Can Enhanced Street Lighting Improve Public Safety at Scale? MacDonald, John and Chalfin, Aaron and Moritz, Maya and Wade, Brian and Mendlein, Alyssa and Braga, Anthony and South, Eugenia C.
Add to the growing evidence that few things deter crime so well as being observable by others.
Generally, decisions to spend federal funds come is the authority of congress. But the Trump administration has very publicly made clear that it will try to cut the things that are within its authority (or that it thinks should be within that authority). Truly, the fiscal year with the new Republican unified government won’t begin until October of 2025. So, the last quarter is when we’ll see what the Republicans actually want – for better or for worse. In the meantime, we can look past the hyperbole and see what the accounting records say. The most recent data includes 95 days after inauguration. First, for context, total spending is up $134 billion or 5.8% from this time last year to $2.45 trillion.
The Trump administration has been making news about their desire and success in cutting. Which programs have been cut the most? As a proportion of their budgets, below is a graph of were the five biggest cuts have happened by percent. The Cuts to the FCC and CPB reflect long partisan stances by Republicans. The cuts to the Federal Financing Bank reflect fewer loans administered by the US government and reflect the current bouts to cut spending. Cuts in the RRB- Misc refer to some types of railroad payments to employees. In the spirit of whiplash, the cuts to the US International Development Finance Corporation reverse the course set by the first Trump administration. This government corporation exists to facilitate US investment in strategically important foreign countries.
But some programs have *increased* spending since 2024. The five largest increases include the USDA, the US contributions to multilateral assistance, claims and judgments against the US, the federal railroad administration, and the international monetary fund. Funding for farmers and railroads reflect the old agricultural and new union Republican constituencies. The multilateral assistance and IMF spending reflects greater international involvement of the administration, despite its autarkic lip service.
Continue readingI’ve got a new working paper circulating.
“Better Stealing Than Dealing: How do Felony Theft Thresholds Impact Crime?” by Stephen Billings, Michael Makowsky, Kevin Schnepel, and Adam Soliman.
The abstract:
“From 2005 to 2019, forty US states raised the dollar value threshold delineating misdemeanor and felony theft, reducing the expected punishment for a subset of property crimes. Using an event study framework, we observe significant and growing increases in theft after a state reform is passed. We then show that reduced sanctions for theft have broader effects in the market for illegal activity. Consistent with a mechanism of substitution across income-generating crimes, we find decreases in both drug distribution crimes and the probability that a released offender previously convicted of drug distribution is reincarcerated for a new drug conviction.”
For those interested in a bit more of the nitty-gritty, we analyze both arrest and recidivism data within a stacked event study because we are dealing with staggered (diffent years) and fully-absorbing treatments (i.e. once they raise it they never lower it back). States raise their felony theft thresholds for a portfolio of stated and unstated reasons, but the reality is that the value of the marginal stolen good is often deteriorated by decades of inflation only to be doubled or tripled by a single act of legislation. This makes for an excellent before/after experimental setting to test the effect on crime.
We’re going to look at two things broadly: arrests and recidivism. The importance of arrests is straightforward: they give us a sense of the rates of crime across populations. Recidvism is more subtle. More on that in a bit.
In the quarters leading up to a threshold change (above) we see flat pre-trend with a coefficient of zero i.e. nothing happening. Nothing happening is good, it means that neither law enforcement nor criminals exhibit any sign of anticipating the change. Once a given state makes the change, we see an uptick in rates of theft within 6 months that persists for three years. Speculating beyond that is dangerous – too many other things happening in the world. But criminals seem to be responding.
We don’t see any effect on Burglary or Robbery, however (below). This is also a sign of rational criminals since these thresholds don’t apply (i.e. they are always a felony, regardless of property value). In other words, we don’t see an effect on all property crime, just on those crimes for which expected punishment is reduced.
We do, however, see an interested effect on drug distribution (below). In the quarters after a theft threshold reduction, we see a significant and persisting reduction in drug arrests. Yes, we include controlling covariates for medical and recreational marijuana legalization. There’s something else going on here. Are people exiting one income-generating crime for another?
This is where recidivism comes in. Using detailed, restricted-access, prisoner records, we track when prisoners are released and if/when they are returned to prison. By stratifying the analysis by the crime types they were previously incarcerated for, we can separately estimate the effects of felony threshold changes on individuals with human and social capital in the drug distribution business from those who do not. What we observed is both striking and subtle.
For indidividuals previously incarcerated for drug distribution (top left), their rate of return for future drug convictions is immediately lower with a reduction in the felony threshold. For those who were never in the drug trade, there is no effect (bottom left). Reducing the expected punishment for theft is pulling individuals out of the drug business.
