The Three Tracks of Criminal Enterprise

The Three Tracks

Crash test dummies are the people who are too unambitious, stupid, impulsive or unreliable to ever be given serious responsibilities or achieving major power in a criminal organization. As a result, they are treated as totally expendable.

Middle management types are the solid earners for the organization...

The players are the top dogs. The ones who really make the power moves.

The prime examples used are the Sopranos and the Wire, but this categorization seems to be able to apply to many movies and television shows. Intuitively, it seems to apply to the hoods on the street too, but I try to avoid direct experience in that area.

h/t The Fourth Checkraise

Tom Lehrer on Social Sciences

The Conscientiousness Gap

A 2006 article from the the City Journal on the Marriage Gap between more educated and less educated women got me thinking. Especially these two parts:

According to the strength-in-numbers theory, then, two parents are better than one much the way two hands are better than one: they can accomplish more.

But this theory finally doesn’t explain all that much. If two parents are what make a difference, then why, when a divorced mother remarries, do her children’s outcomes resemble those of children from single-parent homes more than they do those from intact families? Why do they have, on average, lower school grades, more behavior problems, and lower levels of psychological well-being—even when a stepparent improves their economic standard of living?

And

Others take an alternative approach to the question of why children growing up with their own two married parents do better than children growing up without their fathers. It’s not marriage that makes the difference for kids, they argue; it’s the kind of people who marry. Mothers who marry and stay married already have the psychological endowment that makes them both more effective partners and more competent parents. After all, we’ve already seen that married mothers are more likely to be educated and working than single mothers; it makes sense that whatever abilities allowed them to write their Economics 101 papers or impress a prospective boss or husband also make them successful wives and mothers.

The first quotation was something I already knew. I had not yet thought deeply about it, but it cuts against both an primarily economic argument for stable nuclear families and a naive kind of magical thinking that pairing up two people and calling it a 'marriage' somehow makes the family function better. I'm not knocking the stepfamilies out there, it is just that I've never observed them to be quite the same as traditional families where the parents are alive and are married to each other. It was the second passage that really struck me, however. What if the difference between those who stay married and those who never get married or who are divorced and/or remarried is a stable causative factor that also affects family life?

My new favorite explanation, conscientiousnes, seems to fit well. After all, what is C?

Conscientious personality (high ‘C’) – an ability to take the long view, work hard with self-discipline and persevere in the face of difficulty

This seems pretty clearly related to both getting and staying married, and the ability to raise children well. It is further strengthened by the heritability of C. Conscientious children will tend to behave better and get better grades, all else being equal. This seems a much better explanation than the author's, which is to posit that better educated women believe in the institution of marriage for raising children. If we are really looking at education as the variable, I would wager that more education tends to undermine belief in the value of marriage, which is the kind of thing the GSS is good for looking into.  However, having more education is more and more correlated with high C as time goes on, so we find that more educated women are more and more likely to be married and stay married, regardless of their beliefs on the subject. 

Concealed Carry in Establishments that Serve Alcohol

I had been thinking about this topic since it came up in July after Gov. Brewer signed the bills. Since the laws take effect tomorrow, it gives me the excuse to think about it again.

If anyone had asked my opinion, which they did not, I would have agreed with Zanzucchi that firearms and alcohol do not mix. It is unfortunate that the State legislature felt that this would be a good idea, but the thing is done. I don't respect the NRA for the same reason I don't respect the ACLU, they both take a good thing too far.

That being said, having considered the topic, I'm not worried about an upswing in drunken altercations involving firearms. The thing is, this law applies only to people who have already completed the process for acquiring a concealed weapons permit. In the State of Arizona, this requires one to take the required training class, be fingerprinted, and have a background check for felony convictions and other prohibitors.

The training class is shorter than it used to be, which is another thing we can thank the NRA for, but at least there is a class that presents both safe gun handling and the the relevant laws one must follow.

This seems like it isn't that much work, but in reality it selects for people with higher than average intelligence, law abidingness, and conscientiousness, which are pretty much what you want in people who are armed. For proof of this, we need only consult the statistics collected by the Concealed Weapons Permit Unit to see that in the last 15 years, 138,348 permits have been issued in the State of Arizona, and 972 have been revoked. That comes to 65 acts per year that result in revocation (mostly conviction of felonies or domestic violence) versus 29.059 violent crimes last year in Arizona (with a population of 6,500,180).

On a per year, per capita basis, that gives us 47 revocable acts per year per 100,000 permit holders versus 447 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in 2008. That is an order of magnitude difference, pretty darn good in sociology. People who get concealed carry permits are much more law-abiding (and less crazy since that is a disqualifying condition) than other Arizona residents on average. This is clearly a good thing. It would be undeniably better if the rate were even smaller, but this is what we find.