Malcolm Gladwell responds to those dying to know what he really thinks of Freakonomics, a book for which he wrote a glowing cover blurb. He finds the freakonomic analysis “occasionally frustrating,” he says. His pet peeve is Levitt and Dubner’s highly-touted explanation of the surprise drop in crimes rates in major American cities in the ’90’s in terms of the legalizaiton of abortion. In his own book, Tipping Point, he had favored the so-called Broken Windows theory, in short that crime drops when there are more police on the streets.
Forget for a moment that, in this post, he waffles abit about whether Levitt and Dubner are even conceding or disputing the Broken Windows theory. In the end, he resolves the conflict by appealing to the notion that economic and psychological explanations of behavior do not contradict but complement each other.
But there’s a second dimension to crime, and that is the immediate contextual influences on human behavior…”
Either this is a sophisticated argument that somehow lost me, or it is simplistic, vague and unsatisfying. I suspect the latter. Social scientists have expended endless energy trying to parse the complicated interactions of sociocultural and psychological influences on human behaviors. Gladwell’s assertion that he ‘likes’ psychological explanations better is both abit shamefaced to the extent that he concedes their reductionism, and abit uninsightful about what he himself is up to. Economic explanations inevitably have recourse to the psychological as they dissect how an incentive turns into a motivation. And certain psychological motivations, of course, relate to ‘economic’ incentives. Gladwell’s quibble over how they differ in explaining falling crime rates doesn’t really resolve anything…
And:
The cracks in ‘broken windows’
“A crime-fighting theory that says stopping major crimes begins with stopping small ones has influenced policing strategies in Boston and elsewhere since the 1980s. But scholars are starting to question whether fixing broken windows really fixes much at all.” (Boston Globe) Progressive academic critics seem particularly eager to dismantle ‘broken windows’; finding the war on quality-of-life crime a thinly veiled war on minorities. Champions of ‘broken windows’, notably the egotistical William Bratton, accuse critics of ‘broken windows’ of an anti-cop bias.
