Kieran Healy

“Snort”:http://www.sumama.com/misc/911_tape.wma. (Via “Pangadon”:http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/004875.html).

“Like Henry”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/29/joining-up-the-dots/ and “Max”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/index.html, I got a bit of a laugh out of the “Left Business Observer’s plots”:http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/FreedomIndex.html of the Heritage Foundation’s “Freedom Index.” I think the LBO are right to be skeptical of the index. But maybe the scatterplots they show sell it a bit short.

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“The patient then was a 65-year-old drilling contractor, badly injured in a freak accident at his home. … In 1988, however, there was no such fiery rhetoric as the congressman quietly joined the sad family consensus to let his father die. … Doctors advised that he would ‘basically be a vegetable,’ said the congressman’s aunt, JoAnne DeLay.”

The product liability lawsuit that followed, a class of tort which DeLay later described as “frivolous [and] parasitic,” and sponsored a bill to outlaw, would be like an added bonus if this whole thing wasn’t so sad and wrong.

Based on a letter I wrote this morning and plan to send this afternoon (once I look up the right address), from now on I’d like to be known as “‘Nobel Prize-nominated”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200503220009 blogger, Kieran Healy.’ I’m up for consideration in Physics. I nominated everyone here at CT as well, except “Montagu”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/author/montagu-norman/ because prizes aren’t awarded posthumously. There aren’t enough categories for us all to win in the same year (even counting “Economics”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Prize_categories), but I’m sure everyone’s turn will come.

Bloggers with more patience than me have been dealing with the tragic story of Terri Schiavo. “Lindsay Beyerstein”:http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2005/03/the_left_and_te.html has been “especially good”:http://www.alternet.org/story/21572. It’s clear that the Republican position on Schiavo is sheer grandstanding and hypocritical to boot. There’s plenty of evidence for this, what with President Bush’s signature on the “Texas Futile Care Law”:http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/schiavo_/2005/03/schiavo_futile_care_and_money.php and Bill Frist’s “statements about Christopher Reeve”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_03_20_atrios_archive.html#111169758487216228 and his support for “harvesting organs from anencephalic children”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_03_20_atrios_archive.html#111160342761631336. And never mind the broader policy context where the fiscal means whereby people might support patients in persistent vegetative states — via Medicare and bankruptcy protection — are being hacked away. Now, via “DC Media Girl”:http://dcmediagirl.com/index.php?entry=entry20050324-204119, we have the icing on the cake. Some “Fox News Pundit”:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,151442,00.html is thinking that Jeb Bush should just authorize a SWAT team to storm the hospice and get Terri Schiavo out:

bq. Just to burnish my reputation as a bomb thrower, I think Jeb Bush should give serious thought to storming the Bastille. By that I mean he should think about telling his cops to go over to Terri Schiavo’s (search) hospice, go inside, put her on a gurney and load her into an ambulance. They could take her to a hospital, revive her, and reattach her feeding tube. … So Jeb, call out the troops, storm the Bastille and tell ’em I sent you.

It’s our old friend, “poetic justice as fairness”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/07/17/poetic-justice-as-fairness/. Two words, buddy: “Elian Gonzalez”:http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/elian/.

While thinking about the “deterrent effect of the death penalty”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/24/deterrence-and-the-death-penalty/ I wondered about cross-national variation in rates of violent death. Comparative data on homicide rates undoubtedly exist, but I don’t have them to hand. I do have OECD data on rates of death due to assault, though, so here’s a nice picture of this trend for eighteen capitalist democracies from 1960 to 2002.

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Apologies for yet another meta post. How many sets of teeth can one site have, anyway? I’d really appreciate some help, though.

