This is a plausible theory, but I'm not entirely convinced:
1. I am uneasy that so much of the thesis depends on one particular region--Latin America. It seems plausible that some other aspect of Latin American culture is to blame, not "democracy".
2. Even worse, there are very few dictatorships in Latin America, and the largest one (Venezuela) has a very high crime rate. El Salvador seems like the strongest evidence for this hypothesis, but it's too soon to say how that will turn out in the long run. Can they imprison so many young men indefinitely?
3. Tough on crime policies are very popular with voters--as you acknowledge. So why should democracy be the problem?
4. I am reminded of theories that you need a strongman to promote efficient economic policies, even though almost every single side-by-side comparison shows that democratic countries are richer (India/Pakistan, China/Taiwan, Colombia/Venezuela, Poland/Belarus, Thailand/Burma, etc., etc.) If democracy is indeed better for the economy, then looking at crime rates by controlling for GDP per capita tends to unfairly penalize democracies.
Other Latin American countries are beginning to see Bukele-type candidates. Let's see how they do before we abandon democracy.
"Tough on crime policies are very popular with voters--as you acknowledge. So why should democracy be the problem?"
See the last paragraph. Post-Warren Court American norms has become part of the democratization package. It doesn't need to be that way, which is why Bukele is popular.
"If democracy is indeed better for the economy, then looking at crime rates by controlling for GDP per capita tends to unfairly penalize democracies."
In Latin America, the trend has been toward democratization but slow growth. In relative terms, the region was better off than Asia in the middle of the twentieth century and in some cases ahead of parts of Europe. They've fallen behind since. Slow growth and democratization have gone hand in hand.
Sorry, I read that final paragraph too quickly. That makes sense.
I don't believe that democracy explains the slower growth in Latin America, as the less democratic countries in that region have done especially poorly. Growth slowed in most parts of the world after the mid-1970s (except China and India), regardless of whether the country was democratic or not. I put more weight on cross sectional evidence than time series evidence. (Admittedly, there is still the correlation/causation problem.)
I said there might be some other factor or factors that explains Latin America. It's not hard to imagine that this "other factor" might also explain why the US is an outlier.
To be clear, I think Richard is correct that "soft on crime" policies play a role in the US, and probably elsewhere as well. The rise in US crime during 1965-73 was clearly related to a change in criminal justice practices. The decline after 1991 was also probably linked to higher rates of incarceration.
Don’t people in Europe do drugs? Why don’t their drug markets lead to similar homicide rates in Europe and in nearby countries that have smuggling routes?
I've been on a Latin American history kick for a few months now as it one of the places in the world I had a big knowledge gap on. The "imperialism is to blame for all of the Third World's problems" explanation of history is obviously bad and wrong, but it comes closer to being true for Latin America than for just about any other place. The Spanish system was uniquely stupid - entrenching more or less feudalism, incentivizing convoluted color-based status obsessions, disenfranchising local native talent in favor of Spanish born mediocrities, kneecapping development, and more. And it lasted for 300 years. The conditions for building successful democratic societies was very poor because of all this at the time of the rebellions from Spain.
It *did* lend itself to rule by strongmen (caudillismo), but the strongmen themselves seldom were strong enough to fend off other strongmen or various peasant rebellions. Figuring out how to reign in the incessant military coups took another 200 years and it's only now that most of Latin America has finally pulled out of this for more than a few decades. Mexico was precocious here in building a coup proof central government, but it still has problems with crime violence. One reason for this is that in order to protect from coups, a successful strongman had to embed and ingratiate himself in elaborate corruption/patronage networks with local bosses (caciques). So, on top of crappy state capacity to fight crime, these states often developed an elaborate "pay under table" system which might be good for avoiding coups but is also a great way for organized crime to pay officials to look the other way.
It's interesting how anti-colonialism in Latin America focuses its ire on Britain and the U.S., even though Spain was clearly the dominant colonial power in the region. When the Bad Bunny Halftime Show debate was raging, Spanish was regarded as the anti-colonialist language, even though it's arguably the ultimate colonial language.
I remember a boss at an old job who was politically far-left saying that he wished America was a Latin American country. He was of Irish descent and so he really leaned into anti-Anglo sentiment. Of course, you can never tell a super-liberal that they're letting hate cloud their judgment, because liberals can never be hateful!
It is hard to hate people who are 30-50% your ancestors. You do not see them as "The Other".
There is also the part that Spain never really managed to get rich on colonialism, nor after that period really. All that gold and silver was spent on the military, so on colonialsm itself, in the broader sense, also Spanish troops in Italy and Netherlands. So in this sense, it was not robbery but more like an utterly pointless exercise.
Like, how to put it, if you are robbed and then robber invests the money and lives well it is more annoying than if the robber squanders the money and has nothing. The later feels more like a kind of poetic justice. Also realistically then you can get nothing back, so what is the point.
BTW as a James C. Scott anarchist, I think I can count as far-left, but I don't understand that version of far-left as your old boss. I mean, the political spectrum is about values. It is not about facts, facts are objective, one cannot have alternative facts. And between America and Latin America, it is a completely obvious fact which way people are voting with their feet. And far-left values like low inequality, inequality really does seem worse in Latin America than America. Even racial inequality, like everywhere you go in Latin America, rich people look a whole lot whiter than poor people. So I don't really understand those people, perhaps really just a reflexive "my country bad" feeling.
(1) People tend to have warm and not really “anticolonial” feelings against their own ancestors. Americans don’t feel anti colonial resentment towards British. Historically, most white Americans had British ancestry and a plurality still do. Many Latin Americans - perhaps most - have at least some Spanish or other European ancestry.
