Beyond that though, we should be asking whether heroes themselves are part of the problem? This is a theme that arises regularly in comic stories. At some point in time, most heroes have had to face a resentful civilian who accuses them of attracting the criminal element to a city. Desperate cries of “if it wasn’t for you…” are normal occurrences and typically lead the hero down a hole of critical self-examination. That makes for a good storyline, but from an economic perspective we need to dig a little deeper. Is there some justification to this claim, and if so, what is it based on? Does the preconceived notion that a hero will let the justice system run its course, meaning a villain ends up in a jail cell, however temporarily, rather than in an electric chair, alter the incentive structure of villains? Heroes are often extreme on this point. In one story, Batman goes so far as to provide evidence of Joker’s innocence in a series of crimes, despite Joker’s history of getting away with so many other crimes (Dixon and Nolan, 1996). Does a hero’s adherence to the rule of law therefore embolden the criminal element? Interestingly, there is a parallel between this question and a thread of economic theory that focuses on safety.
Another facet driving the criminal element is related to games (but not game theory). In some contests there are payoffs for all the participants, in others only the winner gets a payday. For example, in politics, business, and professional golf there is no real prize for second place.1 An election victor, the person who becomes CEO, and the champion of a golf match win huge monetary or fame prizes. The second-place contestant receives what amounts to a parting gift for their troubles. This is germane to our analysis of comics because people, including lawbreakers, are expected to behave differently when they know there is a huge payday for winning and very little for coming in second.
So, let’s take a path less traveled and explore what motivates villains. We all have a favorite, from the looney 1960s Batman television show rogues, to the mallet-wielding Harley Quinn, to the god of mischief Loki, to the multi-layered Magneto. The question on the minds of many readers is: Why do the villains try so hard when they almost always lose? What keeps them coming back for one beating after another is more than just entertainment; it is partially about economics.
Villain Origins: Tell Me About Your Mother
In the comics, the early villains were often relatively normal people—except for the extraterrestrial warlords—possessing interesting gadgets and gimmicks but without any real superpowers. The Penguin, Toyman, and Catwoman are all familiar Batman villains who began as petty thieves or simple burglars.
Other evildoers are intellectuals with visions of grandeur. Lex Luthor is a scientific genius who lost his hair trying to discover a cure for Kryptonite poisoning (more on this later in the chapter).2 The Riddler wanted everyone to know how smart he was so he left clues to befuddle the Caped Crusader. The Green Goblin is another magnificent but troubled scientist, Norman Osborne, who lost his sanity but gained super strength after injecting himself with an experimental serum.3 Dr Ock, Otto Octavious, is a gifted researcher who unfortunately went a step too far and ended up melding metallic legs to himself. Mr Sinister was yet another mastermind who mutated himself through genetic engineering, which has potentially granted him immortality (the word is still out on this). Ozymandias is believed to be the most brilliant man on the planet and had the great fortune of not transforming himself into a bizarre creature. Other supervillains are alien in origin—Brainiac, Darkseid, Doomsday, Galactus, Sinestro, Thanos, and Venom all fit the bill here—while some are mutants, such as Apocalypse, Magneto, and Mystique.
Regardless of their derivation, most villains have backstories as well. They typically come from homes with abusive parents, or they have lost a parent due to a tragic event. Essentially, their home lives were disasters. The death of a spouse or significant other is also a common character device. Many criminals are pulled into the underworld because of a lack of positive role models. Some, like Magneto, are driven to the dark side after viewing a horrific event. Eric Lehnsherr’s family was killed in a concentration camp. He escaped by hiding under the dead bodies of other prisoners. As Magneto, he seeks to defend mutants by any and all means from the actions of normal people wishing to do them harm. Criminals such as Catwoman are just doing what comes naturally after spending their lives on the streets. Catwoman’s burglaries are relatively minor compared to those of more vicious members of the crime community.
Some villains are in it for revenge. Others are megalomaniacs. Still others are just deranged. When it comes to committing crimes or doing bad things, it seems there is no shortage of motivations and no shortage of players on the big stage. Regardless of what inspires these scoundrels, they keep breaking out of jail and trying again, and again, and again to pull one over on the good guys. Rarely, however, does crime pay.
Crime Is Terribly Revealing
The real question for those contemplating committing a crime, as laid out by Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker (1968), is what motivates such action? Becker’s famous paper about the economics of crime suggests that those who engage in malfeasance may not be as irrational as we believe. Criminals weigh the costs and benefits of their actions by balancing the payoffs from wrongdoing against the probability of being caught, and the punishment for their actions if they are apprehended. The implication of Becker’s research is that economic analysis applies to the choices made by all types of people, be they criminal or hero.
