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  Dutch Euthanasia I--- Political Economy

Currently, Dutch law permits doctors to administer a lethal dose of muscle relaxants and sedatives to terminally ill patients, at their request.

The Groningen Protocol would permit doctors to euthanize patients who, according to the opinion of doctors and other medical experts, lack "free will." This category of unfortunate individuals would include newborn babies, persons in irreversible comas and persons with severe mental retardation.

    Worse, the Groningen hospital, after which the protocol is named, has already begun to administer the procedure, even without formal legal sanction. To date, Dutch prosecutors have refused to step in.

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Dutch Euthanasia II

… more than 80% favor "voluntary euthanasia," according to recent polls. The Dutch Parliament recently passed a measure completely decriminalizing euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide. The Netherlands is now the first democratic nation on earth to permit, under law, doctors to kill their patients.

And they may be accustomed to doing so. Of the 130,000 Dutchmen who died in 1990, some 11,800 were killed or helped to die by their doctors, according to a 1991 report by the attorney general of the High Council of the Netherlands.

An estimated 5,981 people--an average of 16 per day--were killed by their doctors without their consent, according to the Dutch government report.

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Dutch Euthanasia III

And these numbers do not measure several other groups that are put to death involuntarily: disabled infants, terminally ill children and mental patients. Some 8% of all infants who die in the Netherlands are killed by their doctors, according to a 1997 study published in the Lancet, a British medical journal.

Consider the case of Dr. Henk Prins, who killed--with her parents' consent--a three-day old girl with spina bifida and an open wound at the base of her spine. Dr. Prins never made any attempt to treat the wound, according to Wesley J. Smith, author of the book "Culture of Death." The treatment was death.

Many old people now fear Dutch hospitals. More than 10% of senior citizens who responded to a recent survey, which did not mention euthanasia, volunteered that they feared being killed by their doctors without their consent. One senior-citizen group printed up wallet cards that tell doctors that the cardholder opposes euthanasia.

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Readings on Crime, 13 August 2006, Eric Rasmusen

• 73 pages total. • James Fitzjames Stephen, "The Doctrine of Liberty in Its Application to Morals," Chapter IV of

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Hypertext by Terrence Berres, London: Smith, Elder, & Co. (1873) (my source here). Excerpt of 7 pages.

• William Stuntz, "The Political Constitution of Criminal Justice," 119 Harv. L. Rev. 780 (2006). Excerpt of 5 pages.

• Eric Rasmusen, "Stigma and Self-Fulfilling Expectations of Criminality," Journal of Law and Economics 39: 519-544 (October 1996). Excerpt of 8 pages.

• United States v. Estate of Parsons, 367 F.3d 409 (5th Cir. 2004), (6 of the 15 judges dissented, but I do not include the dissent.) 10 pages.

• Richard Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, 4th ed. Sections 7.2-7.4, pp. 223-239, Little Brown (1992). 16 pages.

• Steven D. Levitt, "Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors That Explain the Decline and Six That Do Not," The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18, 1:163-190 (Winter 2004). 27 pages.

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Reference

• The slides that follow this are for answering questions, rather than for the presentation.

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Some data sources in the notes

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The Driver’s Decision to Speed: First Cut

5540 69 9080

mph

Benefit

or

Cost

Benefit

Cost

8

The Driver’s Decision to Speed: Second Cut

5540 70 9080

mph

Benefit

or

Cost

Benefit

Cost

54 67

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The Potential Criminal’s Decision

0

crimes

Benefit

or

Cost

Benefit

cost

his optimal choice

moral cost

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The Public’s Decision

0

crime reduction

Benefit

or

Cost

Benefit

cost

optimal choice

fixed cost of courts,police

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The cost of crime is about $400 billion/year

$150 billion in cost to victims (Cohen)

$100 billion in private precautions (Anderson)

? in criminal time

$150 billion for victimless crimes (pure guess; drug trade is $160 billion, Anderson says)

We spend $72 billion on police, $57 billion on imprisonment, $38 billion on courts---$167 billion. That is the cost of keeping crime DOWN t $400 billion in costs.

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Should we increase police by 10%? • Increasing police by 10% costs $7.2 billion directly.

• If court and prison costs increase at the same rate, the total cost is $16.7 billion.