Now let’s look at the return rate for felony larceny. For most prisoners (bottom right), there is a massive reduction in the rate of return for larceny. This makes complete sense – if more theft is classified as a misdemeanor, you are much less likely to be re-incarcerated with a new sentence for it. When we look at prisoners previously incarcerated for drug distribution, however, there is no observed effect (apologies for the changing y axis scales, there’s no good way to keep them constant). What does this mean? We interpret this as evidence that the reduction in punishment for theft is canceled out by the shift into theft as a preferred way of earning income. The labor substitution effect cancels out the effect of reduced punishment.
There’s obviously a lot more in the paper. No, there is not an effect on violent crime (Table 2). No, there is not an observed effect on officer enforcement intensity (Appendix Table A3). No, we can’t do a regression discontinuity at the threshold values (too much bunching, see Appendix Figure A7). The conclusions are both obvious and subtle, but the most important may simply be the reminder that all policies have tradeoffs and spillovers, no matter how narrow they might seem.
TLDR; When states increase the property value threshold delineating misdemeanor from felony theft, prospective criminals respond by a) committing more theft and b) substituting out of drug distribution and into theft. This pattern of substitution in the criminal labor market is more evidence that criminals are not only rational and respond to deterrence incentives, but are also selecting across criminal options, which means we should expect spillovers across crimes when policies create differential changes in expected punishments, enforcement, and returns.
Recently, I learned what humidity is. That might sound stupid, so let me clarify. I knew that humidity is the water content of the air. I also knew that the higher the number, the more humid. Finally, I also knew that the dew point is the temperature at which the water falls out of the air. But, now I understand all of this in a way that I hadn’t previously.
First, what does it mean for there to be 70% humidity? As it turns out, it’s a moving target. There are two types of humidity: specific and relative. Specific humidity is the mass of water in, say, a kilogram of air. So, more humidity means more water. This is obvious. There’s a related concept called absolute humidity, which is more like mass of water per volume of air (sometimes used in place of specific humidity). Again, more humidity means more water. Neither of these is the way that humidity is reported on the weather channel.
Relative humidity is the number that you see in your weather app. What’s that? Relative to what? First, we need to know that warm air can hold more water than cool air. Pressure also matters, but atmospheric pressure doesn’t change enough to make its effect on humidity significant on relevant margins. So, all of this discussion, and the number in your phone, is at atmospheric pressure. Below is a graph that illustrates the maximum amount of water that can be in the air at different temperatures (red line). So, at 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), there can be as much as 27 grams (0.95 oz or ~2 tablespoons) of water in the air.
More after the jump.
Continue readingIn no particular order:
The “broken windows” theory of crime (i.e small crimes lead to bigger crimes) continues continues to find very little support.
Air quality remains an underrated public good.
It’s conditional cooperation all the way down.
Literature on Recent Advances in Applied Micro Methods
Your one-stop-shop for an updating list of the papers currently advancing causal identification in social science
What, you think I’m going to pretend anyone is paying attention to anything but the trainwreck on Wall Street? As of 10:15AM this morning, the market is down 8% in 5 days, almost 20% off it’s peak, and is still falling. It’s entirely attributable to a unfathomably stupid trade war that has been forecast for months, if not years. This is the kind of probabalistic event that is usually internalized within the market in advance, which suggests that either very few people thought Trump a) was telling the truth, b) would be able to execute, or c) other forces within government would be able to stop him.
The legislative branch has largely ceded power to the executive, with only the judicial hanging on as some check against power. The open question, then, is at what level of damage will the legislative branch find incentive to reassert itself against an executive that (probably) doesn’t have the constraint of a future electoral victory to pursue? Will the destruction of great swaths of the US and global economy warrant reclaiming of power or impeachment of an executive?
I’m not optimistic.
Myself and a student coauthor worked hard on our article that is now published in Social Science History. It’s the first modern statistical analysis of the historical deaf population. We bring an economic lens and statistical treatment to a topic that previously included much anecdotal evidence and case study. We hope that future authors can improve on our work in ways that meet and surpass the quantitative methods that we employed.
Our contributions include:
I’m finally watching the Ken and Sarah Burns documentary on Da Vinci. It is, predictably, excellent. If you are heavily read on Da Vinci then there probably isn’t much that will be new to you, but the visual composition really adds something to what is less a propulsive story and more an attempt to capture the raw capaciousness of this person’s mind. It’s breathtaking, humbling, and inspiring.
