Eugene Volokh and a correspondent discuss Max Weber’s views on the state and legitimate violence, and between them make a common error:
I was corresponding with a friend of mine — a very smart fellow, and a lawyer and a journalist — about concealed carry for university professors. He disagreed with my view, and as best I can tell in general was skeptical about laws allowing concealed carry in public. His argument, though, struck me as particularly noteworthy, especially since I’ve heard it in gun control debates before: “Forgive me, but I’m old-fashioned. I like the idea of the state having a monopoly on the use of force.”
I want to claim that this echo of Weber (who said “Today … we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”) is utterly inapt in gun control debates, at least such debates in a Western country.
He goes on to give a string of alleged counterexamples: “Every jurisdiction in America has always recognized individuals’ right to use not just force but deadly force in defending life … Use of deadly force for self-defense has always been allowed in public places as well as in private places … many non-state organizations even maintain private armed staff — armed security guards …” The examples actually make Weber’s point. Weber said that a distinguishing feature of the modern state is that it “claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory … the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.”
It’s the legitimacy point that’s key. The state claims the right to regulate who can and cannot do things like own weapons, shoot people, run some kind of armed organization or what have you, and under what circumstances and with what restrictions. Which is precisely what Volokh’s examples show: jurisdictions _allow_, laws _recognize_, and so on. It is this legitimacy claim that is behind the state’s labeling certain groups as terrorists, for example. Volokh goes on to say that his “point is simply that this Weber quote is of no relevance to the question of private gun possession for self-defense.” Weber won’t resolve any detailed policy questions in that department, though his definition does make it clear that in a modern state the private ownership of weapons is something the state will certainly claim the right to regulate.
_Update_: To clarify, as I wrote this in a bit of a rush: (1) Volokh’s counterexamples rebut effectively the idea that the state has a monopoly on the commision of violent acts (especially armed violence). (2) This is not what Weber meant by “monopoly on legitimate force.” (3) It seems to be what his correspondent thought Weber meant, however, and so (4) Between them they end up propagating a common error about Weber, though it’s not Volokh’s intent to discuss Weber’s ideas specifically. I’ve changed the title of the post to forestall misinterpretation.
From the Economist, some advice on “English As She Is Wrote”:http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=673903. As is usual with such lists, there’s much to agree with and a few nits to pick. A current peeve of mine — which doesn’t make the list — is the use of “incredibly” to mean “very.” There is also probably a name for the law requiring that there be several errors of style or grammar in this paragraph, but I don’t know what it is.
Driving home today I saw a guy standing by a busy downtown intersection holding a large sign that read, “9-11 Was An Inside Job.” It doesn’t quite rise to seeing a giant muppet-like creature holding the same sort of sign, but maybe he’s working on it.
_Update_: Here’s a recent piece from the _Chronicle_ about 9-11 Conspiracy Theories in academia. (Hat tip: Evan Goldstein.)
After a moderately funny NPR April Fool’s piece on banning ringtones in New York, this sponsor announcement made me laugh out loud.
On the news headlines that followed, the lead item was that the U.S. was scrambling to complete a huge free trade deal (“the biggest since NAFTA”) with North Korea.
This is just too funny. John Lott, having had his lawsuit against Steven Levitt and _Freakonomics_ thrown out, has gone and written a knock-off called — I’m not making this up — Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Freaky Theories Don’t. The jacket design is right out of the “David Horowitz playbook”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/22/cover-story/, too.
Presumably it’s blurbed by Mary Rosh. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to the final chapters of my two forthcoming books, Greedonomics: A rogue trader shoots first and Fritonomics: Exploring the hidden side of snack foods.
John McCain’s “MySpace page”:http://www.myspace.com/johnmccain “borrows” Mike D.’s page template and also hotlinks to images on his server. So he “makes a few changes to them.”:http://mike.newsvine.com/_news/2007/03/27/633799-hacking-john-mccain
Via John “You’re having a membership drive but you still haven’t mailed me my t-shirt, it’ll be three months on Friday” “Gruber.”:http://daringfireball.net/
I took a quick trip around “Fantasy Island”:http://www.dirtragmag.com/print/article.php?ID=441 this morning, a series of fast, fun mountain-bike trails about twenty minutes from downtown Tucson. To get there, you drive past “Davis Monthan AFB”:http://www.dm.af.mil/ and “AMARC”:http://www.amarcexperience.com/Scrapyards.asp, better known as the Boneyard. This is a huge complex of decommissioned, mothballed, cannibalized and just plain decaying U.S. military aircraft of all sorts. Here’s a Google Satellite Shot to give you a sense of the scale of the place.
As it happens, this is only one of three boneyards in the area. Up out past the northwest side of town past Marana is “Pinal Air Park”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinal_Airpark, which is a boneyard, storage and re-branding site for civilian aircraft, including many 747s. (It also has a history as a CIA Airfield.) And it’s here that St Kieran, an Aer Lingus 747, met his end some years ago.
Here’s a larger shot. This photo was taken in 1997. I don’t think he’s there any more, having probably been scrapped in the meantime. Like I say, you see some strange things in the desert. (Me on a mountain bike, for example.) Maybe I should do a series. Next up could be the local Titan II ICBM silo (missile included), where we take job candidates when they ask us where the Dean’s office is.
