If I remember right it shows:

1) strong correlation between ending death penalties and then subsequently dropping homicides
2) rising homicide rates *after* the nationwide moratorium on capital punishment was lifted.

and other things... i have a trove of all that stuff back home. i'll get back to you

A strong correlation that doesn't take into account an increasingly educated populace... Again, I'll look at them when you are back home, but I suspect there are plenty of factors not accounted for in these studies. They are staticstics, not scientific evidence because there are no controls and they aren't repeatable.

Well, I am disappointed the thread is going off in this less interesting direction, but since it is....
I took a class on econometrics in law school, which focused for much of the term on evaluating death penalty papers. I'd have to dust off my notes, but I think the following could be fairly said:
(1) There is a great deal of ambiguity and contradiction on the surface in the published studies on the death penalty. Such simple points as "(2)" in Thucy's prior post generally prove nothing, since simple "event A, followed by trend B" type scenarios are just prone to mask too many other social trends.

(2) Many of the studies showing deterrent effects are methodoligically deeply flawed.

(3) The _less_ flawed studies tend to show little or no deterrent effect, though not in crystal clarity (contra Thucy's claim). The evidence is simply not really determinative of anything. And the techniques required to correctly assess the data are extremely sophisticated, so these arguments can get very technical. In some sense, the data we really need in order to do the studies right is not available.

A good description of the state of things right now can be found here:

http://works.bepress.com/john_donohue/4/

Donohue is very anti-death penalty, and I think sometimes tends toward the rhetorical in his work (unfortunate, for an econometrician); also, I have some qualms about a few of his perspectives on data analysis. All that notwithstanding, I think this is a pretty balanced and fair critique / discussion of where we stand today. (Just fill out a form to read the article for free).

(Edit: Donohue, at least, believes that I am wrong in still saying the data are fuzzy: http://works.bepress.com/john_donohue/80/ . Also linked from there are citations to people who disagree with him).

My support for the death penalty is not based on utilitarianism, but I thought that for those interested in the statistics, this might be useful.

I used to be a great propronent of capital punishment. I've changed my view over the last few years.

First, it has very little deterrent effect - except for the obvious one that the dead person is pretty thoroughly deterred from future crimes. But life in prison does that too. Source: Freakanomics, which researched the *hell* out of the issue

Second, prosecuters are more likely to go for the death penalty when they think they can get a conviction - which means that the well to do, who hire high priced lawyers, rarely get the chair. I don't necessarily *blame* prosecutors for making that decision, although I'm hardly thrilled with it - but it's not like we're talking a level playing field for anyone convicted of a capital crime.

Third, there have been far, far too many people who have been rotting in jail for decades being proven innocent for me to be comfortable we're not frying a potentially innocent man. Note that I've chosen my words carefully - there are people who have been freed who have been proven *not* to have committed the crime, not just that the evidence is too weak for a retrial. While the idealist in me likes to believe that the goal of the criminal justice system is to solve crimes, the realist knows that the goal of many people is to *close cases* - which may not be the same thing.

Having said all that, if someone were to take my family from me, I would be finding out who I would have to bribe to be the person to push in the needle, but that has nothing to do with justice - that would be *vengance*. But I'd still have to be *damn* sure I was getting my revenge on the right person, not just lashing out in my rage.

Studies like this, Draugnar, *indicate* things and *prove* nothing, this I know well being a skeptic, but, at the same time, they do tell us things that are in general true in the practical world.

Are you aware of the concept of "returning to the mean"?

It goes like this: we tend to think reprimanding people after they fuck up royally makes them shape up. Why? Because they were returning to the mean. Fucking up was an anomaly. And whether you scolded them or not, they were going to go back to their average level of behavior pretty quick, probabilistically speaking. But you attribute your scolding as the cause for what you perceive as a behavior improvement.

Extend that to the deterrent effect and you have a fallacy on your hands. That's more my opinion though.



But back to why all people are equally worthy - for all intents and purposes, we humans are all mostly alike. We have the same *types* of experiences and emotions. We make quite a large deal out of the differences (race anyone?) but really, being human is a pretty relatable thing if you are human too. We have a lot in common just by being people.

So in the sense that I can pretty well see myself being anyone who is a human being, and in the sense that I would not want myself to be treated like shit or devalued or told someone else is more worthy than I am, I do not do this to other people, because, you know, the Golden Rule.

Also, since a person could change at any time, and become anyone, you can never say that so and so is of such and such a worth based on their actions.

Osama bin Laden, yes The Devil Himself, the Enemy of Truth, Justice, and the American Way could have changed. He could have become Nelson Fucking Mandela. He didn't, cause, you know, he got shot. But he could have.

And he should have been afforded the chance, by, you know, not killing him. Capturing him instead.

