So, Nicholas Kristof came through again, declaring 2017 as the best year in human history. Don’t believe it? You should:
A smaller share of the world’s people were hungry, impoverished or illiterate than at any time before. A smaller proportion of children died than ever before. The proportion disfigured by leprosy, blinded by diseases like trachoma or suffering from other ailments also fell.
We need some perspective as we watch the circus in Washington, hands over our mouths in horror. We journalists focus on bad news — we cover planes that crash, not those that take off — but the backdrop of global progress may be the most important development in our lifetime.
Every day, the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty (less than about $2 a day) goes down by 217,000, according to calculations by Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs a website called Our World in Data. Every day, 325,000 more people gain access to electricity. And 300,000 more gain access to clean drinking water.
Readers often assume that because I cover war, poverty and human rights abuses, I must be gloomy, an Eeyore with a pen. But I’m actually upbeat, because I’ve witnessed transformational change.
As recently as the 1960s, a majority of humans had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. Now fewer than 15 percent are illiterate, and fewer than 10 percent live in extreme poverty. In another 15 years, illiteracy and extreme poverty will be mostly gone. After thousands of generations, they are pretty much disappearing on our watch.
Just since 1990, the lives of more than 100 million children have been saved by vaccinations, diarrhea treatment, breast-feeding promotion and other simple steps.
Kristof cheekily quotes Max Roser, saying, “there was never a headline saying, “The Industrial Revolution Is Happening,” even though that was the most important news of the last 250 years.” He concludes,
So, sure, the world is a dangerous mess; I worry in particular about the risk of a war with North Korea. But I also believe in stepping back once a year or so to take note of genuine progress — just as, a year ago, I wrote that 2016 had been the best year in the history of the world, and a year from now I hope to offer similar good news about 2018. The most important thing happening right now is not a Trump tweet, but children’s lives saved and major gains in health, education and human welfare.
Every other day this year, I promise to tear my hair and weep and scream in outrage at all the things going wrong. But today, let’s not miss what’s going right.
[Today’s post is by guest blogger Robert Kirchoff.]
St. Louis Interim Chief O’Toole, photo courtesy of St. Louis Post Dispatch
Last week I posted on Facebook criticizing the City of St. Louis’ most recent iteration of a long tradition of wasteful political theater: their December 2017 “Gun Buyback” scheme. Launched in the face of the City’s startlingly high murder count–shocking in absolute terms but downright third-world in per capita terms–the “buyback” was of course heralded as an immediate success by the city and its faithful cadre of mostly left-of-center and wholly well-meaning local reporters.
An acquaintance responded to my post echoing support and taking exception to the idea that this effort was anything but a win:
“Seems relatively logical no? Most murderers happen by guns in the city, remove some guns, maybe a few less murders?”
On first inspection this is a perfectly reasonable view. It seems obvious, therefore it must be right. Or at least worth the old college try.
Trouble is, gun “buybacks” (is the government selling guns to people in the first place?) are nonsense hiding in the threadbare guise of common sense. This guise shields the concept from all criticism, no matter how often if fails to achieve the desired result. To people who don’t have the time, expertise, or inclination to think further than the first step, such an idea will always sound reasonable. And most of the time in politics, getting past the initial sniff test is half the battle.
For that reason I hold no grudge towards my acquaintance. This mentality is not confined to him or to his portion of the political spectrum. I do hold a grudge towards the St. Louis politicians who pushed this idea, and who garnered public support and resources for it that could have been used elsewhere to good effect. They should know better.
But what should they know? Why aren’t buybacks a good idea? Here are just a few points that I could come up with off the cuff:
1. Sustainability
If you reduce the supply of something while leaving the demand unchecked, prices rise. This means that insofar as this policy “succeeds” it will begin to fail. That is, even if guns are moved “off the streets” and into police custody, insofar as those guns are in demand the remaining ones become more valuable. Meaning that the relatively modest prices offered by the buyback will rapidly look less attractive, diminishing further effectiveness. “Non-sustainable model” comes to mind.
2. Impact
The above assumes a key point: that supply will be affected enough to meaningfully impact prices. But alas, this is not so. St. Louis’ self-declared “massive” success yielded fewer than 1000 weapons. Sounds like they made a splash. But did they really?
