The Business of Governing

Michael Lind asks if we need a businessman in the White House:

At first glance, it might seem plausible that successful private sector leaders understand the modern national and global economies. But doing well in one part of the economy is quite different from understanding what is good for the economy as a whole …. Running an economy that is good for business is radically different from running a business, in a number of ways.

Agreed, although Lind undersells the important point that “running an economy” is not the president’s responsibility. The temptation by the Mitt Romneys of the world to say, essentially, “I’d be a good president because I’ve run businessy stuff” misconstrues the job as predominantly managerial. Yes, a president does have to manage the organization that is the White House, and preside over the large bureaucracy we know as the executive branch, and there is ample evidence that these aren’t Barack Obama’s strong suits.

But in terms of the impact of a presidency, these are small parts of the gig compared to big picture matters of policy and diplomacy, which bear virtually no resemblance to the kind of experience one gets wearing a suit in the private equity world. Given an ideologically neutral choice for president (or governor or mayor) between an intellectually nimble, thoughtful person who grasps the nuances of policy, diplomacy, and political philosophy, and a competent, pragmatic alternative who knows his or her way around a boardroom, I’ll take the egghead every time.

Lind also wonders, if business types would do so well, why there have been so few:

The vast majority of American presidents have been career politicians, who moved up in state politics before aspiring to a national stage. And most presidents who worked in the private as well as the public sector were lawyers, not corporate managers or investors.

This analysis is less successful: equating the rarity of a thing with its merits might work in the rare gemstone trade, but as argument goes it falls short of the mark. Given rather limited evidence that our system results in the election of outstanding political leaders, it makes little sense to draw inferences about ideal qualifications from the attributes of those who have held office in the past.

Statistical Homicide

This post appeared on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.

In a Tennessean op-ed last week on the proposed budget for Nashville and the tax increase it contains, local businessman Nathan Massey made a statistical claim that more money for policy officers reduces crime:

Let’s look at crime statistics. There were 51 homicides in Nashville in 2011. That is the lowest number of homicides since 1966. That suggests a direct relationship between investment and return.

I won’t comment on the merits of the budget or the tax hike,* but I can put on my social scientist hat (or striped shirt, to upgrade the metaphor) and referee the merits of a statistical argument. And on the matter of a lower number of homicides supporting a relationship between investment and return I’m throwing yellow flags: extremely illegal procedure.

Massey’s factoid may be accurate — the number of homicides has receded to the terrority it occupied back in the 1960s — but the meaning of those numbers is anything but clear. If you want to understand trends in violent crime, murder is perhaps the least reliable thing to look at. It is well understood that drops in raw homicide numbers can be explained in significant measure by advances in medicine and technology that make victims of attempted murder likely to survive. A landmark 2002 study, “Murder and Medicine,” published in the academic journal Homicide Studies (and who doesn’t want a subscription to that next Christmas?) showed that it’s not violent assaults that dropped over the last four decades of the twentieth century — nationally the rate of aggravated assault quintupled! —  but rather the lethality of assaults. The study (summarized by the NIH here) found that but for the dramatic drop in trauma mortality, murder rates by the turn of the century would have been much higher than they were.

A glance at long-term trends in violent crime in Nashville (using the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting statistics, synthesized for Metro Nashville here) bears out this skepticism about the meaning of a drop in homicides. Looking at rates of violent crime in Davidson County, rather than numbers, we find that while, yes, the murder rate (per 100,000 population) has dropped by more than a third since the mid-1960s, rates of aggravated assault, rape, robbery, and violent crime overall have more than doubled. On an upbeat note, though, these rates have noticeably backed off their peaks during the 1990s.

As a New York Times writer put it at the time the “Murder and Medicine” study came out, we “aren’t any less murderous — it’s just getting harder for us to kill one another.” It is, by extension, statistical malpractice to use long-term trends in the raw number of homicides as evidence either for or against the efficacy of law enforcement spending.

*_{No can do, owing to spousal unit on Metro Council who will vote on the thing.}