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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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I got into a discussion with someone regarding whether poverty was sufficient to explain disparate crime rates between different ethnicities. To this end, I ended up citing https://www.city-journal.org/poverty-and-violent-crime-dont-go-hand-in-hand this study, which goes into the poverty level of NYC of different ethnicities, and their crime rate. It demonstrated that although Asians had higher rates of poverty in NYC, compared to even African Americans, their crime rate remained the lowest of the various ethnicities studied.

The response of the person was 1) that because NYC was the 'wealthiest city in the US', the city was not going to be representative of the average American. Specifically, he stated "I think if you extrapolate data from the outliers (the highest cost of living city) onto the average American, then you are trying to "smuggle in hidden confounders" which is why I have an issue with your study." Later on, he also noted that 2) the study was not conducted over a long period of time, but rather only looking at data from 2020. Therefore, it could be a temporary effect.

My response to his criticism was pointing out that when trying to see whether there are differences between different groups, it isn't necessarily important for the individuals studies to be the centered around the "average" individual per say. What's important is that the individuals studied all have been subjected to the same incentives and forces which cause this deviation from the average. That way, their effects cancel out, unless we can see some specific reason for there to be an unequal effect on each ethnicity.

Yes, NY is a non-modal city, but the influences that fact has should equally affect white people, black people, and asian people. Therefore, whatever distortion NYC has by its citizens being on average richer, shouldn't matter, because 1) we are explicitly looking at comparative income/poverty level, and there are still poor people in NYC, and 2) the effects cancel out because everyone in NYC being subjected to the special circumstances of NYC.

This in fact makes the study better than a 'naive' use of survey data across the US, because Asian people, Black people, and white people are distributed unevenly across the country, and in fact a more general survey would be liable to confounders like rural vs urban location, north vs south, etc., whereas studying a single city would in fact be a superior methodology.

We never got to actually discuss whether the data being from 2020 was sufficient to ignore the study. I suppose it could have gone to talking about the effects of Covid on crime, especially hate crimes, but the conversation was unable to get even close to this.

On reflection, (since the conversation I had was very unsatisfying with the guy), I wanted to see whether that logic was actually sound, or if in fact it was just me sounding good in the moment.

I also was wondering if people had other similar studies which demonstrated that poverty was not sufficient to explain variable crime rates across ethnicities, especially when it comes to Asians and Asian Americans.

It demonstrated that although Asians had higher rates of poverty in NYC, compared to even African Americans, their crime rate remained the lowest of the various ethnicities studied.

What's the argument for why Asians are such an outlier?

Is it possible that low-income Asians tend to live in insular mostly low-income Asian communities and that whatever crime does occur inside the insular ethnic community gets handled within that community and isn't reported to the data collectors?

The murder rate is also low; however. There is no way there are massive number of Asian murders being swept under the rug in NYC or America in general.

I don't think that poverty or inequality substantially explains crime, and a while ago a wrote a long post explaining why: https://devinhelton.com/inequality-crime

The most compelling evidence to me is just the existence of so many communities that are far poorer or more unequal than poor areas in America, while having extremely low rates of crime -- whether this be the slums of Edwardian England, post-war South Korea, Chinatown in old San Francisco, or the peasant areas of contemporary China. By any objective standards (such as calories and protein the average person can afford) these places were way poorer than the ghetto in a modern American city. Yet the crime rates were below that of modern America as a whole.

The second most compelling branch of evidence is the failure of policy based on the "poverty causes crime" thesis. We have foodstamps, government housing, and formerly had "general assistance" specifically to pull people out of the worst of poverty. And these public housing buildings became notorious for extreme high rates of crime, worse crime than is recorded in many far more impoverished areas.

Any link between poverty and crime is probably mostly the inverse -- the prevalence of anti-social habits and behaviors that create high-crime, also make for bad employees and make a community a bad place to build wealth.

I don't think simple "studies" will ever convince anyone, as I show in my post, there can always be accusations of confounders and cherry-picking. One actually has to make an attempt to read a variety of quantitative and qualitative sources and really try to understand the world.

One sophistic tactic I see in this debate, is to abuse the word "poverty." So people will admit that there are many food-poor populations will have low crime, but say that "poverty" is much more than that. For instance the UN defined poverty as:

Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and cloth[e] a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living on marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation.”

