Month: March 2022

Economic Indicators and Crime

Economic Indicators and Crime

Posted on by jabittan
“Criminologists have long known that unemployment rates don’t correlate well with rates of violent crime,” writes Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Despite what feels like it must be true, that national unemployment rates influence crime, there is not a correlation between rising unemployment and rising crime. We all have ideas about what causes crime, and for many of us unemployment is an explanation, but it turns out crime is much more complex and doesn’t fall in line with many of our economic indicators.
 
 
Pinker continues, “In the three years after the financial meltdown of 2008, which caused the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the American homicide rate fell by another 14 percent.” Every time I read this statistic I am surprised. It is hard to believe that when unemployment gets worse people do not resort to more crime. I imagine that many of us would expect more crime as desperate people try to get money and resources through illicit means when jobs are not available to provide those things for them. But that is not what has happened recently. Until 2020 crime was falling, going through the economic downturn of the early 2000s and the subsequent rise and record low unemployment of the late 2010s.
 
 
It also turns out that inequality isn’t much better at predicting crime. Regarding inequality Pinker writes, “the problem with invoking inequality to explain changes in violence is that while it correlates with violence across states and countries, it does not correlate with violence over time within a state or country.” Like unemployment, I would expect that more unequal societies would have more crime, as those at the bottom fight among themselves and are unhappy with the wealth and opulence they see in the lives of others. However, inequality was at a low point in the 1960s in the United States, when crime was  much worse across the United States. In the last couple of decades inequality has worsened in the US, but with the exception of the slight increase in crime since 2020, crime trends have gone downward. The global differences we see in crime rates, Joseph Henrich would argue in The WEIRDest People in the World, are probably better explained by factors other than a single measure of inequality.
 
 
The crime waves that have occurred since the end of WWII and our explanations for those crime waves are an interesting example of how quickly we can jump to inaccurate conclusions about the world. Humans make causal observations and connections in the world around them, but sometimes those causal links are invalid. While I do believe we have the ability to use math, statistics, causal observations, and experiments to be able to deduce and understand root causes, the process is difficult. Crime is an example of how far off our causal reasoning can be from reality. Explaining social phenomena is difficult, and even the best theories rarely seem to be able to explain more than 40% of the variance we see in a given phenomenon. We can do lots of studies of crime and start to get a better understanding, but simply assuming that a couple of economic indicators will explain crime is an inadequate way to think about trends and phenomena.
Baby Boomer Solidarity

Baby Boomer Solidarity

Posted on by jabittan
In The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker writes, “the baby boomers were unusual … in sharing an emboldening sense of solidarity, as if their generation were an ethnic group or nation.” Pinker explains that the baby boomers were the first, and perhaps only, generation to grow up as the largest demographic group in the nation and as a connected and unified age bracket. Nationwide technology was developing to bring instantaneous television and radio directly to the people. There were limited shows and channels, but everyone could listen and watch at the same time. And everyone could know that everyone else was watching the same few tv channels or listening to the same few songs on the radio. This brought the baby boomers together in a way that never happened before, and might not be able to happen again in our hyper specialized and individualized media environment that current generations are growing up within.
 
 
The Better Angels of our Nature is a book that explores the ways in which humans and our societies have become less violent over time. The baby boomers, Pinker explains, in some ways have contributed to the trend of reduced violence while in other ways have been a counter trend to reduced rates of violence. A large group of 15 to 30 year-olds who are emboldened and socially connected is a recipe for increased crime. Most crimes are committed by men in this age bracket, and when the baby boomers hit this age bracket, there was a lot of potential for crime in the United States simply because there were a lot of men living in their most crime prone years. Baby boomers reached this age bracket in the 1970s, a time when drug usage spiked and crime rose. However, a group of hyper connected hippies wasn’t exactly the most aggressive group of individuals of all time. While baby boomers may have created a crime bump in the United States, they opposed war in Vietnam in large numbers. Baby boomer opposition to the war likely played a role in decreasing the overall violence of that conflict (not to say there was not a ton of violence in Vietnam). Baby boomers continued the trend of being less violent, so even though there were record numbers of them and record levels of solidarity, their outlets and beliefs were less violent overall.
 
 
I think it is interesting to think about the baby boomers and their relationships with violence. Having large numbers of youth always creates the potential for violence, and we have seen this with different generations. The baby boomers also show us how emerging technologies can shift mindsets and change the way people think about social norms which may be tied to crime, drug use, relationships, and international security. Baby boomer solidarity, and a sense that they were the first generation in history to have such a sense of solidarity, created a unique moment in history where one generation could have such a dramatic impact on society, crime, and politics. That impact though, was hard to predict and had differing effects that didn’t always seem to fit together, like a pacifying influence on international war while simultaneously contributing to more crime within the United States.
American Homicides & Honor

Honor & American Homicides

Posted on by jabittan
The United States has more guns and more homicides than many other WEIRD countries. Compared to Europe in particular, the United States has much more gun violence, gun deaths, and murders in general. Peter Singer offers one plausible explanation for this in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature.
 
