A Response to Pridemore and Rogers

Please allow me to have a quick whine. If any other researchers involved in the UR project think I’m abusing my privileged position here, please submit a blog any time you think you have been misrepresented in any type of publication.

Unfortunately, we do tend to encounter ‘straw targets’ in mainstream academic journals. Here, Pridemore and Rogers – link below- in an article to be published in the journal ‘Criminology’, take quotes from a 2009 article ‘A Tale of Two Capitalisms’, written by myself and Craig McLean, out of context. According to Pridemore and Rogers, we had claimed that ‘markets’ are some sort of causal context for high homicide rates. Here are the quotes. “In sum, according to Hall and McLean (2009), markets are “socially toxic” (p. 329), and a neo-liberal market orientation (at least as practiced by the United States and similar nations) is “the quintessential politico-economic generator of social division, anomie, narcissism and brutalizing competitive individualism” (p. 334) that “invariably generate[s] the basic socio-cultural conditions that tend to increase homicide rates” (p. 333).”

Utter nonsense. We actually wrote that neoliberalism – we were referring to the ‘greed is good’ culture of the 1980s in the context of deindustrialisation and job loss in the US and the UK – is “the quintessential politico-economic generator of social division, anomie, narcissism and brutalizing competitive individualism”. We also suggested that minimally regulated forms of neoliberal capitalism “invariably generate the basic socio-cultural conditions that tend to increase homicide rates”. Not ‘markets’ in general. All modern societies have markets of one type or another – even North Korea. The main differences revolve around the extent to which they dominate and monopolise human activities.

Furthermore, as the title of our 2009 article should suggest, it wasn’t a comparative analysis of multiple nations aross the globe. What we said is that compared to periods characterised by a minimally regulated market economy in the US, the more regulated social market economies of the US under FDR and historically ongoing in Europe had proven more effective at reducing homicide without resorting to mass surveillance and incarceration, especially after the economic crash of 1929. We also pointed out that during deindustrialisation after 1979 the regulatory social market legacy of Europe coped better than the US and maintained lower homicide rates, while during the rapid transition to neoliberalism in Russia after 1992 – “more shock than therapy” – homicide rates increased.

Nowhere in our article did we claim that ‘markets’ – whatever that might mean – are a direct and invariable cause of high homicide rates. How does stuff like this get past reviewers?

@ASCRM41https://assets.pubpub.org/ih43ssi9/Market%20Orientation%20and%20National%20Homicide%20Rates-71755197799367.pdf