• Add time costs of prisoners--$40K (2million)=$80B. Another $8 billion. But would prison costs fall with more police, less crime?

• A 10% rise in police causes a 3% decline in crime in a city, according to Marvell and Moody.

• The benefit, if we believe Marvell and Moody, is a 3% decline in

crime, which is a benefit of $12 billion ($12 billion = .03 x $400 billion).

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Measuring What Affects Cost and Benefit: Simple Regression

Crimepercapita

Policepercapita

error

error

errorerror

error

error

Metropolis

Northville

Southville

Mudville

Barchester

Bay City

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Suppose you think a city’s age profile, police, and prisons all reduce crime. You look and see that that on average:

• Cities with older citizens have less crime • Cities with more police have less crime• Cities with more prisoners per crime have less

crime

Problem 1--- Multiple Causes. If both aging and police reduce crime, how can we untangle them?

Problem 2--- Coincidental Correlation. What if aging is the true cause, and it just happens that cities with older people have more police?

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Multiple Regression: The Logic Problem: most cities with an elderly population have

lots of police too. So we can’t untangle their effect on crime from looking at the correlations.

Solution: look for cities where that is not true.

Do cities with lots of elderly but few police have low crime?

Do cities with few elderly but lots of police have low crime?

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Multiple Regression: The Math

The computer finds values for a, b, and c that make the sum of squared errors added up over all cities as small as possible.

Crimecity = a - b*Policecity - c*%over-65city + errorcity

Bay City 120 = 200 - 2x20- 3x25 +35Mudville 100 = 200 - 2x30 -3x10 -10

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How much less crime is there in cities with more police?

0.0

5.1

.15

.2.2

5C

rime

Pe

r C

apita

0 .005 .01 .015Police Per Capita

Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 1999

Police and Crime Per Capita from 2494 U.S. Towns and Cities withPopulation Greater than 10,000

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Problem 3, Reverse Causality: A city with a big crime problem will hire more police.

One Solution: Use time lags

1. If crime increases in Northville by 10% in 2001, how many more police does Northville hire in 2002?

2. If Southville hires 10% more police in 2003, how much less crime is there in 2004?

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Marvell and Moody (56 cities, 1973-1993, * = significant)

Variables to be explained

Target explanatory variables Police Crime

Police lagged one year .50* -.13*

Police lagged two years <.01 ---

Crime lagged one years -.01 .79*

Crime lagged two years .08* -.23*

Control variables

Population 15-17 -.09 .06*

Population 18-24 .22 -.50

Population 25-34 .20 .32

Prisoner population <.01 -.12*

African-American % -.06 .02

Female-headed hslds. .10 .09

Education spending .20* .24*

Welfare spending .04 -.02

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The Impact of Police

A 10% rise in crime causes a 1.3% rise in the number of police in a city.

A 10% rise in police causes a 3% decline in crime in a city.

Declines range from 2.2% for larceny to 8.5% for car theft.

One more officer results in 24 fewer crimes--- .02 homicides, .1 rapes, 1.8 robberies, 5.3 burglaries,

12.5 larcenies, and 4.5 auto thefts. The effect on assault was statistically insignificant.

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The Prison Population and Crime

20

30

40

50

Vio

len

t Cri

me

Ra

te

400

600

800

100

01

200

140

0P

riso

n P

opu

latio

n (

100

0s)

1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005Year...

Prison Population (1000s) Violent Crime Rate

Violent Crime Rate is violent crimes per 1000 pop over the age of 12Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/

•Crime is roughly level 1980-1995, and then starts dropping.

•The prison population rises steadily.

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Leavitt--Prisons

Same problem as before: If crime rises, so does imprisonment. The South has higher crime, higher imprisonment.

We could use the same approach as Marvel-Moody: see if crime falls after imprisonment rises.

But we will look at a different approach: find a situation where imprisonment rises for a reason clearly unrelated to an increase in criminality.

Leavitt used prison overcrowding litigation

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Reverse Causality Again

(1) Longer prison terms reduce crime.(2) If there is more crime, people call for

longer prison terms.

Effect (1) tends towards a negative correlation, while effect (2) tends towards a positive correlation between prison and crime. Just like police and crime.

Thus, we might see crime and prison terms rising simultaneously.

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We need an experiment in changing the prison population

The scientific approach would be to do an experiment.