(2) The US has been far more interventionist in Latin America than Spain since independence. It is the US who followed the Monroe Doctrine and declared all of the Americas its backyard and sphere of influence.
1. That's interesting. I've never given that any thought. Good job on that.
2. That's true but America was nowhere near the colonial power in Latin America that Spain was. It just objectively wasn't. That said, it goes back to #1.
US meddling in Latin America has a sordid and bloody history, from Trujillo to the Bay of Pigs. Not saying the US is wholly or uniquely responsible for central America’s ills, but we have done some truly heinous shit in the name of fighting commies and earning $$$. Take the example of the United Fruit Company. For instance: https://swindledpodcast.com/podcast/50-the-octopus/
Forgetting for now colonialism and US intervention, consider the effect of the drug trade, driven mainly by the insatiable demand of norteamericanos for dope.
You know the interesting part is the individual yeoman-farmer settlement pattern in the northern US states, Canada and Australia on one hand, with a general principle of equality. And on the other hand the aristocratic slave plantation thing in the southern US and also the Latin American hacienda-peons stuff, yes, I would say despite the later lacking cattle slavery, these two are the same pattern, the general principle of high inequality, aristocrats vs. servants.
This later is IMHO the cause of most problems there, and would have caused the same in an independent Confederacy. It codes corruption and dictatorships.
On a related note, this is why I do not understand libertarians and semi-libertarians like Richard. You cannot possibly have freedom and liberty with really high inequality, it was never so. High inequality always resulted in a society where people on the top boss around the people on the bottom. Money is power and so on.
Yes, the plantation system is the chief reason the south is underdeveloped to this day compared to the North though the gap is closing in many areas and probably will be mostly gone within another 100 years. There will still probably be very poor regions in the South such as the Delta, but they won't be notably worse than other areas of protracted poverty outside the South (West Virginia, New Mexico barrios, Western Indian rez, etc.).
In general, the latifundia/hacienda/plantation type system is just a bad way to organize society, and I think is the #1 reason humans stayed stuck at lower levels of technological development than you might otherwise expect for 5000 years. The issue isn't inequality so much as lack of growth or anything like meritocracy. I will give the leftists one item - radical land redistribution (or at least the replacement of landed gentry with industrialists and merchants) has not happened without violence many times in history. Of course, peasant rebellions also usually end in disaster so it's very gnarly problem and why humanity got stuck in this cul-de-sac for so long.
I'm not saying that success comes from some Jeffersonian ideal either. The long-term goal is to liberate as much of your population from agricultural labor as possible. Modern farm conglomerates replace peasant labor with machines and thus succeed in aiding development by pushing peasants into cities and industrial labor where old-style plantations failed.
Migration does also help with this. Mexico arguably still hadn't de-peasantized itself until NAFTA made peasant style Mexican farming unmarketable. Mexican migrants to USA came disproportionately from these peasant backgrounds.
There is very little on Earth that sucks as much as being a subsistence farmer or tenant farmer or serf. All over the Earth, humans strive to do something else wherever they have a chance. It's something I wished modern populists understood - how crappy most historical elites were by keeping the masses of humanity stuck in these conditions and why you should not kill the golden goose because you are mad about Jeff Bezos' yacht or Kamala Harris collecting DEI art.
I myself sort of defy a label but am probably more or less a state capacity libertarian as the closest match. I don't think elites of any age are particularly noble of themselves and I think they will do what they can to entrench their positions (just like all humans do). The only way to permanently stop them from doing this is to normalize churn. Of course, there is very little a populist hates more than churn and uncertainty - hence the love of things like rent control. I deeply despise churn myself and there's really not much I want more than to sit on my porch in peace looking out over woods and fields I own, but there's no way to read history seriously and come away believing in the Shire. I am a proponent of "Star Trek socialism" which is to say that in a society with food replicators, it's very stupid to still have people starving to death. But the food replicator is contingent on technological progress. At the point you have food replicators, starving people is mostly a product of bad institutions, bad logistics, and stupid regulations (not all regulations are stupid) - hence the need for competent state/institutional capacity and governance. But you can assert all day that no one should starve in a subsistence farming society during a swarm of locusts and it will get you nowhere.
This is all really, really hard to build and sustain so some amount of epistemic humility is in order. Hence the healthy libertarian impulse to let people decide for themselves as much as possible. But I think you can exercise common sense here as well. Almost no one wants to starve, be murdered, have their children die of cholera because there's shit in the water, etc. and it absolutely makes sense to pursue these commonsense goals of general wellbeing with the power of the state.
Baltimore resident here. Interesting read. Worth noting that our current mayor is far from populistic, yet his two term run has conceded with the mind-boggling drop in murders here. Post hoc, etc. But wanted to point that out.
This is not really a mystery to me, it's the drug trade. When you give billions of dollars to gangsters you get murder. Violence is useful to regulate their black market trade, so the usual market mechanisms will reward and select for groups which are very effective at violence. They can in turn use the profits for bribes and weapons, as well as it being a powerful incentive for poor young ambitious men to become gangsters themselves. When the US banned alcohol they found a similar domestic problem, and the political backlash was intense enough that they reversed course, but when the climate conditions are such that the drugs are produced by foreigners at the cost of foreign deaths there is no political pressure to reverse course, so we get here. The US has drug gangs as well of course, but they are richer so they're less outgunned, bribes are less effective and the gangster life is less attractive, comparatively of course, all three things are still seen in the US. As an example you can look at the murder rate in Ecuador, it was very low some years back until Colombian drug traffickers realized their ports were easier to use to ship drugs compared to Colombian ones because of the inexperience of their law enforcement, the result you can see in one of the dots in your graphs.
