Another imperative shaping this book’s construction and its presentation of causality comes from the nine years I’ve spent on the Pulitzer Prize board, which means reading a ton of investigative journalism, as well as a fair amount of nonfiction emerging out of investigative journalism. Gradually I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in which a huge amount of writing in this genre has the same causal structures built into it. Take, for example, investigative journalism on childcare centers where children get abused or neglected, or on eldercare facilities where sexual abuse of elders occurs. You can end up reading any number of studies where vulnerable people get abused and fall through the cracks. The causal story structuring 85% of the writing in this field suggests that such abuse plays out because the government hasn’t regulated these sectors enough. A standard solution follows: we need more government regulation of childcare centers or more government regulation of eldercare centers or more government regulation of how nonflammable mattresses get produced. But if we truly acted on all these calls for regulation coming out of investigative journalism, I think we would have a state at a level that we cannot even imagine.Allen is assuming that regulations can only be enforced by a Regulatory Agency funded and staffed by the State. The problem with such Agencies is that they may be 'Captured'- i.e. rendered ineffective or manipulated into creating monopolistic profits by creating an artificial barrier to entry- or else impose high compliance costs in a corrupt manner.
One alternative is for Industries to self-regulate so to avoid becoming a repugnancy market. The other is for Consumer groups to exercise a countervailing power through litigation and public 'naming and shaming'. Quality certification is frequently done by wholly private organisations or those funded by the industry in question.
In all these cases some amount of Regulation can improve outcomes without necessarily giving rise to a costly bureaucracy or expansion of the State.
Allen does not understand the concept of correlated strategies in Game Theory. Regulations are public signals which improve the outcome for everybody. They reduce administrative costs. They roll back the State. Why? They permit Civil Society to burgeon and thus 'internalize' negative externalities which previously had to be policed. Where local authorities are empowered to enforce different laws, subsidiarity based Tiebout sorting further improves allocative efficiency and allows for 'endogenous growth' of a particularly valuable type. Capacitance diversity increases globally thus rendering the system as a whole more robust.
So as I began to research this book, I thought about which core causal story might most writers come at it from. I knew, going in, that I had to present more complexity to this causal story than “Somebody ought to do something,” or “If there had been a regulation everything would have worked out fine.” But I also knew that, precisely because one kind of causality so dominates our writing landscape, if I wanted to represent different forms of causality, I would have to find and adopt different writing techniques. So one approach I found really useful comes out of economic game theory, with its ways of thinking about equilibrium states, where incentive structures generate patterns of behavior that stay in equilibrium, and where you also can track phase shifts from one equilibrium to another.
Phase shifts occur in networks or cellular automata where all agents, or monads, obey a mindless rule. Game theory is quite different because there are cooperative strategies, which however may not be stable. Eusocial mechanisms make them so. Allen's own subject was valued because it represented a rational and secular, as opposed to Revealed Scripture based, approach to such mechanism design.
I had a moment of discovery when I realized that this sequence of acceleration in Michael’s life, when he went from very small, not super frequent thefts to really violent acts, provides one of those phase shifts. I sensed that if I could find and trace these phase shifts in Michael’s equilibrium, then I could get to a different answer about causality, and so that’s what I did. But then I also needed to write that process. So I don’t know if you remember this one passage…
The prose all of the sudden keeps repeating the word “shift.”
Exactly. Thank you for your careful reading. I use this image of a vacuum tube getting whisked up. I had to find images that convey this new way of thinking about causality that economics has delivered to us, but which has not yet appeared much in nonfiction. I had to try to render causality differently in nonfiction. Again that effort lies beneath this whole book.This is bonkers. A 15 year old gets hold of a gun. Guns are cool. So are cars. Within a couple of weeks of getting hold of a gun, his crime spree culminates in an attempted car-jacking. Unfortunately, the middle aged geezer he is trying to jack grabs the gun and shoots him in the neck.