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Eugene Volokh “quotes extensively”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_03_20-2005_03_26.shtml#1111616457 from a new paper by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule that presents an “argument for the death penalty”:http://aei-brookings.org/publications/abstract.php?pid=922. It begins by reviewing recent studies that find the death penalty has a deterrent effect on potential murderers. In particular:

bq. Disaggregating the data on a state by state basis, Joanna Shepherd finds that the nation-wide deterrent effect of capital punishment is entirely driven by only six states … [The states] showing a deterrent effect are executing more people than states that do not. In fact the data show a “threshold effect”: deterrence is found in states that had at least nine executions between 1977 and 1996. In states below that threshold, no deterrence can be found. This finding is intuitively plausible. Unless executions reach a certain level, murderers may act as if the death is so improbable as not to be worthy of concern. Her main lesson is that once the level of executions reaches a certain level, the deterrent effect of capital punishment is substantial.

This is an elegant idea, but trouble with it is that only few states execute anyone in a given year. Most execute no-one. A tiny few — notably Texas — kill a lot of people in some years. As a result, evidence for a threshold deterrent effect depends on a very small number of observations. In a “nice analysis”:http://preprints.stat.ucla.edu/396/JELS.pap.pdf of state-level data from 1977 to 1997, “Richard Berk”:http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~berk/ shows that just eleven state-year observations out of a thousand drive the deterrent effect. It’s possible to mess around with the specification a bit to get a less strongly skewed measure (by standardizing the number of executions by the number of death sentences, say) or making the data more fine-grained so that you have more observations (using county-quarters as a unit, for instance), but in the end its hard to escape the worry that about 1 percent of the observations are behind the results.

We’re probably witnessing the birth of a dubious stylized fact about deterrence and the death penalty. I don’t doubt that the Sunstein and Vermeule paper raises a bunch of interesting questions, but the empirical results they rely on just don’t seem that robust. This is a bit ironic given their argument that “The widespread failure to appreciate the life-life tradeoffs involved in capital punishment may depend on cognitive processes that fail to treat ‘statistical lives’ with the seriousness that they deserve.” One of these processes is the tendency to latch on to a cool finding a bit too quickly. Negative results (like the ones reported in Berk’s paper) are just not as interesting, unfortunately.

Draft review of “Heat Wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226443221/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, by Eric Klinenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Forthcoming in “Imprints”:http://www.imprints.org.uk/.

In the middle of July of 1995, temperatures in Chicago rose to record heights as a mass of hot, humid air settled over the city. On Thursday the 16th, the high temperature was 106 degrees Fahrenheit, or just over 41 degrees centigrade. The humidity made it feel even hotter, more like 126 degrees (52 degrees centigrade). Chicago prides itself on being “the city that works,” but during the week of the 13th to the 20th, the city’s infrastructure, its administration and its people were tested to breaking point. Like the city’s buildings and roads, Chicago’s government, police force and hospitals buckled in the heat as they tried to deal with the crisis. In the end, epidemiologists found that there had been 739 excess deaths that week. “According to emergency workers, the task [of dealing with these deaths] was equivalent to having one fatal jetliner crash per day for three consecutive days” (p8). Eric Klinenberg describes and analyzes the effects of the heat wave in this ambitious book. His goal is to produce a “social autopsy” of the disaster by looking closely at the “social organs of the city” to “identify the conditions that contributed to the deaths of so many Chicago residents that July” (p11).

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Hello again everyone. By “resident guru”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/22/back-in-business/, Henry means I am the person who gets to ask better-informed people questions like this: Does anyone know how to get the “ComPreVal”:http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/ComPreVal plugin working when “Staticize”:http://dev.wp-plugins.org/browser/staticize-reloaded/ is also installed? The former previews and validates comments while the latter turns on page caching, which helps when the server is under heavy load. But they don’t play together: when someone tries to preview a comment, I think the cached version of the page keeps appearing rather than a new version including the preview.

