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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32405 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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I'm kind of with @TIRM on this one but have a slightly different theory on the mechanism. I think a good chunk of the difference comes down to public housing, which due to reasons both historical and economic skews overwhelmingly black. When you look at the UCR breakdown by county and municipality it quickly becomes apparent that it's not "America" or "Blacks" that have a crime problem, it's specific cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Saint Louis, and in some cases (where the data is sufficiently granular) specific neighborhoods like South Chicago and Central City New Orleans. This also conveniently explains a lot of the victimization statistics as Gang wars tend to happen in areas where the gangs hold sway and methed-out psychos generally have issues with bus fare.

What we have is a situation there are certain geographical pockets of violent crime that are so extreme that they are skewing the statistics for the entire population.

Edit to Add: this also ties in with @hanikrummihundursvin's comment below.

Rural South has a lot more shootings and murders than rural Washington, Vermont, or Idaho. There are indeed pockets of extreme crime, but it is by all means false that all “crime problem” is concentrated there.

Yes, the rural south may have more shootings per capita but I don't think that proves as much as you think it proves. Two murders in Smallville might be statistically equivalent to 500 in Metropolis but the latter is going to show up in the national statistics more than the former.

Sure, most of the crime is committed in cities, and these have most impact on national statistics, but what I point out is still a death blow to your argument as stated above:

When you look at the UCR breakdown by county and municipality it quickly becomes apparent that it's not "America" or "Blacks" that have a crime problem, it's specific cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Saint Louis, and in some cases (where the data is sufficiently granular) specific neighborhoods like South Chicago and Central City New Orleans.

The places you listed do most of work in bringing up the national crime rate, but it doesn't mean that there is no "crime problem" outside of these. Heavily black areas in the South have huge crime problem, with homicide rates often nearing those of big cities with lots of crime.

I think a good chunk of the difference comes down to public housing, which due to reasons both historical and economic skews overwhelmingly black. When you look at the UCR breakdown by county and municipality it quickly becomes apparent that it's not "America" or "Blacks" that have a crime problem, it's specific cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Saint Louis, and in some cases (where the data is sufficiently granular) specific neighborhoods like South Chicago and Central City New Orleans.

This is a greatly underpowered answer. While the study shades at blaming racism, the fact is affluent black young men appear to commit a lot more crime than white peers in the same income and housing.

Black people have a much higher propensity to crime at every income level, but single motherhood alone makes up almost all that difference. The problem is much clearer than people often let on.

The father is usually alive. Parents don't live together probably because one, or maybe both parents are assholes. These traits are passed to children. Doesn't neccessarily mean that forcing parents to live together will eliminate the gap. Remember, pre Civil-rights era such horrible share of single parent household didn't exist and the crime gap was about the same.

Obviously the parent is still alive, the question is if they are contributing to child care in any meaningful way. Just splitting the time between households is probably not meaningfully different than having 1 parent. The benefit of nuclear family is probably mostly in having more child rearing labor at any time. You actually see the same effect in Japan, except with traditional multi generational families having better outcomes vs nuclear families.

Parents don't live together probably because one, or maybe both parents are assholes. These traits are passed to children.

This may have some effect, but given that even significantly heritable factors like height and intelligence aren't that inheritable (I think IQ is roughly 30%?), it really doesn't fit.

Remember, pre Civil-rights era such horrible share of single parent household didn't exist and the crime gap was about the same.

Pre ~1950 data isn't that good in the first place, (EDIT: actually even now I don't think the data is excellent) but there is a pretty huge uptick in crime that fits very well with the adolescence of the first generation of single parent children.

I think you're looking at different parts of the elephant. Suppose propensity to commit violence has a distribution that, like the normal distribution, has the property that a small shift of the mean results in a large change at the tails. If that's true, if black people overall have a slightly higher mean propensity to commit violence, the tail of black people with a VERY high propensity to commit violence will be much larger than the same tail of white people, and will account for most of the staggering numbers like 13/53.

That, plus a tendency for blacks to live in conditions(eg, single motherhood, poverty, drug use) where that propensity is more likely to be realized.

Firstly that's not what the study says, secondly in order to actually rebutt my hypothesis you'd have to first answer the question; where are these "affluent black young men" coming from?

Prince Georges County, Maryland is the wealthiest predominantly-black county in America, but its crime rate is pretty high.

Well, they appear largely to be too young to have made the money themselves...

There may be studies that show a zip code breakdown that says that within zip codes there is no difference. I am not aware of such a study. This Times article appears to make the claim that living in wealthy neighborhoods does not protect black men from the devil of racism, which would seem to rebut your theory to an extent.

Hlynka is just shoveling the same copium that's been piling up for the last fifty years.

I never said it was poverty asshole, It's culture. As much as wokesters and their fellow travelers like to make hay out of blacks making up 38 percent of those incarcerated despite being only 15 percent of the general population, the fact remains that "is the son of a single mother" remains a far stronger predictor of whether someone will spend time in prison than their skin color, and that's a big part of why establishment liberals would rather make it about race.

Thing is that woke left and alt right have both made rolling their eyes at and talking down "boomer social-cons" a major component of their identity, and the last thing any of them want to do is admit that the Republicans were right about anything.

How do you know this is culture and not genetic confounding? Like, I'd imagine that men – regardless of race – who dump mothers of their own children have antisocial inclinations across the board, and perhaps women who find such men tolerable tend to possess subpar characters as well. It's reasonable to stipulate that this far left tail of black population explains much/most of their overrepresentation in violent crime statistics for genetic reasons, without bringing in some special single-parent culture.

Of course it's never 100% genetics. But that's no salvation to the theory. I'm pretty sure there was at least one study that showed that removing a violent/criminal father (as in, incarcerating him) is a net improvement for the child's outcomes, despite moving the family into single-mother category. Do we have good studies on the effect of those specific fathers being kept around the family, or just comparisons versus organic two-parent black homes?

In Africa, most of agriculture is done by women, who can survive by themselves, so less reasons for a male to be attached to a single woman.

To be fair that is a possible, and perhaps major confounder. At the same time it's not guys like me who are making excuses for sluts and deadbeats. And I can't help but suspect that there is something to the fact that those who are making such excuses are the same ones who are trying very hard to make any disparity in outcome out to be something biological rather than something to do with the fact that they've been making excuses for sluts and deadbeats regardless of how much conventional wisdom would seem to argue otherwise.

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