Living richer and safer.

From Underpoliced and Overprisoned, revisited by Alex Tabarrok. Quoting others.

“The United States today is the only country I know of that spends more on prisons than police,” said Lawrence W. Sherman, an American criminologist on the faculties of the University of Maryland and Cambridge University in Britain. “In England and Wales, the spending on police is twice as high as on corrections. In Australia it’s more than three times higher. In Japan it’s seven times higher. Only in the United States is it lower, and only in our recent history.”

Interesting insight.

I was especially struck by this:

The everyday lived experience of urban poverty has also been transformed. Analyzing rates of violent victimization over time, I found that the poorest Americans today are victimized at about the same rate as the richest Americans were at the start of the 1990s. That means that a poor, unemployed city resident walking the streets of an average city today has about the same chance of being robbed, beaten up, stabbed or shot as a well-off urbanite in 1993. Living in poverty used to mean living with the constant threat of violence. In most of the country, that is no longer true.

Hard to grasp or accept but it is from a reliable and reputable source. And the 1990s were definitely dangerous, particularly in the cities where the steepest declines in criminality have occurred.

But this allows to pair a couple of very striking temporal comparisons.

The bottom quintile of Americans in income have the same purchasing power of the middle quintile of Americans in 1970 and of European middle quintile today.

The poorest Americans today are victimized at about the same rate as the richest Americans were at the start of the 1990s.

In the first instance, the bottom quintile are not earning all that much more (or at all more) but they are the beneficiaries of a far more robust (though haphazard) safety net than existed in 1970. The ownership rate in America of the bottom quintile of homes, cars, smartphones, computers, etc. is astonishing and rivals the top quintiles for many OECD countries.

They are relatively poor in American terms. They are not poor at all in OECD terms. This is not to belittle their condition and the gap between them and their prosperous fellow citizens. Merely to observe that solving problems of absolute poverty (which hardly exists) and relative poverty are two different problems with two different solution sets.

And not only are the richer, they are safer. These are good things.

But we are hostages to old stereotypes and prior assumptions.