Nothing like teen sex to get sociology in the newspapers. Here’s “more interesting stuff”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-std20mar20,1,964952.story?coll=la-headlines-nation from the “AddHealth dataset”:http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth/, and more particularly from “Peter Bearman”:http://www.sociology.columbia.edu/people/faculty/bearman/ and “Hannah Brueckner”:http://www.yale.edu/socdept/faculty/brueckner.html. This is the most recent in a line of papers on abstinence pledges and adolescent sexual activity more generally. A summary from the “L.A. Times”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-std20mar20,1,964952.story?coll=la-headlines-nation:

bq. Young adults who as teenagers took pledges not to have sex until marriage were just as likely to contract a venereal disease as people who didn’t make the promise, according to a study in the Journal of Adolescent Health. … The study found that 88% of sexually active people who took the pledge had intercourse before marriage. Sexually active pledgers were less likely to use condoms the first time they had sex, Bruckner said. The study found that people who took an abstinence pledge were less likely to get tested and treated for venereal disease. They may then be infected longer than other people.

An earlier paper, “Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and First Intercourse”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJS/journal/issues/v106n4/040236/040236.html addressed the question of whether abstinence movements like “True Love Waits” worked like they were supposed to:

bq. Since 1993, in response to a movement sponsored by the Southern Baptist Church, over 2.5 million adolescents have taken public “virginity” pledges, in which they promise to abstain from sex until marriage. This paper explores the effect of those pledges on the transition to first intercourse. Adolescents who pledge are much less likely to have intercourse than adolescents who do not pledge. The delay effect is substantial. On the other hand, the pledge does not work for adolescents at all ages. Second, pledging delays intercourse only in contexts where there are some, but not too many, pledgers. The pledge works because it is embedded in an identity movement. Consequently, the pledge identity is meaningful only in contexts where it is at least partially nonnormative. Consequences of pledging are explored for those who break their promise. Promise breakers are less likely than others to use contraception at first intercourse.

In short, true love doesn’t wait, except to when it comes to going to the clinic.

Via “Elayne Riggs”:http://elayneriggs.blogspot.com/2005/03/estrogen-month-day-14-welcome-any-new.html comes Tild~’s “She-Blogger”:http://tildblog.blogspot.com/2005/03/return-of-she-blogger.html. Enslaved to the conventional wisdom, constantly whoring for attention and desperate for validation by the polite society they affect to despise, these sad creatu– I’m sorry, those are the He-Bloggers. That should have read, Sharp-tongued, lurking in the shadows and heedless of their proper place in life, these slatterns tempt innocent young boy-bloggers to “subvert the dominant link hierarchy”:http://www.google.com/search?q=subvert+the+dominant+link+hierarchy. Disgusting. Yet strangely alluring.

The effort to normalize torture proceeds on two fronts. The first comes up with scenarios where torture seems justified — the “ticking bomb”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/13/torture-2/ case that we “know and love”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/18/by-the-power-of-stipulation-i-have-the-power. As we know, real torture never meets the criteria that even seemingly reasonable ticking-bomb hypos demand. The scenario depends on the prospective torturer knowing everything relevant about the circumstances _except one thing_ (viz, the location of the bomb and the time it will explode), which the suspect knows, and we know they know. This never happens. Instead, torture is generally a much more protracted affair, carried on with much less information about what the suspect knows or even who the proper suspects are. Nevertheless, as we saw the “other day”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/13/torture-2/, the ticking-bomb still exerts a “considerable hold”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18709-2005Mar8.html over people’s minds. Why?

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Two good posts on the continuing slide towards routinized and euphemized torture by the U.S., one at “Body and Soul”:http://bodyandsoul.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/the_beast_in_us.html and one at “Respectful of Otters”:http://respectfulofotters.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_respectfulofotters_archive.html#111068506853331238. Jim Henley “notes”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2005/03/11/4026 a couple of recent domestic crime cases where the obvious suspects turned out not to have done it, asking “Couldn’t we have tortured the “right” people into confessing to both these crimes?” (That “real-estate arson”:http://www.jrrobertssecurity.com/security-news/security-crime-news0013.htm last year in Maryland was in that category, too.) Meanwhile, “Juan Non-Volokh”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_03_06-2005_03_12.shtml#1110426704 might be trying to talk himself into it through the “latest version”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18709-2005Mar8.html of our old friend, the “ticking bomb”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/18/by-the-power-of-stipulation-i-have-the-power.