On Jul 19, 2010, at 3:50 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> I've now read it, and not surprisingly given my previous comment I'm with
> Michael, this is silly. An "economic" foundation 150 or more years ago -
> not reinforced by economics since that time - for a culture of
> honor/violence that generates higher murder rates (but not other crimes and
> murder rates which are a proxy for defending one's family/personal honor) in
> the present.
>
> 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...
Two things. Did your copy of the paper not contain section 6, on cultural transmission mechanisms? And did you notice how narrowly she defined the kind of violence under study? Not just murder, but a certain kind of murder?
So far, most of the objections I've read to this paper come down to, "I just don't want to believe it, nyah-nyah."
Doug