To bloodless policy analysts, there are few societal afflictions worse than the dreaded anecdote.
An anecdote can brush aside years of work, mountains of data. What happened to Bob or Jane or Frank or Ralph on a Tuesday afternoon can shake the very foundation of national, state and local policy – even if the anecdote is self-reported, self-serving and not replicable anywhere other than Mars.
Politicians love anecdotes. It is difficult to rouse an audience with a PowerPoint presentation featuring a demand curve run amok, but the story of one family in desperate circumstances can be the foundation for a multi-billion-dollar government initiative.
Even seemingly straightforward policy matters that the average citizen can grasp reasonably well are vulnerable to the tyranny of the anecdote. Consider the death penalty.
What determines, in small part, whether a particular state has a death penalty at all; and what determines, in large part, the particular crimes that prompt the potential for capital punishment; is usually anecdote.
Massachusetts, with no death penalty on the books and few folks marching in the streets to reinstate one, would need only one particularly hideous homicide, involving a cop; a frail, elderly grandma; or a virginal, blond suburban girl on her way home from school; to rouse the legislature to, perhaps, maybe, add a little death penalty to the mix of punishment options.
This summer, New Hampshire got that death penalty fever, following an awful home-invasion burglary that featured a knife and machete attack on a mother and daughter. New Hampshire had a quite precise collection of six types of murder that might earn one a death penalty, but burglary was not in the mix, even if it led to a homicide. Based on the one 2009 attack, that has now been clarified.
Rhode Island is currently involved in a peculiar tug-of-war with the feds, over a creature charged with shooting to death someone making a deposit at a bank in Woonsocket. Rhode Island, which has no death penalty, made the arrest. The federal authorities want the robbery-murder suspect, in theory at least, because his crime occurred at a federally insured bank. At the federal level, the death penalty looms.
Rhode Island won’t give him up, to block the potential for a death-penalty trial. The federal courts will sort this one out, but, what if the crime had been more grotesque, more grandiose, involved more than one body or severed limbs or something particularly unspeakable? Would the anecdote have changed Rhode Island’s mind about how warm and fuzzy it would be in protecting the creature from the potential for execution?
Marginal Costs
The criminal justice scholars, and a handful of economists, enjoy playing the anecdote game with the death penalty.
A favorite scenario: A jurisdiction is caught up in a wave of brutal burglaries, where victims are often beaten and disfigured. The anecdotes are too much. The governing body imposes a capital punishment option for burglary. What is the result?
More murders. The bad guys figure that if they’re facing the potential for the death penalty for burglary, they might as well kill all the witnesses. No marginal cost for the additional crime.
In fact, marginal cost often comes into play when debating the merits of creating or abolishing a death penalty option. If there is no death penalty, some folks argue, the marginal cost to the monster of killing three people instead of one; of raping instead of just robbing; or torturing, instead of just killing; is little or none. Life in prison is life in prison. Nothing he does ups the ante to death, if there is no capital punishment. The anecdotes would be moot – until, one supposes, the next session of the legislature.
Back a few years ago, when Massachusetts had less compassion, the state did execute 26 women for practicing witchcraft. The anecdotes were remarkable. Those girls could have been newspaper editors or something equally horrific.
Of course, readers of this newspaper are well aware of the power of anecdote-mania. When is a subprime loan “predatory?” It often depends on the power of the anecdote. Poor little helpless family, out on the street. Bad bank/mortgage broker/financial services monsters. Bad. Bad.
