Do societies with freer markets really become less homicidal over time? New evidence from 131 developed and developing societies, 2000–2021
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research into the social correlates of free-market institutions has significantly expanded during the past 15 years with the widespread use of indexes of economic freedom. One crucial issue, however, has been only very sparsely probed: the relationship between free markets and homicidal violence. The few studies that do exist are mostly beset by one or multiple serious methodological weaknesses, such as reliance on single cross-sections, failure to disaggregate the index of economic freedom, not investigating its potentially heterogenous effects in developed and developing societies, ignoring possible endogeneity, etc. The present study addresses these issues in a panel sample of 131 developed and developing countries between 2000 and 2021. A key novel finding, robust to dynamic panel estimation techniques addressing endogeneity concerns, is that the aggregate economic freedom index has a negative over-time relationship with homicide in developing countries. Conversely, it exhibits a positive relationship in the developed world, exacerbating homicide rates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".