The Broken Windows Man

[shetuck]

James Wilson's Obit in this week's Economist...

His "borken windows" theory has come under much criticism, but he was, nonetheless, one of the big thinkers of our time.

James Q. Wilson, investigator of American society, died on March 2nd, aged 80

Mar 10th 2012

LECTURING once at Harvard, where he taught government for 26 years, James Q. Wilson slipped in a slide of himself in scuba-diving gear beside a 20-foot shark. His students, accustomed to his shyness, were somewhat surprised. They should not have been. Mr Wilson had co-written with his wife Roberta a book on coral reefs, and dived down to explore them whenever he had the chance. There, swimming among the calcified branches, he asked himself questions. Why were some fish camouflaged, and not others? Why did some socialise in the mornings, but not the afternoons? Why did they like to feed on non-nutritious bits of the reef? In short, why did they do what they did?

Sitting eagerly in Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox game, or strolling through the streets of New York City, he asked much the same questions about the swarming mass of human beings. What motivated them, and were their motives changing? What made them afraid? What made them happy? Why were their marriages and families failing? Could they be governed better and, if so, how? Fans of his frequent articles in Commentary and the Public Interest sometimes joked that his "Q" was for query, as well as quirky.

His doctoral thesis in 1959 inquired into the political behaviour of blacks in Chicago, finding that their subservience to white powerbrokers was a way of getting benefits for themselves. His masterwork "Bureaucracy" (1989) looked at armies, prisons and schools as well as government agencies, discovering that policymakers rarely knew what the cliff-face workers did. From the mid-1960s he was periodically sucked in to sit on government commissions agonising over the crime rate, because no one else asked questions about it in the fresh-eyed way that he did.

[...]

This "broken windows" theory, written up with George Kelling in the Atlantic in 1982, made Mr Wilson's name, especially when it was taken up, years later, by the police departments of New York and many other cities. He was glad of that, but also modestly irritated. Among his many books, he was proudest of those that investigated the workings of government in all its flawed, shambling efforts to balance fairness, fiscal prudence, big goals and multiple clashing interests. The label "sociologist" annoyed him. "Political scientist", though, was fine and good.

cont'd