7 ms·

That's quite an amazingly strong claim of biological essentialism. Got any data to back it up? It would be naive to imagine that there is no "fundamental natu

That's quite an amazingly strong claim of biological essentialism. Got any data to back it up? It would be naive to imagine that there is no "fundamental nature" element to people. That your genes or early childhood experiences or whatever do not make some people more prone to antisocial behavior, and indeed do not make some people guaranteed to be extremely antisocial. Some people who are now criminals connected with the drug trade would, in a counter-factual world of legalized drugs, find other outlets for their antisocial tendencies. But it's just as naive, perhaps more so, to imagine that the circumstances that people find themselves in do not also affect their social/antisocial behavior. A hundred and sixty years ago, millions of people in the United States actively participated in a monstrous crime perpetrated against an entire race of people, the equivalent of what in the modern world would be multiple felonies per day across their lifetimes. It was certainly antisocial. Was that destiny? Were all those people just inherently bad? If so, what happened to them? Why doesn't modern Georgia have most whites being serial felons?

javert 12y ago
There is something very important missing in your "nature vs. nurture" worldview, which is: people can and do think for themselves and thereby determine their own values. For instance, you attribute the grandparent's point of view to "biological essentialism." The grandparent said no such thing. He said: certain people are prone to crime. That is true. Those people are acting out their values and their ideas about the world and about how they can best survive and cope within it. I don't agree that everyone who is a drug criminal would necessarily find some other avenue of crime, but to suggest that they would is not a claim to biological essentialism. > A hundred and sixty years ago, millions of people in the United States actively participated in a monstrous crime perpetrated against an entire race of people, the equivalent of what in the modern world would be multiple felonies per day across their lifetimes. It was certainly antisocial. Was that destiny? Were all those people just inherently bad? If so, what happened to them? Why doesn't modern Georgia have most whites being serial felons? What happened is the spread of ideas about human rights from the Enlightenment. Slavery has been the norm for 99% of human history. The Southerners you talked about just didn't have the great newfangled idea of people having rights. That was a real intellectual achievement that took humans thousands of years.
rayiner 12y ago
I'm not suggesting anything is biological. But the guy who has never had a real job other than crime isn't not a "bad, antisocial person" just because you can ascribe his condition to his circumstances growing up. Nor can you say that the drug war created those circumstances.[1] The drug war didn't create these insular low-income communities that don't trust the police. It didn't create households where fathers abandon their kids. It didn't create the vacuum of social authority in these communities that is filled by the gangs. Say you end the drug war, legalize everything so you can go into Wal-Mart for a hit of heroin. What happens? The gang members driving around shooting each other aren't going to go get jobs (there aren't any). Heck, you might dry up a lot of what little income flows into these communities. [1] Very interesting set of graphs: http://www.newclarion.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/homicides-1900-20062.jpg; http://www.newclarion.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/homicid... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate#mediaviewer/File:U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat... http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/images/11217607.0002.206-00000002.jpg http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/images/11217607.0002.206-.... The first image is the number of homicides per capita. After hitting a minimum in the late 1950's, it starts increasing again in 1960. By the early 1970's, it's at historical highs (last seen in the 1930's). The second image is incarceration rate, which we can use as a proxy for the intensity of the drug war. Note how it's almost flat till about 1973-1974, and starts really increasing around 1975-1980. The third image is a comparison of America's murder rate to that of the U.K. Note how we have always been a dramatically more violent society throughout the entire 20th century. The final thing to note is that the peak murder rates of the 1980's are similar to those of the 1930's. In other words, homicides went down dramatically in the 1940's and 1950's, but returned to their previous levels by the 1960's and 1970's. Don't be quick to ascribe the first peak to Prohibition, either. Prohibition lasted from 1920-1933. You can see it caused an increase in homicide rates, but the rate from 1900-1920 was already very high, and Prohibition didn't increase it that much relative to how much it went up from 1960 to 1980. So what causes this pattern? Is it Prohibition or the Drug War? Or are those just relatively small effects on top of much larger phenomena? The social upheaval of the 1900's-1930's and of the 1960's to 1980's?
- aetherson 12y ago
  You seem to be really caught up in this idea of hard-core gang members. And, sure, it's true: people who have committed fully to lives of violent crime are deeply unlikely to turn around and become model citizens. But: if they don't have an income to support their lives of crime, and if their leaders don't in fact have quite a nice income that the more common criminals can aspire to, there's going to be much less incentive for people who are deciding what they want to be to choose a life of crime. And furthermore: committed, full time violent criminals are not the only people we care about here. People whose lives are impacted by the black market nature of the drug trade include many criminals who may in fact have a job, and do some crime on the side. It also includes people who are drug consumers, not dealers, who would materially benefit from a safer and hopefully cheaper drug habit. And it also includes people whose boyfriends and fathers would not be in jail now, and if a large number of those boyfriends and fathers would not be material help to their girlfriends and children, some number of them would be. Is this it? Is it the only policy that we would need to vanquish poverty and crime in the US? Of course not. But there's a reasonable argument that you can't meaningfully address poverty and crime without addressing the drug war -- that it blocks any other attempt to improve conditions in poor, crime-stricken communities.