When it comes to incarcerating the bad guys, choices must be made. Imposing punishments is costly, not just for the lawbreaker but for society as well. Conducting public trials and transferring prisoners like Magneto, the Green Goblin, or Gorilla Grod would be a nightmare. Dr Doom, from the country of Latveria, might not agree to extradition, and forget trying one of the alien villains like Sinestro or General Zod in a court of law. Some bad guys can’t really be killed, either. Nitro can blow himself up and reform, Vandal Savage has lived for millennia and there are gods who go on like a Celine Dion song. Trying to find the least costly way of imposing those penalties is necessary for the efficient use of society’s resources. If sentences are not properly deterring behavior, in other words if punishments are too light or the probability of being apprehended is too low, then we should expect more people to engage in criminal activity, or we should at least expect criminals to be more brazen.
Incentives, then, should have some impact on an individual who is riding the fence about committing an act of lawlessness, that is if they are behaving rationally. For instance, Machin and Meghir (2004) find that low-wage workers, not necessarily those unemployed, are more prone to committing crimes primarily because they have less to lose if caught. The rate of return to criminal activity is higher for those in low-wage circumstances. So, in a city where there are a lot of minimum-wage jobs we should see more crime. As we’ve noted before, incentives drive behavior. However, there are different kinds of incentives.
Ignoring the criminally insane for now, in the case of many non-comic-related bad guys, felonious behavior can be thought of as a natural response to two types of incentives which were discussed in Chapter 1: positive and negative. If you recall, positive incentives are the rewards you receive for engaging in certain kinds of activities. These are the pats on the back for doing a good job, the paycheck you earn from going to work, the high you get from smoking dope. However, there are desultory effects from certain kinds of behaviors as well. Negative incentives are the slaps on the wrist for doing something naughty: Tickets for speeding, a failing grade for not submitting the research paper on The Grapes of Wrath, jail time for possession of that dope. Positive incentives are there to get you to behave in certain ways, while negative incentives are in place to try to get you not to do something. In the case of criminal behavior, the punishments for being found guilty of a crime are intended to deter misconduct. However, if those incentives are not credible then they will fail to accomplish their goal. Thus, if prison time isn’t a burden because supervillains can easily esca
pe, malefactors will continue to commit crimes.
As if revolving door prisons weren’t enough to encourage criminal behavior, the punishments themselves are so relatively soft that they fail to deter anyone. It is almost a running joke. The extent of the punishment is often a significant deterrent to would-be criminals. Ehrlich (1996) reviews the economics literature (which is a good thing because reading through economics research papers can be like doing time in Iron Heights) and finds that, at the very least, punishments, and particularly capital punishments, have the effect of discouraging murder. The presumption is that you will think twice about committing murder if there is an extremely stiff penalty attached; however, the consequences of engaging in misconduct in hero comics must not have much cachet, given the number of recurring felonious personalities. A stay at Ryker’s Island is a room and three-square meals for some criminals. When the cell gets a little cramped, it’s time to hit the road.
With the rap sheets of some of the regulars going back to the 1940s, and given the heinousness of some of their crimes, it is a bit strange that stronger medicine has not been administered. The only instance of a villain having been condemned to death by the justice system occurred in Captain Marvel #46 (Binder and Beck, 1945), where Mr Mind, a deranged worm (he was literally a worm) accused of killing over 100,000 people, is executed by electrocution.
In cities like Gotham where crime is running amok, the pervasiveness of criminal activity might inhibit the judicial system from levying the proper penalties. Research by Bar-Gill and Harel (2001) suggests that the rate of crime itself can affect the ability to properly deter the bad guys. In situations where lawlessness is out of control, prosecutions are not carried out effectively, punishments are dispensed without enough thought to deterring others, and the probability of being caught falls because law enforcement resources are stretched too thin. This is likely the case in Gotham, assuming the GCPD doesn’t increase its resources (not to mention half the police force is being paid off by crime bosses). This would also explain the efforts of criminal masterminds to break others out of jail.4 More chaos increases the chances that you’ll get away with the crime.
That being said, the presence of heroes could reasonably be expected to ameliorate the mayhem. If heroes are more capable than the police department then they should be able to increase the incidence of capture and reduce the rate of return to criminal activity.5 Curiously though, despite Batman’s best efforts, crime in Gotham only seems to fall in alternate realities where he exists as a vigilante nightmare, becoming judge, jury, and executioner. For instance, in Kingdom Come, Batman utilizes a paramilitary police force to rid the streets of crime (Waid and Ross, 2008). It’s chillingly dystopian but effective.
One final issue should be considered. Perhaps crime is a function of the existence of heroes themselves. In the case of the vigilante hero, the cops are often more interested in pursuing the vigilante than they are the villain. Batman, Daredevil, Green Arrow, and others combat criminals outside the bounds of the law. They break the rules to keep others safe. This activity crosses a line that good police officers find abhorrent, even when the aims of the vigilante are in line with the city’s finest. Crime-fighters distract the police, interfere with traditional methods of stopping the bad guys, and encourage copycats, crime fighters who are far less capable than the hero. The result is that the cops are trying to hunt down the hero and the villains are roaming free.
