2 sides of the coin
Thank God the coin has 2 sides. There is some divine logic and poetic justice in this fact. It gives the impression that somewhere in universe there is a delicate balance – there is multi-dimensionality, as against polarity. That alone is enough to make me happy… confused… but happy.
I like the fact that there are multiple explanations and alternatives for everything. Human beings have too much ego to believe in simplicity I think, and am no exception.
A while back now, I was completely taken up with Gladwell’s ‘Tipping point’ and particularly enamoured by the Broken-window theory. Its such a cool concept and has such instant and universal appeal.
Here’s an excerpt from Gladwell’s book ‘Tipping Point’ (since there is no way that anyone else’s words can do justice to the brilliance of the author):
In 1992, there were 2154 murders in New York City and 626,182 serious crimes, with the weight of those crimes falling hardest in places like Brownsville and East New York. But then something strange happened. At some mysterious and critical point, the crime rate began to turn. It tipped. Within 5 years, murders had dropped 64.3% to 770 and total crimes had fallen by almost half to 355,893. The most interesting and controversial explanation that was 1given for this came from criminologists James Q Wilson and George Kelling. They came up with the ‘Broken Windows Theory’. Wilson and Kelling argued that crime is the inevitable result of disorder. If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building on the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes. In a city, relatively minor problems life graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes. This is an epidemic theory of crime.
The 2 heroes in the story were David Gunn (the new subway director), William Bratton (the head of transit police from 1990-94, and later appointed Head Of New York City Police department in 1994 by Rudolph Guliani)
David Gunn was brought in in 1984 to oversee a multibillion dollar rebuilding of the subway system. Many subway advocates, at the time, told Gunn not to worry about graffiti, to focus on the larger questions of crime and subway reliability, and it seemed like reasonable advice. Worrying about graffiti at a time when the entire system was close to collapse seems as pointless as scrubbing the decks of the ‘Titanic’ as it headed toward the iceberg. But Gunn insisted. “The graffiti was symbolic of the collapse of the system,” he says. Gunn drew up a new management structure and a precise set of goals and timetables aimed at cleaning the system line by line, train by train. Gunn made it a rule that there should be no retreat, that once a car was ‘reclaimed’ it should never be allowed to be vandalized again. Gunn’s graffiti cleanup took from 1984 to 1990.
At that point, the Transit Authority hired William Bratton to head Transit Police and the second stage reclamation of the subway system began. Bratton decided to crackdown on ‘fare-beating’. First he picked stations where fare-beating was the biggest problem, and put as many as 10 policemen in plainclothes at the turnstiles. Bratton also insisted that a check be run on all those arrested. Sure enough, one out of 7 arrested had an outstanding warrant for a previous crime, and one out of 20 was carrying a weapon of some sort. Suddenly it wasn’t hard to convince police officers that tackling fare-beating made sense.
After the election of Rudolph Giuliani as mayor of New York in 1994, Bratton was appointed head of the New York City Police Department and he applied the same strategies to the city at large. “Previous police administration had been handcuffed by restrictions,” Bratton says, “We took the handcuffs off. We stepped up enforcement of the laws against public drunkenness and public urination and arrested repeat violators, including those who threw empty bottles on the street or were involved in even relatively minor damage to property.” When crime began to fall in the city – as quickly and dramatically as it had in the subways – Bratton and Giuliani pointed to the same cause. Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping points for violent crime. The Broken Window Theory is based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details and the immediate environment. That is, if you think about it, quite a radical idea.
My love with this breakthrough idea lasted till I read Freakonomics, which had a unique take on the Broken Window concept.
Here’s an excerpt from Levitt & Dubner’s ‘Freakonomics’ (since there is no way that anyone else’s words can do justice to the brilliance of the author):
In 1966, one year after Nicholae Ceausceau became the communist dictator of Romania, he made abortion illegal. “The fetus is the property of the entire society,” he proclaimed.Ceausceau’s ban on abortion was designed to achieve one of its major aims: to rapidly strengthen Romania by boosting its population. Abortion was in fact the main form of birth control, with 4 abortions to every live birth. Now virtually overnight, abortion was forbidden. Within one year of the abortion ban, the Romanian birth rate had doubled. These babies were born in a country where, unless you belonged to the Ceausceau clan, or the Communist elite, life was miserable. Compared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of children born after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way: they would test lower in school, they would have less success in the labour market, and they would also prove much more likely to become criminals. The abortion ban stayed in effect until Ceausceau finally lost his grip on Romania.
The story of abortion in Romania might seem an odd way to begin telling the story of American crime in the 1990s. In one important way, the Romanian abortion story is the reverse image of the American crime story.
