I enjoyed reading this informative and well-researched post, but honestly one of my takeaways was that YIMBY (or “land use reform” as openphil calls it) seems like a marginally better cause area than crime reduction:
You say that the total cost of crime to society is similar to the total cost of land-use restrictions. But the solutions to land-use restrictions seem pretty obvious—to a first approximation, just let people build more houses by having higher levels of government squash local opposition to projects. (Then if you want to get fancy, you can address flaws in the first-order solution with patches like congestion pricing, Harberger / Land Value taxation, etc.) Meanwhile, the solutions to crime seem more nebulous: yes, I agree we’re probably underpoliced and overimprisoned, but cutting against this is the “incapacitation” effect you mention of locking up the small percentage of repeat offenders.
It’s hard to say exactly why, but to me, these crime-reduction ideas seem like they’d probably run into to diminishing returns. Even if you managed to encourage optimal policing policy across hundreds of local counties/cities, it’s hard to picture an amazing total victory that turns America into a nordic-style low-crime utopia. I would expect something more like a 30% reduction in crime, closing some but not all of the gap between the USA and Europe. To me, total victory in the YIMBY arena seems more plausible (although again, idk why, just a feeling).
(For me to believe that a low-crime utopia is possible in the USA—matching or besting countries like Japan—I feel like it would have to involve some totally wild mechanism of the sort that Robin Hanson would dream up, or possibly some kind of intensive social-credit system.)
YIMBY problems are arguably greater in scale: prohibitively expensive urban real-estate is a plague across the entire developed world—places like the UK, Canada, and New Zealand have it even worse than the USA. Meanwhile, most discussion that I see about crime focuses on how America has anomalously high crime rates and should aspire to be more like low-crime Europe. If crime is dragging down America’s GDP by ~10%, but land-use is dragging down the entire developed world’s GDP by ~10%, then land-use would be the bigger overall issue. (On the other hand, you could say this is an argument for the tractability of crime reduction—just be more like Europe! Versus the global nature of land-use problems maybe indicates that, as easy as it seems to just let people build more housing, perhaps there is some universal force of creeping vetocracy and stakeholder management that will eventually doom any attempts to go full YIMBY.)
All that said, even here on the EA Forum which is all about prioritizing causes, it feels pretty silly for me to be doing a compare/contrast between YIMBY and crime-reduction policies when I am in favor of both, and the two feel so synergistic! (You mentioned how one of the major costs of crime is that it causes people to feel unsafe in cities and move to the suburbs. And in my own life, I personally care about both affording a home and living in a safe, high-trust neighborhood.) I am not trying to start a debate, rather I suppose I am asking, “As a guy who is excited about institutional experimentation and big potential improvements to civilization’s status quo, what are the most interesting/hopeful/exciting ideas about crime-reduction policy?”
Some other questions, if you will forgive the stream-of-consciousness style of this long comment:
Some people say that you could reduce crime a lot by looking at “pipeline”-style interventions very far upstream of the crimes themselves. Do any of these seem to you like they’d plausibly have big effects on crime in the USA? I’ve heard people mention things like:
investing more in schools (and generally “investing in communities”, eg libraries)
running a sufficiently hot economy that unemployment is kept low
removing pollutants like lead from the environment
something about cultural values and fatherhood, idk
My impression is that drug use explains some (but not all) of the western hemisphere’s high crime rates compared to Europe and East Asia. So any approaches to reduce drug use (or somehow make drug use less criminogenic / change what drugs are popular / etc) would be very valuable. But (per this Slow Boring article), this seems like a very hard problem. Do you see any promising approaches here?
I enjoyed reading this informative and well-researched post, but honestly one of my takeaways was that YIMBY (or “land use reform” as openphil calls it) seems like a marginally better cause area than crime reduction:
You say that the total cost of crime to society is similar to the total cost of land-use restrictions. But the solutions to land-use restrictions seem pretty obvious—to a first approximation, just let people build more houses by having higher levels of government squash local opposition to projects. (Then if you want to get fancy, you can address flaws in the first-order solution with patches like congestion pricing, Harberger / Land Value taxation, etc.) Meanwhile, the solutions to crime seem more nebulous: yes, I agree we’re probably underpoliced and overimprisoned, but cutting against this is the “incapacitation” effect you mention of locking up the small percentage of repeat offenders.
It’s hard to say exactly why, but to me, these crime-reduction ideas seem like they’d probably run into to diminishing returns. Even if you managed to encourage optimal policing policy across hundreds of local counties/cities, it’s hard to picture an amazing total victory that turns America into a nordic-style low-crime utopia. I would expect something more like a 30% reduction in crime, closing some but not all of the gap between the USA and Europe. To me, total victory in the YIMBY arena seems more plausible (although again, idk why, just a feeling).
(For me to believe that a low-crime utopia is possible in the USA—matching or besting countries like Japan—I feel like it would have to involve some totally wild mechanism of the sort that Robin Hanson would dream up, or possibly some kind of intensive social-credit system.)
YIMBY problems are arguably greater in scale: prohibitively expensive urban real-estate is a plague across the entire developed world—places like the UK, Canada, and New Zealand have it even worse than the USA. Meanwhile, most discussion that I see about crime focuses on how America has anomalously high crime rates and should aspire to be more like low-crime Europe. If crime is dragging down America’s GDP by ~10%, but land-use is dragging down the entire developed world’s GDP by ~10%, then land-use would be the bigger overall issue. (On the other hand, you could say this is an argument for the tractability of crime reduction—just be more like Europe! Versus the global nature of land-use problems maybe indicates that, as easy as it seems to just let people build more housing, perhaps there is some universal force of creeping vetocracy and stakeholder management that will eventually doom any attempts to go full YIMBY.)
All that said, even here on the EA Forum which is all about prioritizing causes, it feels pretty silly for me to be doing a compare/contrast between YIMBY and crime-reduction policies when I am in favor of both, and the two feel so synergistic! (You mentioned how one of the major costs of crime is that it causes people to feel unsafe in cities and move to the suburbs. And in my own life, I personally care about both affording a home and living in a safe, high-trust neighborhood.) I am not trying to start a debate, rather I suppose I am asking, “As a guy who is excited about institutional experimentation and big potential improvements to civilization’s status quo, what are the most interesting/hopeful/exciting ideas about crime-reduction policy?”
Some other questions, if you will forgive the stream-of-consciousness style of this long comment:
Some people say that you could reduce crime a lot by looking at “pipeline”-style interventions very far upstream of the crimes themselves. Do any of these seem to you like they’d plausibly have big effects on crime in the USA? I’ve heard people mention things like:
investing more in schools (and generally “investing in communities”, eg libraries)
running a sufficiently hot economy that unemployment is kept low
removing pollutants like lead from the environment
something about cultural values and fatherhood, idk
My impression is that drug use explains some (but not all) of the western hemisphere’s high crime rates compared to Europe and East Asia. So any approaches to reduce drug use (or somehow make drug use less criminogenic / change what drugs are popular / etc) would be very valuable. But (per this Slow Boring article), this seems like a very hard problem. Do you see any promising approaches here?