Bad Behavior part IV

Dennis Prager (Townhall.com) has an article where he lists ten reasons why people do evil.

1. The Devil
2. Genes
3. Parents
4. Religion
5. Money
6. Power
7. Pursuit of Good
8. Sadism
9. Boredom
10. Victimhood

He calls them reason for doing evil; I call them excuses for doing evil. The first three take the choice out of the person hands and puts them as victims. They eliminate free well. Since I believe humans have free well, then I mark the first three down as influences not reasons.

The remaining six I look at as more in the Dale Carnegie school of thought that says that people do thing in order to feel important. The evil comes in to play when people put themselves in front of others. Religion, money, power and the pursuit of good are paths in order to find importance while the sadism, boredom and victimhood are because the individual realizes they are not important. I include sadism because it involves hurting and destroying in order to build oneself up (others must fail for me to succeed).

This all ties in to Bad Behavior heading that I have been working on and I will be getting back to this but I want to move on to the paper by Naci Mocan and R. Kaj Gittings called "The Impact of Incentives on Human Behavior: Can We Make It Disappear? The Case of the Death Penalty" and as can be expected is an economist look at crime.

In the economic approach to crime, decades of empirical research has demonstrated that potential criminals indeed respond to incentives.

The paper mainly focuses on murder but can be expanded to all crimes within reason.

One common argument made by non-economists against the economic approach to human behavior is that people are not rational enough to behave according to the predictions of economic theory when it comes to behaviors such as smoking, consumption of alcohol and illicit drugs, sexual activity and crime. However, an enormous empirical literature in economics has demonstrated that even these behaviors are responsive to prices and incentives.

Crime will follow a “Cost versus Benefit’ equation. The cost is a mixture of the punishment if caught, the possibility of being caught and some social pressure for being a criminal. The benefit, of course, is the successful execution of the crime and/or what even material gain occurs.

In order to reduce crime, the cost/price must out weight the benefit/gain. That is a simple statement to a complex issue. The most obvious ways to increase the cost would be to have stricter punishments (longer terms and the death penalty) and increase the chance of being caught (more police, more surveillance equipment and better investigation techniques). The problem now is how to pay for all of this and how much is needed to overcome the rational aspect.

The rational aspect is the willingness of the individual to pay the price. Each individual has their own level of acceptance for the price required. Think of it along this line, some people will not speed no matter what even when a multitude of others around them are zooming by. They feel the price speeding, the cost of being caught or increase risk of accident, is too high for the benefit of getting somewhere faster. The cost being broken down in to actually get caught, the ticket when caught and insurance issues. For some it takes the threat of a patrol being present before the price out weights the benefit, while others continue to speed after receiving several tickets, high insurance rates and losing their license. For some people the cost has to be so high, it becomes unrealistic to charge.

Here comes another “easier said than done” moment. In order to effective reduce crime people must believe the price is too high. This requires a “no exception rule” for the guilty. It requires enforcing the law on every account, no matter who is found guilty. It requires the person convicted to serve the full term of their sentence. Finally it requires the person be allowed to earn a place back into normal society when they have fulfilled their punishment.

I'm going stop here and come back to a couple points later on.