Daniella Zalcman for The Wall Street Journal
As New Yorkers have learned in recent weeks, parking tickets don’t exactly have the force of law for all motorists in our fair city. The ticket-fixing investigation into the New York Police Department has revealed “a lot of evidence” that vehicular infractions can be made to vanish, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg said last week.
Yet blowing off tickets hasn’t been the exclusive privilege of those with personal connections to helpful police officers. A new academic paper looks back at the era when foreign diplomats in New York City were free to flout parking rules without paying fines. And the findings just might leave New Yorkers feeling downright dumb, in light of our widespread ticket-fixing ways.
George Mason University economists Garett Jones and J.V.C. Nye set out to solve a riddle: What makes someone likely to obey the law in situations where there’s no chance for punishment? Before 2003, diplomats enjoyed just this type of impunity when parking on city streets. Hundreds of United Nations representatives and foreign consulate officials in New York were free to ignore parking tickets issued by police without fear that their vehicles would be impounded.
A federal law took effect in 2003 giving local authorities the power to pull diplomatic plates from cars with too many unpaid tickets, introducing the first real consequence. Unpaid tickets plummeted as a result. But even in the freewheeling era of diplomatic immunity, not every nation’s diplomats ignored parking tickets just because they could. As the economists note:
Delegations differed widely in their scofflaw tendencies: The median diplomat averaged 8 unpaid tickets per year, the standard deviation was 33 tickets per year, and the maximum was 250 per year (from the Kuwaiti delegation).
Those statistics, from 1997 to 2002, are on a per-diplomat basis. That means each Kuwaiti diplomat averaged almost one unpaid parking ticket per business day over that stretch — nearly double the average for the Egyptian delegation, which had the second-highest average rate of unpaid parking tickets. (Fun fact: these fines remain unpaid. Kuwait and Egypt topped a 2010 list of nations in debt to the city for parking violations — owing $1.2 million and $1.9 million, respectively.)
Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria and Mozambique all averaged more than 100 unpaid tickets per diplomat each year. On the other side of the spectrum, 21 countries had zero unpaid tickets, including Canada, U.K., Israel, Turkey, Oman, Ecuador, Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates.
Looking through the unpaid ticket numbers, the George Mason economists found a strong correlation: Delegations with more unpaid New York City parking tickets were likely to come from countries with lower national average IQs and average years of education. Diplomats from higher-IQ nations were likely to have fewer unpaid parking tickets, even when the city made no effort to enforce the law. In fact, Jones and Nye argue that a low national IQ is a better predictor of unpaid parking tickets by diplomats than home-country corruption or GDP. (A note here on IQ: the authors aren’t arbitrarily calling countries dim. Economists regularly use national IQ averages in studies, although the metric is not without its critics. Here’s background.)
For the economists, the relationship between national IQ and unpaid tickets from New York’s era of lawless diplomatic drivers supports the notion that intelligence and education foster social capital. Societies with more social capital will be more likely to abide by laws even when the threat of enforcement is weak.
Amid revelations of the city’s alleged ticket-fixing ways, it’s worth asking what these findings might say about us. When given the chance to escape a lawful parking fine with impunity, many of us appear to have behaved like Kuwaiti attachés to the U.N. and blown off the tickets. Looking at the evidence like economists, is it possible New Yorkers aren’t quite as bright as we think?