The crime rate began falling in the early 1990s, it did so with such high speed and suddenness that it surprised everyone. It took experts many years to even recognize that crime was falling, so confident has they been of its continuing rise. But the evidence was irrefutable : the long and brutal spike in crime was moving in the other direction, and it wouldn’t stop until the crime rate had fallen to the levels of 40 years earlier.
There was perhaps no more attractive theory than the belief that smart policing stops crime. It offered a set of bona fide heroes rather than simply a dearth of villains. Bratton took a novel approach to policing. Instead of coddling his precinct commanders, Bratton demanded accountability. Instead of relying solely on old-fashioned cop know-how, he introduced technological solutions like Compstat, a computerized method of addressing crime hot-spots. The most compelling idea that Bratton brought to life stemmed from the Broken Window theory. Most New Yorkers loved this crackdown on petty crimes on its own merit. But they particularly loved the idea, that choking off these small crimes was like choking off the criminal element’s oxygen supply. Today’s turnstile jumper might easily be wanted for yesterday’s murder.
New York City was a clear innovator in police strategies during the 1990s crime drop, and it also enjoyed the greatest decline in crime of any large American city. Homicide rates fell from 30.7 per 100,000 in 1990 to 8.4 per 100,000 people in 2000, a change of 73.6%. But a careful analysis of the facts shows that the innovative police strategies probably had little effect on this huge decline.
First the drop in crime in New York began in 1990. By the end of 1993, the rate of property crime and violent crime, including homicides, had already fallen nearly 20%. Giuliani, however, did not become mayor – and install Bratton – until early 1994. Crime was well on its way down before either man arrived. And it would continue to fall after Bratton was bumped from office after just 27 months.
Most damaging to the claim that New York’s police innovations radically lowered crime is 1 simple and often overlooked fact: crime went down everywhere during the 1990s, not only in New York. Few other cities tried the kind of strategies that New York did, and certainly none with the same zeal. But even in Los Angeles, a city notorious for bad policing, crime fell at about the same rate as it did in New York once the growth in New York’s police force is accounted for.
There was a demographic change, however, unforeseen and long gestating, that did drastically reduce crime in the 1990s. Think back for a moment to Romania in 1966. Suddenly and without warning, Nicholae Ceausceau declared abortion illegal. The children born in the wake of the abortion ban were much more likely to become criminals than children born earlier. Why was that? Studies in other parts of Eastern Europe and in Scandinavia from the 1930s through the 1960s reveal a similar trend. In most of these cases, abortion was not forbidden outright, but a woman had to receive permission from a judge in order to obtain one. Researchers found that in the instances where the woman was denied an abortion, she often resented her baby and failed to provide it with a good home. Even when controlling for the income, age, education, and health of the mother, the researchers found that these children too were more likely to become criminals. The United States, meanwhile, has had a different abortion history than Europe. In the early days of the nation, it was permissible to have an abortion prior to “quickening” – that is, when the first movements of the foetus could be felt, usually around the 16th to 18th week of pregnancy. In 1828, New York became the first state to restrict abortion; by 1900 it had been made illegal throughout the country. Abortion in the 20th century was often dangerous and usually expensive. Fewer poor women, therefore, had abortions. They also had less access to birth control. What they did have, accordingly, was a lot more babies.
In the late 1960s, several states began to allow abortion under extreme circumstances. By 1970 5 states had made abortion entirely legal and broadly available and in 1973, with the landmark judgement in the Roe v/s Wade (on the abortion rights), legalized abortion was suddenly extended to the entire country. The Supreme Court gave voice to what the mothers in Romania and Scandinavia – and elsewhere – had long known: when a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or too unhappy, or she may think her drinking or druf use will damage the baby’s health. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.
In the first five years since Roe v/s Wade, some 750,000 women had abortions in the US (representing 1 abortion for every 4 live births). By 1980 the number of abortions reached 1.6 million. One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the earliest years of the legalized abortion would be 50% more likely than average to live in poverty; he would have been 60% more likely to grow up with just 1 parent. These are the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future.
In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v/s Wade was hitting its late teen years – the years during which young men enter their criminal prime – the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Levitt points out data that the 5 states where abortion was legalized earlier also showed crime drops earlier than others as well as correlation data between abortion and crime rates as support for his theory.
So there you have it!
Here are 2 arguments, both equally compelling, both supported by data, both with equal instant and universal appeal and charisma, both presented equally brilliantly by authors of great repute… so which is right?
Isn’t it infinitely annoyingly exasperating that there is no right answer? But that’s the beauty of it! How boring life would be without the gut wrenching dilemma of how to take sides… So here I am.. confused … but happy… and glad that the coin has 2 sides!
I am glad that there are 2 sides to a coin for the simple reason that it means that people out there are not satisfied with just one explanation for an event / phenomenon… there is a desire to dig deeper, challenge established norms and explanations (the ‘broken window’ theory itself challenged the established norms and explanations of its time… till it was challenged by an even more outrageously controversial theory) and there is hope of new discovery… there is creative dissatisfaction and creative destruction... and a better world... I would be inclined to think.
