Nearly half a million people are around the world every year. While the means vary across nations 鈥� knives in Australia and the UK, guns in the US and Mexico 鈥� what is universal is the sense of hopelessness about these deaths. Yet there is a solution, one that comes from an unexpected source: the subway system of Stockholm, Sweden.
Since a solution can only be unexpected in relation to some conventional wisdom, it is useful to start by looking at how we have typically thought about the problem of interpersonal violence.
Advertisement
In most countries, right-of-centre political parties tend to think violent crime stems from intrinsically bad people who are unafraid of the criminal justice system. That has led to policies that try to disincentivise violence through ever-harsher punishments.
Left-of-centre parties tend to think violence stems from bad economic conditions, that it is committed by desperate people who need to feed their families. That has led to policies that try to disincentivise violence by improving alternatives to crime, like jobs and income support.
Interestingly, both sides implicitly agree that violence stems from a premeditated, deliberate weighing of pros and cons. It is, as my late University of Chicago colleague Gary Becker put it, rational. No wonder so many policies focus on disincentives.
This view of violence turns out to be wrong, according to an by economist Mikael Priks. It looks at a sort of natural experiment created by the installation of surveillance cameras in Stockholm subway stations at different times from 2006 to 2008. This means we can see if crime declined more in the stations that got cameras early relative to those that got cameras later on. The data shows that the installation of cameras reduced crime overall by 25 per cent.
The key insight, though, comes from looking at what types of crimes were, or weren鈥檛, affected. Property crimes declined, but violent crimes didn鈥檛. The lesson is that deterrence works, but mostly for income-motivated crimes, which are the ones that tend to be premeditated and (relatively speaking) rational.
Deterrence works much less well for interpersonal violence because so much of it isn鈥檛 premeditated. Most violence stems from in-the-moment arguments when people aren鈥檛 thinking about the consequences of their actions. No wonder disincentives don鈥檛 help.
In my new book, I argue that we should heed the lessons of this Stockholm subway study and radically reorient our policies around violence prevention.
We need to recognise that violence is usually a crime of passion, not profit. For solutions, we must stop looking exclusively at the idea from neoclassical economics of perfectly rational people, and start looking towards behavioural economics instead.
What would that look like? One of the most important lessons from behavioural economics is that our deviations from rational behaviour have some predictable structure. That includes emotional, violent behaviour. This has allowed us to develop social programmes to help people better understand their own minds and how to prevent emotions taking over, as well as policies to get more trained adults out in public to defuse conflicts. The impacts are large 鈥� depending on the policy, , , even decreases in violent crime 鈥� while the costs are typically low.
Most progress in the human condition for things like life expectancy or material well-being has tended to come from scientific breakthroughs. The good news is the same pattern could potentially hold 鈥� if we pay attention to the data and the evidence 鈥� for one of our most seemingly intractable social problems as well.
Jens Ludwig is the author of
