Just time for a couple items tonight.
- How alarming statistics about shoplifting (especially by brazen gangs) aren’t actually true;
- How the ideal of the “free market” unhobbled by regulations is simplistic.
Here’s an example where it turns out you can’t trust the data after all. When the people providing it have a motive to be biased.
NY Times, Eduardo Medina, 8 Dec 2023: Retail Group Retracts Startling Claim About ‘Organized’ Shoplifting, subtitled “The National Retail Federation had said that nearly half of the industry’s $94.5 billion in missing merchandise in 2021 was the result of organized theft. It was likely closer to 5 percent, experts say.”
Why would the National Retail Federation exaggerate shop-lifting numbers?
The retraction comes as retail chains like Target continue to claim that they are the victims of large shoplifting operations that have cut into profits, forcing them to close stores or inconvenience customers by locking products away.
The claims have been fueled by widely shared videos of a few instances of brazen shoplifters, including images of masked groups smashing windows and grabbing high-end purses and cellphones. But the data show this impression of rampant criminality was a mirage.
Again: “widely shared videos” are like anecdotes; one or two or even a few of them don’t prove anything. On any given day you can find some example of brazen crime; and certain news organizations, nominally honest or not, tend to run such stories because they attract viewers. Especially when there’s video. (The local TV news stations are the worst; sometimes that’s all they show, for half an hour.)
Alec Karakatsanis, a civil rights lawyer who has studied and critiqued how the media has covered organized retail crime, said that the retraction underscored how some news organizations, which have extensively covered the issue of shoplifting, were “used as a tool by certain vested interests to gin up a lot of fear about this issue when, in fact, it was pretty clear all along that the facts didn’t add up.”
Issues like this stir up conservatives, of course, who are easily alarmed.
…former President Donald J. Trump called for violence, telling Republican activists in California this year that the police should shoot shoplifters as they are leaving a store.
But again, was this a simple misinterpretation of data, or did someone have a motive for overestimating the problem? The article doesn’t come to a firm conclusion. But there are a couple clues.
At issue is “total annual shrink” — the industry term for the value of merchandise that disappears from stores without being paid for, through theft, damage and inventory tracking mistakes.
And:
…the exaggerated narrative of widespread shoplifting was weaponized by the retail industry as it lobbied Congress to pass bills that would regulate online retailers, which they claim is where much of the stolen product ends up.
So the retail industry wants to crack down on online retailers, and so have a motivation to exaggerate shoplifting losses; and perhaps they want to disguise losses they’ve incurred for other reasons, by blaming them on shoplifting.
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Things are seldom as simplistic as conservatives assume. Here is an item for those who want government regulations to get out of the way of the pure “free market.”
Robert Reich, 8 Dec 2023: The Myth of the Market (Why American capitalism is so rotten, Part 3), subtitled “The so-called ‘free market’ is a dangerous illusion”
The point is in the subtitle.
FEW IDEAS have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which government “intrudes.”
In this view, your pay simply reflects what you’re worth in the market. If you aren’t paid enough to live on, the market has decided you’re not worth enough. If others rake in billions, the market has decided they must be worth it.
If millions of people are unemployed or have no idea what they’ll earn next week, that’s also the outcome of market forces.
If corporations decide to lay off their workers and shift jobs overseas, or use computers and software to do what their workers did, that’s also just the market doing its thing.
According to this view, whatever we might do to reduce inequality or economic insecurity runs the risk of distorting the market and causing it to be less efficient.
Although the government may need to intervene in the market on occasion — to prevent, say, pollution or unsafe workplaces, or provide public goods such as highways or basic research — these are thought to be exceptions to the general rule that the market knows best.
On the contrary, says Reich.
BUT THE PREVAILING VIEW, as well as the debate it has spawned, is utterly false.
There can be no “free market” without government. The “free market” does not exist in the wilds beyond the reach of civilization.
Competition in the real wild is a contest for survival in which the largest and strongest typically win. As the 17th-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it in his book Leviathan (chapter 13),
“[in nature] there is continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Civilization, by contrast, is defined by rules.
Rules create markets, and governments generate the rules.
A market — any market — requires that government make and enforce the rules of the game. In most modern democracies, such rules emanate from legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts.
Government doesn’t “intrude” on the “free market.” It creates the market.
And he goes on to explain this. A key quote:
Those who argue for “less government” are really arguing for a different government — often one that favors them or their patrons.
So-called “deregulation” of the financial sector in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, could more appropriately be described as “re-regulation.” It did not mean less government. It meant a different set of rules.
Until the financial crisis of 2008, when the government changed the rules yet again. To save the banks, while “caus[ing] millions of people to lose their homes.”
Not quite the end, but Reich summarizes thus:
The so-called “free market” is a myth that prevents us from examining these rule changes and asking whom they serve. The myth is therefore highly useful to those who do not want such an examination and who don’t want the public to understand how power is exercised and by whom.
And that’s all I have time for this evening. Others are demanding my time, annoyingly.