I like the fact that there are multiple explanations and alternatives for everything. Human beings have too much ego to believe in simplicity I think, and am no exception.
A while back now, I was completely taken up with Gladwell’s ‘Tipping point’ and particularly enamoured by the Broken-window theory. Its such a cool concept and has such instant and universal appeal.
Here’s an excerpt from Gladwell’s book ‘Tipping Point’ (since there is no way that anyone else’s words can do justice to the brilliance of the author):
In 1992, there were 2154 murders in New York City and 626,182 serious crimes, with the weight of those crimes falling hardest in places like Brownsville and East New York. But then something strange happened. At some mysterious and critical point, the crime rate began to turn. It tipped. Within 5 years, murders had dropped 64.3% to 770 and total crimes had fallen by almost half to 355,893. The most interesting and controversial explanation that was 1given for this came from criminologists James Q Wilson and George Kelling. They came up with the ‘Broken Windows Theory’. Wilson and Kelling argued that crime is the inevitable result of disorder. If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building on the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes. In a city, relatively minor problems life graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes. This is an epidemic theory of crime.
The 2 heroes in the story were David Gunn (the new subway director), William Bratton (the head of transit police from 1990-94, and later appointed Head Of New York City Police department in 1994 by Rudolph Guliani)
David Gunn was brought in in 1984 to oversee a multibillion dollar rebuilding of the subway system. Many subway advocates, at the time, told Gunn not to worry about graffiti, to focus on the larger questions of crime and subway reliability, and it seemed like reasonable advice. Worrying about graffiti at a time when the entire system was close to collapse seems as pointless as scrubbing the decks of the ‘Titanic’ as it headed toward the iceberg. But Gunn insisted. “The graffiti was symbolic of the collapse of the system,” he says. Gunn drew up a new management structure and a precise set of goals and timetables aimed at cleaning the system line by line, train by train. Gunn made it a rule that there should be no retreat, that once a car was ‘reclaimed’ it should never be allowed to be vandalized again. Gunn’s graffiti cleanup took from 1984 to 1990.
At that point, the Transit Authority hired William Bratton to head Transit Police and the second stage reclamation of the subway system began. Bratton decided to crackdown on ‘fare-beating’. First he picked stations where fare-beating was the biggest problem, and put as many as 10 policemen in plainclothes at the turnstiles. Bratton also insisted that a check be run on all those arrested. Sure enough, one out of 7 arrested had an outstanding warrant for a previous crime, and one out of 20 was carrying a weapon of some sort. Suddenly it wasn’t hard to convince police officers that tackling fare-beating made sense.
After the election of Rudolph Giuliani as mayor of New York in 1994, Bratton was appointed head of the New York City Police Department and he applied the same strategies to the city at large. “Previous police administration had been handcuffed by restrictions,” Bratton says, “We took the handcuffs off. We stepped up enforcement of the laws against public drunkenness and public urination and arrested repeat violators, including those who threw empty bottles on the street or were involved in even relatively minor damage to property.” When crime began to fall in the city – as quickly and dramatically as it had in the subways – Bratton and Giuliani pointed to the same cause. Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping points for violent crime. The Broken Window Theory is based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details and the immediate environment. That is, if you think about it, quite a radical idea.
My love with this breakthrough idea lasted till I read Freakonomics, which had a unique take on the Broken Window concept.
Here’s an excerpt from Levitt & Dubner’s ‘Freakonomics’ (since there is no way that anyone else’s words can do justice to the brilliance of the author):
In 1966, one year after Nicholae Ceausceau became the communist dictator of Romania, he made abortion illegal. “The fetus is the property of the entire society,” he proclaimed.Ceausceau’s ban on abortion was designed to achieve one of its major aims: to rapidly strengthen Romania by boosting its population. Abortion was in fact the main form of birth control, with 4 abortions to every live birth. Now virtually overnight, abortion was forbidden. Within one year of the abortion ban, the Romanian birth rate had doubled. These babies were born in a country where, unless you belonged to the Ceausceau clan, or the Communist elite, life was miserable. Compared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of children born after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way: they would test lower in school, they would have less success in the labour market, and they would also prove much more likely to become criminals. The abortion ban stayed in effect until Ceausceau finally lost his grip on Romania.
The story of abortion in Romania might seem an odd way to begin telling the story of American crime in the 1990s. In one important way, the Romanian abortion story is the reverse image of the American crime story.
The crime rate began falling in the early 1990s, it did so with such high speed and suddenness that it surprised everyone. It took experts many years to even recognize that crime was falling, so confident has they been of its continuing rise. But the evidence was irrefutable : the long and brutal spike in crime was moving in the other direction, and it wouldn’t stop until the crime rate had fallen to the levels of 40 years earlier.
