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The Economics of Executing Virus Writers
applemasker writes "Slate.com has an article titled Feed The Worms Who Write Worms to the Worms which argues based on economic theory (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that it is a 'better investment' to execute the creators of worms, virus and trojan authors, than murderers. Anyone who has tried to resurrect a network or computer after a nasty infection may agree. Although the author does not seriously argue for capital punishment for the script kiddies, it does raise some interesting issues about how much 'value' society puts on certain types of harm and the author's view of a government's role in protecting us from it."
Politicians love to associate their names with "get tough on crime" laws that raise the punishment for certain crimes... but you rarely here about anybody supporting lower sentances for crimes.
Is it just me, or is there an inflation effect hitting our criminal justice system as over time the punishments keep getting higher for the same crimes...
"They never would be missed, They never would be missed."
First, let's execute some spammers, _then_ we can move on to the virus & spyware folks. Viruses and worms only are a problem for one segment of the online population, spam has to be dealt with by all of us.
Well, there's a thought. Though some would say the punishment wouldn't really fit the crime. Unless a worm/virus/whanot caused someone's death because it screwed up the computer that ran air traffic control. Or, you know, something a bit less unlikely and somewhat more likely.
Kind of scary the process by which people can take anything and reduce it to a number somehow. That's probably why I hated statistics class.
>insert witty sig file here
They may not fear death. I'd suggest limiting them to 33.6 kbps internet connections. That's the real hell.
Killing people is wrong. No matter who does it.
I say first we take their fingers and toes, and rub them down with sandpaper, taking a break every 5 minutes to dip the stumps in salt. How can you program viruses if you have no fingers, you fucking script kiddy.
we should add spam to the list of capital crimes as far as wasting the world's time, resources, bandwidth, and money.
Tounge-in-cheek or not, this article is comparing a person's life to a dollar figure. Now, I'm as much a fan of cleaning out virii as anyone else, but that's just messed up. How much is a human life worth?
<insert witty linux comment here>
Execute the lazy/ignorant sysadmins and infrastructure guys who fail to keep their servers patched, have their firewalls set to "Allow all" and who leave the default passwords on their systems.
Yeah, right.
As soon as there is a virus/trojan/etc. that spreads easily and is highly destructive (overwrites crucial hard drive sectors, for example) I think everyone will start seeing the punishment of virus writers in a whole new light.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
by putting them in a room with a bunch of spammers on penis enlargement pills and viagra.
Any execution of anyone is a bad idea, no matter how much they "deserve" it.
thisnukes4u.net
Execute bad CEOs first.
ok, if you are thinking about executing a person for writing a piece of malicious software (that didn't even cause any human harm), you need to step away from the computer, turn off the power, get out of your office and walk through the woods for a while.
and if you come back and tell me "financial harm is human harm" i say go back and walk through the woods some more. maybe read a book while you are out there... something that doesn't mention computers. Something by Emerson.
Same punishment could apply.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
I think that it would be even better to execute the senior management at companies that release their software to the general public while it is still full of holes that can be exploited by authors of malcious code...
;o)
Infact... wasnt this what Tarintinos new flick is about... I havent seen it yet!
Microsoft's press wing advocates executing intelligent teenagers rather than writing secure software. Film at 11.
i have actually seen a fair amount of similar sentiment - not always "tongue in cheek" - expressed, lately, on the net.
i can not believe that anyone, in their right mind, can seriously equate an action which causes a temporary inconvenience with one which causes a permanent end to a human life.
i find this trend very disturbing.
So why destroy Abu Ghraib prisons in Iraq? Seems like a worthy use of these facilities!
The problem with capital punishment are that (1) it's irreversible, and (2) it is dangerous to give governments that kind of power. The economic costs resulting from these two properties of capital punishment are probably enormous. The first means that you need a complex judiciary and review process (and, in fact, executions seem to be more expensive than life imprisonment). The second means that it creates a serious risk that governments become totalitarian.
I suspect the evidentiary situation for virus writers is even hazier than for your average murder, so capital punishment would, on balance, probably be worse.
