I guess that would be an interesting point if there was any reason to suspect Sarah wasn’t aware of this idea....Whereas Sarah is taking the more methodical approach of actually measuring how bad it might be. I don’t think someone writing about only costs, or only benefits, is necessarily bad. I never go the impression the article was advocating for widespread release and abolition of the prison system.
The same person you’re saying is being modest and merely examining one part of the problem is the one who dismisses out of hand any talk of deterrence as being (I quote) “cartoon supervillain” thinking.
If she really wanted to approach this sensibly, she would’ve started with it being an explicit cost-benefit approach and compared a widely-agreed-upon inefficiency in the prison system—for example, if she had started with a discussion of the net QALY loss due to incarceration for marijuana-related crimes (which I believe now a majority or near-majority of the USA, and supermajority of LWers and her readers believe should be decriminalized and/or legalized as having minimal social & health costs) and compared that to existing disease death tolls. That would be an interesting, valid, and intellectually relevant comparison.
To talk about the system as a whole and dismiss out of hand any discussion of the (huge, enormous, by many orders of magnitude, because it makes it possible for there to be a USA at all with anything approaching its current population size compared to a hunter-gatherer tribal equilibrium) benefits of a working legal system is just plain bizarre.
She’s not even correct when she tries to excuse her dismissal by saying
like, how much could improving criminal justice buy, if it were done optimally?
The current cost of prison in lives is nothing remotely like the marginal profit from shifting to an optimal system, and amusingly, this fallacy is directly addressed by a recent submission: “Costs are not Benefits”.
Costs are costs—that is all.
Saying that you can estimate how much the benefit from optimal criminal justice from how much it currently costs is like saying, ‘this random house costs $500k, so the profit from finding the best real estate investment must also be somewhere around $500k!’ No, the profit from the optimal decision could be anywhere from -$500k (the Detroit market is in a bubble and you don’t want to buy anything because it will soon be worthless after property taxes) to $0 (efficient market, no expected profit or loss) to hundreds of millions (huge mine soon discovered under the land). ‘This surgery costs $1000, the benefit from an optimal decision to do it or not do must be around $1000!’ No, it could be anywhere from +$10m (cures a horrible disease which is tantamount to being dead, giving you a normal life with full statistical value of life) to -$10m (kills you as a child, costing you everything).
I think you’re being disingenuous and taking semantic laziness on Sarah’s part as a fundamental flaw in the reasoning itself. I think it’s fair to say she wasn’t trying to dismiss any talk of deterrence as being cartoon villainy (I didn’t see a super prefix there? But maybe it was an edit. Doesn’t really matter). But was responding to your specific, separate from the argument of her post, comment noting that she wasn’t willing to consider the benefits of, in the example you gave, deterrence based rape. Which is different from her considering deterrence in the original post, and saying it’s only worth considering for ‘cartoon supervillians.’ Whether deterrence based implied prison rape is a benefit is a totally different beast.
I mean, the analogy might not be great. And the post might not seem useful to you (or others) if it’s strictly studying costs. But I think the argument “This wasn’t a useful post because it excluded benefits, which is something I think is integral to this study. It also wasn’t useful because it used a lazy analogy that seems to misrepresent the reality, even if that wasn’t your intention.” Is different than what you’re saying. I think you’ll agree with me on that, no?
I think you’re being disingenuous and taking semantic laziness on Sarah’s part as a fundamental flaw in the reasoning itself.
It is a fundamental flaw. A cost is not a benefit, nor is it a profit. This is a hard and fast point, similar to: p-values are not posterior probabilities; probabilities are not utilities; correlations are not causations; maps are not territories; and so on.
When Sarah asks
like, how much could improving criminal justice buy, if it were done optimally?
This is a great and valid question! I have many strong opinions on the topic, such as the high human cost of the War on Drugs and whether the prison rape epidemic is a good idea. However, it has next to nothing to do with the raw total of how many people are in prison. Because the deterrence tremendously affects everyone else and costs are not benefits.
With something like cancer, it is totally reasonable to ask how many people have cancer to estimate an upper bound on the value of researching cancer. If 1m people have skin cancer, this is a good starting point for upper bounding the value of skin cancer research—maybe skin cancer research is totally intractable and it’s worth $0, but you can be sure the value is <1m people. And if $1b gets spent on treating skin cancer every year, it’s reasonable to suggest that the value must be at least $1b. This is because cancer is a very nicely behaved problem and we do not live in a world where if you cut skin cancer treatment budgets by 50%, the skin cancers might start exploding and infecting everyone in a chain reaction of ever growing Akira-sized cancer blobs causing the collapse of skyscrapers and the end of Western civilization and life as we know it and everyone agrees as they roam the wastelands looking for gasoline that this is very unfortunate and we probably should’ve not cut the skin cancer budget.
Alright, I think if you and I sat down and talked about the cost vs. benefit of incarceration and the war on drugs, we would be in almost complete agreement. The costs are in equilibrium with benefits, so it’s sort of like trying to see where you can save the most utility a year by looking at your financial records: Sure, the more expensive items are more likely to have a high magnitude of savings, but they also could generate more utility. You haven’t ever read anything I’ve written, but I’ve read your site, so you’ll have to take my word on that :)
That means our disagreement here has more to do with our almost-legal interpretation of the article, which is sort of a boring thing to disagree on honestly. I’m willing to give her reading a more charitable interpretation, I am probably filling in the gaps in her article with my own reasoning, which perhaps is too charitable or incorrect. I still think you are not being charitable enough, but again, that’s a boring thing to disagree on. So let’s call it good.
