The Globalization of Crime

"The Question" in Detective Comics #859 by Greg Rucka and Cully Hamner

Renee Montoya, aka The Question, is on a mission to root out a network of human traffickers coming through Gotham City. The problem, as she's starting to see, is that the network is much more complicated than she expected. In fact, the trafficking operations seems to take place all over the world and involve many different agents.

Many refer to this phenomenon as "The Globalization of Crime." Globalization, basically the process by which national economies become integrated into a global economy through various mechanisms--trade, foreign direct investment, spread of technology, etc.--brings about several benefits. Supporters of free trade, for instance, argue that globalization heralds economic prosperity, especially for developing nations. Such economies would realize the benefits of trade, the free and unfettered flow of information, and might even see improvements in civil liberties.

Others argue, however, that the minimization of trade restrictions actually brings about other problems. For example, it might make the transportation of illicit goods across national borders that much easier. According to the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, the production and spread of synthetic drugs has been rising rapidly for years and, as of October 2009, income from the drug trade has hit $320 billion.

Here is one author talking about the connection to globalization:

International organized crime has globalized its activities for the same reasons as legitimate multinational corporations. Just as multinational corporations establish branches around the world to take advantage of attractive labor or raw material markets, so do illicit businesses. Furthermore, international businesses, both legitimate and illicit, also establish facilities worldwide for production, marketing, and distribution needs. Illicit enterprises are able to expand geographically to take advantage of these new economic circumstances thanks to the communications and international transportation revolution.

[...]

Globalization is coupled with an ideology of free markets and free trade and a decline in state intervention. According to globalization advocates, reducing international regulations and barriers to trade and investment will increase trade and development. But these very conditions that promote a globalized environment are crucial to the expansion of crime. Crime groups and terrorists have exploited the enormous decline in regulations, the lessened border controls, and the resultant greater freedom, to expand their activities across borders and to new regions of the world. These contacts have become more frequent, and the speed at which they occur has accelerated. Whereas the growth of legal trade is regulated by adherence to border control policies, customs officials, and bureaucratic systems, transnational crime groups freely exploit the loopholes of state-based legal systems to extend their reach.

The ease with which these criminals dodge regulations is actually even mentioned in the comic. See?


So what can be done about this? The article mentions that we need "greater international cooperation, more harmonized legislation and increased sharing of intelligence." The UN argues that we should focus on promoting health, justice and security across the world to mitigate the regional economic conditions that might foster drug and human trafficking.

This all sounds very complicated. Too bad the real world doesn't have a global network of bat-related crime fighters (or Liam Neeson)!

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The Value of Life

"The Question" in Detective Comics #857 by Greg Rucka and Cully Hamner (2009)

Hmm...I don't know about that, Tot. I think people who sell human lives think of them as a pretty damn expensive commodity. After all, they know just high highly valued human lives are and are cognizant that certain types of people value them so highly that they'd be willing and able to pay very large sums for them. It's a money maker.

Economists value lives too, but in a different way. Actually, they have done considerable work on this. Of course, the economic "value of life" is a statistical in nature and should not be confused with value in the sense that "life if priceless." Rather, "value of statistical life" estimates see what people would be willing to pay or sacrifice to reduce the probability of death. The thing is that most of us (unless you were someone like, say, The Joker) would be willing to give up all of our wealth to avoid a 100% probability of death. Yet, when it comes to smaller probabilities, individuals make trade-offs between monetary wealth and safety every day. People pay for health insurance, get vaccines, buy alarms for their houses, etc. Similarly, people accept small risks in order to not expend anything. When someone jaywalks, for instance, that person is subject to a tiny increase in the probability of death for the payoff of saving a few seconds of time. These implicit trade-offs are what make up the value of a statistical life.

Economists, policymakers, federal agencies and others use such estimates to evaluate the potential benefits of public policy programs, particularly those involving health, environment, workplace safety and transportation regulations. There are numerous studies and methodologies to arrive at these estimates. Some use surveys that flat out ask what individuals would be willing to pay to diminish the probability of death. Others look at data on individual expenditures and purchases to construct variables that portray willingness to pay (i.e. pay for safety) or willingness to accept (i.e. get paid for a risk). For instance, this paper looks at the trade-off between worker fatality risks and wages using BLS data on worker deaths by occupation and industry. It estimated a value of $4.7 million for the full sample used, $7.0 million for blue collar males, and $8.5 million for blue collar females.

I haven't kept up with the research, but most estimates I have seen tend to hover around $7-$8 million or so. In June 2008, the EPA had estimated the value of a statistical life to be $6.9 million (about $1 million less than five years ago), which prompted the media to have a field day about the devaluation of human life.

Here's an NBER paper about general problems and uses of value of life estimates.

What do you suppose the human traffickers that Renee Montoya is hunting charge for lives they sell? I know that this is a different value than the one we just discussed, but do you think it's more than $7 million?

Edit: Apparently it's much less, according to a comment. The lesson here is that the economics in action movies are generally unreliable.

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