Incidentally, there is an easy way to avoid paying a high cost for the effects of viruses: don't let them infect your systems in the first place. And that's easy: keep them patched and up-to-date. So, while virus writing isn't nice, I think people whose systems get infected are contributing to the damage through their negligence. By comparison, while stealing cars is illegal, if you leave your car unlocked and running with the key in the ignition and it gets stolen, you won't get much sympathy from either the police or your insurance company.
This is just dumb. Perhaps if the monetary value were higher than the 83 cents they've calculated. They also fail to take into account that the safety increase is not just for that individual, but also for everyone they care about. So, would you rather have 83 cents, or the knowledge that you, your family, and friends are slightly safer?
Stupid, pointless article.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
I first laughed at the simple concept of it.
But what happens if a nasty worm/virus starts disrupting food transport, shredding hospital documents, places trains on the same track, open the doors in the CDC, route airplanes into skyscrapers?
A properly designed infection could wreak havoc, and kill hundreds, thousands?
I realize that I'm being overly dramatic, but there's probably a point where capital punishment WOULD be a justifiable answer.
While reading the article, just bear in mind that Slate is owned and paid by Microsoft.
Ironclad Security only exists when you have Chuck Norris on the shift. Do we really have to discuss this? (Plutonite)
Want to eliminate certain types of crime?
Make the punishment so harsh, no one will want to commit said crime.
This either:
(a) Solves the problem
or
(b) Turns your country into a police state.
Which will it be?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
should we also execute fraudulent managers of big corporations?
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
saved. Capital punishment deters the ammount of people killed. You cant quntify that a life is worth 10 millions and argue based on that.
Python script to convert photos into "artsy" portraits: http://p2pbridge.sf.net/pyPortrait/
Capital punishment is inexcusable. Full stop.
Even tongue in cheek, it's just wrong to say that another person should die for writing computer viruses. It's also wrong to say that another person should die for killing someone.
Confiscate computers, not somebody's life.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
SK: d00d, I just got sentenced to death.
l4Mer: sux0r
SK: At least I'm going to die for something important.
l4Mer: I'll sell you one of my lives. PayPal me.
Best Windows Freeware
I swear to god, if they nerf archery, I'll write a worm that'll bring the world to it's knees!
Xel'Naga
I tired of "white-collar" crime that ruins family, lives, and dreams getting such light punishment.
A ghetto-born man who kills a police officer gets executed.
A suburb-born CPA that ruins the retirements of thousands of families gets a slap on the
wrist.
It's not fair, just, or right.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
"And then we nuke it from orbit; it's the only way to be sure..."
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Oh yeah, nuking the producers of the most-used OS on the planet would be brilliant.
This sort of joke isn't funny, its just demonstrative of an unhealthy vitrol towards Microsoft. Linux is great, no one is saying otherwise, but it has serious lackings. It lacks ease of use, unification, game support, hardware support, etc. Quit bitching [everyone] about Microsoft, and help develop a viable Linux solution to the home user desktop.
"Stumble before you crawl"
Who do more damage in my opinion before we start executing the script kiddies and bored teenage hackers.
Tounge-in-cheek or not, this article is comparing a person's life to a dollar figure. Now, I'm as much a fan of cleaning out virii as anyone else, but that's just messed up. How much is a human life worth?
How about equating this in term of life-hours destroyed? A murder takes, at most, 872,000 hours (100 years) of one person's life. But a virus creator takes hours from each of millions of people's lives. The total "life lost" is worse with computer viruses.
Moreover, I'd argue that the victim's life destroyed by virus/worm/trojan infections is far worse than murder as it is more a prolonged torture rather than a quick end.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Good to see that the style of Jonathan Swift's famous modest proposal for aleviating poverty in Ireland is still around. His idea was to treat impoverished Irish children as livestock to be fattened up for consumption. A tongue cannot become more firmly embedded in a cheek!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I would argue that virus and worm writers fulfill an important role in software ecology. Billions have been spent on making computers safer from Ninja, CodeRed and Sasser. Without these threats the money would not have been spent and nearly every PC would be wide open today. Can you see how much power that would give to those who do not fear the death penalty?