There is a temptation to marvel at his dedication, ability to learn, and breadth. To relegate his accomplishments to the realm of outlier genius. Fight that temptation. Instead, take a moment to consider how dedicated he was to being unencumbered. To finding projects and patrons that would service to subsidize his pursuits in totality.
More than anything, observe a brilliant person for whom both the prospect and opportunity of boredom led him to follow his curiousity into whatever intellectual avenues it wanted to pursue, and then turning his imagination into product manifest in text and on canvas.
Boredom is an opportunity we increasingly don’t afford ourselves nearly enough of. We are starved for boredom. Allow for its sustenance.
“In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man. Between them stands a sellsword. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. Who lives and who dies?”
…“Power is a curious thing, my lord. Perchance you have considered the riddle I posed you that day in the inn?”
“It has crossed my mind a time or two,” Tyrion admitted. “The king, the priest, the rich man—who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey? It’s a riddle without an answer, or rather, too many answers. All depends on the man with the sword.”
“And yet he is no one,” Varys said. “He has neither crown nor gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel.”
“That piece of steel is the power of life and death.”
“Just so… yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend our kings hold the power? Why should a strong man with a sword ever obey a child king like Joffrey, or a wine-sodden oaf like his father?”
“Because these child kings and drunken oafs can call other strong men, with other swords.”
“Then these other swordsmen have the true power. Or do they?” Varys smiled. “Some say knowledge is power. Some tell us that all power comes from the gods. Others say it derives from law. Yet that day on the steps of Baelor’s Sept, our godly High Septon and the lawful Queen Regent and your ever-so-knowledgeable servant were as powerless as any cobbler or cooper in the crowd. Who truly killed Eddard Stark, do you think? Joffrey, who gave the command? Ser Ilyn Payne, who swung the sword? Or… another?”
Tyrion cocked his head sideways. “Did you mean to answer your damned riddle, or only to make my head ache worse?”
Varys smiled. “Here, then. Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.”
“So power is a mummer’s trick?”
“A shadow on the wall,” Varys murmured, “yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”
Tyrion smiled. “Lord Varys, I am growing strangely fond of you. I may kill you yet, but I think I’d feel sad about it.”
GRR Martin, Song of Ice and Fire, Vol 2
Blog reading types might have already seen “Fertility on demand” by Ruxandra Teslo.
My first reaction is that, at the current state of technology, I feel like wishing for more IVF on women is cruel. If someone you love has gone through it, you wouldn’t wish it on more people. Supporting the careers of women who want to have children while they are young seems preferable and lower cost to society. The problem is that supporting mothers is a tricky collective action problem, so we seem stuck with this.
“The egg freezing process is also expensive, costing between $8,000 to $15,000 per cycle. Fortunately, more and more women are being covered by insurance plans that offer free egg freezing. According to a 2021 survey, 20 percent of American companies with over 20,000 employees and 11 percent of smaller companies offer such benefits – an increase from six and five percent respectively in 2015. But most women still have to pay out of pocket.” $15,000 is sort of a lot. It’s cheaper than a year of paid maternity leave for a PhD student, but the total cost of a “medical baby to an older couple” is pretty high.
Some of the technology Rux described was new to me and encouraging. If babies and birth becomes much more medicalized (and civilization doesn’t end), then I could imagine a world where most couples look like Simone and Malcolm Collins by choice with designer babies on demand after having a carefree childfree decade.
“The main advantage of IVM is that it allows immature eggs to be collected instead of mature ones, which significantly reduces the burden of hormonal stimulation.” Exciting! Think of how far we’ve come with cancer treatments or treating AIDS. If enough research goes into this, then potentially the cutting, injecting, pill popping hell that women have to go through for IVF could become smaller and more focused on exactly what is near certain to work.
Someone’s going to come along and grumble and say nature is better, but recall from earlier: “Supporting the careers of women who want to have children while they are young seems preferable and lower cost to society. The problem is that… “
On an optimistic note, I am witnessing a beautiful success story of embryo adoption among my relatives. It worked. A wonderful couple has twins now, and those twins are experiencing love and contact from both their birth family and genetic parents. That technology only became available in the late ’90s. Expect more stories like this.
We might even be close to AI childcare that works. Imagine a daycare where robots do 100% of the food and cleaning work so that the humans in the room can focus exclusively on emotional and relational work with the kids. That could make daycare better or cheaper or both.
The simple technology of food and grocery delivery has already helped parents. The founder of Shipt, Bill Smith, got the idea for grocery delivery by experiencing how hard it is to do grocery shopping with his young children. Guess what? We don’t have to take toddlers to the grocery store anymore, unless we want to.
earlier thoughts: Awards for young talent are antinatalist
Economist Writing Every Day 