Economics appears to be a neutral tool, but it often subtly embeds values that we are better off surfacing and discussing. In a recent post henceforth to be known as “Economics Will Be Our Runiation I,” I pointed out how, by preferring to measure the movement of dollars, orthodox economics treats leisure as a bad thing and laments advances in technology-based entertainments.
This installment of EWBOR focuses on an interesting and insightful article recently published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, “An Economic Understanding of Search and Seizure Law.” In it, George Washington University Law School professor Orin Kerr shows that the Fourth Amendment helps increase the efficiency of law enforcement by accounting for external costs of investigations. Here is his model:
The net benefit of any particular investigative step can be described as P*V – Ci – Ce, where P represents the increase in probability that the crime will be solved and successfully prosecuted, V represents the net value of a successful prosecution resulting from deterrence and incapacitation, Ci represents the internal costs of the investigative step, and Ce represents its external costs.
Ci means things like the cost of training and equipping police officers and paying their salaries, as well as their own use of their time. Ce, external costs, “include privacy harms and property losses that result from an investigation that is imposed on a suspect. They also include the loss of autonomy and freedom imposed directly on the subject of the investigation (who may be guilty or innocent) as well as his family or associates.” Kerr rightly includes in Ce more diffuse burdens such as community hostility to law enforcement.
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