St. Louis city has a population of about 300,000. The metro area exceeds 2,000,000. Roughly one third of U.S. households have a firearm in the house. Over two thirds of gun owners have more than one gun. Napkin math tells me that there are, at minimum, 1,500,000 gun in the metro area. Considering Missouri’s conservative bent and Midwestern location, the true number is likely well north of 2,000,000.
So did 1,000 guns make much of a difference? Probably not. Especially when you consider which guns are being turned in and by who.
3. Self-Selection I: The Attic Crowd
The fact that buybacks in the U.S. are voluntary dooms them.
Understand, I am not advocating they be mandatory (which in any case would likely be illegal given SCOTUS jurisprudence on the Second Amendment); I’m pointing out that absent compulsory participation, buybacks do an awful job of actually reducing the pool of guns likely to be used in crime.
When voluntary, these programs are just a place for people to dump the contents of their attics. Scrounge around and find grandad’s rusty old bolt-action and get $150 for it? Sweet deal. But what rational gun owner is going to sell a rifle worth $1000 for $200? Generally, they won’t. This is borne out by the St. Louis’ own statistics: only 6 out of the 1000 or so guns traded in were considered “assault rifles” (probably erroneously, but more on that later).
Thus you tend to get people turning in guns that don’t work, are rarely used, or are owned by someone ignorant about guns (inheritors, generally). These guns are not the problem and removing them does next to nothing.
4. Self-Selection II: Criminal Avoidance
Put simply: what criminal in his right mind is going to turn in his gun knowing full well the police are right there checking guns for past criminal involvement? Maybe a few exceptionally stupid ones.
This presents a really serious problem for the buyback scheme. A large segment of gun crime is gang violence,* which is to say, repeat offenders. If you disarm 90% of the population but the repeat offenders hold on to their guns, not much is going to change in the gun crime numbers.
*Exact percentages are exceedingly hard to pin down because of statistics gathering methodologies among law enforcement groups, but some estimates place it as high as 80% of gun homicides , though the real number is likely lower if still quite high.
5. Fungibility
Money is fungible. People can spend it as they like.
Consider the following scenario: Bob has a break-action shotgun he got from a family member. Bob doesn’t really want it, since it’s rusty and only fires one shot. But Bob is smart, and trades in his long gun for $150 cash to the fine, well-meaning folks at the St. Louis buyback. What’s to keep Bob from taking this cash to the nearest gun store and buying a brand-new pistol?
Nothing.
In this way, buybacks can function like a gun upgrade coupon program. In fact, buybacks are almost identical in concept to the notorious “cash for clunkers” program pushed early in Obama’s presidential tenure, only in the latter case the Fed’s stated goal was to induce owners of old, dirty cars to go buy news, cleaner cars. The buybackers do the same thing but claim they’re getting guns off the streets. Particular guns, sure. But total guns? Less sure. If you have two different policies that function identically but whose stated aims are diametrically opposed, someone isn’t right.
[An anecdotal aside: While attending the gun show in St. Charles on New Year’s Eve, I observed that the show guests as a group were about half black. This is a marked contrast to the usual sea of white seen most places in St. Charles generally and more specifically at gun shows. I can’t help but wonder if there were some savvy St. Louis gun owners who wisely traded up to something nicer on the buyback’s dime. That’s nice for them, but it doesn’t accomplish what the city intended—and used up scarce resources trying to make happen.]
6. Ignorant pricing
Per the RFT, the St. Louis City buyback featured this price list: “$200 for assault rifles and guns with a magazine capacity of more than ten rounds, $150 for shotguns and rifles, and $100 for handguns.”
First, a petty complaint: assault rifles are defined as select-fire intermediate-cartridge rifles; i.e. they can go full auto. These are both extremely rare (being very difficult to own legally) and extremely expensive (regularly auctioning for thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars). Their use here is either ignorant or intentionally misleading. Or, I suppose, the City might really believe that someone will trade in a rifle as valuable as a brand-new car for enough cash for a weekend stay at the Motel 6.
More to the core objection: these prices make no sense! Yes, pistols tend to be the cheapest firearms, so maybe if you didn’t think too hard you’d price them lowest. Except that, per the FBI, pistols account for 90% of all murders involving a gun where the type of gun is known. Rifles of all types accounted for a measly 4%, despite garnering the highest price point in the buyback.