In the comic world, it seems as if the justice system has broken down. No matter how good the lawyers are, no matter how tightly the case is presented, no matter how incontrovertible the evidence, no matter how secure the facility, criminals escape. Interestingly, even prisons built by Superman fail to keep the nasties contained. Plastic Man initiates a breakout of the legions of imprisoned people Superman has rounded up in Injustice: Gods Among Us (Taylor et al., 2016). Similarly, the great supervillain prison to which Supes banishes all wrongdoers in Kingdom Come (Waid and Ross, 2008) isn’t enough to hold the concentrated villainy. Combine this with the faulty incentive structure that doesn’t work to deter crime, namely inadequate sentences and a non-credible commitment to incarcerations, and you have a recipe for continued illicit mischief. So, in part we can blame the continued activity of the criminal element on the system. In this case, we can fix part of the problem by focusing on the incentive structure that has been established.
Moral Hazard, Not Dukes of Hazzard
Consider, if you will, a world where every action is made as safe as possible. You can drive your car as fast as you want, Thelma and Louise style, towards the edge of the Grand Canyon.6 As you leave terra firma, the momentary weightlessness gives you a sense of flying. However, that blissful freedom is quickly replaced by an abject panic as gravity takes over and you begin to plunge into the abyss. But just before you meet your maker, your momentum is arrested. You hang, suspended in mid-air, your sense of relief mixing with a curiosity strong enough to kill a dozen cats. Ever so gently your car is lifted out of the canyon and returned to solid ground. You see a man in a cape give you a friendly wave, and without a word he rockets off into the sky, likely looking for other unfortunate souls to save. You sit there in stunned silence for a minute before a wicked grin forms on your lips. You back the car away from the cliff, turn it around, then gun the engine. Like a child being thrown in the air by their father, a voice in the back of your head screams “Again! Again!”
Moral hazard is kind of like that. If superheroes were around to protect us from doing stupid things, we might just engage in those stupid things more often. In fact, moral hazard is the result of excessive intervention in the graphic novel Superman: Red Son (Millar and Johnson, 2014). This alternate reality imagines how the world would have looked if Superman had landed in communist Russia instead of Kansas. Superman, unencumbered by privacy concerns, scans the country to prevent fatalities. This may sound good, and many people say that superheroes should be more involved in day-to-day activities to prevent random calamities, but Superman isn’t initially keen on the idea. In a discussion with Wonder Woman he notes that “nobody wears a seatbelt anymore. Ships have even stopped carrying life jackets. I don’t like the unhealthy new way that people are behaving” (p. 64). The reason people become more risk-loving in Superman’s Russia isn’t because they’re drinking too much vodka. It’s more as if they’ve won the insurance lottery. If superheroes are always going to prevent untimely accidents, why not take more risks? It is like having free insurance. Jumping out of a plane without a parachute is a huge rush, or so I’ve been told, but no matter how it makes you feel while you’re falling, the splat at the end is probably not worth it. But if Superman is going to stop me from becoming a human pancake, then why not give it a go? When risk is taken out of the equation, people behave differently.
This has been duly noted by economist Sam Peltzman (1975). Peltzman’s work is so important that he has an effect named after him—the Peltzman effect (you didn’t think economists were going to be more creative with the naming, did you?). The Peltzman effect basically applies moral hazard to driving behaviors. When you reduce the risk of driving a car, people get a little more reckless. Of course, the driving force here is entirely unintentional. In the name of protecting people from themselves, government mandates safety features in automobiles. Seat belts, air bags, anti-crumple zones, you name it. Those things are supposed to help the driver live through an accident and they seem to have worked. As long as drivers and passengers actually use these devices, people survive car crashes in astonishingly high proportions. However, what wasn’t expected was that the number of fatalities of bikers, walkers, and other pedestrians increased, and the people who were killed in car accidents tended to die in more grisly ways (that’s what the driver’s education videos in high school taught us, to be sure).
Peltzman reasons that if you mandate safety, people will find a way to screw it up. Maybe that doesn’t sound economic enough but that is what happens. Put another way, if you try to legislate
safety, people will unpredictably respond to the incentives in front of them. When you feel safer inside the car, you engage in riskier behavior. This means you drive a little faster because “if I hit something, the air bag will save me!” You pay a little less attention on the road because, once again, “if I hit something, the air bag will save me!” The problem, of course, is that mothers pushing baby strollers don’t have built in air bags, and even an air bag isn’t effective if you drive fast enough.
More generally, the Peltzman effect says that regulations alter people’s behaviors. When you make them feel safe, they stop taking what lawyers call reasonable care. We see this in sports, too. An extraordinarily cool paper by O’Roark and Wood (2004) demonstrates that the Peltzman effect applies to NASCAR races. When you try to make auto racing safer, drivers who are already risk-loving—and you would have to be to drive at 180 miles per hour despite traveling in circles—will take even more risks, which has led to more accidents.
Safety regulations in football lead to extremely large human beings slamming into each other with the force of a rhinoceros. All those pads and helmets give men who are young enough not to fear much a reason to fear even less. The contact between two average-sized football players can generate 1,600 pounds of force (Higgins, 2009). As players get bigger, faster, and stronger, the force exerted during a tackle can be massive, leading to severe injuries, “but don’t worry ma, I’ve got my helmet on.”
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