A couple of days ago, I posted Facts and Emotional Friends.
The genesis was a social media post from a friend overseas outraged over American gun policies that would allow a Uvalde tragedy. Even though I have a reasonably close relationship with and respect for this friend, we obviously come from quite different personal backgrounds, two different countries with different histories, national cultures, etc.
We can all be anguished over the Uvalde tragedy. The question is what can be done to prevent a similar incident in the future? Gun control is obviously an instinctive response for anyone from a nation where power and authority are centrally concentrated. With their predicates, it can make perfect sense. However, there are many empirical reasons for disputing this line of reasoning and pursuing other lines. Always towards the shared common goal of fewer violent deaths.
But these legitimate reasons can be obscured when people don't share common national, historical or cultural roots. When they don't share a common fact-sheet.
And then there are the trade-offs between goals. Americans, or at least many of them, have always taken seriously, in a way uncommon in other OECD countries, the argument that the right to arms for self-defense is a philosophically credible argument. There is a fundamental trade-off for them between the right of self-defense and the supposed safety which might come through gun control.
An argument which has always been contemptuously dismissed by the American left-leaning chattering class but which has taken on heightened salience in the past couple of years.
The political class in many American cities adopted, de facto if not de jure, a defund the police policy. It has been an unpopular but consequential choice and is already beginning to have severe consequences at the polls. Even in cities where there might not be severe political consequences (San Francisco, Portland, Minneapolis), there are still dramatic negative changes to the city quality of life.
One of the primary results of the defund policy has been a very large surge in crime in some of our largest cities, particularly violent crime. The numbers aren't fully in yet for 2021 to allow detailed analyses but it appears that government choosing not to enforce laws may have cost between 500-2,500 additional lives.
In addition, during Covid, we had the violent riots in 2020 related to George Floyd. It became clear, no matter how bad the violence might be, there would be occasions when the police either would not, could not, or were not allowed to protect individual citizens and their property.
It is in that context, rising crime and violence and falling police protection, that the argument that arms for self-defense as a human right becomes surprisingly more relevant. To many people in many places, it either appears, or is clear, that the State will no longer perform one of its most fundamental duties.
In my solidly (90-95%) blue neighborhood in Atlanta, Democrat policy fads are always well received and chattered about and gun control is deeply supported. But even in this deep blue privileged neighborhood with its own security patrol, people are talking openly on NextDoor about which guns to purchase and where to practice for self-defense. The surge in crime isn't as bad as the social media response would indicate but it does reveal that even the most anti-gun communities can, under the right circumstances, find an unexpected affection for the Second Amendment.
But how do you approach formulating such an argument where two individuals have materially different cultures, histories, and fact sheets. My friend in Asia Pacific would have none of that context. Goodwill and mutual trust is obviously a predicate but pragmatically how should you formulate an argument where there are such different constructs.
This challenge is already big enough within a country where you have class and regionalism as factors which mean that people engage at very different levels of agreement on whatever might be the relevant facts. When you magnify it globally, it seems daunting to establish a way for people to structure arguments in a fashion that they can make nuanced and sophisticated choices based on common goals but without a shared fact base.
In the earlier post I offered the example of how to deal with the implied statement that the US is uniquely violent as measured by school shootings. It serves as an example where definitions make a huge difference and I provided evidence which is not usually acknowledged.
I made the point that the first step is to establish shared definitions and then gather open data and illustrated how that could lead to a different outcome from the stereotype that the US is a uniquely violent society.
Commenter argued that with different definitions and constructs, the conclusion would be different and that is almost tautologically true. The purpose is the definitions and the open data. How you then extract interpretations and construct forecasts in order to derive new workable policies is a second and third order process once you have achieved the first step. I make no prediction as to what the policy implications might be until there is agreement on goals, definitions, and measured data.
But his query is the opening to a different point which I omitted in the first post because of its complexity and delicacy. It is a point which makes America very difficult for foreign observers to understand and interpret.
America is profoundly heterogenous. By history and by design.
At one point in my career, I was seconded to Australia to turn around a consulting practice. The first few months of such an assignment are overwhelming because you are new and have no context. You need to understand the structure of your own business, your people, the culture of business, the laws of the land, etc. All as quickly as possible.
