Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't (23 page)

Given that there are over 90 million adults in the United States who own at least one gun, the overwhelming majority of gun owners must have been extremely careful, seeing as these figures were recorded before gunlocks were made mandatory.
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Even this relatively small number of tragic deaths is enough to convince many people that gunlocks are a good idea. If gunlocks can keep kids from accidentally killing themselves, their siblings, or their friends, then why not make them mandatory? But this logic is faulty, as the typical person who accidentally shoots and kills a child is not himself a child at all, but rather an adult male in his 20s.
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In fact, very few children under age ten even have the strength to pull back the slide on a
semi-automatic pistol. Most accidental shooters have a history of alcoholism and a criminal record.
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They are also disproportionately involved in car crashes and are much more likely to have had their driver’s license suspended or revoked. Even if gunlocks can stop children from using guns, they are simply not designed to stop adult males from firing their own weapons. Thus, it is hardly surprising that gunlocks show no significant impact on accidental gun deaths.

Gunlock laws, along with safe-storage regulations, are sometimes touted as a means to prevent suicides, but the great majority of academic studies have found this benefit to be small or non-existent.
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There are a lot of ways to commit suicide, and people intent on doing so tend to find a way, with or without a gun. Economist John Whitley and I examined juvenile accidental gun deaths and suicides in all fifty states. We found that safe-storage laws had no impact on either type of death.
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The laws were primarily followed by the kind of law-abiding families among whom hardly any accidental deaths were occurring. The laws did have an effect, however, in hindering the ability of these families to defend themselves against intruders. The states that adopted safe-storage laws from 1977 to 1998 faced over three hundred more murders and 4,000 more rapes per year. Burglaries also increased dramatically.
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Laws that force people to lock up their guns or discourage them from owning guns in the first place result in more deaths. Sometimes even the best-intentioned laws have unintended consequences that end up costing lives.

 

The United States Sentencing Commission sought to revamp the criminal penalties for corporations in the early 1990s. As mentioned earlier, one problem it addressed was an inconsistency in assessing penalties for environmental crimes. But there is another aspect of the problem. Traditionally, those who committed major environmental crimes—such
as a massive oil spill from a tanker running aground—had to pay fines equivalent to the amount of the damages. In contrast, for minor environmental crimes—for example, dumping a barrelful of waste off the side of a ship—the fines were many times greater than the damage estimates. The commission reversed this relationship so that penalties for the more serious crimes became many times bigger than the damages.

While the new regulations seem logical, there was a sound reason for the earlier policy. A major oil spill is something that is nearly impossible to hide—we will know with near-certainty that the crime occurred and which ship was responsible. But it is much more difficult to identify the culprit—or even to detect the crime—for a smaller transgression like dumping just a barrelful of waste off the side of a boat. That’s why the Sentencing Commission’s policy change was actually counter-productive; if we want to create disincentives to environmental crime, we need to ensure that small-time offenders face relatively harsher penalties which act to offset the high probability that they’ll get away with their crime.

Free markets and political freedom usually go hand in hand. While it’s possible for an authoritarian government to preside over a free economy, such instances are very rare.
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Regimes that don’t trust their people enough to allow democratic elections usually like to keep close control over their subjects’ economic activities and their access to information.

With so much at stake, it’s worthwhile to subject our own electoral process and its history to some economic analysis. This kind of study leads to numerous unusual conclusions. First, we find that the growth of government, commonly attributed to President Roosevelt’s New Deal, actually began earlier and was largely due to the enfranchisement of a single group of citizens. Second, measures meant to improve the voting system, such as the secret ballot, had some rather unintended consequences, particularly a large drop in the voting rate. Third, we can evaluate different types of fraud accusations in recent elections, distinguishing the legitimate problems from the partisan hype. And finally, we uncover some hidden agendas in the media and
in public schools—the two mediums through which most people receive their information and form their world views.

Economists have long pondered why the government started growing precisely when it did. The U.S. federal government, aside from periods of wartime, consumed about 2 to 3 percent of GDP up until World War I. That was the first American war after which government spending did not return to pre-war levels. Then, in the 1920s, non-military federal spending began steadily climbing. President Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s—often viewed as the genesis of big government—really just continued an earlier trend. What changed before Roosevelt came to power that explains the growth of government? The answer is women’s suffrage.