If we were to kill all harmful bacteria today, infections will go back dramatically. But when, in 80 years, a new strain happens to come into existence, nobody will have any immunity system and humanity will be wiped in 24 hours.
As soon as someone shouts for capital punishment after IT crimes, writing viruses or sending spam would be the least of all cases, compared to intellectual property violations. RIAA, MPAA, BSA and others would like to see thousands of software/media pirates executed. These associations have much more power than all anti-spam initatives together.
Somebody's gotta say it, might as well be me:
The Dalai LLama
...damn, I love this quote...
My sig could be your sig!
A virus writer creates a computer virus which causes a minor inconvenience for a relatively large number of people (and a major inconvenience for a few system administrators). Keep in mind that these people are the people who open up a word document called "I love you".
A murderer kills someone. He ends their life, forever. They will no longer feel happiness, or sadness, or laugh, or click on "I love you" attachments". A murderer devastates the lives of the countless people who are friends and family of their victim.
These two acts are not comparable. An "equivalent punishment", be it captial (which I'm opposed to in either crime) or some other, only makes sense if you have a greatly over-inflated view of the "value" of economics.
The author makes a great point on the value of a deterrent.
We focus all of our efforts on futilely trying to prevent easy-to-commit crimes, such as writing Windows virus scripts, when we should be concentrating more on deterrence. For example, stealing horses a hundred years ago was ridiculously easy. You just walked up to the hitchin rail, grabbed the reins, climbed aboard, and rode off over the horizon...no key required. It would have been impossible to 'prevent' the crime so the punishment focused on deterrence. Horse thieves were publicly derided and executed...sometimes without the benefit of a trial.
The modern day equivalent of a horse thief is a virus author...or a spammer.
I think this is quite interesting.
When estimating the value of human life when making laws, a decent estimate would probably be the value of that life to society.
I'd pay quite a bit to continue my own life, or someone in my family, but that's for selfish and sentimental reasons only. Odds are, people in Montana couldn't care less whether I live or die, despite what some might say to the contrary. There are only a small amount of people who are actually aware and affected by my existence.
A simple means of measuring an individual's effect on society as a whole then is the economic impact that person would have over his lifetime. Like him or not, Bill Gates will obviously have a much greater impact on society over his lifetime than your average joe. Many more people have an interest in his continued well-being than they have an interest in mine.
Should this be weighed when making laws? I don't know. It would seem to me that since Bill Gates has a measurably greater impact on society, he deserves greater compensation for wrongs done to him and also has more responsibility to do the right thing, knowing that his actions affect millions.
But the economic impact is not the only consequence of crime. I'm not scared to walk through a bad neighborhood at night because I think Martha Stewart is going to jump out of the bushes and rob me. Her crime has little impact on the order of society and the perceived safety of its citizens.
Similarly, should we prosecute someone who kills a homeless man? They have little impact on society, and their lives aren't worth as much in economic terms. I think, however, most people would reject the idea that some murders are more ok than others based on economic reasons.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
One of the major assumptions by the author of the article (and most people) is that the death penalty deters murder. It doesn't.
:(
;P
Check out The Death Penalty Inormation Center for more facts, info, and studies.
All of the authors economic number crunching is totally invalid because of this.
However that doesn't mean that I don't WANT to execute them.
What about having them pose naked next to a sign "I'm selling penis enlargements"?
The base problem with this article is the author actually believes you can put a dollar value on life. Once one believes this, crazy statements like this follow:
"Execute the people who write computer worms"
"Harvard professor Kip Viscusi estimates the value of a life at $4.5 million overall, $7 million for a blue-collar male and $8.5 million for a blue collar female"
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Since we've thrown the entire world on one ad-hoc network without securing anything, those pranks are damned expensive right now and there's a real problem. But.... most of the people causing these untold trillions of dollars of damage are bored teenagers, just as antisocial as a lot of other teenagers who are out smashing post office boxes, spray painting walls, and sniffing glue, that happen to be somewhat adept at using a computer.
There do seem to be a few pro's in the field that could be linked to the spam operations and possibly even corporate and government espionage, but they're still seriously in the minority.
