Broken Window Theory.
I’d been meaning to write a post on broken window theory for a while, and when I came across this video of a bike the other week, it came to mind again. The theory takes its name from an Atlantic article entitled ‘Broken Windows’ written in 1982 by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. The article put forward the idea that small acts of vandalism and urban disorder (such as a solitary broken window) can then become the catalyst for a gradual rise in severity and frequency of additional crime.
“Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.”
The video of the bike mentioned above seems to conform to the theory:
On January 1, 2011 we chained a fully loaded bike - bells, basket, lights and more - to a post along a busy Soho street. We took a picture of the bike everyday for 365 days, watching it slowly vanish before our eyes.
Amazingly, nothing gets taken from the bike for the first three months, at which point the bike pump gets stolen, and 50 days later, the drink bottle along with it. It’s not until the saddle gets stolen on day 230 that things get interesting - 40 days later and there’s very little of the bike remaining, at which point it disappears completely.
The theory had some fairly far-reaching consequences, and was probably most famously tested in New York during the late 80’s and early 90’s. After co-writing the article, George L. Kelling was hired as a consultant by the The New York City Transit Authority, resulting in the graffiti in the city’s subway system being cleaned up. William J. Bratton described George L. Kelling as his ‘intellectual mentor’ and so when he became head of the New York City Transit Police in 1990, wasted no time in implementing measures that would counter the theory (namely cracking down hard on petty crime). Those measures eventually became known as ‘Zero Tolerance’, a strategy that was then controversially adopted city wide by Mayor Rudy Giuliani after his election in 1993.
Zero Tolerance is often touted as reason for New York City’s crime rate dropping during the early 90’s, however this is generally disputed. Ben Bowling for instance, writing in the British Journal of Criminology, blames other factors such as the drop in crack cocaine and argues that “the ‘New York story’ has been over-simplified and over-sold, and that ‘zero tolerance’ is an inappropriate language for police policy or practice.”
Meanwhile, in his book ‘Prisons of Poverty’, Loïc J. D. Wacquant “tracks the incubation and internationalization of the slogans, theories, and measures composing this new punitive “common sense,” fashioned to curb mounting urban inequality and marginality in the metropolis. He finds that a network of Reagan-era conservative think tanks (led by the Manhattan Institute) forged them as weapons in their crusade to dismantle the welfare state and, in effect, to criminalize poverty.”
Despite the failures of the implementations attempting to respond to Broken Window Theory, the social science (and specifically the ‘crowd psychology’) behind it still stands true. One of the best books I’ve read on that particular topic is “The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You” by Marc Buchanan, who also used to run a corresponding blog by the same name. He now writes on The Physics of Finance, which is also worth a read.
In another interesting note, the photograph of broken windows on the Wikipedia page are from the ill-fated Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St Louis and is probably one of the most appropriate images for the theory. For a really good story on the failings of Pruitt-Igoe, head over and listen to this excellent little Podcast at 99Percent by Roman Mars.
One last thing, while discussing this with the economically minded, taco cartel running, Hersh (who occasionally posts stuff here), He was genuinely shocked to find out that I’d heard of the theory before - As it turns out, he was thinking of the Broken Window Fallacy, which is a completely different thing and no doubt why any economists reading this is now utterly confused.