Young adult Fiction and films have been showing this 'phase shift'- which involves crossing a threshold for violence- since before I was born. This is a story about thrill seeking and pop culture. This particular 15 year old probably watched rap videos featuring cool young punks brandishing pistols. He had probably viewed countless car chases on TV growing up. Being a well built, personable, young man, he felt he was the hero in his own gangster rap video. He was jacking a car at gun point and the next thing that would happen would be a car chase with the cops featuring all the usual cinematic tropes, till he finally ditches the smoking hulk of a vehicle and walks away looking cool.
So now to the substance of this causality. As I traced the history of our drug market’s own equilibrium shifts, it became increasingly clear how much we all focus our analytical powers specifically on the world that we can see (that is, on the state).WTF? We can't see the State. Its functioning is wholly opaque which is why K street makes so much money. We can see the street. In some neighbourhoods, having a gun and being known to have jacked a car is going to get you laid and make you popular. In others... not so much. Everything depends on the street you grow up on. That's why people pay a lot of money to move from one type of street to another. That's economics.
But tracing Michael’s phase shift, situated in a different world, helped me finally to see that other world with its own equilibrium, its own incentive structures generating different kinds of behavior. That particular thinking process finally made the parastate visible to me.15 year old kids don't constitute a 'parastate'. There was no equilibrium which Michael was 'discovering' because there was no rational self-interest or genuine money motive. This was about thrill seeking and looking cool. An 'affluenza' plea would have got him a suspended sentence with some mandatory counselling at a 5 star rehab facility. But, Michael's Mom wasn't affluent and his Uncle, who may have been, doesn't seem to have helped much.
Michael wasn't high at the time he committed the crimes for which he was sentenced. Something else had disinhibited him. What? It may have been the intoxicating presence of other young people he was trying to impress. Or it may have been his own imaginative power which could picture himself as a ruthless gangster in so compelling a manner that he acted as one. Allen tell us her cousin 'had a mild proclivity for theft'. That was before he got hold of a gun and went on a crime spree.
He had a good physique and was popular with his peers. He thought he'd make a good armed robber but it turned out he was mistaken- he was crap at gun play. At his age, I had a mild proclivity for being a nerd because of the kind of street I grew up on. I imagined myself as being good at maths. I started borrowing some elementary texts from the library on subjects like tensor calculus. But, it turned out, I was crap at maths. I could pass the easy sort of maths exams we have in Econ but would never develop any creative insights into the techniques I was mindlessly applying. I had to content myself with the prison of junk social science and the malaise of physics envy. At some stage, I encountered structuralist French psilosophy which features pseudo-mathematical bullshit. I buggered it to buggery in my prison cell. My fate was sealed. My poetry is at best shite staining the socio-proctologicial digit of many fingered Time. It has nothing to do with our intersubjective reality. At best it is ontologically dysphoric. At worst, it is paranoid or dyspeptic.
The same can be said of Michael and of his transgender lover who- in the troubadour or ghazal tradition- was also his assassin. Their reality was orthogonal to that of quotidian house-keeping or governance.
Allen prefers to romanticise her cousin. She thinks this loser was part of a 'para-state'. This is bonkers. Michael's attempt at being a gangster was as ineffective as my attempt to become a proper nerd. It is the common fate of the vast majority of teenagers. Almost all of us have to settle for the equivalent of being glorified accountants rather than path breaking Mathematicians. From the Romantic point of view, Michael was fortunate. He found both Love and Death in the same cell-mate. But, in Jail there were no guns- so Thanatos was more inaccessible than Eros. In the 'hood there were too many guns- so, sooner rather than later, he received, from his inamorata, a bullet not a billet doux. He was lucky. His forehead is stamped with, not the mark of Cain, but that of Adonis and those who consider his Love 'transgressive' are but Caiaphas custodians who bar themselves from his, and Dante's, damaged but therefore the more beloved, bride of Christ.
