The New York Times ran an interesting op-ed today highlighting the value of using formal and sophisticated statistical models to examine conflict. In “Doing the Math on the Mexican War,” Viridiana Rios, PhD Student in Government at Harvard, describes her own work on the Mexican drug war and how it brought her to a dangerous border town.
In this violent world, with the man in the blue Chevy whispering at me behind the window, math is my shield. Speaking up about drugs is in these parts a dangerous game. But not if you speak in the language of sigma and conditional expectations. Math protects me from the immediacy of the violence, and it protects me from them.
The beauty of my method lies in its simplicity. With mathematics I’m able to codify and simplify reality to make it manageable and, more important, malleable. I represent each possible individual as an equation in which each term symbolizes tastes, goals, profession and abilities. All people get portrayed: Policemen, politicians, citizens and drug cartels start living in this mathematical world as planes and hyperplanes and, as in real life, they interact and affect one another, sometimes colluding, sometimes colliding, sometimes neither.
The op-ed is very light on details about Rios’ work, but is an excellent bit of publicity for the type of research I write about here at ZIA. It also brought Rios herself to my attention, whose research is interesting. For those who would like further reading, I suggest, “To be or not be a drug trafficker. Modeling criminal occupational choices,” which the above article alludes to.
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Drew,
I agree I think its interesting research. Furthermore, her summary of the violence in Mexican cartels is one of the most comprehensive and precise explanations of the recent violence. However, I have two issues with her paper. A key assumption of her model is that:
“Assume that during P_pri there were no entry costs for legal activities but illegal activities remained closed to the general population. Only those
who belonged to traditional cartel families could have t∗i > 0″ (p.10).
She then finds that ” P_pan are more violent and more entrepreneurial than those that were criminals in P_pri ” (p.16). It think this is more an artifact of her assumption than her model doing any real work. Moreover, the interesting thing is why the market was more closed under the PRI and she assumes that away.
Second, “By increasing the difficulty of the drug business, the Mexican government is fostering that drug traffickers increase their demand for labor qualifications that are not valuable in the legal markets (i.e. tastes for violence). Indeed, as the drug business becomes less similar to the legal markets, it “compete” less with it. Talent sorts more adequately, leading those whose talents are valuable for the legal industries to remain there” (p. 18-19).
I can see her point that this may be a positive effect of the drug war. However, a negative effect, and the point I thought of her model, was that more violent individuals also gravitated to the drug cartels. I think if you asked people in Mexico whether the positive effect that the drug war has helped people better match skills in the labor market is a bigger gain than the increase in violence perpetrated by the drug cartels you would get a blank stare. Nevertheless, a very interesting line of research.
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Hola, Drew
Muy interesante. Puedo decir que el caso colombiano es similar al descrito en el trabajo de Ríos, incluyendo claro está, otros actores como los paramilitares y grupos guerrilleros. El caso de los paramilitares es el más parecido en la escalada de violencia y crueldad que se describe; especialmente en el cambio de los integrante que conforman sus filas. De hecho, es el punto que me resultó más interesante: de hecho puede argumentarse que la escalada de violencia interna es el más interesante: ya no se trata de lealtades, sino de una “carrera administrativa” en la que se deben demostrar “talentos y aptitudes” hacia la violencia. “Sí, te respeto mientras tomes las decisiones; pero al menor descuido caerás”.
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