The Boring Lies of Social Science

To understand gun violence, let's try poetry instead.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. — William Wordsworth

Songs are written in the moment…while I’m feeling what I’m feeling. — Taylor Swift

If a compelling new book about crime in Chicago is right, modern American gun violence is “expressive” rather than “instrumental.”

“A careful look at twenty years of U.S. murder data collected by the F.B.I.,” University of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig writes in Unforgiving Spaces, “concluded that only 23 percent of all murders were instrumental; 77 percent of murders—nearly four of every five—were some form of expressive violence.”

Americans, that is, don’t shoot one another as a means to an end. We fire our guns as a way of expressing powerful and spontaneous feelings. A gun shot is a quick way of making wild internal states concrete, and manifest in the real world.

This is violent crime as an aesthetic act.

Ludwig goes on to argue that subduing expressive violence requires a different set of policies than subduing instrumental violence. It’s one of those nifty arguments with the potential to tilt a bit too PowerPoint. But I’ll get to that.

First I must confess that “aesthetic” is my word. Ludwig doesn’t use it. For all his talents, Ludwig is not, as you might suspect, a literary critic. That’s OK—our ranks are few, our budgets tight, and our books remaindered.

Instead of using ideas about human nature from Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads, then, Ludwig pings the pop-psych bible Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.

I’m on the record as a seething skeptic of all the overfunded social-sciencey fields that were spontaneously convened in the last few decades: behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, the scientific science of branding, you name it, even neuroscience—especially insofar as such lavishly capitalized fields are called on almost exclusively to facilitate the making of money and the amassing of power.

“Behavioral economics” often serve mostly to give a manly glow-up to the businesses of marketing and sales. And the delusions of evopsych are responsible for a manmade catastrophe in social and romantic relationships. It still informs the manosphere hellscape.

Then there’s the fraud.