Richard is using "democratic" as a proxy for civil liberties like rights for criminal defendants. I'm not an expert on the Indian criminal justice system, but AI makes it sounds like their police use coercive interrogation tactics and individuals regularly spend extended periods of time in pretrial detention following a threshold showing of guilt. I would not assume it has the same regime as South American countries, although I agree there's other factors that are probably weightier.
It’s literally their belief in karma. They don’t want to come back as something worse in the next life so they don’t commit egregious crimes towards each other.
I think it's less the religion than the culture itself. Religions usually act as a method of transferring cultural values. India's cultural values are based on the caste system/karma, so your lot in life was determined by the gods and is your reward or punishment for your behavior in past lives - so you have no right to forment revolution or to commit crimes against your social betters as your lot in life was your just dessert for your....get ready for it.....bad karma! Ghandi himself was the exception that proved the rule as he was a Brahman, and was revolting against the alien white Christians of Britian, so the system did not disuade his revolution.
But religions have a limited ability to counteract culture. In medieval Europe for instance, the knightly class was quite warlike even though Christianity is at it's core a pacifistic religion. Many have noted that MAGA Christians are highly unchristian in their behavior - even embacing open sexual immorality and pontificating about the Sermon on the Mount being "woke". So it makes sense that in Latin American countries that have experienced a massive cultural breakdown that you'd see Christianity having little effect on the most violent actors - in fact a lot of gangsters appropriate Catholic mysticism for their own ends (patron saints of drug dealers and whatnot).
It brings to mind a saying I heard once: religion does not change people so much as it reveals them.
Yeah Hinduism is a peaceful religion compared to the Abrahamic religions. I think it's a lot of why India is very small-l liberal and low-crime for its level of development.
I don't think it is necessarily peaceful, but I do think the religion reinforces certain cultural beliefs and tendencies - such as the idea that you have no right to change the world around you.
I'd definately stop short of calling Hinduism a "peaceful" religion, espeically when one considers the frequent outbreak of violence against members of minority religions in India.
Yeah, one thing people don't realize is that Latin American courts are just as soft on crime if not more than first world countries. So I agree. I'd add genetics to the mix though too. Homicide rates correlate extremely well with % of black or mulatto people in Latin America. Compare Argentina with the lowest homicide rate after El Salvador to places like Brazil or Haiti.
It's a different type of "soft on crime" though. In the First World, it's ideological. In Latin America, it's more systemic. The First World does it because they believe criminals are actually victims who've been done dirty by society. Latin America on the other hands breeds criminality due to cultural and institutional idiosyncrasies.
No, it's the exact same thing. Left-wing judges view criminals as victims. And the sentences are a complete joke. In fact, the US has much harsher sentences on average than Latin American countries.
It's hard to create a system that would let you systematically round up criminals without giving them standard protections and civil liberties in a way that doesn't also let you direct that infrastructure towards elites you dislike, critical businesses, or political opponents. In theory, a political opponent or a businessman is just as eligible to be a 'criminal' as the young guy weirdly standing by the gas station is. Because of this, democratic institutions and Bukele style crime policies coexisting would be incredibly vulnerable to the first party that decides to 'defect' and use the status quo to their political advantage. Maybe it gets instituted by Republicans and then Democrats use it to arrest figures like Elon Musk or 'colluding landlords'. Maybe it gets instituted by Democrats and Republicans use it to target 'pedophile teachers' and 'Soros institutions that are funding terrorism'.
This article proposes a much more radical idea than Hanania. I am not opposed to it, but I would want to see how it works in a lower stakes context (maybe some state tries it, or a poorer country) before advocating for that level of upheaval of our criminal justice system.
In actual America, without said upheaval, doing stuff like loosening requirements for warrants when executing criminal searches would allow Democrats to regularly execute drug searches on the residences of Elon Musk. They might send the DEA in to regularly raid Thiel parties for suspected 'drug trafficking'.
Protecting "privacy" rather than property under the Fourth Amendment means there is no penalty for a search that turns up nothing, but aside from that I don't see your hypothetical as that bad.
Wonder if the real problem is Western liberal criminal justice ideas, combined with low state capacity. Those ideas are popular in LatAm among liberals.
I think Japan has certain very different ideas about criminal justice than the West, despite being democratic. Still has death penalty too. Of course Japan would presumably be low crime regardless, but the point is democracy doesn’t have to be synonymous with Earl Warren.
Japan had dictatorship for almost its entire history prior to the end of WWII. Presumably the strict enforcement social hierarchies in East Asia for millennia suppressed certain criminal behaviors.
But I don't think that makes it a good model to follow at all.
I don’t mean to say Brazil should imitate Japan. Obviously impossible. But it’s to say we should be able to come up with more models for criminal justice under democracy than Earl Warrenism, without drifting towards kakistocracy.
Canada shares the world's longest border with, famously, the most heavily armed country in the world by a gigantic margin, yet has a pretty low homicide rate. I guess one could believe that the US-Canada border is effectively keeping guns out, but I don't find that very convincing. Basically everyone acknowledges that border control measures can't stop literal tons of hard drugs, why would they stop a few firearms? So I don't see 'availability of guns' as the most important factor
Gun use is not legal in Mexico de jure, but is de facto available via the black market. I believe it is not that complicated to get a gun if you have decent means.
It doesn’t matter how “tough on crime” an authoritarian government is since such a government itself is the biggest criminal anyway.
Trying to view politics through statistics is like driving down the highway full speed while only looking in the rearview mirror. You’re not even looking in the right direction.
Politics is fundamentally about rights. You either have rights-protecting government, which means low crime and high standard of living, or you have rights-violating government which means high crime and a low standard of living.