So - does some kid doing something stupid warrant destroying the rest of the kid's life? Do these kids really understand the consequences of what they're doing and what kind of destruction they're causing? I think in most cases - no, they don't. In the rest, well - they're still kids. Punish them, let them know what they did was wrong, but don't try to lock them up for the rest of their lives or bury them under the jail for what to them seemed like a funny prank. There's a huge difference between creating a piece of code and shooting someone in the head.
I think we need to do two things.
I write code.
Given that Microsoft will write software that can be exploited, I'd much rather have it exploited by something that reboots my machine and some script kiddie gets a kick out of it, than have it exploited secretly and repeatedly by someone with worse motives. If we didn't have these occasional public displays of how insecure our software is, it would be far easier for other people to take advantage of it, people like the terrorists and governments. That would be a hell of a lot worse than having all your machines reboot, or even losing a hard drive here and there.
The real solution is quality software, and punishing virus writers won't get us any closer to that.
This argument is of course only valid as long as the viruses are relatively benign.
For a virtual crime, the right punishment probably should be virtual death. Lifetime ban on using computers.
That might make a hacker think twice.
Let's do the math. What do we get out of executing a murderer? Deterrence. A high-end estimate is that each execution deters about 10 murders. (The highest estimate I've ever seen is 24 murders deterred per execution, but the closest thing to a consensus estimate in the econometric literature is about eight.) That's 10 lives saved...
Now, I'm no expert on these matters, but would there really be ten times more murders in america if capital punishment was substituted with life in prison?
That number sounds completely ridicoulous to me. I would probably put that number lower than 2 and closer to 1... without taking the time to compare all 38 states with capital punishment to those who don't it doesn't look like theres anywhere near a factor of ten difference between them.
this article looks like yet another example of the fact that 86.2% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
1) Script kiddie writes virus
2) If virus is successful you hire the writer to continue writing viruses.
3) Writing virisus becomes exponentially more difficult as easy exploits are found and patched.
Result: Stronger software. Instead of wasting time paying people trained to create things to discover the flaws that destroy things, you hire specialists who have the correct mindset.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
While it sounds cool on the surface to kill the vermiscripters (along with the lawyers and the spammers), it seems that we're creating new despised classes of people for the digital age. Geeks and nerds have never been very popular to begin with, and now the government is getting in a position where it can finally punish this despised class just as ethnic minorities have similarly suffered disproportionately at the hands of the government. For my money, I'd still rather get the truly violent off the streets rather than offing some pimply faced hacker.
So let's hope that this talk of killing virus writers won't become more than talk. Next thing you know, the Department of Justice will be rounding up file sharers for RIAA...oh wait...
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
It's just you.
Some penalties for some crimes have gone up over the last 15 years (and some have gone) but over the last, say, 100 years, the severity of punishments served out has gone down dramatically. Think of the hanging judges in the wild west, or the justice system of any European country 150 years ago.
Just like the viruses that attack the human body on a daily basis and make our immune systems stronger.
With out them pounding on the operating systems insecurities what motivation would you have for making something more secure?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
How many viruswriters / hackers continue writing viruses / hacking after they got caught, convicted, served time and were released? How many viruswriters / hackers get job in the computersecurity industry and thus contribute to society?
How many murderers continue murdering after they got caught, convicted, served time and were released? How many murderers get a job with the police / FBI and thus contribute to society?
Privacy is terrorism.
I don't know about judging a cumulative effect as the same as a one time effect.
If I give 100,000 people paper-cuts, causing them pain and wasting cumulatively a whole lifetime of hours when they take time out to apply band-aids, am I really as bad as someone who kills another person? Are people going to be afraid to go outside because of the paper-cut man? Are neighborhoods going to decay because of me?
I don't think so.
Even if a pickpocket steals from thousands of people over his lifetime, he is only guilty of many counts of petty theft. He doesn't graduate to grand larceny after a certain cumulative dollar amount.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
And since humans learn much more slowly nowadays, it takes longer sentences to teach them a lesson, right?
;)
The point is that humans aren't inherently bad, except in some rare cases, but some people get some fucked up ideas about ethics. So, the people who are causing significant harm get yanked out of society for a bit, deprived of some of the things they enjoy, in hopes that they will not only be negatively reinforced, but that they will also have time to think and realize why what they did was inappropriate.
