roots of crime

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Since May, I have been able to spend time in two of the world’s biggest metropolises, Istanbul and Mexico City. They are similar in several ways beside their vastness. Each is the leading city of a substantial and proudly independent nation with a distinctive culture. In both, neighborhoods of poor, traditionally religious migrants from the countryside abut cosmopolitan secular districts.

One significant difference is the crime rate. Three people per 100,00 are murdered annually in Istanbul, versus 13.2 in Mexico City. This is a case where a quantitative difference becomes qualitative. In Turkey, crime is so low that I have seen—admittedly, in a smaller city than Istanbul—a whole shop’s worth of consumer goods left outdoors and unguarded overnight. In Mexico City, conversation quickly turns to avoiding violence. Is it safe to hail a cab? (Generally, the answer right now is: No.) Can you drive safely along a certain road?

According to Philip Mansel (in Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire), Istanbul was notably safe in the 1500s, when it was already one of the biggest—or perhaps the single most populous—city in the world. “Merchants could leave stalls unattended; pastry-sellers trusted members of the public to pay for the wares they left on a small round tray.” Mansel quotes Lord Charlemont’s report from the 1700s: “Housebreaking and street robbery, crimes so unfortunately common in our great towns as to render dwelling in them unpleasant and unsafe, never happen in the Turkish metropolis, and a man may walk its streets at all hours of the night with his pocket full of money, without the smallest fear of danger or molestation.”

Charlemont had an explanation: “the salutary rigour of frequent acts of execution.” It is hard to believe that executions were more frequent in Constantinople than in London or Paris, where a child who stole a roll would be hanged. And even if the Ottomans really used capital punishment more than the English or the French, I doubt the executions of those days can explain the safe streets now.

The “broken windows” hypothesis won’t explain the difference, because Mexico City and Istanbul are both rather chaotic and rife with violations such as illegal construction. Poverty is not a likely explanation, because Mexico City’s per capita GDP is twice as high as Istanbul’s, and its inequality index is not much worse. The proportion of residents under age 20 is virtually identical in both cities. Any explanation of the difference may have to be regional, because Mexico City shares similar crime rates with most other large cities in its region. (With Istanbul, it’s a little harder to say what the region is, and I cannot find crime statistics for possibly similar cities, such as Tehran.)

I’m sure there’s a large literature on this topic, but no persuasive explanation is well-known enough that it has reached me.

I suppose one possibility is that there is no root cause. Crime is part of a cycle: each act of violence begets more violence, puts strains on the state, and makes law-abiding behavior less rational for other people. Once you get into a high-crime pattern, it is hard to get out. But if you can avoid or stop the circle, you may be better off even five hundred years later.

public deliberation: the state of the field

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The current issue of the Journal of Public Deliberation (which offers open access) “assess[es] the state of our field, celebrates our successes, and calls for future innovative work. The authors are scholars and practitioners who represent the diversity of our field and provide a wide range of perspectives on deliberation, dialogue, participation, and civic life. The ideas from this issue will be discussed at the upcoming Frontiers of Democracy conference [at Tufts], after which the editors will write an ‘afterword’ reflecting on lessons learned.”

My own contribution is a short piece entitled “Beyond Deliberation: A Strategy for Civic Renewal.” My abstract says:

To expand opportunities for discussion and reflection about public issues, we should look beyond the organizations that intentionally convene deliberations and also enlist organizations that preserve common resources, volunteer service groups, civics classes, grassroots public media efforts, and partisan, ideological, and faith-based movements that have some interest in discussion. Many of these groups are not politically neutral; more are adversarial. But they have a common interest in confronting the forces and decisions that have sidelined active citizens in countries like the US. They are all threatened by the rising signs of oligarchy in the United States. Collectively, they have considerable resources with which to fight back. It is time for us to begin to stir and organize–not for deliberation, but for democracy.

found poetry

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This may sound like Basho, but it’s actually from Tripadvisor, describing the Dilek National Park in western Turkey:

Purest beach. Comfort of
pine tree’s shadow.
Wild pigs around of you and asking meal.
Peaceful please in every season

Not so much facilities inside.
Do not expect so much.
Hard to find sandy beach inside this park.
Expect wild bores and squirrels around.

from the achievement gap to empowerment

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Harry Boyte argues that the “achievement gap” is the wrong framework for thinking about education. It “assumes the point is upward mobility — how to give poor people, especially racial minorities, resources and remediation so that they can make it in a hypercompetitive, individualist, meritocratic educational system and society.” But Harry asks, “What if the problem is the hyper-competitive, individualist education system itself, now largely a screening mechanism for personal advancement?”

I would elaborate as follows. The main policy debate about education is about individual human capital in a competitive global market. The premise is that individuals need skills to compete. Poor individuals especially need better investment to give them a leg up in the labor market. Communities’ welfare depends on the aggregate of individuals’ human capital.

The limitations of that narrative are at least as follows:

  • It omits non-cognitive skills that also redound to the benefit of the individual, such as being able to work in teams (and especially in diverse teams)
  • It overlooks social capital and collective agency as the basis of economic success for communities and nations. If we have a lot of people who know math but don’t ever work together, we will not prosper.
  • It has an implausible motivational theory: teachers, kids, and families must do whatever it takes to boost individual human capital. In reality, activities like service and politics can be more motivating.
  • It overlooks the importance of communities in education. James Coleman started the whole social capital research agenda by arguing that communities’  engagement with schools was a precondition of their success, even when success was measured in individual economic terms. It is very hard to engage communities in schools if they turn into machines for developing the individual labor market advantage of students. (Why should I engage with the school in my community if its job is to prepare each individual student to compete against my kids in the labor market?)
  • It overlooks other educative assets and resources, beyond schools.
  • It works best for the institutions that are drawing the most economically competitive students and faculty. The dominant narrative works fine for Stanford. But what is a local college supposed to do? Should it try to claw its way up the competitive rankings in search for students who already perform better before they enroll?
  • It overlooks democratic and civic outcomes, such as participating effectively in the democracy.