There’s no strongman case for populism, just like there’s no strongman case for continuing to dig once you’ve already dug yourself into a hole.
What we need urgently are political professionals that actually understand the subject of politics.
wow. Impressive. You can talk a pageful about homicide rates being high in Latin america without ever mentioning that it is the region with the highest economic inequality. And conclude that the problem is not inequality but democracy. Brilliant.
I think Hanania's argument is interesting because some countries poorer than LatAM countries and with a lot of inequality too don't have such a high murder rate. I think the settler-native dynamic in a lot of these countries led to a sort of libertarian Mad Max world where the elite press their advantage, and the average citizen is so powerless and uneducated that it becomes sort of a free for all with the government struggling to enforce the law.
Yeah, I agree. I just think it's important to keep a hierarchy of causes: effective law enforcement >> inequality + despair, envy, resentment in the poor >> cultural factors and possibly this democracy vs authoritarian thing which as the gist of this piece.
Cultural factors are the key. Even in unequal India, people are bound together by a shared civilizational-religious identity. In Mexico, Catholicism used to play a similar role, but it was a much more recent thing, and has unraveled with modernity and people's loss of faith.
That's because inequality only provides an excuse for crime. It doesn't cause it. Without inequality. work isn't worth the effort. The juice has to be worth the squeeze.
Yes, obviously this is the most important part. If you don't get that right nothing else is worth talking about. But other factors matter too, of which inequalities is a key driver. Wish Richard had plotted crime vs inequality instead of crime vs GDP.
There is no externally dictatable 'optimal' amount. The market will decide how it shakes out. If the state wants to help people who are genuinely in need, it can (if the people with wealth will consent to being taxed sufficiently), but there is no reason to aim for a specific Gini co-efficient. If it costs $40,000 a year to provide free health care and subsidy for groceries and rent to the poorest, there is no need to give them $60,000 just because that would make the society with billionaires more equal.
High inequality might incentivize the envious poor to commit more crime, but only if the wealthy can't use sufficient threat of violence to deter them. If you're really wealthy, well-paid armed guards are cheaper than submitting to the egalitarian taxation that would be necessary to bribe the dangerous classes into leaving you alone.
Wealth doesn't get created in a vacuum. You need functioning institutions and infrastructure. Which must be paid for - who pays, is the question. Anyway, thanks for engaging. We'll have to agree to differ.
Isn’t the context of the murders an important differentiator? If 80% of murders are thugs killing rival thugs, then legalizing drugs would have a far greater impact than electing an authoritarian to jail the thugs without trial. The authoritarian route only seems effective until you are the one being arrested because someone planted some drugs in your car and paid a police officer to arrest you.
Very interesting article, though as an Argentinean I struggle with fitting all of Latin America under one big umbrella. Is Chile comparable to Colombia, Ecuador, Brasil? I also think there's some nuance, for example in Argentina crime (specially violent crime) happens mostly in the skirts of urban zones, but there are many smaller cities where people still sleep with their doors open at night...
Free and fair elections have a very strong correlation with pro crime because 'free and fair elections' imply a push to lower all barriers to voting. Gathering as many votes as possible in a large city means that progressives will start winning, because mobs with no barrier to entry love voting for free stuff. Progressives being elected means that they will start enacting pro crime policies, because that's been their M.O. for the past century and no amount of snappy thinkpieces will change that.
This analysis isn't hitting the nail on the head, at least when it comes to South Africa (my home country) and Brazil (where I've lived for a year or so).
If you look again at the first chart, there's a correlation of high violenge with "middle" average income. A straight line fit isn't really appropriate there, at a guess a normal distribution would be a better fit.
Thinking only of SA and Brazil, there are many common factors:
1. rapid population growth combined with increased mechanization of jobs that would have been performed by unskilled labour.
2. decades of undemocratic government - and thus inability of the majority of people to effect changes in the law - inculcated a culture of "working around the law", what the Brazilians call "jeitinho". You could also say, "no history of rule-of-law". Also, state violence was the norm of those times.
3. growing wealth of the not-really-privileged, people outside the elites who found good jobs as the economies industrialized.
4. high joblesness mostly due to (1)
5. lack of enough economic power to support a welfare state
6. availability of drugs especially marijuana that grows like a weed in these countries
So there are many people drawn to crime as a way to survive (and desensitized by drug-taking), there is a large pool of people with possessions that are nothing special but still worth stealing (and this group is too numerous to be protected by the police), and a low expectation that the authorities will do anything about crime.
To paraphrase J.S. Mill: "despotism is not only legitimate but effective when dealing with barbarians." However, I don't think it's wise for the Right to play anywhere near the "gee, dictatorship isn't all bad" line. It's true, but saying it out loud is foolish.
As a side note: I live in CA, and I think you underestimate just how corrupt and broken some parts of America really are.
This is a plausible theory, but I'm not entirely convinced:
1. I am uneasy that so much of the thesis depends on one particular region--Latin America. It seems plausible that some other aspect of Latin American culture is to blame, not "democracy".
2. Even worse, there are very few dictatorships in Latin America, and the largest one (Venezuela) has a very high crime rate. El Salvador seems like the strongest evidence for this hypothesis, but it's too soon to say how that will turn out in the long run. Can they imprison so many young men indefinitely?
3. Tough on crime policies are very popular with voters--as you acknowledge. So why should democracy be the problem?
4. I am reminded of theories that you need a strongman to promote efficient economic policies, even though almost every single side-by-side comparison shows that democratic countries are richer (India/Pakistan, China/Taiwan, Colombia/Venezuela, Poland/Belarus, Thailand/Burma, etc., etc.) If democracy is indeed better for the economy, then looking at crime rates by controlling for GDP per capita tends to unfairly penalize democracies.
