Some of the precepts of economic analysis of law borrowed from economics are very simple, almost intuitive, and very, very powerful. Now, we all know that a repeat offender is punished more severely than a first time offender. And that graduation of penalties may increase well beyond just the first and second offense. So what are we doing when we do that? We are saying basically that we are putting a price on bad behavior. If you engage in this criminal behavior, the price will be X number of years in jail or fines or what have you. If you do it a second time, it means we underpriced. We underpriced. We didn't realize your demand for this criminal activity was greater than the price we put on it. So we have to raise the price for the second offense. Now, it seems intuitive and we've been doing it forever, but all we're doing is saying that there is a slope to the demand for the criminal activity, right? And when the price goes up, the quantity demanded goes down. If you raise the price of candy bars, the number purchased will go down. The quantity demanded will go down. You raise the price of crime, the quantity of crimes will go down. Totally intuitive, but once you start expressing it in those terms, it's the beginning of the ability to do things like measure carefully what the actual deterrent effect is of a particular penalty and to try to find the right level to deter the amount of crime. You don't want to deter a crime to the point of zero because it's not worth it. It's not worth eliminating the last murder even because the process, the system for dealing with it is expensive. You have to have police, you have to have a judicial system, you have to have a prison system, or some other penalty scheme, and those are not free, they're costly. So we don't try to eliminate every vestige of some unwanted activity. We stop at the point where the benefits are greater than the costs. Now we can graph that, we can put that up in economic terms. But without the economic terms, it's intuitively understandable. There's no point taking a step that costs more than the benefit you get from it. But we can be more rigorous in trying to identify that once we have the economic model of a downward sloping demand curve. Simple as that. Once you, once you think about the fact that the demand goes down as the price goes up, you have a very powerful tool. For all kinds of social control through the law. Looking at the effects of a law, or a change in the law, on the average, is a very tempting thing to do, but it's irrelevant. What you want to know is what's the effect at the margin. Now we could put a graph and show you the margin, but just think of it this way. If we raise the price of cigarettes to discourage smoking, or Starbucks raises the price of a cup of coffee. Some people, at the margin, are going to say, that's it, I'm paying $4 and I'm not going to pay $4.25 for a cup of coffee. They're going to drop out. All we want to know is what's the effect at the margin, because most people are intramarginal, we could show it on a graph, they're not affected by the change, so it would be irrelevant to ask what's the average consequence of the law or of a change in the law. You want to know what's the marginal consequence.