Note that "susceptibility to violence", ie crime, gets baked into the definition of poverty, so the link between crime and violence becomes tautological!

Note that by making the definition of poverty basically "all bad things", it becomes a great blender where any bad thing gets linked to poverty and then pretty much any NGO or government agency that has a mandate to tackle some specific issue is also addressing poverty. So the argument becomes, if you want to address crime, just expand the budget for all the things that the government is doing ...

whether this be the slums of Edwardian England

Which were an improvement upon their predecessors, the rookeries of London. There was a concerted public campaign of private benevolent do-goodery, social agitation, the government instituting slum clearance policies, and an improvement in the economy which helped alleviate poverty somewhat:

At their zenith, they were a problem that seemed impossible to solve, yet eventually they did decline. Changes in the law, the growing effectiveness of the police, slum clearances, and perhaps the growing prosperity of the economy gradually had their effect.

Comparing Edwardian slums to 21st century inner city American ghettos is also not comparing like-with-like. For instance the claim that increased policing made crime rates drop:

Violent crime was not as much of a concern in 1901 as it is today and was seen as falling. A report by the Criminal Registrar, published in 1901, noted that the period had 'witnessed a great change in manners: the substitution of words…for blows…an approximation in the manners of different classes; a decline in the spirit of lawlessness'. This was partly due to policing: the historian V.A.C. Gatrell has argued, in his article in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, that the Edwardian working classes were heavily regulated and that the falling indictable crime rate between 1860 and 1914 reflected a period when policing was able to obtain 'a peculiar and transient advantage…over ancient forms of popular lawlessness visible on the street'.

And imprisonment rates ≠ crime rates:

In 1901, imprisonment was the commonest form of punishment; at the time this could involve hard labour. 199,875 people were sent to prison in 1901, nearly 75% of whom were men. Statistics for 1900 show that 52% of those convicted of indictable offences were sent to prison, a proportion that would fall to 18% by 1950, but rise again to 23% in 1998. Fines were imposed on 22% of such offenders in 1900 and a further 9% were punished by whipping.

In 1901, juvenile offenders could be sent to reformatories or industrial schools (replaced by borstals in 1908). Stockport Industrial School admitted 32 children aged between 9 and 13 in 1901 for offences such as 'frequenting company of reputed thieves'; 'beyond [parental] control; 'larceny'; 'found habitually wandering and not under proper control'; 'stealing rabbits'; 'non-attendance [at school]'; and 'refractory in workhouse'.

And what types of crime are we measuring? And how, and by whom, are they prosecuted?

Crime, 1780-1925

As with all periods in history, there were many illegal acts which could, if detected (and the perpetrator was prosecuted) appear as "crimes". However, the vast majority of crimes were never prosecuted. Modern historians can sometimes study unprosecuted acts of violence or theft, but this is more difficult for historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many acts we would describe as crimes today - sexual predation or domestic violence, for instance - were largely unprosecuted before the mid-nineteenth century, as were many minor property offences. We cannot, therefore, estimate the number of domestic violence incidents that took place. In fact, we can only determine the number of prosecuted crimes from 1856 onwards, when annual statistics were published.

The vast majority of crimes prosecuted between 1780 and 1925 were property offences, and many of these offences, including larceny, pickpocketing, burglary, and robbery, changed little. But there are some significant differences in the commission of crime and the apprehension of offenders that took place over the period covered.

So, the numbers and types of crimes that were prosecuted relied on an active victim who was determined to take the cases to court. We have to remember that victims of crime had many options. They could come to terms with the perpetrator, and accept money in damages or compensation (a process known as compounding). Employers could sack workers who stole their workplace materials. Victims of assault could use physical retribution themselves; violent husbands could be subject to "Rough Music" (community sanctions) in their neighbourhood.

The crimes that did not make it into court tell us as much as the crimes that did, but it is the latter which the evidence forces us to focus on. We can see what kinds of crimes people thought were worth prosecution, and who brought those cases to court. Unfortunately, this tends to skew our view of the type and amount of crimes that predominated. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the government published annual crime statistics. Although these were deeply flawed, it is possible to see how crime (or prosecution) trends were presented, and determine why the Victorian State and the general public reacted to apparent outbreaks of crime at particular times.