javert 12y ago

There is something very important missing in your "nature vs. nurture" worldview, which is: people can and do think for themselves and thereby determine their own values. For instance, you attribute the grandparent's point of view to "biological essentialism." The grandparent said no such thing. He said: certain people are prone to crime. That is true. Those people are acting out their values and their ideas about the world and about how they can best survive and cope within it. I don't agree that everyone who is a drug criminal would necessarily find some other avenue of crime, but to suggest that they would is not a claim to biological essentialism. > A hundred and sixty years ago, millions of people in the United States actively participated in a monstrous crime perpetrated against an entire race of people, the equivalent of what in the modern world would be multiple felonies per day across their lifetimes. It was certainly antisocial. Was that destiny? Were all those people just inherently bad? If so, what happened to them? Why doesn't modern Georgia have most whites being serial felons? What happened is the spread of ideas about human rights from the Enlightenment. Slavery has been the norm for 99% of human history. The Southerners you talked about just didn't have the great newfangled idea of people having rights. That was a real intellectual achievement that took humans thousands of years.

rayiner 12y ago

I'm not suggesting anything is biological. But the guy who has never had a real job other than crime isn't not a "bad, antisocial person" just because you can ascribe his condition to his circumstances growing up. Nor can you say that the drug war created those circumstances.[1] The drug war didn't create these insular low-income communities that don't trust the police. It didn't create households where fathers abandon their kids. It didn't create the vacuum of social authority in these communities that is filled by the gangs. Say you end the drug war, legalize everything so you can go into Wal-Mart for a hit of heroin. What happens? The gang members driving around shooting each other aren't going to go get jobs (there aren't any). Heck, you might dry up a lot of what little income flows into these communities. [1] Very interesting set of graphs: http://www.newclarion.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/homicides-1900-20062.jpg; http://www.newclarion.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/homicid... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate#mediaviewer/File:U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat... http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/images/11217607.0002.206-00000002.jpg http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/images/11217607.0002.206-.... The first image is the number of homicides per capita. After hitting a minimum in the late 1950's, it starts increasing again in 1960. By the early 1970's, it's at historical highs (last seen in the 1930's). The second image is incarceration rate, which we can use as a proxy for the intensity of the drug war. Note how it's almost flat till about 1973-1974, and starts really increasing around 1975-1980. The third image is a comparison of America's murder rate to that of the U.K. Note how we have always been a dramatically more violent society throughout the entire 20th century. The final thing to note is that the peak murder rates of the 1980's are similar to those of the 1930's. In other words, homicides went down dramatically in the 1940's and 1950's, but returned to their previous levels by the 1960's and 1970's. Don't be quick to ascribe the first peak to Prohibition, either. Prohibition lasted from 1920-1933. You can see it caused an increase in homicide rates, but the rate from 1900-1920 was already very high, and Prohibition didn't increase it that much relative to how much it went up from 1960 to 1980. So what causes this pattern? Is it Prohibition or the Drug War? Or are those just relatively small effects on top of much larger phenomena? The social upheaval of the 1900's-1930's and of the 1960's to 1980's?

aetherson 12y ago
You seem to be really caught up in this idea of hard-core gang members. And, sure, it's true: people who have committed fully to lives of violent crime are deeply unlikely to turn around and become model citizens. But: if they don't have an income to support their lives of crime, and if their leaders don't in fact have quite a nice income that the more common criminals can aspire to, there's going to be much less incentive for people who are deciding what they want to be to choose a life of crime. And furthermore: committed, full time violent criminals are not the only people we care about here. People whose lives are impacted by the black market nature of the drug trade include many criminals who may in fact have a job, and do some crime on the side. It also includes people who are drug consumers, not dealers, who would materially benefit from a safer and hopefully cheaper drug habit. And it also includes people whose boyfriends and fathers would not be in jail now, and if a large number of those boyfriends and fathers would not be material help to their girlfriends and children, some number of them would be. Is this it? Is it the only policy that we would need to vanquish poverty and crime in the US? Of course not. But there's a reasonable argument that you can't meaningfully address poverty and crime without addressing the drug war -- that it blocks any other attempt to improve conditions in poor, crime-stricken communities.