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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Percent increase seems unreasonable.

If country X has GDP of 1m and Country Y has GDP of 1t a 3% increase in country X is likely easier than Country Y.

Run into the same problem here.

Smaller absolute numbers are still more likely to be outliers. The very first iteration of this argument I saw was trying to make the opposite point (that R cities had a bigger increase than D cities), and it did so by cherry-picking out some random tier 3.5 cities with an R mayor that went from 4 murders to 8, and weighed that "100% increase" against the "50% increase" from major cities depicting hundreds of excess murders. Hundreds of discrete murders is obviously going to offer more statistical reliability than something like "This year had an unusually lethal driveby shooting". Similarly, it would be asinine to look at stats from the early 2000's and count 2001 as having an extra 3000 murders in NYC.

You really can't, because the largest city with a Republican mayor is Jacksonville, Florida and has less than a million people. For really large cities there's no basis for comparison.

The problem is that large cities may be different than smaller ones in ways that do not scale linearly with population.

That's fair. If we really wanted to answer the question, given the disparity in mayorships for big cities, we might want to do something like find the 50 largest Republican-run cities, and then compare that to the 50 Democrat-run cities with the closest demographics.

Assume same population. I’m not arguing that absolute levels are the right indicator but rate indicators are also not the right indicator as it isn’t apples to apples. Even sometimes per capita can hide things. For example, is Chicago or Memphis more deadly. Well, the answer is…it depends and as with many of these things it depends how city lines are drawn etc.

I agree that it is a difficult question. Perhaps one way to try to judge it is to see where and how policy changes (at state and local level) and see the impact. For example if Memphis introduced policy X but the state didn’t change and crime decreased Y then that is some evidence X did something. Now you have to adjust for a host of things so it ain’t easy.

Yeah I tend to agree empirically. Presumably there are some theoretical concepts that can be applied.

Did you read the Substack post? He makes a similar argument but proposes a different methodology to account for this. But he was using the data in the original Tweets which contained an arbitrary set of cities and used varying "to this point in 2020" datasets that varied based on the available data. I ran his methodology with a complete dataset, and the results came to the opposite conclusion. If he were simply trying to prove that the Twitter guys were spouting crap then there's no disagreement there, but the article comes to the conclusion that increases were higher in Democratic-run cities, which his methodology doesn't support if you look at a complete dataset.

No didn’t read it. Will read it now. I’m agnostic on the question (my guess is crime increases are generally not directly related to policy but a host of things including policy). Just saw discussions of rate and was thinking that may be inaccurate due to different sized populations.

I generally don’t like reading blog posts by someone posting “come read my blog”.

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