Deathwatching

Standing at the checkout line in Safeway last night I found a misplaced Newsweek propped up among the Enquirer and diet mags. On the cover a photo of a grizzled Paul Krugman and the statement that he was in loyal dissent.

I flicked through some of the article while waiting but didn’t buy it which I am now rather regretting. This morning I checked out his blog (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/). He makes economics look fun and sensible, and I keep wondering whether a clearer understanding of these principles would help me understand international affairs better with relation to crimes against humanity too.

Last year, I learned a great deal reading a book (at work so I can’t reference it today) about the convergence of civil unrest over natural resources and civil war. At ACJS this year I heard an interesting theory of crimes against humanity and genocide which included intra-social economic threat. Talking with a colleague last week, he proposed the co-incidence of violent crime with large groups of unemployed young men.

In this early phase of my studies of these crimes I have been preoccupied with internal conditions for genocide: psychological conditions in perpetrators - falling into the trap of seeing system-based crimes as arising from individual pathology. While I do not doubt that we must seek an integrated theory of crimes against humanity which includes an individual component, economic theories may also provide a partial explanation for their eruption. For example, might there be an economic model which suggests that when conditions become bad enough there is an explosion of innovation? Sometimes that innovation is peaceful and sometimes violent. I am sure I have read that wars seem to happen when economic conditions at home are severe. After all I generally felt that England’s war with Argentina over the Falklands was curiously well timed given both Thatcher and Galtieri’s respective problems economically at home.

I have also heard that war stimulates economies and certainly it seems that Dick Cheney and Haliburton have done OK (and for all I know are still doing OK out of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan). In the past I have not followed these stories, but I am beginning to wonder more about how an understanding of these issues would deepen my theory of crimes against humanity.

I think Krugman could help.