You should of course start with your highest-conviction fixes and I don’t think TikTok lands there. But no, most persistent behaviors, not even problems specifically, are multicausal and overdetermined. Behaviors that are not this way are fragile and rarely persist long enough to even be labeled as “a behavior”.
> You should of course start with your highest-conviction fixes and I don’t think TikTok lands there.
I would rather start with things that provably work...
> But no, most persistent behaviors, not even problems specifically, are multicausal and overdetermined. Behaviors that are not this way are fragile and rarely persist long enough to even be labeled as “a behavior”.
Salvador seemingly proved that its very high murder rate had a single major cause: gang activity [1]. Some "social" problems have simple solutions. Some don't.
Now that's an excellent proposal: look into the future to pre-determine what will work and then pick the things that'll work.
El Salvador proved what was already known. You can rapidly eliminate crime by just imprisoning anyone suspected of crime. Now tell me... why doesn't every country on the planet do this? Why does the United States have such strong restrictions against this, by design (e.g. "Blackstone's Ratio" to let 10 guilty men go free rather than imprisoning a single innocent one)?
Could it be that this behavior tends to scoop up innocent people, delegitimize the state, and yield more violence and more chaos?
This is exactly the type of simplistic thinking I'm cautioning against. Maybe it'll work out for El Salvador, but in general throughout history this has not yielded good outcomes, which is why most of the prosperous countries on the planet do not behave this way despite its obvious near-term advantages.
If you can't make reliable predictions then try looking into the past.
> You can rapidly eliminate crime by just imprisoning anyone suspected of crime.
Overgeneralization from the get-go is how you end up confusing a situation and do nothing.
> why doesn't every country on the planet do this?
A first reason would be that they don't have gangs, so it would be useless to target them. Then, if they have large gangs and they can identify members of such gangs, then yes -- why don't they do this?
> Could it be that this behavior tends to scoop up innocent people, delegitimize the state, and yield more violence and more chaos?
This is changing the conversation. Those are not causes, but potential consequences. You said that problems are always multicausal and can't be solved by simple solutions, but isn't it more like you have strong moral standards that prevent you from considering such solutions? So this is not about a correct analysis of causes and such, this is about how to solve problems within your own framing.
To answer: if you outlaw being in a gang, then anyone identified as part of one is not innocent. Arguably a state is more delegitimized when it fails to prevent its peaceful members from being murdered or ran over by carjackers. Third is simply: no, I don't think so at all. Third, is a "theory of inverse": having more order, creates more disorder. It's never applied anytime in my life -- when I clean my place, it doesn't get dirtier, and it doesn't seem to me that this theory has worked on a societal level either.
> but in general throughout history this has not yielded good outcomes, which is why most of the prosperous countries on the planet do not behave this way despite its obvious near-term advantages.
Speaking of framing, the "most prosperous countries on the planet", by which I assume you mean the U.S. and various Euro countries, executed a large percentage of their population for centuries until the (late) second part of the 20th. If you look at the UK for example [1], the Bloody code (in the 19th) included 220 reasons for capital punishment (including many dismeanors).
It would be simplistic to conclude that extremely harsh legal systems lead to prosperity, but it seems that not only are there obvious short-term advantages, there might even be long-term advantages.
Finally, I will say that, amusingly, El Salvador doesn't have the death penalty, so instead of executing a few gang-members every year, and having the police control them on the road every day, they're just locking up a large number of them with huge short-term success.
The harshness of the punishments and strictness of enforcement are not the relevant dimensions: the legitimacy of them is.
El Salvador is very likely committing extrajudicial killings and imprisoning people without anything resembling fair trials. Again, this will have the intended effect in the short term and will very likely not in the long term.
For example, why does MS-13 et al exist anyway? Well, as consequence of the Salvadoran Civil War which was kicked off in part due to extrajudicial killings that the government at that time was using to maintain control over a brittle society!
You’re just seeing a repeat of the same cycle that produced the violent gangs in the first place. The problem will re-emerge and I’m sure we’ll have another proposal to do “the simple thing” and just go imprison and execute a bunch of people extrajudicially. Maybe it’ll work that time.
I don't understand this insistence on extrajudicial executions; doesn't the U.S. have them too? Those are not part of the Salvadorean legal system, are they? It brings nothing to the discussion, and seems an attempt at pointing fingers at best. If you want to discuss vigilantism, you realize that's another thing?
In any case, I can't agree with anything you said. Obviously reducing murders by half will have very deep trickling positive effects on a society. And the Salvadoran Civil War was simply not due, even in part, to cracking down on gang crime.
I reiterate that, even though you may not like it, or may want to use softer methods, or may resent one for making this observation, repressive methods provably work at stopping violent crime. Unless you're a slippery slope afficionado, what this should tell you is not that you should declare martial law on Earth, but that violent crime is a provably solvable problem. Arguably, alongside with morals, it would be nice to also have the imagination and motivation to achieve such result.
Conflating state-sponsored extrajudicial killings (El Salvador) with homicide (the US) seems like bad faith argumentation.
I guess we'll see how stable El Salvador seems in a few years. I would bet that it will either be an authoritarian state rife with human rights abuses as a matter of daily operation or it will be once again overrun with crime bordering on civil war.