 
Pinker writes, “In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms. … In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.”
 
 
The argument that Pinker makes is that Americans maintained their weapons because they never allowed government to become strong enough to take their weapons away. Americans never fully gave government the sole authority to use violence. Americans have retained the idea that they should be able to use violence to protect themselves if ever needed. In an almost mythical manner, weapons and defensive violence have been enshrined in the United States.
 
 
However, having weapons and placing defensive violence in a special place is not the entire explanation for higher rates of murder in the United States that Pinker offers. Pinker suggests, especially in the South, that the United States has also maintained a culture of personal honor. In such a culture, any slight against the individual needs to be avenged so that the individual’s honor is not damaged. Pride, family heritage, and displays of strength and power are important in such a system, and must be upheld (it is fitting that the biggest movie franchise in the United States is the Avengers).
 
 
The way this translates into more homicides is not through direct murders for individual advancement or gain, but through murders following individual fights. Pinker writes, “southerners do not outkill northerners in homicides carried out during robberies, only in those sparked by quarrels.” Southerners are far more likely to turn to violence, and accept violence, when it is a response to aggression or a slight against an individual. Honor, it turns out, is a dangerous force and idea that leads to more homicides surrounding frivolous slights.
 
 
I don’t think Pinker’s explanations fully capture or fully explain why homicide rates in the Untied States are higher than in other WEIRD countries.  I do think they demonstrate different aspects of the United States which contribute to greater uses of violence. When combined with ideas about racism in the United States, extreme positions of inequality, lack of social safety nets, and some capitalistic aspects of our economic system, I think Pinker’s considerations are very important. Violence is not fully owned by the state because our population won’t allow the state a full monopoly on violence. Many parts of the country still cling to honor cultures that tacitly encourage violence – especially in self-defense or preservation. As a result, the murder and violence potential of the Untied States is higher than many WEIRD countries, and that shows through in the data.
Violence and Statelessness Within a State

Violence and Statelessness Within a State

Posted on by jabittan
Recently I have been making efforts to take longer views of history, to understand how things that happened and developed a long time ago still impact the world today. Sometimes this is easy to do. In a city, infrastructure decisions are evaluated and planned with 30 or more years of useful life intended for the investment. A building, bridge, or park is expected to stick around for a while, shaping its immediately area for a long time (or possibly forever if we chose to maintain the infrastructure indefinitely).
 
 
What is harder to see is how cultural products, as opposed to physical infrastructure products, stick around and continue to shape the culture and development of human social worlds. We are used to thinking of humans as individual actors who have the power to change and adapt to any given situation. We don’t think about how specific cultural arrangements could influence people for the long term. But the reality is that cultural interactions, products, and institutions can have a dramatic long term impact on people, just as a park or bridge can have a long term impact on a city.
 
 
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker discusses how lower-income African Americans ended up with higher rates of violence due to poor policing. These higher rates of violence translated into discriminatory practices that have lasted for a long time, and are still with us today. It is easy to think that any black person in the US today can simply chose to be different, to ignore the long influence of history, but that is to ignore the real social institutions that shaped how African Americans understood themselves in our nation. Just as it would be foolish to ignore the impact that a park had in making a city an enjoyable place to live, ignoring the discrimination that African Americans faced and the subsequent violence that grew within African American communities would be foolish.
 
 
Pinker writes, “communities of lower-income African Americans were effectively stateless, relying on a culture of honor (sometimes called the code of the streets) to defend their interests rather than calling in the law.” When government discriminated against black people, when the police were not a reliable and trustworthy source of justice, when black people had to defend their own honor or risk being taken advantage of, violence became a solution. By segregating black people, denying them access to quality services, and by racially profiling communities of color in policing, a stateless people were created within our country. The law did not afford equal protections and the state did not provide the same opportunities and engagement for black people relative to white people. This created situations in which violence flourished, furthering the very systems of inequality and injustice that created the situations for violence in the first place.
 