Don't get hung up on the specifics of the OBL case please, it's an example.

" the dead person is pretty thoroughly deterred from future crimes. But life in prison does that too"

Wrong! Prison crime, particularly gang crime resulting in murdered inmates, is a *very* real problem. Ask any corrections officer.

I have avoided OBL and Hitler in this discussion for good reason. But do you really think Jeffrey Dahlmer *could* have become Mother Theresa? A leopard can't change it's spots and a psychopath can't become something it never was. The "returning to the mean" argument implies the person was once at the mean. Some people never were. they are just fucked up for whatever reason and have never had a mean similar to yours and mine.

First, a brief appology for posting this and then vanishing. Life can be amusingly inconvenient at times.

@ Jamie

"1. Why do you ask this question?
2. What do you mean by "worth"? Dollar value, or something else? Without clarification on this point your question is worthless.

I happen to think that human lives are priceless and cannot be valued objectively - any attempt to do so, and to make policy on that basis, leads to horror."

To answer question 1, it's because I find it fascinating (ie it's the sort of thing I tend to think about when taking a bath) and hearing the views of other people who have a decent standard of thinking and wildly differing ideas is quite interesting

As far as question 2 goes, as much as coming up with a pounds, shillings and pence value would be fun, I dare say it wouldn't be worth the grief it'd generate from the outraged oversensitives that populate large parts of this forum. As such I'd be perfectly happy defining worth in the hand wavey fluffy inexact way that current exists in this thread.

As far as human lives being priceless goes, I really don't know how you can justify this. If our major charities are to be believed many millions of fellow humans can be saved from death for the price of a few dollars a month from each of us, and yet this does not happen. If people truly believed their fellow humans to be priceless then there'd be far fewer starving people in the world.

I find your "regression to the mean" example troubling as well, Thucy. It seems to me that people who do what you're doing here mix up cause and effect. Sure, an abstract probabilistic system (a weighted coin or what have you) exhibits these certain properties. But it's not the laws of probability that MAKE it do so. It's the laws of physics that determine the coin's proclivities and how it lands. The laws of probability just tell you what it MEANS to say there is (say) a 30% chance it will come up tails on each throw -- what are the consequences of that fact.

Similarly with humans. A human is not some abstract thing that acts well (say) 70% of the time. There are reasons and motivations for the actions. The scolding may well be what caused the person to straighten up -- the fact that people get scolded for screwing up may well be WHY they act well 70% of the time, and can correctly be modeled by that assumption (arguendo).

If they weren't, as Draug suggests, they might (hypothetically) drift to a new mean. That obviously happens sometimes, and nothing in the laws of probability forbids it. How could they? They are only descriptive of other properties in terms of a base property (that it acts well 70% of the time, say independently).

So with respect, it seems to me that the fallacy here is yours.

42 is the answer

What the world believes and what is reality are two different things. There are two things at play here. A few dollars may save a life, for now. But then it takes a few more dollars every day/week/month/whatever to continue that life. Add to that there are so many lives to be saved, way more than you might realize, and that few dollars becomes billions per year. And those dollars don't do anything in and of themselves. they are used tpo by food and clothing and medicine, commodities that are *not* in a limitless supply. So while "$20 per month) sounds good? It isn't realistic when they use for that $20 is revealed and the extent of how many $20 are needed to accomplish the mission.

Additionally, life being priceless and the world still placing a value on it doesn't make the world right. I do believe that every life is priceless until that life choses to make itself worthless by not having that same standard. That's why I'm for the death penalty in certain cases. I have already pointed out the flaw of reverting to the mean/norm being applied to some people whose norm is abnormal and always has been. And at the same time, I'm against abortion beyond a certain very early time frame unless the life of the mother is threatened by the pregnancy.

I have only glanced at this thread, but this one stood out as a good statement.

"I happen to think that human lives are priceless and cannot be valued objectively - any attempt to do so, and to make policy on that basis, leads to horror"

+1 Jamiet99uk, well said

@ Crazy A

It's not true, though. There are plenty of illnesses out there that can be cured or slowed if we throw enough money at them, but we do not. This isn't because we see the human with the condition as not having value, but we do consider the price of saving them too high. Humans are clearly not priceless

What should be and what is are two different things. You could say the "market" undervalues human life, which is why these problems aren't addressed. Indeed the market's greatest flaw is that it overvalues trivialities and undervalues essential provisions needed for life.

The market is simply too inefficient to deal with social needs.

"It's not true, though. There are plenty of illnesses out there that can be cured or slowed if we throw enough money at them, but we do not."

I'd say at once it can be true and not. He said that it cannot be valued objectively. I'm not sure that anyone (and I could be gravely wrong) is sitting on their hands not looking for a cure to any deadly disease just because it would be too expensinve, but more becasue there are other diseases that kill more people and a finite amount of money to throw at all of them. It's akin to triage.

