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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16082 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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German immigrants for comparison had a homicide rate of about 15 per 100k.

Of note, this is about 3 times the homicide rate of the whole US today. Homicide rates have dropped precipitously across groups, which is also important to keep in mind when discussing solutions. For example, pointing to the Irish provides evidence that poverty and discrimination are a factor; they're clearly not that genetically different from other Europeans, but being mostly Catholic, were subject to colonization by the English and discrimination in the US. The data point about Koreans in Japan is also very interesting; I'm reasonably confident that Korea's murder rate is not 14 times higher than Japan's. So this likely reflects either selection bias in who ended up in Japan, or some form of discrimination (or some other theories: An effect of finding yourself in a very different society than the one you're used to, a lack of good institutions, etc.)

Homicide rates have dropped a lot in the last two centuries or so, at least in part because of greatly improving medical care. That's why I think proportions are more important that absolute numbers.

The data point about Koreans in Japan is also very interesting; I'm reasonably confident that Korea's murder rate is not 14 times higher than Japan's.

That's for crime in general, not homicide; unfortunately I couldn't find data on Korean immigrant vs Japanese homicide in particular, though another source I posted also stated that they were overrepresented in "violent crime" (unfortunately without giving a proportion, and citing a Japanese-language source).

Homicide rates have dropped a lot in the last two centuries or so, at least in part because of greatly improving medical care

Yes, but the size of this effect is very important. The white homicide rate in the US is somewhere around 2.5-3 per 100K, 5-6 times lower than the 15 per 100K quoted for Germans above.

That's for crime in general, not homicide

Good point, but I would assume Korea's general crime rate is also not 14 times that of Japan either (this source claims it's 26 vs 22, about 18% higher).

The white homicide rate in the US is somewhere around 2.5-3 per 100K

In 2019, the homicide victimization rate for non-Hispanic whites was 2.6. With accounting for asymmetric interracial homicide, the rate of offending was probably under 2.5 per 100k.

Source: CDC, Deaths: Final Data for 2019, table 9. 2020 data should be out by now, but I haven't been able to find it.

Edit: According to the first reference here, Deaths: Final Data for 2020 is still "forthcoming" as of this month. I guess they're busy with COVID stuff?

I think the report is actually available, at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db427.htm or https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db427.pdf. The citation just hasn't been updated.

That's a summary report. The full report is like a hundred pages with statistics for over a hundred different causes of death broken down by multiple demographic stats. Here's the report for 2019:

https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/106058/cdc_106058_DS1.pdf

Do you have the Japanese source handy? I can take a peek if you’d like.

The cite is "Shihō Chōsaka, Shihō Kenkyū 17, Hōkokushū (Judicial Research: No. 17, Collection of Reports), Tokyo: Shihōshō (Mar. 1933), 434 (National Diet Library, Call Number: AZ-771-H26)." I don't know if this would be digitized anywhere.

I took a look - as far as I can tell, it’s available only via their intranet, and I’d have to essentially buy a copy from the national diet library and have it delivered. From what I can see from the table of contents, the entire thing is about Korean-Japanese criminality and its purported reasons (and a hundred something pages on background on Koreans living in Japan at the time), all 500+ pages of it.

Oh well!

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