Other Latin American countries are beginning to see Bukele-type candidates. Let's see how they do before we abandon democracy.
"Tough on crime policies are very popular with voters--as you acknowledge. So why should democracy be the problem?"
See the last paragraph. Post-Warren Court American norms has become part of the democratization package. It doesn't need to be that way, which is why Bukele is popular.
"If democracy is indeed better for the economy, then looking at crime rates by controlling for GDP per capita tends to unfairly penalize democracies."
In Latin America, the trend has been toward democratization but slow growth. In relative terms, the region was better off than Asia in the middle of the twentieth century and in some cases ahead of parts of Europe. They've fallen behind since. Slow growth and democratization have gone hand in hand.
Sorry, I read that final paragraph too quickly. That makes sense.
I don't believe that democracy explains the slower growth in Latin America, as the less democratic countries in that region have done especially poorly. Growth slowed in most parts of the world after the mid-1970s (except China and India), regardless of whether the country was democratic or not. I put more weight on cross sectional evidence than time series evidence. (Admittedly, there is still the correlation/causation problem.)
Surely the two of you are skipping right past the big elephant: why the US looks more like Latin America than democratic Europe and Asia Oceania?
I said there might be some other factor or factors that explains Latin America. It's not hard to imagine that this "other factor" might also explain why the US is an outlier.
To be clear, I think Richard is correct that "soft on crime" policies play a role in the US, and probably elsewhere as well. The rise in US crime during 1965-73 was clearly related to a change in criminal justice practices. The decline after 1991 was also probably linked to higher rates of incarceration.
> It's not hard to imagine that this "other factor" might also explain why the US is an outlier.
Proximity to US drug markets is correlated with homicide rates.
Don’t people in Europe do drugs? Why don’t their drug markets lead to similar homicide rates in Europe and in nearby countries that have smuggling routes?
Much of the rights you describe sounds pretty pre-Warren to me:
The right not to be indefinitely detained, the right to know what you are specifically being charged with, etc., etc..
You really need to read the Bill of Rights.
I've been on a Latin American history kick for a few months now as it one of the places in the world I had a big knowledge gap on. The "imperialism is to blame for all of the Third World's problems" explanation of history is obviously bad and wrong, but it comes closer to being true for Latin America than for just about any other place. The Spanish system was uniquely stupid - entrenching more or less feudalism, incentivizing convoluted color-based status obsessions, disenfranchising local native talent in favor of Spanish born mediocrities, kneecapping development, and more. And it lasted for 300 years. The conditions for building successful democratic societies was very poor because of all this at the time of the rebellions from Spain.
It *did* lend itself to rule by strongmen (caudillismo), but the strongmen themselves seldom were strong enough to fend off other strongmen or various peasant rebellions. Figuring out how to reign in the incessant military coups took another 200 years and it's only now that most of Latin America has finally pulled out of this for more than a few decades. Mexico was precocious here in building a coup proof central government, but it still has problems with crime violence. One reason for this is that in order to protect from coups, a successful strongman had to embed and ingratiate himself in elaborate corruption/patronage networks with local bosses (caciques). So, on top of crappy state capacity to fight crime, these states often developed an elaborate "pay under table" system which might be good for avoiding coups but is also a great way for organized crime to pay officials to look the other way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caudillo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacique#Caciquismo_and_caudillismo
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-mexico-built-a-state/
It's interesting how anti-colonialism in Latin America focuses its ire on Britain and the U.S., even though Spain was clearly the dominant colonial power in the region. When the Bad Bunny Halftime Show debate was raging, Spanish was regarded as the anti-colonialist language, even though it's arguably the ultimate colonial language.
I remember a boss at an old job who was politically far-left saying that he wished America was a Latin American country. He was of Irish descent and so he really leaned into anti-Anglo sentiment. Of course, you can never tell a super-liberal that they're letting hate cloud their judgment, because liberals can never be hateful!
It is hard to hate people who are 30-50% your ancestors. You do not see them as "The Other".
There is also the part that Spain never really managed to get rich on colonialism, nor after that period really. All that gold and silver was spent on the military, so on colonialsm itself, in the broader sense, also Spanish troops in Italy and Netherlands. So in this sense, it was not robbery but more like an utterly pointless exercise.
Like, how to put it, if you are robbed and then robber invests the money and lives well it is more annoying than if the robber squanders the money and has nothing. The later feels more like a kind of poetic justice. Also realistically then you can get nothing back, so what is the point.
BTW as a James C. Scott anarchist, I think I can count as far-left, but I don't understand that version of far-left as your old boss. I mean, the political spectrum is about values. It is not about facts, facts are objective, one cannot have alternative facts. And between America and Latin America, it is a completely obvious fact which way people are voting with their feet. And far-left values like low inequality, inequality really does seem worse in Latin America than America. Even racial inequality, like everywhere you go in Latin America, rich people look a whole lot whiter than poor people. So I don't really understand those people, perhaps really just a reflexive "my country bad" feeling.
I have two answers to that
(1) People tend to have warm and not really “anticolonial” feelings against their own ancestors. Americans don’t feel anti colonial resentment towards British. Historically, most white Americans had British ancestry and a plurality still do. Many Latin Americans - perhaps most - have at least some Spanish or other European ancestry.
(2) The US has been far more interventionist in Latin America than Spain since independence. It is the US who followed the Monroe Doctrine and declared all of the Americas its backyard and sphere of influence.
1. That's interesting. I've never given that any thought. Good job on that.
2. That's true but America was nowhere near the colonial power in Latin America that Spain was. It just objectively wasn't. That said, it goes back to #1.