The reason being that all coordination in markets requires voluntarism and exchange. You have to give something up in order to get something. Well quite frankly people aren't willing to voluntary give up their wealth and privilege in order to deal with social problems. The only mechanism that accomplish this kind of coordination is authority and commands/requisitions, in particular authority independent of the influence of big property owners.

My feeling is not that the market undervalues human life, but that the market is too damned scared to give human life a value in the first place. As such business tends to either ignore it completely, or comes up with meaningless phrases such as "every life is priceless".

If a human life was given a price based on easily understood variables the resultant would be of benefit rather than horror. The huge inefficiencies that currently dominate third world aid could be greatly reduced. The true cost of mining and construction projects could be calculated instead of the deaths of miners being dismissed as "one of those things".

The true horror is not a possible future market price on human life, but they way we currently ignore the value of humans out of squeamishmess and the tragedy that results.

Why would the market be scared? Since when has the market been inhibited by ethical questions? If you have a world society based on voluntary exchange, in which the only way you have rights or freedom is if you have some assets to offer, and due to the forcible way in which private property was originally distributed millions of people have nothing whatsoever to offer, there is no way out of that problem through exchange. There is simply no "profit" in helping people and distributing food to where it is most needed. A huge percentage of food is lost due to waste. It's more profitable to concentrate food production where it is wasted than to distribute it to the hungry. It is more profitable to jack up drug costs through patents and private ownership rights than to distribute generic drugs to the poor. If the market collectively inexplicably acted like a monolith and really was squeamish about putting a price tag on human life, when they do it every day in the form dirt-cheap wages and terrible working conditions, this stuff wouldn't happen. We wouldn't have mining accidents all the time. Because corporations wouldn't cut corners about safety in order to make a buck.

If you want your life to have value then meet as many people in it as possible and add something to their lives.
You people act like how to give a life value is a mystery.
If you don't want your life to have value then act irresponsibly repeatedly and soon you will see that no one thinks you are worth anything.

Thucy, I don't misunderstand you. You simply talk out of your ass like the teenager that you are.
Get some experience before you shoot your keyboard off like you are the delphi oracle kid.

Can someone let Charlie Manson and Bernie Madoff know that they can shack up at JaimeK's when they get out. He doesn't care what you've done your life is priceless.

LOL!

There's plenty of profit to be found in helping people. Governments spend huge amounts of taxpayer's money on aid to other nations. Put a value on human life, and ask the private sector to compete to provide the best return on the aid money, and you would find yourself with a thriving market that would almost certainly do more good than the current hodge podge of good natured volunteers.

I saw a video on youtube where a man said that birth certificates in the US are on the stock market, is this true? And if so what does it mean?

I saw a video on youtube where a guy got cut in half and then put himself back together!

Youtube videos are full of shit, dude.

Of course you should help people, and you should use your brain on who to help not some blind, useless government program. I know a ton of good people who need help. A husband of an employee had to check into rehab for a drinking problem and she needs time off. No problem. I'll cover your desk myself.
That's how it should be done not in some fucking office with some bureaucrat who doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground about your problem.
I digress though. I'm speaking plain common sense her and no one needs to hear that. It's just redundant.

That makes no sense Octavious, how would the private sector get "returns" on the aid money? Where is the profit? Are you talking about private sector loans to poor countries? They already do this. They extract enormous returns from poor countries via interest. That's why a lot of countries have been in debt for decades.

We had this explicit pricetag on human life, it was called slavery. I suppose we could go back to that. People argued that slave labor was treated better than free labor because it was the difference between renting and ownership. So if the poor people were simply enslaved then perhaps the market would help them because owners would want to make sure they're in good physical condition.

@ Putin

The same way private sector businesses get returns whenever they take government contracts. A local council needs the potholes fixed, and private companies compete to provide the best pothole fixing service. A government needs to be seen to be helping the destitute in some disaster hit region, and private companies compete to provide the best emergeancy fresh water delivery service. They take government money, cream off their share as profit, and use the rest to get the job done in a way that's ultimately more efficient than via trational methods.

It means that the cradle to grave welfare state in the United States is so corrupt that all you need to do if buy a birth certificate for $10,000 and you can recoup your investment two times over in less than a year by applying for Obamanomic programs.

Disclaimer-Offer valid only while taxpayers outnumber Obamanomic recipients or the Fed can't borrow money at reasonable rates, whichever occurs sooner.

Oh I see, so the government bears all the costs and the private sector gets all the profits. Yeah that efficient method is what led to the mortgage and securities crisis. You're in effect creating a private sector middle man to provide services the government is already equipped to provide, I don't see what is so efficient about that.