Increasing sentences is only going to drive people batty.... at least, I say
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
What would be the consequence of the government refusing to punish virus-authors? It would amount to a privatization of software security. (And isn't privatization supposed to give us faster and more efficient results than government control?) Publishers like Microsoft would have no choice but to make security job #1, or be ruined in the marketplace. It'd be sink-or-swim... and those product-lines which survived would be hardened fortresses of supreme security.
Reducing the punishment to virus-authors is equivalent to removing a government subsidy on sellers of insecure software- and cutting a subsidy always unleashes the free market to do it's optimizing work.
Worm authors are like punk kids who break into corporate offices or bank vaults and kick over all the furniture before running away. Yes, they've caused some inconvenience in knocking stuff over, which can equate to lost chance for revenue, which is somewhat like damage. But they've also revealed a gaping security flaw in a way that the company can no longer deny and will thus fix before real thieves start to use it. Most of the "costs" attributed to worm-authors are actually spending to fix security holes that should've been done anyhow.
Software is more secure today than it would be if nobody wrote worms and virues.
If in 40 years Osama BinLaden Jr discovers a flaw in Microsoft(tm) WindowsGJ44(r), he might be able to cripple the world economy and kill thousands of people- and he's already accepted his own death, so the threat of one more execution won't stop him.
I hate to see such rubbish published, even if the article is half joking. You may get deterrence but you also get brutalization. Personally i doubt there will be a positive (lives saved) balance. Crime figures of countries with and without capital punishment leave some doubts concerning this. But the point is not about capital punishment.
Why do we have courts and just don't hang'em high? Because "Deterrence" is only a secondary goal of serving justice. The primary goal ist restoration of judicial peace. If we forget this, we may also toss the idea of the rule of law outside out of the window. Punishment may be one measure to achieve it. All those strange procedures during prosecution and at court are to ensure that in the end, even if the ruling is faulty, we have a state of judical peace.
This notion may seem strange, but you always have to be aware, that there can never be a "perfect justice".
Regards, Martin
Maybe we should execute politicians whose districts receive more money than average (say $4.5 million more than average, since that was the "value" of a white-collar worker in the article).
The "trick" to the "value of a human life" point in the paper is that humans do not assign value linearly. The author simply converted a point on a value curve into a dollar amount. Dollars are normally valued linearly with risk (.1 chance of 10 == 1 chance of 1), so he started doing linear calculations, then converted back into value. This does not work.
It's very clear that the author is wrong. For example, we may pay a dollar to avoid a one-in-ten-million chance in being killed. However, if someone offers me $10 million dollars to be killed, I wouldn't take it -- simply taking what I would be willing to pay and multiplying it by ten million does not correctly predict my actions. My value/risk curve is not linear (and isn't likely to be, until we turn into perfectly rational beings).
May we never see th
Jesus, I can't believe you actually wrote what you did. Riiight, of course we need to learn the "mentality that crime can be low enough."
It's only ever low for those who haven't been raped, murdered, stabbed, robbed, etc.
For those that have, the rate is always too high.
I can see which of the two categories you fall in.
Jeez, people, it's satire! This form of satire has been around for a long time. I love how someone can write a "punishments go up, never down" hyperbole and another can write "how can we compare human life to a dollar figure?" (Hint: It's done all the time) and it gets modded insightful. I hope the original posters were extending the joke, but somehow, I get the sense that they were posting in earnest.
If you don't see the humor in this article, I beg of you to abstain from watching Farrelly Brothers and Austin Powers movies and recommend you pick up some books and read some Jonathan Swift or Oscar Wilde, to name a couple. There's more to humor than dick and fart jokes, and if you understand that, I'm sure you'll live longer.