Allen nevertheless insists there is some invisible para-state in which her cousin was a 'player'. Why? It is her inverted 'family romance' such that she herself is not the daughter of a legal luminary but some deadbeat, abusive, loser Dad. Thus she says-
And it shouldn’t surprise us that this parastate remains hard to see.Are you kidding me, Allen? Are gang members with their prison tatts and low slung pants and rolling perp walk really so invisible? The reason Michael sported no such insignia, the reason he remained your beloved 'Cuz'- actually your little brother you lovely woman who has stooped to the folly that is 'Social Science'- is because the kid was never a gang banger. He couldn't be coz he had the love of his own 'Cuz'. Yes, he thought guns were cool same as I thought tensor calculus was cool when I was 15. But, God be praised!, he was crap at gunplay, same as I was crap at fucking over poor people using Amartya Sen type shite algebra or econometrics or Kaushik Basu level stupid Game Theory. Michael didn't hurt his own people. He didn't even hurt you. He gave you a way out. He dragged no one down with him. He is a martyr to a great, a universal, truth- viz. gender dysphoria is something real. Transgender people deserve love. If the Ayatollah's of Iran can show empathy for them and make their path easy, why not the most Christian community in America- that of the African Americans, which has brought the Joy of the Gospel into the hearts of even worthless shitheads like me?
The Greek Church- which you know about coz u know from Greek- makes a distinction between akrebia and oikonomia. The former is rigid and rule based and deterministic. The latter is flexible and spontaneous and ultimately based on agape and affection and empathy and quiet tears for what might have been not ponderous tomes noisily advertising a wholly bogus type of scholarship.
But first I went around for a while asking economists: “Where should one look for the economics of the black market? How can we see it? How can I find it?” and so forth. Sudhir Venkatesh, for example, has studied the black market.There is no black market for jacking cars simply as a matter of thrill seeking. Nobody gets paid for doing so. Sudhir Venkatesh studied gangs which made money out of crime. He didn't study thrill seeking delinquents on a gun toting crime spree.
Steven Levitt has done some work. But there’s just not a lot, and there’s not much because this market remains illegal.Economists have no trouble studying an illegal market. It's just that its cheaper to acquire statistics and more funding is available, from the industry in question, for research into legal markets.
So here a huge paradox comes into view. We can see and we can model the state’s legal operations, and collect all this data about it, but our methods inevitably will miss this whole other quite significant world. We don’t have data from it. We don’t research it. It remains inaccessible to social science. We only can see what it causes through some of its symptoms. That’s why I give the image of the great white whale basically concealed beneath the surface. Every now and then it shows a fin or tail or something. We have to try and define its submerged shape from these pieces we can see.Sheer nonsense! We can't see and model the state's legal operations because they are opaque and preference falsification arises. No politician or judge or civil servant is going to admit they acted from an impure motive. By contrast, a guy already doing time will quite happily, for a small consideration, lift the lid on motives and modes of operation in his branch of enterprise. The criminal world is hugely legible. There is no false consciousness- that is why gangster films are so popular. Everything occulted or occluded in the legal world is rendered unambiguous in the criminal domain. In the former, the member of the price fixing cartel, or insider trading network, keeps up the pretence that everything was personal, nothing was business. In the latter, the opposite pretence is required- the sociopath assures his victim 'it's not personal'- because no one wants to do business with a murderous nutjob.
Organised crime wishes to establish its rationality. The killer wants to display an economic motive and link it to a self defence type plea. The alternative is to evoke the horror of the mark of Cain.
Sudhir had no difficulty getting the 'Black Gangster Disciples' to trust him and lay bare the workings of their organisation. He could spend a life time embedded with the Justice Department or the D.E.A without getting any similar insights. Why? False consciousness and bad faith are ubiquitous under Agent Principal Hazard. Preference Falsification based Availability Cascades obfuscate all discourse.
So once I began to gain some sense of structure for the world that Michael had started to participate in (the name for that structure is “gangs”), I needed to understand how this particular world intersected with everything else.But Michael wasn't in a gang. He says he had pals who were in a gang but he was 15 and new to the neighborhood. The fact is, had he been a gang member, he would have had back-up. The middle aged guy who took his gun off him and shot him would not have dared to make the attempt if he'd seen a proper thug in gang colours backed up by his homies.
