Don’t ever change, Gawker.
Via Gawker:
[T]he media reaction to the rioting has thus far been uniformly ridiculous. As much as we all love AutoZone and Doritos, hysterically sobbing at the sight of the former being burned and the latter being looted is a tad over the top. A clip of bullets was unloaded into an unarmed black boy and then his killer was ushered through some sort of cop-loving kangaroo court, after all. Some charred car refreshers are hardly something to get worked up about in moments like these.
But is this really so? There is, of course, the historical case to be made for rioting: the past is replete with examples where rioting gets the goods. But there is also, I’d submit, an even more straightforward case for rioting: at the right levels, rioting is economically efficient.
One need look no further than famous economist and Nobel laureate Gary Becker to see how this is true. According to Becker, punishing bad behavior increases the costs of engaging in such behavior and thereby reduces the amount of it. This is the underlying theory of most criminal justice schemes. Rioting that occurs in response to gross police misconduct and criminal system abuses imposes costs on doing those things. It signals to police authorities that they risk this sort of destructive mayhem if they continue on like this. All else equal, this should reduce the amount of police misconduct as criminal justice authorities take precautions to prevent the next Ferguson.