 
This history is long. It is not something that can be understood simply by looking at the violence that exists in African American communities today. To understand how we ended up with Black Lives Matter, to understand why rates of violence in communities of color are what they are, and to understand racial tensions, we have to take a long view of history. We have to acknowledge that cultural factors can have long-term impacts and consequences, just as infrastructure decisions can. Discrimination created a stateless people within the United States, and that statelessness incentivized violence. None of this is a matter of individual moral failings, but a consequence of decades of institutional and governance failings.
Dogmas About Violence

Dogmas About Violence

Posted on by jabittan
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker demonstrates that many of the ways in which we think about violence are inadequate for actually understanding violence. Often, our views toward violence are more dogmatic than evidence based. We have ideas, views, and beliefs of violence that seem to fit, but that don’t actually have much historical backing and don’t really take full context into consideration. Pinker’s book pushes back against such dogmas to help us better understand what is happening in world-wide violence trends. His argument is that by better understanding the causes and underlying factors contributing to violence, we can better understand actual trends in violence and shape our responses accordingly.
 
 
Regarding some dogmas that people hold about violence he writes, “on the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators.” Morality doesn’t necessarily seem to be a key to stopping violence. Pinker demonstrates that many religious wars, such as The Crusades, were fought by people who believed they were very moral. In fact, their morality was at the center of their conflict. Morality today is still used to justify violence, such as when we tie capital punishment to a sense of justice. The idea is that someone who killed another deserves to have the same violence inflected upon themselves. Our moral sense is that more violence is a worthy response to violence.
 
 
Pinker continues, “a Third dubious belief about violence is that lower-class people engage in it because they are financially needy … or because they are expressing rage against society.” What Pinker found is that this isn’t necessarily true. People in the lowest socioeconomic levels, Pinker argues, tend to be “effectively stateless.” At a certain point, legal recourse to address crimes is just not possible for people in the lowest economic spheres. People may be dependent on government aid and assistance, but  they may be locked out of some of the protections that government and institutions afford more affluent people. Violence is better than trying to resolve conflicts legally for these individuals.
 
 
From a middle class perspective, impulse control more important for future success and security than it is for lower class individuals. Being impulsive and using violence against another person could lead to a job loss, a financial loss, the loss of friends, and the loss of familial assistance. If you have already lost those things, then the cost of violence falls. Approaches to address violence that are designed for the middle and upper classes literally are ineffective because they don’t operate on the proper incentive structure facing people in the lowest socioeconomic classes. And when those approaches fail, it can lead to a positive feedback loop where the poorest people are simply blamed for being impulsive and violent. We miss the importance of larger institutions and incentives.
 
 
Understanding these dogmas and the reality of violence helps us better understand why people are violent. Taking a long view of humanity allows us to more clearly see how these dogmas are built from limited perspectives of our current moment and current socioeconomic situations. To get beyond these dogmas requires that we think differently about the systems, structures, institutions, and incentives in people’s lives and how those factors can influence violent behavior.
Declines in Elite Violence

Declines in Elite Violence

Posted on by jabittan
Violence among the elites and upper classes isn’t something that never happens, but it is less common than violence within lower socioeconomic status groups. This feels obvious and not really worth calling out, unless you take a long view at human history and violence. Medieval Europe was a place of great violence inflicted by elites. Even the American South from the inception of chattel slavery on the continent to the Civil War was a region of violence inflicted by elites. It has not always been the case that in human societies the elites and highest socioeconomic status individuals were the least likely to use violence against other humans.
 
 
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker writes, “The European decline of violence was spearheaded by a decline in elite violence. Today statistics from every Western country show that the overwhelming majority of homicides and other violent crimes are committed by people in the lowest socioeconomic classes.” Humanity has gotten more peaceful in part because violence among elites has fallen. We no longer live in a world with economic systems (in WEIRD countries) where feudal lords and slave owners can use violence to drive workers and manage their estates.
 
 
Pinker continues, “One obvious reason for the shift is that in medieval times, one achieved high status through the use of force.” Gang violence, black markets, and crime syndicates can be a pathway to riches today, but they are not the dominant ways or preferred ways to riches. They are risky, particularly because they operate outside of the state and the legal protections of the state. In medieval times, however, the state did not have the ability to prevent violence and illegal means of wealth creation in the ways the state can today. Similarly, slave owners could use violence to force and compel their workforce of subjugated humans. Violence was a necessary and even expected tool in wealth creation in the Antebellum South.
 
 
What this demonstrates is that changing economic systems and structures changes levels of violence in human cultures among socioeconomic strata. When incentives existed to use violence to obtain wealth, then it was common for elites to use violence. When institutions and incentives shifted, elites became less violent. In the Untied States we view ourselves and our decisions, actions, and behaviors through a lens of individualism, often forgetting the larger institutions and incentives that push us to make certain decisions, take certain actions, and generally behave in certain ways. But what Pinker shows is that incentives matter, even for our elites, and that shifting incentives has been key in driving down violence at the highest level of our socioeconomic system.