Gangs don't just jack random cars. They understand supply and demand. At any given time, the chop shops will only buy specific vehicles. There is a division of labour even in armed robbery. The bosses are looking for team work and efficiency. These are not the qualities Michael had at 15. After he came out of prison, he had an established rep and, because he was a big guy with a good personality, he was trusted to deal for a gang. But at 15 who would have trusted him with product? Which chop shop would have taken a car he brought them? These are volume businesses.
Once you start to think through the economic structures of the drug market, from production, to supply chain, to distribution at the wholesale level and then the retail level, you discover this 100 billion-dollar business that the state seeks to combat by attacking street-level distributors.The state is not combating a 100 billion dollar business. It is drawing a rent from its interessement in it. There have been countless TV serials and films which show that the street level distributor may be being supplied by policemen. Higher up gangsters may have senior officials on their pay-roll. Everyone knows this. Why doesn't Allen?
Of course the people who run this 100 billion-dollar business won’t just give up their control of its street-level distribution.Why not? The triads used to run Shanghai. Then the State put bullets in their heads. The street-level distribution disappeared. Bullets in the head, or the likelihood of the same, are very effective. This is common knowledge.
They develop structures of power or authority through violence (also through systems of sanctions and rewards) to keep control.Which is why shooting them in the head is a good idea. Duterte is winning his war on drugs. But does it pay to win? Surely the state is better off taking a percentage of the profits? Time will tell.
That dynamic, that fight between the state and the parastate, traps so many of our young people. And once you start to see that structure, a heck of a lot of stuff makes sense that may not have made sense previously.There is no fight. The truth is, poor people should fuck up their own communities so nice neighborhoods can have better drugs for their parties. Also drug rehab is actually quite a spiritual thing- if you have the money.
The war on drugs, coupled with racially disparate enforcement of that war, has distorted our society to the point that we cannot imagine a world without extensive use of imprisonment, more imprisonment than the world has ever seen, and plenty of imprisonment for what are essentially health issues, not criminal-justice issues. As a result of our overbroad criminalization practices, and our abandonment of the idea that a criminal-justice system should both make victims whole and prepare wrongdoers to contribute positively to society, we have doomed, by now, at least two generations of young men of color, and therefore we have doomed people of color more generally.Allen knows her cousin didn't go to jail for anything drug related. The boy liked guns but he was bad at handling them. Nobody wanted to punish him. Society just wanted to warehouse him somewhere he couldn't get shot or shoot anyone. Once he was released, he did deal drugs but that was cool. He had matured and was businesslike in his approach. It wasn't drugs or the state or the gangs that did for him. He was shot by the transgender lover he'd met in jail.
Young people like Michael had higher life expectancy and physical health in prison than on the streets. That's why their own community votes for politicians who promise to keep them locked up.
In our criminal-justice system, we use incarceration for 70% of the sanctions we impose. In Germany that rate is 6%, and in the Netherlands it is 10%.Because neither Germany nor the Netherlands has a gun culture. 15 year old Hans isn't pulling a gun and trying to jack every passing BMW.
There are completely different ways to approach criminal justice, and we don’t even have space in our minds to consider them. If you narrate the facts of Michael’s crime to people, and ask them how he should have been punished, and add the constraint that they can’t use the term “prison,” it is almost impossible for most people even to begin to address this question.Because we know Michael had low life expectancy on the streets. Prison was the safest place for him.
Yet it is in fact possible to punish wrongdoing and work to re-socialize wrongdoers without relying on prison. Germany and the Netherlands prove this case. We have to open up space in people’s minds for such ideas. I would get down on my knees and beg everyone to read this report by the Vera Institute: Sentencing Practices in Germany and the Netherlands.Michael died because he was released from prison. He was good at knocking out his lover, but she was better at stabbing and shooting him. In the end, her bullet was faster than his fist.
Allen knows very well that the three things her family and community could have done (and may actually have done) to safeguard Michael were
1) Demonise guns. Teach that guns are from the Devil. Campaign for Gun Control.
