Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't by John Jr. (books to read for 12 year olds txt) 📗

there was about a 20 percent increase in the rate of both robberies and homicides inside people’s homes. As previously noted, having a gun is by far the safest course of action when one is confronted by a criminal. But a locked gun is not nearly as accessible for defensive purposes.

Accidental gun deaths among children are, fortunately, much rarer than most people believe. Among America’s 40 million children under the age of ten, there were just twenty accidental gun deaths in 2003.128 While gun deaths receive a lot of attention, children in the same age range were forty-one times more likely to die from accidental suffocations, thirty-two times more likely to die from accidental drownings, and twenty times more likely to die as a result of accidental fires.129 Among children under age fifteen, there were fifty-six accidental gun deaths in 2003—still a fraction of the deaths resulting from these other accidents for just the younger children.130

Given that there are over 90 million adults in the United States who own at least one gun, the overwhelming majority of gun owners must have been extremely careful, seeing as these figures were recorded before gunlocks were made mandatory.131

Even this relatively small number of tragic deaths is enough to convince many people that gunlocks are a good idea. If gunlocks can keep kids from accidentally killing themselves, their siblings, or their friends, then why not make them mandatory? But this logic is faulty, as the typical person who accidentally shoots and kills a child is not himself a child at all, but rather an adult male in his 20s.132 In fact, very few children under age ten even have the strength to pull back the slide on a semi-automatic pistol. Most accidental shooters have a history of alcoholism and a criminal record.133 They are also disproportionately involved in car crashes and are much more likely to have had their driver’s license suspended or revoked. Even if gunlocks can stop children from using guns, they are simply not designed to stop adult males from firing their own weapons. Thus, it is hardly surprising that gunlocks show no significant impact on accidental gun deaths.

Gunlock laws, along with safe-storage regulations, are sometimes touted as a means to prevent suicides, but the great majority of academic studies have found this benefit to be small or non-existent.134 There are a lot of ways to commit suicide, and people intent on doing so tend to find a way, with or without a gun. Economist John Whitley and I examined juvenile accidental gun deaths and suicides in all fifty states. We found that safe-storage laws had no impact on either type of death.135 The laws were primarily followed by the kind of law-abiding families among whom hardly any accidental deaths were occurring. The laws did have an effect, however, in hindering the ability of these families to defend themselves against intruders. The states that adopted safe-storage laws from 1977 to 1998 faced over three hundred more murders and 4,000 more rapes per year. Burglaries also increased dramatically.136

Laws that force people to lock up their guns or discourage them from owning guns in the first place result in more deaths. Sometimes even the best-intentioned laws have unintended consequences that end up costing lives.

Big Penalties for Small Environmental Crimes: A Surprisingly Good Policy

The United States Sentencing Commission sought to revamp the criminal penalties for corporations in the early 1990s. As mentioned earlier, one problem it addressed was an inconsistency in assessing penalties for environmental crimes. But there is another aspect of the problem. Traditionally, those who committed major environmental crimes—such as a massive oil spill from a tanker running aground—had to pay fines equivalent to the amount of the damages. In contrast, for minor environmental crimes—for example, dumping a barrelful of waste off the side of a ship—the fines were many times greater than the damage estimates. The commission reversed this relationship so that penalties for the more serious crimes became many times bigger than the damages.

While the new regulations seem logical, there was a sound reason for the earlier policy. A major oil spill is something that is nearly impossible to hide—we will know with near-certainty that the crime occurred and which ship was responsible. But it is much more difficult to identify the culprit—or even to detect the crime—for a smaller transgression like dumping just a barrelful of waste off the side of a boat. That’s why the Sentencing Commission’s policy change was actually counter-productive; if we want to create disincentives to environmental crime, we need to ensure that small-time offenders face relatively harsher penalties which act to offset the high probability that they’ll get away with their crime.

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Voting Rights and Voting Wrongs

Free markets and political freedom usually go hand in hand. While it’s possible for an authoritarian government to preside over a free economy, such instances are very rare.1 Regimes that don’t trust their people enough to allow democratic elections usually like to keep close control over their subjects’ economic activities and their access to information.

With so much at stake, it’s worthwhile to subject our own electoral process and its history to some economic analysis. This kind of study leads to numerous unusual conclusions. First, we find that the growth of government, commonly attributed to President Roosevelt’s New Deal, actually began earlier and was largely due to the enfranchisement of a single group of citizens. Second, measures meant to improve the voting system, such as the secret ballot, had some rather unintended consequences, particularly a large drop in the voting rate. Third, we can evaluate different types of fraud accusations in recent elections, distinguishing the legitimate problems from the partisan hype. And finally, we uncover some hidden agendas in the media and in public schools—the two mediums through which most people receive their information and form their world views.

Women’s Suffrage and the Growth of Government

Economists have long pondered why the government started growing precisely when it did. The U.S. federal