A General Theory of Public and Private Violence

In three years, economists will be celebrating the 90th?anniversary of John Maynard Keynes’ treatise, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.??The book written during and inspired by the global economic depression of the 1930s attempted to explain how major economic stakeholders – investors, workers, consumers, savers, and government interacted in ways that determined the performance of the macro economy.??The General Theory continues to influence economists and policy makers today.??

Keynes demonstrated that understanding how the economy works can be accelerated during times of crisis.??Right now, we are experiencing a crisis of public and private violence. Perhaps a Keynesian approach could be helpful to drive understanding of the underlying conditions that are causing the current paroxysm of violence and random mass shootings that are dominating public consciousness today.

A general theory of public and private violence would start with definitions, terminology, and the destruction of myths.??Keynes needed to create new economic terms, a general theory of violence may need new terminology that better captures our current dilemma. Myths about how the economy worked were something Keynes had to dispel before establishing a new way of looking at the economic world. During Keynes’ time, the myths he fought were the myths of the classical economists, whose beliefs still resonate with many today.??High among those myths was the invisible hand.??A second myth was that the economy would “self-correct”.??Classical economists beginning with Adam Smith argued that markets and individual economic actors seeking their own benefit – i.e. profits – created value for everyone else.??A corollary of the benefits of the invisible hand is the claimed ubiquity of negative unintended consequences when government interferes with the freedom of market actors.?

There are plenty of myths associated with the causes of public and private violence. One of the most pervasive myths is that more guns will result in less violence. This includes tropes like “the good guy with a gun myth”; the “government wants to take our guns to enslave us myth”; “the founding fathers wanted an unregulated armed militia myth”;??or the “we are genetically predisposed to be violent” myth.??The later myth about humans being predisposed to violence might like most myths have some bits of truth, but the data comparing peaceful Costa Rica to its violent neighbors El Salvador and Honduras prove genetics are not determinative.??Myths provide comfort to the disillusioned, but make no sense.??

A general theory of violence must include both public violence which is violence by the state and private violence which is violence among private citizens.??

Public violence would also include what we generally call wars between nation states.??The United States waged war in Iraq and Afghanistan for over two decades.??But before that there was the Gulf War, and before that the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the two World Wars, the Spanish American War and of course the Civil War.??This does not include our incursions in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Honduras, China, Grenada, Panama and other places where we sent the Marines, Navy, Air Force and Army to control resources that did not belong to us and people who were not U.S. citizens. War has a way of metastasizing into problems in the society of even the victors.?

Also public violence comes as a by-product of policing citizens.??“To serve and protect” is how most police departments across the country define their mission.??Unfortunately, not all citizens feel served or protected and indeed many of those citizens in low-income and minority communities feel the police are there to protect higher income citizens from their lower-income neighbors.??So called “sundown” towns existed in Connecticut, where Blacks, Jews, and others were not welcomed as homeowners or by the police who “protected them.??These practices were common in northern as well as southern states. More recently, the deaths of George Floyd and others at the hands of police led to the international Black Lives Matter movement.??

Private violence between citizens is also rampant in the United States with the U.S. ranked the 16th?most violent country among the world’s most populous 25 countries.??The most violent countries in the world are El Salvador, Honduras, and Venezuela. Is it any wonder why citizens from these countries are lining up at our southern border desperately trying to enter, and why so many U.S. citizens fear their arrival. A general theory would seek to understand why some countries are more violent than others driving their citizens to leave.

A general theory of violence must look at access to guns, economic inequality and poverty, discrimination of all kinds, mental health, international forces, the role of government in the promotion of domestic and international violence, notions of citizenship, education and ignorance, climate change, political stability, economic opportunity, cultural influences, and belief systems.?

There are also feedbacks between public violence and private violence as well as domestic violence and international violence. For example, some of our most recent mass shootings have been conducted by men who were trained by the military to kill, only to have those men come home and use those “skills” on innocent fellow citizens.?

Keynes knew and modern economists know that complex systems do not lend themselves to simple solutions.??A general theory of violence is no different from the complexities of a general theory of macroeconomics. Like all scientific endeavors, we start with observation. We then create testable hypotheses of these complex relationships.??Data is then brought to bear to test these hypotheses.??Some will be rejected and others supported.??Keynes’ work did not eliminate the business cycle, but he did give us a framework for understanding our economic reality so that depressions were never as deep or as long as compared to the business cycles before the General Theory.

The purpose of a general theory of violence is not simply conversational. We must take seriously this inquiry if we are to live in a society where one day the fear of random violent death becomes a thing of the past or at least as rare as it once was.