For decades, polls have shown that women as a group vote differently than men do. In presidential elections from 1980 to 2004, the “gender gap”—the difference between the way men and women vote—was in the double digits in six of the seven contests, reaching its peak of 22 percentage points in 2000.
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This disparity—in which a higher percentage of women consistently vote Democratic—is very important politically. Excluding the women’s vote, Republicans would have swept every presidential race but one between 1968 and 2004.
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Gender gaps exist on various issues. Perhaps the most significant one is the push for smaller government and lower taxes, which is a much higher priority for men than it is for women. This is seen in divergent attitudes held by men and women on many separate issues. Women were much more opposed to the 1996 federal welfare reforms, which mandated time limits for receiving welfare and imposed some work requirements on welfare recipients. Women are also more supportive of Medicare, Social Security, and education expenditures.
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Studies show that women are generally more risk averse than are men. Consequently, they are more supportive of government programs to
insure against certain risks in life. Women’s average incomes are also slightly lower and less likely to vary over time, which gives single women an incentive to prefer more progressive income taxes. Married women, however, bear a greater share of taxes through their husband’s relatively higher income. Not surprisingly, married women are less supportive of higher taxes than are other women.
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But marriage also provides an economic basis for men and women to prefer different policies. Because women generally shoulder most of the child rearing responsibilities, married men are more likely to acquire marketable skills that help them earn money outside the household. If a man gets divorced, he still retains these skills. But if a woman gets divorced, she is unable to recoup her investment in running the household. Hence, single women who believe they will eventually get married, as well as married women who most fear divorce, look to the government for a form of protection against the risk of divorce—that is, a more progressive tax system and other government transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor. The more certain a woman is that she doesn’t risk divorce, the more likely she is to oppose such transfers. This makes perfect sense—although every society has its altruists, most people don’t want to share their household income with the government if they don’t expect to benefit much from it.

So we see that certain kinds of women tend to support bigger government. Has it always been this way? Can women’s suffrage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century thus help to explain the growth of government?

A good way to analyze the direct effect of women’s suffrage on the growth of government is to study how each of the forty-eight state governments expanded after women obtained the right to vote. Women’s suffrage was first granted in western states with relatively few women—Wyoming (1869), Utah (1870), Colorado (1893), and Idaho (1896).
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It was then extended to eight states between 1910 and 1914, and another seventeen states between 1917 and 1919. Thus, women
could vote in twenty-nine states before women’s suffrage was achieved nationwide in 1920 with the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

If women’s suffrage increased government, our analysis should show a few definite indicators. First, women’s suffrage would have had a bigger impact on government spending and taxes in states with a greater percentage of women. And secondly, the size of government in western states should have steadily expanded as women comprised an increasing share of each state’s voting populations.

Women’s suffrage dramatically increased total voting turnout, as demonstrated in
Figure 1
. Voting participation as a percentage of the adult population
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immediately rose from 25 to 37 percent after achieving suffrage, with a slower, continuing rise to 43 percent over the subsequent decade.
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Figure 2
graphs the relationship between the granting of women’s suffrage and per capita state government expenditures and revenue.
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This chart shows that state governments grew significantly immediately after women were enfranchised.
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State government spending had fallen for four of the five years before women began voting, reaching its lowest point just before the granting of suffrage. But within four years after women’s suffrage, state government expenditures had risen above the previous peak. Within eleven years, real per capita spending had more than doubled—an amazing increase in the size of state governments.
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Yet, as suggestive as these graphs are, we must still consider whether women’s suffrage itself caused the growth in government, or did the government expand due to some political or social change that accompanied women’s suffrage?

Fortunately, there was a unique aspect of women’s suffrage that allows us to answer this question: of the nineteen states that had not passed women’s suffrage before the approval of the Nineteenth Amendment, nine approved the amendment, while the other ten states had suffrage imposed on them. If some unknown factor caused
both a desire for larger government and women’s suffrage, then government should have only grown in states that voluntarily adopted suffrage. This, however, is not the case—after approving women’s suffrage, a similar growth in government was seen in both groups of states.
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Women’s suffrage helps to explain much of the federal government’s growth up to the 1960s. In the forty-five years after the adoption of suffrage, women’s voting rates gradually increased until finally matching the men’s rates. This delay by newly enfranchised groups in fully exercising the vote is not rare, as groups that are denied the vote generally pay less attention to politics than those who are enfranchised—after all, there is not much of an incentive to follow politics if one is unable to participate.
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As a result, it often takes decades for a newly enfranchised group to cultivate an interest in politics and a habit of voting that matches the involvement of groups with a longer voting history. The significance of this gradual increase in the women’s vote between the 1920s and the 1960s is that the size of state and federal governments expanded along with it as women became an increasingly important part of the electorate.
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