Reflections on Corruption and Warfare

There are lots of trends in nature that involve something growing, like the flow of water into a lake (when winter transitions into spring), followed by an increase in the level of water in the lake, then an increase in the flow out of the lake, which persists after the influx has subsided until the level of water in the lake goes back down during the later summer.

In human affairs, we see this sort of thing with crime and law enforcement. The general level of crime goes up, after which there is growing demand for the authorities to do something about it, which is followed by an increase in arrests, more police hired, more people being convicted of crimes, perhaps an increase in the severity of sentences, leading to a non-linear increase in the prison population. In the crime wave of 1965-1994, the prison population actually peaked 12 years after the murder rate did.

The balance of power between perpetrators of crime and anti-crime forces is also subject to dramatic swings over time. One probable driver is the reliability of law enforcement versus its capture by organized crime. Yet another is the ability of crime to organize; its ability to launder revenues; its ability to win cooperation from the general public (or the ability of crime syndicate members to defect; see this 2018 paper on the problem faced by defecting members of Japan’s yakuza.) It’s worth noting that crime in the USA is heavily studied, but statistics are notoriously unreliable (the Japanese data on the yakuza membership are oddly precise), and after sixty years worth of obsessive study, remains very poorly understood.

Part of the reason is pretty obvious: most crime is not organized (e.g., the UNODC report for 2017 [PDF] estimates a total of 464,000 intentional homicides, of which one-fifth were attributed to some form of organized crime. The UN distinguishes between intentional homicides and war fatalities, of which there were about 130,000 in 2017.) One could argue that at least some share of war deaths represents state corruption, which is where I want to go next.

Read more »