There's at least one other very reasonable explanation... and its not associated with the "weak state" argument of the herding culture of honor silliness. I TA'd in a Sociology of Violence, War and Peace class in grad school and the most memorable aspect of the class was the strong, cross-national statistical correlation between death penalty states/countries and murder rates... if the government is violent the people tend to be too...
Now, sure, there may be correlation/causation issues here, too, but jeez, we're really expected to accept that there is a 150 year culturally causal relationship between contemporary murder rates and a precapitalist herding culture, before emigration, the proxy for which is hog and sheep populations in the early 19th C? Anybody heard of herding pigs or is that just the disaggregated census category (from the early 19th C!)? Anybody know of open, extensive terrain like the highlands in the South? Anyone know of another cultural group that's reliably treated as effectively homogeneous and stable from 1860 to 2010?
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 12:59 AM, Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:
> Several days ago, I actually jumped through
> all the gatekeeperish hoops and got a copy of
> the Grosjean paper. Being a kindly soul, and wishing
> to spare others the agita I encountered, I've made
> it available here, for what it's worth:
>
> http://smithbowen.net/grosjean.pdf
>
> A silly exercise, if you ask me -- the sort
> of thing that brings the "social sciences"
> into deserved ill-repute. But your mileage
> may vary.
>
> --
>
> Michael Smith
>
>