The government views the loss of information, and the loss of the use of the computer itself, in a manner similar to a property crime. When my car was broken into and the cd player and airbag stolen - along with massive surrounding damage to the car itself - the police were scarcely interested. You file a report for insurance purposes, and that's it. Similarly, when a box of checks was stolen from the mailbox (stupid! stupid!) years ago, only businesses that cashed the checks could pursue complaints legally, even after the culprits were caught with the checks - never mind the hours and hours over two years it took me to repair the mess to my record. Virus writers, and the damage they cause, I think are viewed in the same manner. They can perpetrate their destruction with little fear of consequences, unless the damage is too great to ignore. Human nature, I suppose, there being bigger fish to fry.
I for one welcome our organ-bank overlords!
That guy took the words right out of my mouth. There is a cost of reducing crime, and it is not worth my freedom.
That said... I have been robbed, my wallet was taken from a locker at a gym (yes it was locked, no I never figured out how they got in...) I found my wallet, devoid of all cash, in a nearby trash can. I was also assaulted about 10 years ago, fortunatly no harm came to me, he took one swing at me, missed, and I ran... A lot faster than he could...
I think crime is pretty low right now. Of corse I wouldn't complain if the crime rate was lowered, but if big brother is needed to lower crime, I will take my chances, thank you very much...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Take a good, hard look at where the world is going in terms of networking everything, and every network interlaced. Today, when a virus strikes, a virus loses a corporation lots of money. (sarcasm) But that's okay, because they're The Man, and we all hate The Man. It's not like it did anyone any harm, right? The Man just didn't get to buy another Learjet that year. (/sarcasm)
But seriously, I don't believe an economic crime demands a lethal punishment. Yet. Why? Because preventatives, insurance, investment, and policy (wise business decisions) can all decrease the effects of these crimes.
However, take into account Hospitals. As more medical equipment comes online, and has to be administered via network, medical care becomes more automated by computer. Medical Files are already on vulnerable networks. As a rule, most hospitals are understaffed, overworked, and in a constant state of emergency. So what happens when a virus brings down an entire hospital's networks for the day? People die. Perhaps the virus only corrupts here and there, unnoticeably. Suddenly medical info is incorrect, or unavailable in a time of crisis during an operation. Someone dies. Perhaps, further down the road, processes (such as medication, or life support) become networked, and a virus brings those systems down, or corrupts the system enough to cause a problem.
That's the most obvious way of a virus writer committing murder. Now apply it to other constant-crisis situations. Flight control-towers, airplanes, filled with people, might in the future be vulnerable as well. Entire planes full of innocent passengers could be lost in mid-air collisions, or ground collisions in low-visibility weather. Traffic control systems in major cities are already online. Corrupting them might cause redlight/greenlight problems, resulting in deaths by car wreck. Or perhaps it just causes a huge traffic jam, and all those in an ambulance, or needing one, are lost due to this virus.
As silly as this article seems, and as smug as the attitude of some posts I've read here, you can't always protect against all virii 100% of the time. There's always going to be something new and clever enough to take advantage of a weakness in the software.
Currently, computer viruses are not a capital offence, but once they start resulting in the loss of human life, and guilt is established, I say let the writer fry/hang/burn/choke/etc... at that point they have just become a premeditated murderer, no different than a bomber.
-The Libra
"You've got no kids, no wife, no job, and you're not in The Tigger Movie!!!"
- my best friend's son, Gabe, at 5 years old.
-The Libra
"Please be patient--The future will begin momentarily."
Sigh.
In the napoleonic era, a typical punishment for highway robbery was death. The punishment for plain old mugging was death. The punishment for burglary was death. The punishment for slipping a few florins from a stranger's pocket into one's own pocket was death. Crimes involving less personal contact were treated a bit more leniently -- the stealer of a sheep in the UK, for instance, could look forward to a mere 8 years or so in an Army penal battalion.
Crime was high, though, much higher than it is now, because of such factors as: the low chance of being caught (no detectives, few police), the large number of desperate people (no welfare), and the social disruption caused by having people EXECUTED THE WHOLE DAMN TIME.
But yeah, make the punishments harsher, it's bound to work.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
You can count me among those. However, I would be wary of talking about moral "costs" and "benefits"; that's economics-speak, not morality-speak.
This is where I part ways with the president of the United States and this article. The article is about an imposition of morality, about the way we calculate the value of a human life in money. But this entire research frame is morally suspect, if life and death are really about more than dollars and cents.
