Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [47]
So did the introduction of TV have any discernible effect on a given city’s crime rate?
The answer seems to be yes, indeed. For every extra year a young person was exposed to TV in his first 15 years, we see a 4 percent increase in the number of property-crime arrests later in life and a 2 percent increase in violent-crime arrests. According to our analysis, the total impact of TV on crime in the 1960s was an increase of 50 percent in property crimes and 25 percent in violent crimes.
Why did TV have this dramatic effect?
Our data offer no firm answers. The effect is largest for children who had extra TV exposure from birth to age four. Since most four-year-olds weren’t watching violent shows, it’s hard to argue that content was the problem.
It may be that kids who watched a lot of TV never got properly socialized, or never learned to entertain themselves. Perhaps TV made the have-nots want the things the haves had, even if it meant stealing them. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the kids at all; maybe Mom and Dad became derelict when they discovered that watching TV was a lot more entertaining than taking care of the kids.
Or maybe early TV programs somehow encouraged criminal behavior. The Andy Griffith Show, a huge hit that debuted in 1960, featured a friendly sheriff who didn’t carry a gun and his extravagantly inept deputy, named Barney Fife. Could it be that all the would-be criminals who watched this pair on TV concluded that the police simply weren’t worth being afraid of?
As a society, we’ve come to accept that some bad apples will commit crimes. But that still doesn’t explain why none of Kitty Genovese’s neighbors—regular people, good people—stepped in to help. We all witness acts of altruism, large and small, just about every day. (We may even commit some ourselves.) So why didn’t a single person exhibit altruism on that night in Queens?
A question like this may seem to fall beyond the realm of economics. Sure, liquidity crunches and oil prices and even collateralized debt obligations—but social behaviors like altruism? Is that really what economists do?
For hundreds of years, the answer was no. But around the time of the Genovese murder, a few renegade economists had begun to care deeply about such things. Chief among them was Gary Becker, whom we met earlier, in this book’s introduction. Not satisfied with just measuring the economic choices people make, Becker tried to incorporate the sentiments they attached to such choices.
Some of Becker’s most compelling research concerned altruism. He argued, for instance, that the same person who might be purely selfish in business could be exceedingly altruistic among people he knew—although, importantly (Becker is an economist, after all), he predicted that altruism even within a family would have a strategic element. Years later, the economists Doug Bernheim, Andrei Shleifer, and Larry Summers empirically demonstrated Becker’s point. Using data from a U.S. government longitudinal study, they showed that an elderly parent in a retirement home is more likely to be visited by his grown children if they are expecting a sizable inheritance.
But wait, you say: maybe the offspring of wealthy families are simply more caring toward their elderly parents?
A reasonable conjecture—in which case you’d expect an only child of wealthy parents to be especially dutiful. But the data show no increase in retirement-home visits if a wealthy family has only one grown child; there need to be at least two. This suggests that the visits increase because of competition between siblings for the parent’s estate. What might look like good old-fashioned intrafamilial altruism may be a sort of prepaid inheritance tax.
Some governments, wise to the ways of the world, have gone so far as to legally require grown children to visit or support their aging moms and dads. In Singapore, the law is known as the Maintenance of Parents Act.
Still, people