US meddling in Latin America has a sordid and bloody history, from Trujillo to the Bay of Pigs. Not saying the US is wholly or uniquely responsible for central America’s ills, but we have done some truly heinous shit in the name of fighting commies and earning $$$. Take the example of the United Fruit Company. For instance: https://swindledpodcast.com/podcast/50-the-octopus/
Forgetting for now colonialism and US intervention, consider the effect of the drug trade, driven mainly by the insatiable demand of norteamericanos for dope.
> Of course, you can never tell a super-liberal that they're letting hate cloud their judgment, because liberals can never be hateful!
Do you model super-conservative bosses as more tolerant of being told that they're letting hate cloud their judgment?
You know the interesting part is the individual yeoman-farmer settlement pattern in the northern US states, Canada and Australia on one hand, with a general principle of equality. And on the other hand the aristocratic slave plantation thing in the southern US and also the Latin American hacienda-peons stuff, yes, I would say despite the later lacking cattle slavery, these two are the same pattern, the general principle of high inequality, aristocrats vs. servants.
This later is IMHO the cause of most problems there, and would have caused the same in an independent Confederacy. It codes corruption and dictatorships.
On a related note, this is why I do not understand libertarians and semi-libertarians like Richard. You cannot possibly have freedom and liberty with really high inequality, it was never so. High inequality always resulted in a society where people on the top boss around the people on the bottom. Money is power and so on.
Yes, the plantation system is the chief reason the south is underdeveloped to this day compared to the North though the gap is closing in many areas and probably will be mostly gone within another 100 years. There will still probably be very poor regions in the South such as the Delta, but they won't be notably worse than other areas of protracted poverty outside the South (West Virginia, New Mexico barrios, Western Indian rez, etc.).
In general, the latifundia/hacienda/plantation type system is just a bad way to organize society, and I think is the #1 reason humans stayed stuck at lower levels of technological development than you might otherwise expect for 5000 years. The issue isn't inequality so much as lack of growth or anything like meritocracy. I will give the leftists one item - radical land redistribution (or at least the replacement of landed gentry with industrialists and merchants) has not happened without violence many times in history. Of course, peasant rebellions also usually end in disaster so it's very gnarly problem and why humanity got stuck in this cul-de-sac for so long.
I'm not saying that success comes from some Jeffersonian ideal either. The long-term goal is to liberate as much of your population from agricultural labor as possible. Modern farm conglomerates replace peasant labor with machines and thus succeed in aiding development by pushing peasants into cities and industrial labor where old-style plantations failed.
Migration does also help with this. Mexico arguably still hadn't de-peasantized itself until NAFTA made peasant style Mexican farming unmarketable. Mexican migrants to USA came disproportionately from these peasant backgrounds.
There is very little on Earth that sucks as much as being a subsistence farmer or tenant farmer or serf. All over the Earth, humans strive to do something else wherever they have a chance. It's something I wished modern populists understood - how crappy most historical elites were by keeping the masses of humanity stuck in these conditions and why you should not kill the golden goose because you are mad about Jeff Bezos' yacht or Kamala Harris collecting DEI art.
I myself sort of defy a label but am probably more or less a state capacity libertarian as the closest match. I don't think elites of any age are particularly noble of themselves and I think they will do what they can to entrench their positions (just like all humans do). The only way to permanently stop them from doing this is to normalize churn. Of course, there is very little a populist hates more than churn and uncertainty - hence the love of things like rent control. I deeply despise churn myself and there's really not much I want more than to sit on my porch in peace looking out over woods and fields I own, but there's no way to read history seriously and come away believing in the Shire. I am a proponent of "Star Trek socialism" which is to say that in a society with food replicators, it's very stupid to still have people starving to death. But the food replicator is contingent on technological progress. At the point you have food replicators, starving people is mostly a product of bad institutions, bad logistics, and stupid regulations (not all regulations are stupid) - hence the need for competent state/institutional capacity and governance. But you can assert all day that no one should starve in a subsistence farming society during a swarm of locusts and it will get you nowhere.
This is all really, really hard to build and sustain so some amount of epistemic humility is in order. Hence the healthy libertarian impulse to let people decide for themselves as much as possible. But I think you can exercise common sense here as well. Almost no one wants to starve, be murdered, have their children die of cholera because there's shit in the water, etc. and it absolutely makes sense to pursue these commonsense goals of general wellbeing with the power of the state.
Baltimore resident here. Interesting read. Worth noting that our current mayor is far from populistic, yet his two term run has conceded with the mind-boggling drop in murders here. Post hoc, etc. But wanted to point that out.
This is not really a mystery to me, it's the drug trade. When you give billions of dollars to gangsters you get murder. Violence is useful to regulate their black market trade, so the usual market mechanisms will reward and select for groups which are very effective at violence. They can in turn use the profits for bribes and weapons, as well as it being a powerful incentive for poor young ambitious men to become gangsters themselves. When the US banned alcohol they found a similar domestic problem, and the political backlash was intense enough that they reversed course, but when the climate conditions are such that the drugs are produced by foreigners at the cost of foreign deaths there is no political pressure to reverse course, so we get here. The US has drug gangs as well of course, but they are richer so they're less outgunned, bribes are less effective and the gangster life is less attractive, comparatively of course, all three things are still seen in the US. As an example you can look at the murder rate in Ecuador, it was very low some years back until Colombian drug traffickers realized their ports were easier to use to ship drugs compared to Colombian ones because of the inexperience of their law enforcement, the result you can see in one of the dots in your graphs.