The years between the 1880s and 1930 has been characterized as the era of the “Policeman State” by Vic Gatrell (1992). Over this time, the police slowly grew to exert a powerful influence over recorded crime through the centrality of their role in the detection and prosecution process. They effectively replaced the victim in court, taking the main role as both the apprehenders and prosecutors of criminality. This affected prosecutions for violence, especially, and they fell dramatically. For example, in England and Wales, assault prosecutions fell from about 75,000 in 1870 to just over 22,000 by 1930. The much-vaunted English miracle of reducing violent crime was, more likely, a function of the changes in the way offenders were brought to court.

If violent crime did appear to be falling, it did not prevent the public (or the newspapers) reporting on a number of crime-related panics in the mid- to late nineteenth century.

Thus, when you are looking at "crime rates in Edwardian England" and comparing them with "crime rates in US ghetto", you are comparing a period which was the result of what had been a sustained and prolonged effort to reduce crime, the rise of an increasingly professional police force, changes in prosecution, changes in imprisonment, and the general social and economic improvements. In other words, the "after" photo in a "before and after" comparison.

Thus, when you are looking at "crime rates in Edwardian England" and comparing them with "crime rates in US ghetto", you are comparing a period which was the result of what had been a sustained and prolonged effort to reduce crime, the rise of an increasingly professional police force, changes in prosecution, changes in imprisonment, and the general social and economic improvements.

That is my point -- policing, prosecution, along with general morality and habits instilled by family and community -- is what matters for crime. The level of material well-being matters much less, if at all, it is rounding error compared to other factors.

Sure, but that is not the same as "District A has income of $10,000 per family, District B has income of $15,000 per family. District B is better-off compared to District A, but District A has a lower crime rate, therefore poverty is not the reason".

If crimes are not being reported in District A, then the true rate is higher. If there are more cops on beat patrol in District A, then there is a disincentive to commit crime. If District A is newly built council housing and District B is an uncleared slum, same. A lot of factors can go into "District A has less crime than District B". Think of the infamous bike cuck cartoon - if people in San Francisco no longer bother reporting bike theft, car break-ins, shoplifting and the like, then simply looking at 'reported rates' or 'arrests made' could lead someone in the future to think "One hundred years ago, San Francisco had less crime than modern Brownville" (if they didn't have access to all the media about how crime is running rampant, etc.)

whether poverty was sufficient to explain disparate crime rates

There is no way that any factor is sufficient to explain any phenomenon that involves human behavior.

I ended up citing https://www.city-journal.org/poverty-and-violent-crime-dont-go-hand-in-hand this study, which goes into the poverty level of NYC of different ethnicities,

I don't think that is particularly helpful, because it defines "poverty" as "below the official poverty line plus adjustments," which is actually pretty high. What about more extreme poverty? If you look at the Census Bureau income spreadsheet here, it says that, at the national level, the pct of Asian American household with income under 15,000 in 2019 was 6.3% versus 17% for "Black only." Similarly, according to the chart on page 4 here, in 2018 the pct of 9-yr-olds in deep poverty (1/2 of the official poverty line) nationally was 3 percent for Asian Americans and 18 percent for African Americans.

Moreover, the data he uses includes COVID relief -- in fact, the key takeaway from the study he links to is that "the poverty rate in New York City actually fell between 2019 and 2020" as a result of COVID relief. Nationally, the poverty rate in 2019 for Asian Americans appears to have been a tad less than half that of African Americans.

I would also note that the linked article refers only to violent crime, whereas you initially referred to crime rates in general. Poverty might well be a better predictor the propensity to commit property crimes, for example. As the article you linked to notes, "A major reason is that crimes of violence are usually motivated by quarrels, personal grudges, perceived insults, and similar interpersonal conflicts, not by economic necessity."

And, of course, to really figure out the effect, if any, of poverty on propensity to commit crimes, you have to control for all sorts of factors, including [immigrant status](Immigrant Assimilation and Crime: Generational Differences in Youth Violence in Chicago), an obvious confounder if you are looking at ethnic groups in NYC ("API individuals in NYC are much more likely to be foreign-born than other racial groups. In 2019, there were 71 percent foreign-born API immigrants in the City compared to Hispanics (39 percent), Black (32 percent) and White (22 percent) immigrants. Overall, 36 percent of the City’s population is foreign-born."