There was perhaps no more attractive theory than the belief that smart policing stops crime. It offered a set of bona fide heroes rather than simply a dearth of villains. Bratton took a novel approach to policing. Instead of coddling his precinct commanders, Bratton demanded accountability. Instead of relying solely on old-fashioned cop know-how, he introduced technological solutions like Compstat, a computerized method of addressing crime hot-spots. The most compelling idea that Bratton brought to life stemmed from the Broken Window theory. Most New Yorkers loved this crackdown on petty crimes on its own merit. But they particularly loved the idea, that choking off these small crimes was like choking off the criminal element’s oxygen supply. Today’s turnstile jumper might easily be wanted for yesterday’s murder.
New York City was a clear innovator in police strategies during the 1990s crime drop, and it also enjoyed the greatest decline in crime of any large American city. Homicide rates fell from 30.7 per 100,000 in 1990 to 8.4 per 100,000 people in 2000, a change of 73.6%. But a careful analysis of the facts shows that the innovative police strategies probably had little effect on this huge decline.
First the drop in crime in New York began in 1990. By the end of 1993, the rate of property crime and violent crime, including homicides, had already fallen nearly 20%. Giuliani, however, did not become mayor – and install Bratton – until early 1994. Crime was well on its way down before either man arrived. And it would continue to fall after Bratton was bumped from office after just 27 months.
Most damaging to the claim that New York’s police innovations radically lowered crime is 1 simple and often overlooked fact: crime went down everywhere during the 1990s, not only in New York. Few other cities tried the kind of strategies that New York did, and certainly none with the same zeal. But even in Los Angeles, a city notorious for bad policing, crime fell at about the same rate as it did in New York once the growth in New York’s police force is accounted for.
There was a demographic change, however, unforeseen and long gestating, that did drastically reduce crime in the 1990s. Think back for a moment to Romania in 1966. Suddenly and without warning, Nicholae Ceausceau declared abortion illegal. The children born in the wake of the abortion ban were much more likely to become criminals than children born earlier. Why was that? Studies in other parts of Eastern Europe and in Scandinavia from the 1930s through the 1960s reveal a similar trend. In most of these cases, abortion was not forbidden outright, but a woman had to receive permission from a judge in order to obtain one. Researchers found that in the instances where the woman was denied an abortion, she often resented her baby and failed to provide it with a good home. Even when controlling for the income, age, education, and health of the mother, the researchers found that these children too were more likely to become criminals. The United States, meanwhile, has had a different abortion history than Europe. In the early days of the nation, it was permissible to have an abortion prior to “quickening” – that is, when the first movements of the foetus could be felt, usually around the 16th to 18th week of pregnancy. In 1828, New York became the first state to restrict abortion; by 1900 it had been made illegal throughout the country. Abortion in the 20th century was often dangerous and usually expensive. Fewer poor women, therefore, had abortions. They also had less access to birth control. What they did have, accordingly, was a lot more babies.
In the late 1960s, several states began to allow abortion under extreme circumstances. By 1970 5 states had made abortion entirely legal and broadly available and in 1973, with the landmark judgement in the Roe v/s Wade (on the abortion rights), legalized abortion was suddenly extended to the entire country. The Supreme Court gave voice to what the mothers in Romania and Scandinavia – and elsewhere – had long known: when a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or too unhappy, or she may think her drinking or druf use will damage the baby’s health. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.
In the first five years since Roe v/s Wade, some 750,000 women had abortions in the US (representing 1 abortion for every 4 live births). By 1980 the number of abortions reached 1.6 million. One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the earliest years of the legalized abortion would be 50% more likely than average to live in poverty; he would have been 60% more likely to grow up with just 1 parent. These are the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future.
In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v/s Wade was hitting its late teen years – the years during which young men enter their criminal prime – the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Levitt points out data that the 5 states where abortion was legalized earlier also showed crime drops earlier than others as well as correlation data between abortion and crime rates as support for his theory.
So there you have it!
Here are 2 arguments, both equally compelling, both supported by data, both with equal instant and universal appeal and charisma, both presented equally brilliantly by authors of great repute… so which is right?
Isn’t it infinitely annoyingly exasperating that there is no right answer? But that’s the beauty of it! How boring life would be without the gut wrenching dilemma of how to take sides… So here I am.. confused … but happy… and glad that the coin has 2 sides!
I am glad that there are 2 sides to a coin for the simple reason that it means that people out there are not satisfied with just one explanation for an event / phenomenon… there is a desire to dig deeper, challenge established norms and explanations (the ‘broken window’ theory itself challenged the established norms and explanations of its time… till it was challenged by an even more outrageously controversial theory) and there is hope of new discovery… there is creative dissatisfaction and creative destruction... and a better world... I would be inclined to think.
Comments