Cut the prison population by • 0% in Indiana,• 10% in Iowa,• 20% in Pennsylvania, • 50% in Virginia. See what happens to crime over the next 10 years.

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• If prisoners are let free by a court order, does crime rise?

From 1971-1993, 12 states had had their entire prison system under court order for overcrowding.

(Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas)

Levitt looks at what happens to prison population and crime rates at key points in the litigation process

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Response of Prison Population and Crime Rates to Prison Overcrowding Litigation - (Final Decision)

(Deviation from National Average Growth Rates)

85

90

95

100

105

110

0 1 2 3 4Year

Prison Population Property Crime

Violent Crime

Source: Levitt (1996), Table IV.

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Levitt’s Results

Levitt finds that a 10% increase in the prison population would reduce violent crime by about 4% and property crime by about 3%.

Levitt estimated that keeping one extra prisoner for one year eliminated approximately 15 crimes in 1993. That implies that increasing imprisonment would have more benefit than cost.

Crime has dropped by 40-50 percent since 1993 and the number of prisoners has increased so that today imprisoning one extra prisoner for one year eliminates fewer crimes. There are diminishing returns. The extra benefit has fallen, while the extra cost has stayed roughly constant. If the benefit– the number of crimes eliminated--- is down to 3 crimes per prisoner, increasing punishment now would have more cost than benefit.

Conclusion: It is no contradiction to say that the increase in imprisonment in the 1990’s was good, but to keep up that rate of increase would be bad, from the point of view of cost-benefit analysis. The optimal rate of imprisonment is neither 0% nor 100% of the population--- we have to stop somewhere.

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Summary1. We can look at the crime quantity level as the result of tastes and incentives, just like

economic markets, except that the “transaction” is involuntary.

2. The costs of both crime and crime control are high, and the big question is how much a small rise or fall in spending on crime control from current levels would reduce crime.

3. We can’t just look at simple correlations because of a) reverse causality b) multiple causes, and c) accidental correlations.

4. Regression analysis is a way to tackle these problems.

5. Police and Prisons do reduce crime. In the early 1990’s, it seems increases in both were cost-effective. By 2006, this is much less clear.

Some fact tidbits: Burglary rates are lower in the US than in Canada, England, and Australia, about the same as in Sweden and the

Netherlands, and higher than in Switzerland.

48% more arrests are made for alcohol offenses than for drug offenses.

Levitt finds that a 10% increase in the prison population would reduce violent crime by about 4% and property crime by about 3%.

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How about voluntary death?

“A wealthy sportsman concludes that the only game dangerous enough to be really worth hunting is man. He offers ten adventurers $100,000 each in exchange for their agreeing that he may choose one of the ten at random and attempt to kill him. They agree.” (David Friedman)

Should this be murder? Should the contracts be enforced by the courts? (think about prizefighting)

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Incentives

• The ex post approach: Someone has done something bad and ended up in court. What should we do? --procedures, sentences

• The ex ante approach: Someone might do something bad and end up in court. What should we do? --- laws, penalties

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Reference

• The slides that follow this are for answering questions, rather than for the presentation.

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Surveys vs. Police Reports

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34

Drug Use by Arrestees

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Marginal Cost and Benefit

0

crimes

Benefit

or

Cost

Marginal BenefitMarginal Cost

his optimal choice

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Crime Statistics1.3 million violent, 10.4 million nonviolent index

crimes reported (violent– murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery) (nonviolent- larceny, burglary, car theft)

2.1 million violent, 18.6 million nonviolent, by survey (not including business victims)

14 million arrests for all offenses (1.6 million for

index crimes)Adults, 84%, Juveniles 16%Males 76%, Females 24%White 71%, Black 27%, Other 2%.

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Reverse Causality Example

• Northville: 80 police, 40 burglaries 100 police, 30 burglaries

• Southville: 80 police, 25 burglaries 100 police, 18 burglaries

Southville chooses 80 police, Northville, 100 police.

It will seem that the 20 extra police cause 15 extra burglaries.

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Another Kind of Incentive: Complements and Substitutes

Bread and Potatoes are substitutes. If the price of potatoes rises, people eat more bread instead.

Bread and butter are complements. If the price of butter falls, people eat more butter AND more bread.

Crime and dishwashing jobs are substitutes.

Crime and pawnshops are complements.