Iceland, murder and eugenics: A brief response to Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification

A new(ish) argumentative line on crime has become popular: The reason people are civilized now is because during the period 1000 to 1800, 1%-2% of the population were executed per generation, and that culled the population of violent people. Hint, hint, maybe we should do it again to make our societies even more peaceful.

The empirical claim backing this grim policy prescription comes from the paper: Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification.

The evidence given in the paper for sky-high execution rates looks slim and is mostly based on an appeal to Savey-Casart (1968) and Taccoen (1982). At best, this supports such a high execution rate for a limited part of Europe, and a fairly narrow slice of time. The two sources are also notably old. Additionally, the genetic model they provide employs highly favorable assumptions for their hypothesis- implausibly favorable in my view. My amateur attempt at re-stimation gives a figure far south of theirs, and when factors like sex differences, stochasticity in the judicial process, stochasticity in the relationship between trait violence and murder, and so on, are factored in, the expected change over the period becomes negligible.

But I don’t want to go through the maths of a population genetics model with you, because there’s another, simpler problem: Iceland. Contemporary Icelanders are primarily descended from medieval Icelanders, making them a perfect genetic laboratory.

Iceland executed 240 people between 1551 and 1830. In 1703, the population of Iceland was 50,358. This supports execution rates somewhere on the order of 1 in 1000 per generation. Many of those executions that did occur were not for violence.

Before 1551, there were almost no executions. There was outlawry, but this didn’t reliably result in death, and it came in a permanent and non-permanent version. From what I can tell, it resulted in fewer deaths per capita than the later Lutheran-based execution system. Essentially, then, Iceland had very little officially sanctioned killing in response to violent crime for the whole period 1000 to 1830.

Icelanders, today, are a fairly peaceable bunch. Typical murders per year are about 3 for the whole island. The small number of murders makes statistical comparison difficult, but puts Iceland in an enviable position compared to most countries. and a slightly above average position compared to other rich countries.

What if Iceland is a fluke, with compensating reductions in violence driven by some other mechanism? Iceland, from what I can tell far from the only area of demonstrably low executions in the past, and low murder rates now.

As always, I want to add: Even if a regime of state murder and/or sterilisation had worked in the past, and even if we had no scruples about such measures, the point would be largely practically irrelevant. Research in genetic engineering would be a far better way to achieve the same effect. More generally, tough-on-crime rhetoric of many sorts patinas itself with rationality, but is usually motivated at root by bloodthirst, disgust, and anger.