make really high salaries. Oh the horror, the horror!
Steve Horwitz awarded me victory of the thread for this comment:

Shouldn’t we expect failing companies to desperately try to attract innovative and talented executives to implement desperate efforts at turning the company around?

This reminded me of a related point. While traveling last weekend the person next to me on the plane had Greenspan’s new biography. When I saw it I immediately thought of a point from Jim Collins’ From Good to Great.
Collins wanted to answer why some companies have done so well above average market returns for so long (sounds similar to “why some countries are rich and other countries are poor?”). His first intuition is to ignore leadership because if it all boils down to “you have to have Steve Jobs to make a profit” than there is no replicable advice for the marginal company. But even though he wants to avoid leadership he keeps coming back to it and recognizes a unique distinction. The companies that pull out as great have leaders you wouldn’t think of as great. They’re reserved, quiet, work-a-holic types, rather than larger than life Lee Iaccoca types.
Now the real point. Nothing speaks more highly to your specific contribution to a firm (rather than the stability and profitability of the firm itself) than the fact that it falls apart as soon as you leave. That’s what came to mind when I saw the Greenspan biography.
Maybe that’s what’s happening in this financial crisis. If so we should interpret it as a sign of the broken nature of these financial institutions – specifically incentives for self-enforcing constraints. I’m not saying Greenspan was great but maybe he was better than the available alternatives and it’s because of his own relative prudence and foresight that we’ve had financial stability in the past decades. But the institutions themselves and the incentives for financial intervention that they promote are messed up to the core. Now these gone things have gone to hell in a hand-basket.
We usually think that the worst tend to get on top but when someone marginally less than awful gets the job we should be careful not to confuse his quality with the quality of the system.

Though I would expect that one of the benefits of economic freedom and prosperity was safety and security in person and property. There is little to no observable correlation between crime rates and economic freedom. If there was we could have an argument about which came first the chicken or the egg, does a foundational respest for person and property make economies boom, or do booming economies afford the ability to secure person and property. Controlling for OECD and various other things doesn’t really help get out a correlation.
The major reason for not seeing correlation here is because international crime data is pretty bad. Not bad in so far as the numbers are false, but bad in so far as the numbers are incomparable with one another. Different countries have different laws and budgets for law enforcement etc. This is desperately trying to be overcome with various statistical techniques. But I’ll bet we could use some cruder indicators to get out a decent correlation.
Empirical evidence on proportionality has shown that different countries maintain similar ordinal ranks of criminal severity but they vary in magnitude. Other studies are being done to measure the gap between crime and reported crime. I would argue that the placement of murder in the consistent tops of ordinal scales across countries tells us it can be selected as a good objective proxy for crime across countries. Now if we can get a good proxy for the differences between murders committed and murders reported then we would have a good objective measure of how much people trust the cops in their country and I’d expect to see the correlation with economic freedom a la Claudia Williams style.
Lastly I would expect the correlation to be stronger if we held constant for prison populations of non violent offenders. Ideally this would parse out the fact that some of the violent offenders are violent because of the profit potential for prohibition trades.
Any thoughts are welcome.

It seems the financial crises has struck a chord with economists both near and far. The following was one of my comments from The Austrian Economists:

I like to begin a lot my classes by explaining that economics is not all about boring GDP, interest rates and financial markets its about a much richer and deeper set of topics pertaining to all of human behavior.
Perhaps I’ve taken that too far because admittedly I know very little about the contemporary political history surrounding the American financial crises. It seems true regardless of the causes that we must in fact understand the causes before any proposed cure can hope to be effective. As for the cause there are two mainstream perspectives: (1) the republicans did it by de-regulating the financial markets, (2) the democrats did it by sub optimally regulating the financial markets. And both of these lead to some sort of bail out with tweaking today.
I think these obviously seem shortsighted, and I am puzzled at the state of economic understanding in much the same way as Boettke. If 500 planes fell out of the sky we wouldn’t blame gravity we would blame some form of policy or plan, and rightly so. To blame markets in this case seems odd.
But what are these specific “de-regulations” that people are accusing the republicans of?
There’s a host of literature that admits to temporary downturns after de-regulations, if the Republicans truly understood the process of deregulation and had some sort of ideological end in mind, then they would have owned up to the potential of downturns and been prepared for such social expansions (because it would threaten their end). I think this greatly weakens the claim that there is some sort of laissez faire conspiracy behind Washington republicans.

Whenever I come across a website or online article worth reading I bookmark it. Doing some spring cleaning today and want to delete these from my sidebar but not loose track of them forever. They’re obviously relevant here:
1. James Wilson at Volokh Conspiracy claims the net gain from incarceration is worth it.
2. A new blog in the form of a personal recollection of life on the inside from Jon.
3. An op ed on how to survive prison.
4. Levitt comments on inmate uses of technology.
5. Cowen points to this new paper on the econ of Vengeance and this other paper on why burglaries have declined.
6. Some political commentary on the extreme rate of incarceration from Jennifer Gonnerman at Mother Jones. More from Physorg.com and from the creator of the Wire at Reason. Concern about bail for profit in America at NYT.
7. What’s proportionate punishment for child rape?
8. Top 100 criminal justice blogs.
9. Brian Hollar on prison rape.
10. Dick Clark on buying a handgun.
11. Prisoner releases in low budget states and the UK.
Admittedly some of these are old news but here they are. Enjoy.