Further, policy debates like this one are full of different methods of decision calculus. This economics-inspired utilitarian accounting of the probable increase or decrease in human lives is just the most popular one, the one you learn in Political Science school and war-planning school. These are ethical methods and moralities too; it's not like policy-centered utilitarianism is "science" and deontology (or some other ethical framework) is "morality".
This utilitarian flavor in political science has real effects at the political level. For example, one woman went to nuclear war-planning school and learned to do this, but found that the decision-making methods used to fight nuclear wars are dehumanizing and illogical, not to mention immoral. Why should it surprise us that more of this warped kind of thinking should lead to warped conclusions?
Other ways to talk about life and death are possible in public policy debate; they're just not permissible. They're also not as tangible and easy to use in mathematics and write up in the annual budget. But who said they should be?
Perhaps this kind of measurement is unnecessary... and perhaps it is flawed... and perhaps, when we learn that it is "counterintuitive" but true that we should kill computer hackers to save money, we should not only seriously question our calculations, we should seriously question our sources of inspiration.
I, for one, would be pleased to have policymakers who are unserious, according to this columnist, who will appeal to the heart's reasons, who think that life is valuable beyond a cash settlement. For "The heart has its reasons, that reason does not know." This is what Pascal was talking about: not that the heart's reasons are inferior to the demands of logic, but that they are superior.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
Chico: (menacingly)I kill people for money. (looks at Harpo) I kill you for money.
Harpo: (looks worried)
Chico: (smiles). No, I no kill you for money. You my friend. I kill you for free.
Harpo: (smiles in relief)
I'm sure killing spammers will be very economic as many people would be willing to do it for free.
P.S. We're currently looking for couriers, so if you've got mad bandwidth then apply within!
Breakfast served all day!
Ahem.
I've been both stabbed AND robbed.
Personally, I think the 'horrendous crime problem' in the US is more a product of the Media trying to sell advertisements than an actual problem. Hell, a study came out a while back showing that violent crime in the UK was the highest in Europe... and a throw away line in the report was that the US ("Known for its violent crime") was lower than any of the European countries being compared.
Yes. Crime is a problem. But, like the grandparent said, there comes a point where the cost of trying to lower crime more is more costly than the crimes themselves...
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
I think, infact, laws on many crimes are becoming far more slack and certain thigns are no longer being considered crimes. I think that we aren't seeing a penalty inflation, we're just seeing the judicial focal point shifting. Of course maybe this is just becaues i'm in canada, and maybe the war against drugs, gay marrige, and such is still raging strong in some states, but up here we've been pruning off the laws that society is starting to see as silly, while maintaining the laws that actualyl protect people.
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
Watch CNN one evening and you'll see what I mean. No reports on, say, technical issues or reports about decreasing crime (or very short ones), but long, horrible reports on death and sex and health risks that are blown way out of proportion. That's why I listen to NPR and watch BBC America; they're less concerned with sensationalism because of the differences in their funding processes.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Indeed, skepticism abounds today, for I cannot believe that you wrote what you did.
There are these wonderful things called "statistics" and arguments like yours are designed solely for the purpose of keeping people irrational and avoiding thinking about them.
The basic thrust of your argument (and I'm hoping that thrust was unintentional) is that, so long as there is a one in six billion chance of being the victim of a violent crime, we as a society are responsible for taking whatever measures are necessary to alleviate that risk.
Let's pull a number out of the air and say that the U.S. spends $100B for state and federal law enforcement every year. Let's also imagine that each time we double that number, we halve the crime rate. Maybe it would be worthwhile to spend $400B to reduce the rate to 1/4, or $800B to get it down to 1/8th the current level. But what about 1/256th? That would cost $25T, which would mean that pretty much the entire economy would be channeled into crime prevention. Forget other wonderful things like medical research, we might not even be able to feed ourselves. And still, people are getting killed, raped, stabbed, and shot.
Nothing in the previous analysis even mentions the secondary costs that come with living in a de facto police state.
