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Notes -
The US does have a European-sized welfare state, has crime rates which are not globally that high, has a high life expectancy and low infant mortality with universal access to emergency medicine(seriously a driver of US healthcare costs is the constitutional right to access emergency medicine and then just not pay it), and has universal access to college education(which, if you’re willing to accept the kinds of conditions college kids have historically lived in, is actually fairly affordable). There’s a housing shortage, but it’s a lot better than other Anglosphere countries.
Crime rates are geographically constrained in the USA rather than an everpresent reality. Much ink can be spilled about general observations, but the simple fact is that if you don't live near blacks, crime will be a much lower problem. The USA has enough space for crime-worried californians to flee to economic centers in texas or florida, while economic activity concentrated in only a few cities filled with racialized criminality limits the options for Europeans.
Racialized crime is a solvable problem; black people don't like crime either as clearly evinced by their disapproval of 'defund the police'. The problem is liberals who use disparate impact as a means to castigate their proximate political opponent instead. There is of course the grift of NGOs and the like to extract sympathy from do gooders, but that happens on both sides of the aisle and so its a wash.
Proximity to black people is not the issue. My reasonably affluent suburban nieghborhood is easily 20% black and im not worried about my nieghbors.
Crime rates are geographically constrained, but that constraint is to the above-mentioned subset of urban areas where the Democratic Party has managed to impose one-party rule. IE places like Baltimore, St Louis, Chicago, and Seattle.
So is mine, but they're pretty wealthy black people. Many of the older ones moved here to get away from shittier co-ethnics. Even then, though... there's a neighboring town which is also wealthy and also has a considerable number of black people, and the few murders there were disproportionately committed by black people (specifically black men, if it needs to be said), including wealthy ones.
Common regression-to-the-mean W.
I was going to say that it reminds me of how wealthy blacks underperform poor whites (and especially poor Asians) on standardized tests. However, to my pleasant surprise while looking up the previous link, I Noticed that Random Critical Analysis also has a post "Racial differences in homicide rates are poorly explained by economics," where he concludes: "Race is a strong predictor of homicide rates at a county level. It predicts better than the poverty rate, median household income, racial segregation, income segregation, education rates, and so on and so forth."
Ah, but does it predict better than percentage of households headed by a woman?
Indeed it does, if we consider the percentage of households headed by women to be equivalent to single motherhood rates.
The literal next sentence after the brief blurb I pasted reads: "The single-motherhood rate is a close second though" (second to % black, in a bivariate correlation table). As shown in Section 3, black remains a significant predictor on top of single motherhood rates; that is, the black effect on homicides is robust net of family poverty and single motherhood rates.
Not that I necessarily believe blacks should be granted "credit" for family poverty and single motherhood rates as to excusing their high homicide rates. Akin to how we wouldn't adjust for homicide rates using battery rates. The same combination of heritable traits such as low IQ, high impulsiveness, and high time preference would result in high family poverty, single motherhood, and homicide rates.
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Crime in the US is a disproportionately but not exclusively black problem- US whites have much higher homicide rates than Europe, and indeed higher than Canada. It’s also not the case that crime is a mostly blue state problem- if anything, it’s more common in blue cities in red states, while there remain many hotspots in other locales.
Red states are disproportionately black, with blue cities in red states blacker than blue cities in blue states. Everytime liberals (so not specifically referring to you) smugly post that red states are stupider and more criminal than blue states they end up shooting themselves in the foot because it goes back to how large the black population is.
The ultimate test of this experiment will be the outcome of St George county in Louisiana after it split from Baton Rouge county. Richer whiter (but still having black residents) zone splits off from failing black county because the whites wanted better schools. With less whites around will the blacker Baton Rouge be free to prosper and flourish without the evils of racism tainting their progress? I posit no, but the anticipation of the upcoming crash is itself part of the journey.
Well yes, Baton Rouge itself does not want St George county to split off for that very reason. And the prototypical blue cities in red states, like Austin and Asheville, are doing at least OK.
Very poor governance associated with extremely large- and often outright majority- black populations is a major problem for these cities; Jackson and St. Louis are not doing well on non-crime related metrics either. Very white red states often do quite well on things like education and crime. But sun belt states maintain high crime rates and rural whites in the south have extremely high crime rates by first world standards- while blacks have a big portion of the blame, there are still other things going on.
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This probably deserves some exploration in itself, but annecdotally there seems to be a flow of bad actors towards places where they will be tolerated, and this is most visible in places where you have an island of "tolerance" in otherwise "intolerant" territory.
There’s probably a confluence of factors, with particularly bad local governance being a factor in lots of cases(Jackson’s water crisis was resolved by the corps of engineers in a matter of hours, but had lasted for weeks with no progress; you don’t get that with even minimal competence from the local authorities). Everything in New Orleans and St. Louis is horribly mismanaged, an adversarial relationship with the state doesn’t help but cant be blamed entirely(Austin seems to do fine despite its frequent and visible fallouts with the state).
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I recall polls as such. Perhaps blacks disapprove of "defund the police," insofar as they may imagine themselves as the victims of crime.
However, it's a different story when it comes to blacks being disproportionate perpetrators of crime—blacks are likely not as enthusiastic about law and order when it comes to imagining their brothers, sons, nephews, etc. doing prison time for robbing convenience stores or gas stations, participating in lootings, harassing/assaulting people in subways and other public spaces, beating up Asian and white classmates with their other black friends, punching Asian grandmothers on the street.
I'm not accusing you of this, but I'm not a fan of using the opinions of blacks to subtract/add legitimacy from/to "defund the police"/"law and order". It reinforces the notion that Black Lives Matter More, and has the vibe of DR3. Mainstream conservatives, such as /r/Conservative, are always two-soyjaks-pointing when it comes to blacks being (at least superficially) supportive of things like "law and order," though.
And why does it matter? Until we bite the bullet and actually go into those areas arrest and jail those committing the crimes, they cannot have the save communities, let alone prosperous ones, they say they want. It’s always been a problem for the liberal democratic state — we often know exactly what the problems are, and exactly how to solve them, but because the solutions require short-term pain they can never be implemented. They probably wouldn’t like tge process of law and order policing, they wouldn’t like to see black men going to prison for decades. They will like not having to ask the clerk to unlock the plastic doors so the6 can take groceries off the shelves. They will like not needing bars on their windows. They will love it when the lower crime rates mean businesses choose their neighborhoods to open up shop.
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Yeah, if the U.S. has a housing shortage than every country has a housing shortage.
I'm hard pressed to think of any single country where a person can get more square feet per hour of labor than the U.S.
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