Tuesday, March 6, 2012

The Policy Maker You Never Heard Of: James Q. Wilson


We don’t hear much from real thinkers anymore or maybe we never did.  Anyway, many people knew about right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart but most never heard of James Wilson – that tells us something.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly counseled Richard Nixon, “Mr. President, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States.”  If you care much about domestic public policy, you know who Moynihan was and that this was high praise indeed.

Both men were a scholar’s scholar so we don’t hear from them unless we read the scholarly magazines or the Sunday newspapers. 

During the 1960s and ’70s, both men noticed that income transfers to the poor increased, but poor neighborhoods did not improve;  instead families disintegrated.  The economy boomed and factory jobs opened up, but crime rates skyrocketed.  Public policy matters and unintended consequences abound.  Moynihan was ostracized at the time for “blaming the victim” and Wilson was dismissed as a conservative for including religion in some of his solutions – after Goldwater, “conservative” became an epithet.

Wilson’s best known idea was his still popular “broken windows” theory on how to reduce crime.  The theory maintains that urban disorder and vandalism leads to additional crime and anti-social behavior.  So, dealing with scoff law offences reduces crime rates and violence.  Declining neighborhoods lead to declining behavior in an escalating downward spiral.  We’ve all seen neighborhoods go to rot but New York and other cities worldwide, fixed the windows, cleaned the graffiti, took the trouble to arrest people who didn’t pay the subway fare and crime went down.

Consider a building with a few broken windows.  If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows.  Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.  Or consider a sidewalk.  Some litter accumulates.  Soon, more litter accumulates.  Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.

From an article titled "Broken Windows" in the March 1982 edition Atlantic Monthly, written by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling.

Also interesting to me, is Wilson’s take on the role of virtue and character in community.  I like it that Wilson saw the rule of law as critical to order. 

“Order exists because a system of beliefs and sentiments held by members of a society sets limits to what those members can do,” he wrote in 1985.

So underpinning law is individual behavior which has to be a group thing.  We must have expectations of one another that we will act with good character:  behave in a balanced way;  think about the long-term consequences of our actions;  cooperate;  be decent.  He thought religion was important to community but he didn’t believe we needed it to have virtue.  Basic virtue is “habituated” by practicing good manners, by being dependable, punctual and responsible day by day.

I really like this;  I like it because it makes reclaiming our worst families and neighborhoods seem an attainable community objective.  We could start by giving schools the responsibility to teach these things to our kids and the authority to require their compliance.

How does character and virtue apply to governance?  Brooks wrote, “Every generation has an incentive to spend on itself, but none ran up huge deficits until the current one. Some sort of moral norms prevented them.”

In another column, Ross Douthat compares Andrew Breitbart, 43, to James Wilson, 80 who both died last week.  Douthat said this:

It’s easy to see the shift from Wilson’s old-media conversation to Breitbart’s new-media circus as a straightforward story of cultural decline.

From public intellectuals to talking heads, from social science to showmanship, from The Public Interest and Commentary to blogs and tweets and gossip.

Certainly there is more noise in Breitbart’s world, more polarization and hysteria.  It’s a climate in which the best often seem to lack a platform commensurate to their gifts, while the passionate intensity of the worst finds a wide and growing audience.

How very sadly true.  But Douthat also points out what many of us know but forget which is that, decline or not, we may simply be returning to American normal:

Prior to WW2, the nation’s media were much more partisan, more sensationalistic, more attuned to scandal and celebrity and less concerned about accuracy and rigor.

In this sense, American journalism in the age of the Internet represents a return to the way that American journalism was practiced in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  And a republic that survived the excesses of William Randolph Hearst can presumably survive the excesses of the bloggers and blowhards.

Douthat says that the higher challenge is to encourage and celebrate work like James Q. Wilson’s in an Andrew Breitbart world.  Personally, I think Wilson would set the bar higher.  I also think that if we're going to act like bums we'd better be more careful who we elcet to run the country.

The Rediscovery of Character
By David Brooks
NYT, March 5, 2012

The Scholar and the Rascal
By Ross Douthat
NYT, March 3, 2012

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