Where we murder for capital.

A pair of fascinating articles on cocaine economics. First up: did cocaine’s declining price cause the drop in violent crime?

Once the margin of profit for dealing small amounts of crack cocaine disappeared, being part of the drug trade was no longer worth the persistent threat of violence or the stiff criminal penalties. A 70 percent drop in cocaine prices like the one that occurred in the mid 1990s combined with competition from decentralized sources for methamphetamines and prescription narcotics would completely eliminate the minimum wage drug dealer as a viable profession.

The same goes for turf wars, which Venkatesh saw as the source of the majority of inner-city violence. He saw the life of a drug dealer as relatively violence-free up until territory conflicts with other gangs ensued. Without the high value of cocaine as a commodity, the incentive for protracted gang wars would dwindle as well as eliminate the economy for the illegal weapons, drive-by shootings, and mercenary “warriors” needed to help defend prime dealing locations. Without profit to fight over, Vankatesh thought that “gang violence would likely return to pre-crack levels.”

On the Mexican side, a forensic economist believes the cartels are behaving rationally:

According to Dell, the cartels have behaved like textbook economic actors, shifting their trafficking routes in predictable ways to circumvent towns where the government has cracked down and raiding towns where competing cartels have been weakened by government efforts.
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What happens when a law-and-order mayor gets elected? All hell breaks loose: Dell estimates that the drug-related homicide rate almost doubles relative to “control” towns where the PAN wasn’t elected. And it’s not the result of traffickers warring with police, but rather traffickers fighting with each other. Dell conjectures—based on anecdotal evidence about the drug war—that police efforts tend to weaken a cartel’s grip on a town just enough that competing traffickers see an opening to come in and fight for control of the town. Indeed, when a rival cartel controls a neighboring town, the effect of a PAN win on the drug-related homicide rate is several times higher.

Linkwad.

1. I desperately wanted this to be wrong.
2. It’s not great for a product when “It really doesn’t suck” is the best defense you can make. Somewhat ironically, here’s a former-Amazon-turned-Googler who thinks Amazon’s done at least one thing much better than el Goog.
3. Does this mean Ezra Klein and I are getting married on the same day? Hey, also, if you didn’t know why posting has been sparse lately: I’m getting married.

Linkwad.

Another scary/depressing edition, unfortunately:

• We are the 99 Percent tumblr.
• While CEO pay rises, thanks to repeated “above-average” contracts (via Yglesias). When San Jose police and fire unions did this, city government basically went bankrupt.
• The short of this long article: forests store carbon, slowing global warming. Global warming kills forests, and could accelerate.
• What? Racism’s not a thing anymore, though!

Linkwad.

1. An excellent post on how superheroes and villains come to their wealth and power.
2. Harvesting hydrogen from wastewater.
3. Neutrinos go faster than the speed of light, possibly, shattering pretty much everything we thought we knew about anything, maybe.
4. I imagine “the sudden death of a guinea pig, shocking enough in itself, can also place the hapless owners outside the law” is the most unlikely phrase you’ll read today. Things like this and Sweden’s “heavy metal disability” go way past “nanny state”–maybe “diaper state” would be more appropriate. Also, click through for a thoroughly adorable photo and caption. Via Yglesias.
5. Bonus: hello, Quipu!
   

Up against the wall.

I’ve felt fairly sympathetic to the UK rioters, all things considered, and coincidentally, here comes Slavoj Zizek with a much, much more eloquent (and smarter) take that dovetails fairly nicely¹:

The protesters, though underprivileged and de facto socially excluded, weren’t living on the edge of starvation. People in much worse material straits, let alone conditions of physical and ideological oppression, have been able to organise themselves into political forces with clear agendas. The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?
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The truth is that the conflict was between two poles of the underprivileged: those who have succeeded in functioning within the system versus those who are too frustrated to go on trying. The rioters’ violence was almost exclusively directed against their own. The cars burned and the shops looted were not in rich neighbourhoods, but in the rioters’ own. The conflict is not between different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, the conflict between society and society, between those with everything, and those with nothing, to lose; between those with no stake in their community and those whose stakes are the highest.

Via @Longformorg.