India is poor, democratic and unequal yet i has low levels of violence compared to Latin America and Africa
Richard is using "democratic" as a proxy for civil liberties like rights for criminal defendants. I'm not an expert on the Indian criminal justice system, but AI makes it sounds like their police use coercive interrogation tactics and individuals regularly spend extended periods of time in pretrial detention following a threshold showing of guilt. I would not assume it has the same regime as South American countries, although I agree there's other factors that are probably weightier.
Maybe they have some internal governance that doesn't show up on democracy score. Plus hereditary effects?
IIRC Kiryat Yoel in NY state is very poor, but has an astonishingly low violence rate.
It’s literally their belief in karma. They don’t want to come back as something worse in the next life so they don’t commit egregious crimes towards each other.
I think it's less the religion than the culture itself. Religions usually act as a method of transferring cultural values. India's cultural values are based on the caste system/karma, so your lot in life was determined by the gods and is your reward or punishment for your behavior in past lives - so you have no right to forment revolution or to commit crimes against your social betters as your lot in life was your just dessert for your....get ready for it.....bad karma! Ghandi himself was the exception that proved the rule as he was a Brahman, and was revolting against the alien white Christians of Britian, so the system did not disuade his revolution.
But religions have a limited ability to counteract culture. In medieval Europe for instance, the knightly class was quite warlike even though Christianity is at it's core a pacifistic religion. Many have noted that MAGA Christians are highly unchristian in their behavior - even embacing open sexual immorality and pontificating about the Sermon on the Mount being "woke". So it makes sense that in Latin American countries that have experienced a massive cultural breakdown that you'd see Christianity having little effect on the most violent actors - in fact a lot of gangsters appropriate Catholic mysticism for their own ends (patron saints of drug dealers and whatnot).
It brings to mind a saying I heard once: religion does not change people so much as it reveals them.
Yeah Hinduism is a peaceful religion compared to the Abrahamic religions. I think it's a lot of why India is very small-l liberal and low-crime for its level of development.
I don't think it is necessarily peaceful, but I do think the religion reinforces certain cultural beliefs and tendencies - such as the idea that you have no right to change the world around you.
I'd definately stop short of calling Hinduism a "peaceful" religion, espeically when one considers the frequent outbreak of violence against members of minority religions in India.
Christians have hell and yet it doesn't seem to have much of an impact in LatAm
Yeah, one thing people don't realize is that Latin American courts are just as soft on crime if not more than first world countries. So I agree. I'd add genetics to the mix though too. Homicide rates correlate extremely well with % of black or mulatto people in Latin America. Compare Argentina with the lowest homicide rate after El Salvador to places like Brazil or Haiti.
It's a different type of "soft on crime" though. In the First World, it's ideological. In Latin America, it's more systemic. The First World does it because they believe criminals are actually victims who've been done dirty by society. Latin America on the other hands breeds criminality due to cultural and institutional idiosyncrasies.
No, it's the exact same thing. Left-wing judges view criminals as victims. And the sentences are a complete joke. In fact, the US has much harsher sentences on average than Latin American countries.
Is believing criminals are victims not a cultural and institutional idiosyncracy?
It's hard to create a system that would let you systematically round up criminals without giving them standard protections and civil liberties in a way that doesn't also let you direct that infrastructure towards elites you dislike, critical businesses, or political opponents. In theory, a political opponent or a businessman is just as eligible to be a 'criminal' as the young guy weirdly standing by the gas station is. Because of this, democratic institutions and Bukele style crime policies coexisting would be incredibly vulnerable to the first party that decides to 'defect' and use the status quo to their political advantage. Maybe it gets instituted by Republicans and then Democrats use it to arrest figures like Elon Musk or 'colluding landlords'. Maybe it gets instituted by Democrats and Republicans use it to target 'pedophile teachers' and 'Soros institutions that are funding terrorism'.
Not that hard: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/who-vouches-for-youhtml
This article proposes a much more radical idea than Hanania. I am not opposed to it, but I would want to see how it works in a lower stakes context (maybe some state tries it, or a poorer country) before advocating for that level of upheaval of our criminal justice system.
In actual America, without said upheaval, doing stuff like loosening requirements for warrants when executing criminal searches would allow Democrats to regularly execute drug searches on the residences of Elon Musk. They might send the DEA in to regularly raid Thiel parties for suspected 'drug trafficking'.
Protecting "privacy" rather than property under the Fourth Amendment means there is no penalty for a search that turns up nothing, but aside from that I don't see your hypothetical as that bad.
Wonder if the real problem is Western liberal criminal justice ideas, combined with low state capacity. Those ideas are popular in LatAm among liberals.
I think Japan has certain very different ideas about criminal justice than the West, despite being democratic. Still has death penalty too. Of course Japan would presumably be low crime regardless, but the point is democracy doesn’t have to be synonymous with Earl Warren.
Japan had dictatorship for almost its entire history prior to the end of WWII. Presumably the strict enforcement social hierarchies in East Asia for millennia suppressed certain criminal behaviors.
But I don't think that makes it a good model to follow at all.
I don’t mean to say Brazil should imitate Japan. Obviously impossible. But it’s to say we should be able to come up with more models for criminal justice under democracy than Earl Warrenism, without drifting towards kakistocracy.
I haven't seen any mention of the availability of guns and ammunition in your article which I'm sure must play a part.
Canada shares the world's longest border with, famously, the most heavily armed country in the world by a gigantic margin, yet has a pretty low homicide rate. I guess one could believe that the US-Canada border is effectively keeping guns out, but I don't find that very convincing. Basically everyone acknowledges that border control measures can't stop literal tons of hard drugs, why would they stop a few firearms? So I don't see 'availability of guns' as the most important factor
My understanding is that Mexico has only 1 legal gun store, which is run by the military.
Gun use is not legal in Mexico de jure, but is de facto available via the black market. I believe it is not that complicated to get a gun if you have decent means.