2) Demonise gangsta rap as utterly satanic and wholly alien to the pious and hard working heritage and ethos of African Americans
3) Collectively mount a 'due process' challenge to the Criminal Justice system by proper economic studies showing statistical bias.
Allen won't demonise guns in her book because that would enrage a powerful vested interest group. Nor will she say anything against gangsta rap because that's the sort of thing Fox News might pick up. As for the third alternative- it was something her Dad ought to have been doing all along instead of sucking up to the Reaganites.
Allen has a bizarre view of the Law. She doesn't understand that it is a system of defeasible reasoning which can be gamed. She thinks it is Magic.
She says-
Laws construct incentive structures around which social equilibria form.
This is utterly mad! How can the Law construct an incentive structure? Incentives are economic. A 'competitive' Nash Equilibrium is generally inferior to a correlated equilibrium where a public signal is sent. Once such a correlated equilibrium becomes Schelling focal, then and only then is there a demand that it be inscribed in the Law books. No doubt, some 'discoordination games' featuring rent-seeking also get inscribed- but those laws are not incentive compatible or allocatively efficient. They will be increasingly costly to enforce. By contrast, Laws reinforcing a corrleated equilibrium, or such as would arise in a repeated game of a particular type, tend to become less and less costly to enforce and have a falling excess burden.
These social equilibria then come to anchor cultural practices (for instance, cultures of violence), which further entrench the problematic equilibria.
Utter nonsense! Cultural practices don't have any anchor at all. That is why people of different ethnicities living under the same Laws and interacting in the same Economic way nevertheless have completely different cultural practices. The Hasidic Jew and the Sanaatan Hindu may have electronic shops next door to each other. They may both obey the same laws and do business in an identical way. But their cultural practices are very different.
But at the heart of the problem is laws that have generated misguided incentive structures.
Allen is talking about laws- like 'three strikes'- which were generated not by 'misguided incentive structures' but by Referendums or the Preference Falsification associated with electoral politics. Naturally, these laws are incentive incompatible! It would be a miracle if they weren't.
And the human tragedy that we have created in this country is so profound that I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to spend time looking for contradictions or inconsistencies in the conservative position or in the progressive position. I think we ought to look past those partisan divides toward more fundamental questions about justice and human flourishing, and squarely face the fact that with our laws we have built a society that makes it considerably harder for many, many people to thrive.
Wow! Allen really doesn't get that a lot of people- not just coloured people- in America have the cards stacked against them from the get go. Why? The principle America was founded on was that you should get to live in a mansion while other people do the dirty work. Picking cotton was bad enough. Now, the need is for cheap teenage truck-stop whores. The American Dream is Harvey Weinstein. Ask the pussy-grabber in chief. Or don't. He's just lowered your taxes. Give him a pass. Everything is the fault of the Law. It creates misguided incentive structures. Politicians aren't to blame at all. Which lets us off the hook for having elected them. Also, for writing self-regarding tosh while pretending to care deeply for the less fortunate. After all, Game theory features 'phase shifts'- rational beings suddenly turn into a liquid or a gas or, in the case of Allen's book, a moist scholastic turd.
Sin being but Social Science for any who can read as well as Tarsus' Saul.
Von Neumann, gifting Econ an axiomatic Game Theory, was, on his death bed, tortured by what Godel was not. Paranoia re. secular food did for the good Christian, by means of inedia not his false theodicy. The agnostic Jew died taking Pascal's wager.
The Law is but Love's shadow. It vanishes at the same moment that all things become lights. Which will happen for you, Allen, coz, we fondly believe, your cuz was never a 'gangsta'. He was good looking and charming and had a tremendous imagination. He cherished your love. His theodicy is massively confirmed by the success of your book. Love pays its debts though it may have died long ago.
The world is a bridge- the saying is attributed to Christ by Hassan of Basra- pass over it, build no houses on it. There is another bridge narrow as a thread and sharper than a knife. Kabir says that the thread will wear away but the knot remains. Love is the bond that redeems itself in full only so as to bind across Worlds.
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