I think you're going out of your way to be insulted. When the grandparent says crime is "low enough," he doesn't mean that we just don't give a crap about the victims who remain. He means that the costs associated with getting it down further are unjustifiable. Going back to my earlier example, imagine if we halved the current law enforcement funding. Assume that caused the crime rate to double. Would that be a bad thing? Certainly. But that doesn't eliminate the possibility that it might be the best thing to do, if funneling that money into medical research lead to an overall improvement in the quality of life.
I could sit here and make precisely the same arguments you do, but in favor of such medical research. After all, for the parents of a child who died of cancer, there is no way the cancer rate was "low enough." But how big a tax increase would we allow to reduce it further than we already have? Would we allow the government to step in and start outlawing certain foods, or require that every citizen take an anti-oxidant tablet every morning? Would we sit by while those who refused the pills were jailed?
The whole idea is that we allocate things like resources and government regulations where they will produce the most good. Simple economics.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
From TFA
I don't know where he gets his numbers, by all measures I've ever seen, they show that capital punishment isn't a deterrence. I guess this may go along with the idiom about lies, damn lies, and statistics.
-Turkey
People need to remember that a human life isn't really just a series of consecutive hours. It's one complete unit. Thinking of it as a series of hours reminds me of one of Zeno's paradoxes. Just because a hacker may steal millions of hours overall, he steals zero complete lives. This is why murdering is of course worse than writing viruses.
No comment.
I buy the economic argument that we should execute verminscripters (and spammers while we are at it). But how about we also calculate the deterrence effect of executing officials of software companies if their products are so insecure that we have to download daily patches to keep from having our work utterly destroyed. What would the economic benefit to us be then?
a study came out a while back showing that violent crime in the UK was the highest in Europe...
If you believe that 25 fistfights is more violent crime than a single gunshot to the head, that is...
We live in a Capitalistic society, it's not the government's job to play Robin Hood.
First of all, you don't live in a pure capitalistic system - you live in a tightly regulated market economy where the Government engages in massive redistributive programs. You ant a pure "Capitalistic" system go back to the 19th century, eliminate social programs, eliminate progressive taxation, eviscerate your middle classes, and reintroduce slavery and debt bondage. Oh, and bring back hanging for larceny and petty theft.
Secondly, does the phrase "of the people, by the people, for the people" mean anything to you? Governments serve people and provide for the common good; they are not mere rubberstamps for corporations or capital - despite what many fringe ideologues in the US would have you believe.
Da Blog
You are wrong. The babies have no ego at all. They don't even know the concept of an internal world in relation to an external world. To them there is no difference between a cloud in their minds eye and the sound of a car outside. Both things just happen. Also, as far as the baby knows they aren't happening to anyone and nobody is doing them. This is exactly what is meant by no ego. Kids only become what you say when adults make them that way. The natural human condition is that of enlightenment in the zen or taoist sense.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Here is a report of international crime statistics which shows that there is, in fact, far more violent crime in the US than in Western Europe.
The following are average numbers of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants per year from 1997 to 1999
US : 6.26
England : 1.45
Germany : 1.28
France : 1.63
Norway : 0.85
Russia : 20.52
S.Africa: 56.49
Interestingly, the land of the free also has the extremely high prison population (from the same source, again per 100.000 inhabitants)
US : 682
England : 125
Germany : 97
France : 91
Norway : 56
Russia : 729
S.Africa: 327
My child didn't. Granted, he's only (just barely) one year old- but if we're all relaxing watching TV, and mommy gives him two cookies, very soon there will be a small hand in my mouth feeding me one of the two cookies. And he came up with this all on his own, it's one of his favorite little games.
Kids learn by immitation- if kids start out as greedy, selfish, egocentric, manipulative beasts, I'd say look at the parents and how they treated the kid during the first three months of life.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Therefore, I would suggest frying a bunch of those simple-minded economists first. The world would be better off without their brain-dead advice, and millions of lives (not to mention huge funds) would be spared in the process.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Question... what are the birth rates per viable female for the following groups?
So next time they "visit" prison givem the option of getting fixed for a reduced "visit" and prevent the next generation of crime. Apply this to all classes from the Michael Milkin's to the crackhead bob's and watch what happens for the next 40 yrs to...