Research shows that people behave irrationally in the
marketplace, lack basic information, and are easily misled and fooled. Therefore
we should give them much more power as voters.
We're using up our oil too quickly. Also, the price of gasoline is too high.
You can't reward teachers with merit pay or fire them for poor performance, because nobody knows how to measure teacher performance. Also, you need this certificate to be a teacher in this state, because the certificate packages together all the prerequisites that make someone a good teacher.
Drug users are irrational about the risks of drug use. That's why we need to ban drugs. With legal penalties in place, people will be rationally deterred by the legal risks associated with drug use.
I have a "COEXIST" sticker on my car, right next to my "I BUY LOCAL" sticker.
Others?
"Drug users are irrational about the risks of drug use. That's why we need to ban drugs. With legal penalties in place, people will be rationally deterred by the legal risks associated with drug use."
ReplyDeleteOne can easily rewrite this to be about time preference.
Drug users can be described as having overly high time preference and being extreme hyperbolic discounters.
As such, employing the force of law to drastically increase both the severity and immediacy of the negative effects of using drugs can curtail drug use.
We have a real world laboratory right now to study this question: the Philippines.
That’s interesting, but I don’t think it really works as a defense of drug prohibition. The chance of getting arrested for drug use is pretty small, probably comparable to other hazards of drug use. There’s “the chance that I’ll get a criminal record, and it will ruin my life”, and then there’s “the chance that I’ll become a dysfunctional drug abuser, and it will ruin my life.” I don’t really think the legal penalties make the risks come any sooner; rather it merely adds to them. I had a few posts in February 2016 clarifying the economic argument here. So far nobody has squared this circle.
ReplyDeleteQuick note: for the “experiment” in the Philippines to be considered a success, it has to do far more than merely reduce drug use (which I don’t doubt it will). The reduction in drug use must justify the great cost of this so-called experiment.
The arrival card for Singapore used to state, in bold red letters, "The penalty for trafficking in drugs in Singapore is death. THIS PENALTY IS ENFORCED."
DeleteScary stuff which I'm sure had an impact.
Right now the legal penalties for drug usage in most industrial countries are quite low.
The market consequences of drug usage are in turn artificially reduced by social safety nets--junkies aren't terribly likely to die in a ditch unlike the drunks of yore.
This imposes costs on society in turns of increased crime, reduced employment, lost taxes, increased public expenditures, increased disease burden, and quality of life issues like vagrants shitting in public parks.
I'm not a fan of the libertarian approach of...giving up...on social problems, even if you're right to point out that interventions should be measured and justified quantitatively.
I always like to look to history, and it's worth noting that a century ago many industrial countries were suffering from serious social problems stemming from alcohol abuse--not just the United States. This was also at a time when social safety nets were weaker and healthcare less effective.
Prohibition in the USA is widely considered to be a failure owing to the organized crime it spurred, but comprehensive alcohol control regimes were implemented in most if not all industrial countries and had considerable success in reducing alcohol consumption.
It might be the manner in which alcohol was tamed is a better model for curbing drug abuse than prohibition, especially as electorates in most modern countries don't have the stomach for extreme violence.
The anti-alcohol campaign of the late Soviet Union under Gorbachev was also widely considered a success, and after the collapse of the USSR alcohol consumption skyrocketed once again. In recent years the Russian Federation has begun the anti-alcohol campaign anew, which is something worth watching.
With respect to the Philippines, a historical parallel might be China. I've heard shocking figures like one-tenth of the population of pre-communist China being addicted to opium. These figures are perhaps exaggerated, but in any case it's my understanding that Mao wiped out opium consumption with a typical communist reign of terror.
The argument isn’t that a sufficiently horrible crack-down can’t reduce drug consumption *at all*, but rather that it’s impossible for this to justify the costs. As you ramp up the penalty, drug use surely falls *some*, but the added harm imposed by prohibition is necessarily greater than the harm reduced by the reduction of total drug use (at least for a drug with inelastic demand, probably true of “addictive” drugs). Here is the more thorough argument:
Deletehttp://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/02/demand-response-to-vice-prohibition.html
And here I discuss a paper by Gary Becker making the same argument (among others):
http://grokinfullness.blogspot.com/2016/10/excellent-paper-on-economics-of-drug.html
It’s not “giving up” to point out that there is a hard constraint, even an impossibility theorem, saying that your policy won’t work. Or more accurately, it’s not like trying harder will overcome an impossibility theorem.
Prohibition was a failure in this sense. It plausibly reduced alcohol consumption (though Jeff Miron has some papers arguing that alcohol consumption was at a minimum by the time prohibition began). Total harm from alcohol consumption almost certainly increased, though, as people were drinking harder drinks, tainted drinks, organized crime rose, etc.
I don’t know what drug penalties are like in other countries, but at least on the supply side they are absolutely horrible in the US. Multi-decade mandatory sentences for a relatively small package of drugs, sometimes. Not the death penalty, but not all that much better.
“…junkies aren't terribly likely to die in a ditch” I think this is incorrect, at least as of very recently. If you take the SAMHSA numbers and the CDC overdose numbers seriously (at least a good starting point), the annual risk of overdose for a heroin use is in the 2-3.5% range. That is *huge*. Someone willing to take this risk will likely shrug off the prospect of a legal penalty.
I’ve heard a very different narrative on Gorbachev’s prohibition. People were drinking perfumes and industrial solvents when they couldn’t buy booze legally. It might be interesting to see if any actual figures are available.
I have a few dozen posts on these topics. You may want to peruse a few of them to see what my view is on this. I feel like I’ve preempted some of these points elsewhere.