So, while your friend is obviously wrong to say that poverty is a sufficient cause of crime, figuring out the extent to which poverty (or anything else) does or does not contribute to the propensity to commit crimes is a daunting task.

There's also this Random Critical Analysis post.

Also important to note that the correlation between crime and poverty is confounded by personality and cognitive traits. People with low intelligence and poor impulse control tend to commit more crime and not be very employable. That doesn't prove that the poverty causes the crime. So much of what R*dditors "know" about sociology is either just made up, or at best based on low-quality research that fails to account for obvious confounders.

I think for some reason many people find sociological explanations as erudite or sophisticated. The truth value is assumed because the explanation flatters the believer.

There are of course other such studies, the one @curious_straight_ca linked is perhaps the best. Oh, regarding the objection about non-representative sample, this just in – looks like it doesn't matter very much.

But what of it? Suppose you technically prove your point, then the other party just pivots to explaining it away with extra racism or legacy of redlining or something, or casts suspicion on your sources (just like that, or with a link to motherjones or something) and demands arbitrary amounts of corroborating evidence; at some point you run out of studies suitable to respond to a specific contrived attack, and the other guy wins, despite the preponderance of evidence. Or, to be precise, you lose the instant you allow yourself to be dragged into the game, because you're not even a player – it's a breakout game for progressives, and you're the wall they throw gotchas at, and compete in who breaks through in the fewest number of moves.

You could just as well say, for example: «I reject your premise that poverty causes crime. It is silly. Of course criminal inclinations cause poverty. Demonstrate that we should assume otherwise» (this is what I honestly believe. People seem to imagine, probably due to media, that modern criminal lifestyle in an affluent country begins with scrappy Dickensian ragamuffins making ends meet or other such nonsense).

Most likely he'll flame out, but if not, you may have a taste of how it feels to be the sovereign. Because, as Moldbug has said in a rare moment of lucidity – sovereign is he who chooses the null hypothesis.

Obligatory link - RCADFM, although note 'explained' here means 'regression coefficients' as opposed to 'clearly cannot be caused by'.

His objections were poor, and indeed asian crime rates are lower than other ethnicities countrywide. But that's what you'd expect from random chats on the internet - an actual attempt to resolve the question would've brought in more studies, rather than just throwing out objections. Reasons sounding dumber than those reasons can be enough to sink any particular study, though. Be wary of "random guy's objections to this were bad, therefore its methodology is good", you're not gonna find any signal in that.

indeed asian crime rates are lower than other ethnicities countrywide

Yes, but Asians are also richer than other ethnicities nationwide. What's interesting about New York City is that for some reason they have the highest poverty rate, and still commit the least crime.

Why Asians have such high poverty rates in New York City is an interesting question. I virtually never see this discussed except as a throwaway line in articles promoting the "Model Minority Myth" myth. I suspect that it has something to do with NYC being a destination for Asian immigrants with limited English and technical skills, and possibly some confounding by age (which would be relevant to the crime issue as well), but I'm not sure.

I suspect a lot of it is due to NYC Asians running small businesses and engaging in a lot of tax evasion, which makes them look artificially poorer than they actually are. No good evidence, though, just suspicion.

Now that you mention it, I'm having trouble finding it now, but I remember reading about some Chinese neighborhood in the US or Canada that ostensibly had a very high poverty rate, but was full of million-dollar houses, the explanation being that there was a ton of tax evasion going on.

Isn’t the pattern for Asian immigrants to be poor the first generation but have sky-high upward mobility thereafter? If NYC’s Asian population is more heavily 1st gen, or NYC has lower upward mobility, that could also be a factor.

I definitely agree with the tax evasion thing but think it’s probably not the explanatory factor.

Depending how the stats are reported, there's also a significant number of Asian college students at NYU/Columbia/Fordham/CUNY/Etc who have very low incomes, even if they are factually rich growing up and once they get a job they're in poverty statistically when they're in school. Idk if that matters in a city that size, but it's there.

Good point, but as you observe, I don’t think it matters in city of that scale. Even if there were 10 schools with 10 000 poor Asians in each, that would still only add up to less than 10% of NYC Asians.

Mexican Americans have lower average incomes than Black Americans but a much lower murder rate.

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