Two examples from what I hope will be an ongoing series:
1. At the annual Miami-Dade Lincoln Day Dinner (for our overseas readers, that translates as “South Florida, right-wing Republicans”), he ended his speech with the stirring phrase, “¡Patria o muerte, venceremos!” Somehow, Romney missed out on knowing that that phrase—“Fatherland or death, we shall overcome!”—has for decades been the closing line of almost every one of Castro’s speeches. It’s 100% associated with the Castro regime. Romney’s audience wasnotimpressed. (From Making Light.)
2. Mitt Romney and his wife were on ‘Larry King Live’ last week, and the former governor discussed his Mormon mission overseas: “Oh, it is a fabulous experience. Look, I was sort of having fun going to college and not worrying about the future. And then I went to a different country and saw how different life could be if we didn’t have the values and the kinds of opportunities that exist in America.”
It is indeed tragic that so much of the world doesn’t have the same freedoms and conveniences that America does. Whole continents are filled with the scourges of disease and poverty. I’m just glad that Romney got a small taste of how so much of humanity actually lives. Anyhow, where exactly was he? “I was in France. Bordeaux, Paris, all over France. A great learning experience to live overseas.” (From The Plank via Brad DeLong.)
Following up on the “Twitter Curve”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/13/twitter-curve/ from last week, here is Twittervision, a mashup of Twitter and Google Maps.
bq. So why *are* women more religious than men? Is it just greater risk-aversion?
According to my colleague Louise Roth, in an article from the current ASR co-authored with Jeff Kroll, the answer to the second question is, “No.” Here’s the abstract:
bq. Scholars of religion have long known that women are more religious than men, but they disagree about the reasons underlying this difference. Risk preference theory suggests that gender gaps in religiosity are a consequence of men’s greater propensity to take risks, and that irreligiosity is analogous to other high-risk behaviors typically associated with young men. Yet, research using risk preference theory has not effectively distinguished those who perceive a risk to irreligiousness from those who do not. In this article, we evaluate risk preference theory. We differentiate those who believe in an afterlife, who perceive a risk to irreligiousness, from nonbelievers who perceive no risk associated with the judgment after death. Using General Social Survey and World Values Survey data, multivariate models test the effects of gender and belief on religiousness. In most religions and nations the gender gap is larger for those who do not believe in an afterlife than for those who do, contradicting the predictions of risk preference theory. The results clearly demonstrate that the risk preference thesis is not a compelling explanation of women’s greater average religiosity.
bq. All manner of worthwhile charities hold events wherein people are “sponsored” based on how many miles they bike, laps they walk, hours they go without sleep, ropes they jump, or what have you. Why the need for the gimmick? Are there some significant number of people who don’t give a damn about curing leukemia but are nonetheless willing to donate to the cause for whatever pleasure seeing people shave their beard yields? Or who aren’t sure whether breast cancer is more worth curing than some other disease and make that determination based on what physical challenges the antis are willing to undergo to prove their point?
It’s a good question. But I think the answer will not be found in differences in degrees of pleasure or utility between “Cure for cancer” and “Cure for cancer plus John Quiggin having no beard.” Neither is it quite a question of uncertainty about one’s preference for giving money to a charity being clarified by the knowledge that someone is also doing a sponsored walk.
Instead, what we’re seeing here is the norm of reciprocity in action. You give me something, and that means I can give you something back. A cure for breast cancer or leukemia is very worthwhile but from the point of view of the immediate exchange it is a long way off. I know that my money will not buy a cure, at least not in any direct or immediate way. Moreover, when it comes to giving away my money, there are innumerable worthwhile charitable causes that might plausibly make a claim on some of it. What things like sponsored shaves or Walks for the Cure or a Free Car Wash (with a donation) do is establish a local gift relationship with someone in particular, for something in particular. Sure, the particular thing being given (a shave, a car wash) is trivial in comparison to the overall cause (a cure for cancer). Nevertheless, it is the small relationship of reciprocity that makes the exchange meaningful for the giver and thus makes it much more likely to actually take place.
In a strictly economic framework, these kinds of activities are analogous to the deadweight loss of Christmas gifts (why not just give money, after all?), or are simply advertising gimmicks whose only function is to attract attention. But the resolution to the puzzle is also similar: without the framework of mutual reciprocity, the exchange likely wouldn’t happen in the first place — even if in principle a more efficient (no shaving, no car-wash) solution would be available to narrowly rational agents with the right preferences. That is why almost all forms of charitable giving in fact involve some kind of reciprocal exchange, whether it’s something as trivial as getting a badge, or as heavily mediated as the performances by celebrities on a telethon.
“Becks at Unfogged”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2007_03_11.html#006439 is justly skeptical of “Twitter”:http://twitter.com/ yet fears its institutionalization may be inevitable. Kathy Sierra’s Asymptotic Twitter Curve is a sharp summary of the problem:
One question is whether the curve describes some kind of cognitive limit or is a rather more cohort-specific representation of the dangers of adopting technologies developed an increasing number of years after your own core work patterns are established.