It doesn’t matter how “tough on crime” an authoritarian government is since such a government itself is the biggest criminal anyway.
Trying to view politics through statistics is like driving down the highway full speed while only looking in the rearview mirror. You’re not even looking in the right direction.
Politics is fundamentally about rights. You either have rights-protecting government, which means low crime and high standard of living, or you have rights-violating government which means high crime and a low standard of living.
There’s no strongman case for populism, just like there’s no strongman case for continuing to dig once you’ve already dug yourself into a hole.
What we need urgently are political professionals that actually understand the subject of politics.
wow. Impressive. You can talk a pageful about homicide rates being high in Latin america without ever mentioning that it is the region with the highest economic inequality. And conclude that the problem is not inequality but democracy. Brilliant.
I think Hanania's argument is interesting because some countries poorer than LatAM countries and with a lot of inequality too don't have such a high murder rate. I think the settler-native dynamic in a lot of these countries led to a sort of libertarian Mad Max world where the elite press their advantage, and the average citizen is so powerless and uneducated that it becomes sort of a free for all with the government struggling to enforce the law.
Yeah, I agree. I just think it's important to keep a hierarchy of causes: effective law enforcement >> inequality + despair, envy, resentment in the poor >> cultural factors and possibly this democracy vs authoritarian thing which as the gist of this piece.
Cultural factors are the key. Even in unequal India, people are bound together by a shared civilizational-religious identity. In Mexico, Catholicism used to play a similar role, but it was a much more recent thing, and has unraveled with modernity and people's loss of faith.
That's because inequality only provides an excuse for crime. It doesn't cause it. Without inequality. work isn't worth the effort. The juice has to be worth the squeeze.
Some is needed for motivation and also simply to reflect inequalities in contribution to society. But how much is optimal? That's the question.
Inequality doesn't excuse an individual's decision to do crime. But it surely statistically leads to more people doing so.
No, crime is caused by criminals thinking they can get away with it, and isn't that renumerative https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/why_do_the_poor.html
Yes, obviously this is the most important part. If you don't get that right nothing else is worth talking about. But other factors matter too, of which inequalities is a key driver. Wish Richard had plotted crime vs inequality instead of crime vs GDP.
No, I don't believe it is a "key driver". If Bill Gates or Elon Musk gets wealthier, I don't believe that causes more crime.
There is no externally dictatable 'optimal' amount. The market will decide how it shakes out. If the state wants to help people who are genuinely in need, it can (if the people with wealth will consent to being taxed sufficiently), but there is no reason to aim for a specific Gini co-efficient. If it costs $40,000 a year to provide free health care and subsidy for groceries and rent to the poorest, there is no need to give them $60,000 just because that would make the society with billionaires more equal.
High inequality might incentivize the envious poor to commit more crime, but only if the wealthy can't use sufficient threat of violence to deter them. If you're really wealthy, well-paid armed guards are cheaper than submitting to the egalitarian taxation that would be necessary to bribe the dangerous classes into leaving you alone.
Wealth doesn't get created in a vacuum. You need functioning institutions and infrastructure. Which must be paid for - who pays, is the question. Anyway, thanks for engaging. We'll have to agree to differ.
Isn’t the context of the murders an important differentiator? If 80% of murders are thugs killing rival thugs, then legalizing drugs would have a far greater impact than electing an authoritarian to jail the thugs without trial. The authoritarian route only seems effective until you are the one being arrested because someone planted some drugs in your car and paid a police officer to arrest you.
Very interesting article, though as an Argentinean I struggle with fitting all of Latin America under one big umbrella. Is Chile comparable to Colombia, Ecuador, Brasil? I also think there's some nuance, for example in Argentina crime (specially violent crime) happens mostly in the skirts of urban zones, but there are many smaller cities where people still sleep with their doors open at night...
Free and fair elections have a very strong correlation with pro crime because 'free and fair elections' imply a push to lower all barriers to voting. Gathering as many votes as possible in a large city means that progressives will start winning, because mobs with no barrier to entry love voting for free stuff. Progressives being elected means that they will start enacting pro crime policies, because that's been their M.O. for the past century and no amount of snappy thinkpieces will change that.
This analysis isn't hitting the nail on the head, at least when it comes to South Africa (my home country) and Brazil (where I've lived for a year or so).
If you look again at the first chart, there's a correlation of high violenge with "middle" average income. A straight line fit isn't really appropriate there, at a guess a normal distribution would be a better fit.
Thinking only of SA and Brazil, there are many common factors:
1. rapid population growth combined with increased mechanization of jobs that would have been performed by unskilled labour.
2. decades of undemocratic government - and thus inability of the majority of people to effect changes in the law - inculcated a culture of "working around the law", what the Brazilians call "jeitinho". You could also say, "no history of rule-of-law". Also, state violence was the norm of those times.
3. growing wealth of the not-really-privileged, people outside the elites who found good jobs as the economies industrialized.
4. high joblesness mostly due to (1)
5. lack of enough economic power to support a welfare state
6. availability of drugs especially marijuana that grows like a weed in these countries
So there are many people drawn to crime as a way to survive (and desensitized by drug-taking), there is a large pool of people with possessions that are nothing special but still worth stealing (and this group is too numerous to be protected by the police), and a low expectation that the authorities will do anything about crime.
To paraphrase J.S. Mill: "despotism is not only legitimate but effective when dealing with barbarians." However, I don't think it's wise for the Right to play anywhere near the "gee, dictatorship isn't all bad" line. It's true, but saying it out loud is foolish.
As a side note: I live in CA, and I think you underestimate just how corrupt and broken some parts of America really are.