This contradiction, more than anything, signals a lack of seriousness and information on the part of the organizers. A buyback program that was both interested in and informed enough to clear away dangerous weapons specifically rather than disarming the public in general would prioritize pistols above all else. Their presence at the bottom of the list seems to communicate what most gun owners suspect of anti-gun policy-makers: they have no idea what they’re talking about.
President Thomas S. Monson–the leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints–died on January 2, 2018. Here is how the NYT covered this event:
For contrast, this is what they tweeted when Fidel Castro died:
The NYT also had nice / neutral things to say about folks like Hugh Hefner and Hugo Chavez when they died. Hefner “founded Playboy magazine in 1953 and became inseparable from his brand” and Chavez “died after a long battle with cancer.”
Under Fidel Castro, anti-gay discrimination was institutionalized.
After a discussion of homosexuality at the Cuban Educational and Cultural Congress in April 1971, homosexuality was declared to be a deviation incompatible with the revolution. Homosexuality was considered sufficient grounds for discriminatory measures to be adopted against the gay community, and homophobia was institutionalised. Gay and lesbian artists, teachers, and actors lost their jobs. Gays and lesbians were expelled from the Communist Party. Students were expelled from university. Gays were prohibited from having contact with children and young people. Gays were not allowed to represent their country.
It is worth noting that by the end of his life, Fidel Castro had done a 180 on gay rights. By 2010, he was calling their treatment under his own regime in the 1970s “a great injustice, great injustice!” and accepting responsibility for that treatment.
Even so, the contrast between the NYT’s treatment of President Monson and Hefner, Chavez, Castro, etc. is illuminating. As Ben Shapiro wrote, commenting on Hefner and Chavez,
…it’s much worse, from the Times’ perspective, to be a religious person who abides by religious dictates on female ordination and same-sex marriage than to be a sexual profligate who trafficked in pornography, or to be a socialist dictator who destroyed an entire country. Monson was obviously a monster.
corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities can lead to higher future productivity…These findings complement previous research that finds “that firms can strategically engage in socially responsible activities to increase private profits. Given that the firm’s stakeholders may value the firm’s social efforts, the firm can obtain additional benefits from these activities, including: enhancing the firm’s reputation and the ability to generate profits by differentiating its product, the ability to attract more highly qualified personnel or the ability to extract a premium for its products.”
It’s important to emphasize that companies must “strategically engage” in CSR activities in order for them to be beneficial. In other words, not all CSR activities are created equal and, as should be clear from the bulk of the article, what truly helps society is managing well. In fact, recent research suggests that CSR activities can lead to employee misconduct:
In this paper, we explore another supply-side channel through which CSR can affect profitability: the impact on employee misbehavior on the job. Employee misbehavior is a common and costly problem facing businesses and organizations. It has been estimated that companies lose about 5% of their annual revenues to various forms of internal fraud (Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, 2016). A survey from the National Retail Federation (NRF) reports that in the retail industry alone, employee theft amounted to $15 billion (over a third of the total inventory shrinkage) in 2014 (NRF, 2015). Another survey reports that in 2015, one in every 38 employees in the retail industry was apprehended for theft from their employers (pg. 2).
They explore the possible effects of CSR through two channels:
“First, [CSR] can serve as a social incentive tool for motivating workers to reduce unethical and counterproductive behavior on the job. Previous studies have shown that, consistent with the standard gift-exchange model, workers reciprocate a higher wage from their employer by reducing misbehavior on the job that hurts the employer (Flory, Liebbrandt, & List, 2016; Ockenfels, Sliwka, & Werner, 2015). Similar to how monetary-incentives reduce worker misbehavior through a gift-exchange mechanism, social incentives in the form of CSR may reduce misbehavior, by triggering reciprocity towards the employer. CSR may thus reduce worker misbehavior through the gift-exchange channel” (pgs. 2-3).
“A second channel is that CSR can increase worker misbehavior through moral-licensing. Prosocial behavior is motivated in part, by self- (and social-) image motives: people act prosocially, in part to signal to themselves (and to others) that they are good and moral individuals (Benabou and Tirole 2006, 2011). While prosocial deeds can boost individual self-image, unethical behavior can damage it. As our moral standards are constantly challenged in multiple dimensions, good behavior in one domain may liberate us to behave unethically in another domain. Such a dynamic of moral licensing in individual behavior has been documented in the social psychology literature” (pg. 3).