The same person you’re saying is being modest and merely examining one part of the problem is the one who dismisses out of hand any talk of deterrence as being (I quote) “cartoon supervillain” thinking.
If she really wanted to approach this sensibly, she would’ve started with it being an explicit cost-benefit approach and compared a widely-agreed-upon inefficiency in the prison system—for example, if she had started with a discussion of the net QALY loss due to incarceration for marijuana-related crimes (which I believe now a majority or near-majority of the USA, and supermajority of LWers and her readers believe should be decriminalized and/or legalized as having minimal social & health costs) and compared that to existing disease death tolls. That would be an interesting, valid, and intellectually relevant comparison.
To talk about the system as a whole and dismiss out of hand any discussion of the (huge, enormous, by many orders of magnitude, because it makes it possible for there to be a USA at all with anything approaching its current population size compared to a hunter-gatherer tribal equilibrium) benefits of a working legal system is just plain bizarre.
She’s not even correct when she tries to excuse her dismissal by saying
The current cost of prison in lives is nothing remotely like the marginal profit from shifting to an optimal system, and amusingly, this fallacy is directly addressed by a recent submission: “Costs are not Benefits”.
Costs are costs—that is all.
Saying that you can estimate how much the benefit from optimal criminal justice from how much it currently costs is like saying, ‘this random house costs $500k, so the profit from finding the best real estate investment must also be somewhere around $500k!’ No, the profit from the optimal decision could be anywhere from -$500k (the Detroit market is in a bubble and you don’t want to buy anything because it will soon be worthless after property taxes) to $0 (efficient market, no expected profit or loss) to hundreds of millions (huge mine soon discovered under the land). ‘This surgery costs $1000, the benefit from an optimal decision to do it or not do must be around $1000!’ No, it could be anywhere from +$10m (cures a horrible disease which is tantamount to being dead, giving you a normal life with full statistical value of life) to -$10m (kills you as a child, costing you everything).
I think you’re being disingenuous and taking semantic laziness on Sarah’s part as a fundamental flaw in the reasoning itself. I think it’s fair to say she wasn’t trying to dismiss any talk of deterrence as being cartoon villainy (I didn’t see a super prefix there? But maybe it was an edit. Doesn’t really matter). But was responding to your specific, separate from the argument of her post, comment noting that she wasn’t willing to consider the benefits of, in the example you gave, deterrence based rape. Which is different from her considering deterrence in the original post, and saying it’s only worth considering for ‘cartoon supervillians.’ Whether deterrence based implied prison rape is a benefit is a totally different beast.
I mean, the analogy might not be great. And the post might not seem useful to you (or others) if it’s strictly studying costs. But I think the argument “This wasn’t a useful post because it excluded benefits, which is something I think is integral to this study. It also wasn’t useful because it used a lazy analogy that seems to misrepresent the reality, even if that wasn’t your intention.” Is different than what you’re saying. I think you’ll agree with me on that, no?
It is a fundamental flaw. A cost is not a benefit, nor is it a profit. This is a hard and fast point, similar to: p-values are not posterior probabilities; probabilities are not utilities; correlations are not causations; maps are not territories; and so on.
When Sarah asks
This is a great and valid question! I have many strong opinions on the topic, such as the high human cost of the War on Drugs and whether the prison rape epidemic is a good idea. However, it has next to nothing to do with the raw total of how many people are in prison. Because the deterrence tremendously affects everyone else and costs are not benefits.
With something like cancer, it is totally reasonable to ask how many people have cancer to estimate an upper bound on the value of researching cancer. If 1m people have skin cancer, this is a good starting point for upper bounding the value of skin cancer research—maybe skin cancer research is totally intractable and it’s worth $0, but you can be sure the value is <1m people. And if $1b gets spent on treating skin cancer every year, it’s reasonable to suggest that the value must be at least $1b. This is because cancer is a very nicely behaved problem and we do not live in a world where if you cut skin cancer treatment budgets by 50%, the skin cancers might start exploding and infecting everyone in a chain reaction of ever growing Akira-sized cancer blobs causing the collapse of skyscrapers and the end of Western civilization and life as we know it and everyone agrees as they roam the wastelands looking for gasoline that this is very unfortunate and we probably should’ve not cut the skin cancer budget.
Alright, I think if you and I sat down and talked about the cost vs. benefit of incarceration and the war on drugs, we would be in almost complete agreement. The costs are in equilibrium with benefits, so it’s sort of like trying to see where you can save the most utility a year by looking at your financial records: Sure, the more expensive items are more likely to have a high magnitude of savings, but they also could generate more utility. You haven’t ever read anything I’ve written, but I’ve read your site, so you’ll have to take my word on that :)
That means our disagreement here has more to do with our almost-legal interpretation of the article, which is sort of a boring thing to disagree on honestly. I’m willing to give her reading a more charitable interpretation, I am probably filling in the gaps in her article with my own reasoning, which perhaps is too charitable or incorrect. I still think you are not being charitable enough, but again, that’s a boring thing to disagree on. So let’s call it good.