Redeeming Economics (8) Crime

In his book called Redeeming Economics, John D Mueller discusses crime and hate.

Just as modern economists have tended to explain love in terms of utility, many have tried to explain crime and other antisocial behavior in terms of utility. Gary Becker was also the leader in expounding this theory...

Like love, crime is not explainable solely in terms of utility. Most people do not commit crimes, even though doing so would increase their wealth (after allowing for the probability of punishment), thus raising the expected total utility of their wealth. To argue that most people must receive utility from not committing crimes reduces the theory to a tautology; it is unscientific, because it renders the theory unfalsifiable.

Crime, or any other kind of subjugation, is the reverse of love. Rather than a gift or voluntary transfer payment given, it is an involuntary transfer payment exacted. In both cases, the motivation of the transfer depends essentially on a weighing of persons, not a weighing of utilities. In gifts (voluntary transfers), the significance of the other person is either positive (for someone who receives a gift) or zero (for someone who doesn’t). In the case of a crime, the criminal gives himself a positive and the victim a negative significance. If I take what belongs to you against your will, I am giving myself a positive significance in a distribution that exceeds 100% of my own resources, and giving you a negative significance in the “distribution.” I may take something from you, or I may destroy something belonging to you. Just as loving one other person half as much as oneself is mathematically equivalent to loving one-and-a-half persons equally, increasing one’s wealth by half through stealing from another persons is mathematically equivalent to loving “two-thirds of a person” equally with oneself. But the number of persons loved equally is always greater than zero, because one always loves oneself.

Here is Mueller's summary.

Crime, like love is essentially not a weighting of utilities, but a weighting of persons. Thus it is always a moral decision. A crime consists in depriving a person of something that belongs to him, giving that person a negative significance in the distribution of goods (pp.109-110).