“To shed empirical evidence into our theory,” the authors write,
we conduct a natural field experiment with over 3000 workers who we hired ourselves. In this manner, we served as the employer of an online labor market platform (Amazon Mechanical Turk) and invited interested workers to our website to perform a short transcription task for payment. The task and the payment structure were designed in a manner that provided opportunities for workers to misbehave. For example, all workers in our experiment received 10% of their total payment upfront, and immediately upon accepting the contract, and received the remaining 90% of their wage, once they completed the task. Receiving a percentage of the wage upfront creates an incentive for workers to accept the contract without actually working on, or completing the task. To provide the necessary variation to identify the critical pieces of the model, we randomized workers’ into one of the 6 treatments, across which we varied wage, CSR incentive, and the framing and timing of the CSR message (pg. 3).
Their results?
Overall, our results suggest that our usage of CSR increased cheating. First, the share of workers who shirk their primary job duty increases significantly –by roughly 20%– from the baseline to our CSR treatments. Indeed, CSR not only increases the number of people who misbehave, it also increases the level of shirking: the average level of cheating by workers increases by 11%. Second, consistent with the moral-licensing effect of CSR, we find the share of cheaters to be the highest when we frame CSR as a prosocial act on behalf of workers. While CSR increases cheating, we do not find any effect on the average quality of work after accounting for the cheating. We also do not find any differences in cheating behavior across workers who could and could not sort themselves into the CSR job. We argue that our inability to document any selection effect may be due to the relatively high rate of accepting the contract by our workers in all treatments.
…As we decrease the wage and increase the expenditure on CSR, we find the share of cheaters to increase considerably. In other words, we find that substituting just about 5% of the wage with CSR increases the share of cheaters by 25%, while substituting 28% of wage with CSR increases the share of cheaters by over 50%. Likewise, the intensity of cheating per worker increases as well (pg. 4).
In short,
our results reveal a potential dark side to the supply-side effect of CSR. We find that CSR can increase worker misbehavior on the job by generating a moral-licensing effect. Our findings also have important implications on how employers should communicate CSR initiatives to their employees. Importantly, we find some suggestive evidence that the way CSR is communicated to workers can play an important role in the extent to which it leads to moral licensing. When communicated to the employees as a benevolent act that the employer engages in, on workers’ behalf, CSR is (marginally insignificantly) more likely to exploit workers self-image and to lead to less moral choices in the future. This result is consistent with the findings of Kouchaki and Jami (2016) who document a higher level of moral-licensing, when consumers are exposed to a CSR message that praises the consumers compared to a message that praised the company for CSR (pg. 4).
This is why my GBR article focused on good management. This does far more good than image-boosting CSR activities. As business ethicist Chris MacDonald explains, businesses contribute to society by making useful products or providing useful services, providing employment, providing investment opportunities for investors, obeying laws and regulations, and paying taxes. CSR, according to MacDonald, misunderstands capitalism, acts as a smokescreen, and squanders public/activist/media attention:
The central tenet of CSR — namely that the best way for business to contribute socially is through good works — is faulty, and implies a misunderstanding of the basic wealth-and-welfare generating function of markets. Businesses contribute by producing things we want; they facilitate voluntary exchanges of goods and services that, when conducted honestly, leave all concerned better off. (Ask yourself: when did Bill Gates start contributing to society? Was it in 1994, when he founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation? Or was it in, say, 1975, when Gates founded the firm — Microsoft — that would help put the power of computers in of millions of offices and homes?
…When business leaders start bragging about their CSR activities, we should smile politely, and then enquire how their companies are doing in terms of honest advertising, corporate governance and regulatory compliance.
In the face of corporate scandals and economic instability, what we ought to be asking of business executives is that they focus on doing their job honestly and diligently. In any given week, millions of dollars are being spent on academic and industry conferences, round-tables, and dinners to talk about the importance of CSR. In any given week, newspaper stories are being drafted about which companies are doing well, or badly, in their CSR efforts. And in any given week, activists are staging protests, writing letters, and educating the public about the failures of companies to be “socially responsible.” What would happen, I wonder, if all of that money and effort were redirected to the simple idea of getting more people, in more businesses, to behave more consistently according to basic rules of honesty and integrity?
I think this fits pretty well with the overall theme of my article: do your job. And do it well.
