Can Kindness Scale?

(c) by Mark Dempsey

It would be cheaper, as well as much more effective and humane to solve a variety of social ills by restoring or even enhancing America's social safety nets. These have been attacked and reduced in recent years. Poverty, crime, and (contagious) disease all thrive in a dog-eat-dog society where isolated individuals take no responsibility for each other, never mind the "least of these." The question is whether humane public policies could ever scale up to address these issues in entire societies.

Whenever society at large addresses the inevitable problems of systemic malfunctions like poverty, crime, and disease, the frustration of too-large or too-slow-to-respond remedies inevitably leads to either society-wide anger or depression. Taking advantage of this understandable frustration, the political right in particular--the representatives of those who have the economic high ground--has pushed back against compassionate remedies for social ills.

For example, the Wall St. Journal recently published an article citing increases in crime in Portland after it implemented more humane treatment of the poor and homeless. These kinder policies led to population declines. The Journal even includes interviews with Portlanders who left but doesn't mention COVID, which is at the root of downtown's problems according to one native I contacted. Back in California, Sacramento Supervisor Frost's newsletter decries recent initiatives to decarcerate or reduce sentences of prisoners as counterproductive, appealing to that same frustration about crime and problems in society at large.

But we've already discovered that large amounts of coercion and policing do not solve the problem of crime. The U.S. is already the world champion in incarceration in absolute or per-capita numbers. With five percent of the world's population, the U.S. has 25% of its prisoners--five times the world's per-capita average, and seven times the Canadian per-capita figures. Yet Canadian and U.S. crime are insignificantly different.

Funding social safety nets is cheaper than building bigger cages, even if someone undeserving profits. Nevertheless, the County wants to spend $450 million to expand its jail--a significant expense--and law enforcement already consumes 70% of the County’s budget.

One contributing factor to the population's faith in the all-sticks-no-carrots approach to social problems is the "Copaganda" of TV detective shows, from Dragnet to Law & Order. These tell us repeatedly that detectives solve the vast majority of crimes, and bad people are, by and large, punished. Yet "police 'have never successfully solved crimes with any regularity, as arrest and clearance rates are consistently low throughout history,' and police have never solved even a bare majority of serious crimes, University of Utah College of Law professor Shima Baradaran Baughman wrote in another 2021 law review article, including murder, rape, burglary, and robbery." (from Reuters)



Another indicator sticks-not-carrots is ineffective: U.S. population increased by 42% between 1982 and 2017, but spending on police increased by 187%, more than four times faster than population growth. Yet crime clearance rates were steady or declining during that period.

The FBI reports "blue collar" crimes like robbery, carjackings, and muggings cost the economy $12 billion a year, yet wage theft costs $50 billion but "white collar" crimes like derivatives and subprime mortgage land mines cost $1 trillion. Where are the efforts to prosecute employers and Wall St. criminals?



And do we really need more money for police and prison? How has it worked so far?

Meanwhile, 40% of the population can't handle a $400 emergency, 58% live check-to-check, and 65% of seniors have only Social Security to fund their retirement. Providing a dignified, healthy life for poor people is unlikely to produce instant results, but how bad do things have to be before we do something different? The U.S. already has roughly 50,000 deaths a year from opioid overdoses--more casualties than the Vietnam War--as evidence of the depression felt by the population about the current state of affairs.

Because anger and depression seldom lead to clear thinking, it's likely any move toward more humane treatment of the poor would be set up to fail, or too modest to have a big impact, and those who prefer police be an army of occupation will say "See! It doesn't work to be nice! We must have brutal, draconian labor discipline!--the reminder that if people don't take whatever crappy job is on offer, they will suffer, or even be put in cages.

Because turning society away from punishment is difficult and complex, there's a bias toward the simplicity of cruelty, vengeful thinking, and pandering to public frustration. It's actually more difficult than hiring more police to make sure everyone is housed, fed, and unburdened by crushing debt.

There's even a perverse incentive for police to ask for more money as their performance degrades.



From 2010 to 2021, San Francisco's police budget increased 15%, yet total arrests declined 41% and although reported offenses were up (+28%) crimes cleared (-33%) and total arrests (-41%) both declined. Knowing this should make the public skeptical of the effectiveness of those massive investments in punishment.

Economist Michael Hudson says what we need succinctly: "...make sure that everybody can support their basic needs without running into debt." A job guarantee would be an affordable way to keep unnecessary job insecurity at bay and would mean far fewer desperate people, and far less crime for far less public money than bigger jails. Such a guarantee would provide a comprehensive price stability framework with a buffer stock of labor. The employment guarantee would also be a tool in the fight against poverty

You wouldn't train a donkey with all sticks and no carrots, but that's what's being promoted as the way to retain social cohesion and solve these systemic problems. Currently, our system is still not configured so the benefits of being a member of society outweigh the costs for large portions of the population.

Meanwhile, of necessity, modern nation-states are always ambiguously extortion rackets or utopian projects. We are still learning how to minimize the former while maximizing the latter. Unfortunately, as one scholar says "evolution has equipped us ...for very rapid and effortless formation of cooperative structures, but at the expense of limiting the scale of these institutions."