As part of the process of making myself aware, I was spending time in all parts of the business listening and learning. I spent several days with the HR department to understand the backlog of issues, the emergent problems and the legal context.
With regard to the latter, I asked about the nature of labor law in Australia and diversity. I was of course thinking in terms of affirmative action obligations and restrictions which might constrain management of personnel. But my intent was not clear and my HR people assured me that the practice was quite diverse.
Even though that wasn't what I had intended to ask, I was quite astonished by the assertion. Australia at that time might have been 1% Aborigine, 5% Asian and 94% European ancestry. I did not believe there to be a problem because the practice conformed reasonably closely with those numbers but I was intrigued by the claim of deep diversity.
I asked what diversity they were talking about? "Oh, we have Greeks, and Lebanese, and Italians." Well, yes, they did have employees with that ancestry. They were correct.
My point being that they considered themselves highly heterogenous when in other contexts they could easily be seen to be highly homogenous (everyone from the cities, everyone college educated, everyone middle class, etc.)
America is a continent-like country with virtually every geography, topography, and environment represented. Our peoples have been here for 15,000 years, for five hundred years, for a generation or two, or only for a fraction of their life. Every race, every ethnic group, virtually every religion, virtually every culture are here. People from every nation.
There are many examples where there are more of a particular group in the US than there are in the originating home country. As an example, there are about nine million people in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. There are some 31 million Americans of Irish descent. The second largest population of Greeks outside Greece is in America with 3 million. There are 500,000 Cape Verdeans in Cape Verde and 100,000 in America. There are 10 million Americans of Swedish descent and 10 million Swedes in Sweden.
We are inherently and astonishingly heterogenous.
Our Classical Liberal Constitution was created to accommodate that heterogeneity. And it has worked extraordinarily well to encompass and recognize rights and freedoms for everyone who has the gift of being an American. It is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world. We have the oldest and third oldest political parties anywhere in the world. (For some posts on American exceptionalism and on early perspectives about civic violence, see Blithely unaware and It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.)
In the 1970s, I had a friend from Belfast in Northern Ireland. This would have been at the height of The Troubles. Terrorist attacks and bombs in Northern Ireland were frequent international headlines. On one occasion I asked him about Belfast and what it was like living there. His response was like that of any other person proud of their hometown. The things to go and see, the history, the university, the weather, etc.
It seemed incomplete given the headlines. "What about all the violence and bombings? Aren't you afraid?"
"No, those don't happen where I live." It seemed an almost untruthful statement but he talked it through and intellectually I could see his point but instinctively I could not shake the disconnect between his delightful descriptions and the headlines.
Over the following decades I have encountered this phenomenon time and again. Things can be dramatically, awfully true (terrorist bombing) and still not be particularly impactful to those on the ground. Either because of physical or social distance or relevance or for some other reason.
It is the same in the US where we are a leading example of Simpson's Paradox. Years ago there was a debate about whether unionized teachers in Wisconsin produced better education outcomes (as measured on a standardized test) versus teachers in right-to-work Texas.
The Wisconsin teachers union pointed out that Wisconsin students in aggregate had a higher average test score than those in Texas. And that was a true fact.
Texas teachers responded by pointing out that every ethnic group in Texas (Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans) scored higher than their counterparts in Wisconsin. And that also was a true fact.
Hence the Simpson's Paradox.
Because Texas is one of our six minority-majority states and because test score averages among different ethnic groups are quite wide, Texas was both providing a better education outcome to all its students than was Wisconsin but with a lower overall average score (because of differences in population proportions.)
That Simpson's Paradox holds true internationally as well.
Where the data exists, and it is patchy, for every single socio-economic metric that I have ever seen, American populations outperform, usually by significant percentages, those in their home continent origins. [It is difficult to find comparable data by specific ethnic or cultural groups across countries].
American Blacks, Whites, Asians, etc are richer than any of their peers in their native continents of origin. They are longer lived. They are better educated. They are more literate. They have higher incomes and generate greater productivity. They are healthier. They are more tolerant. They are more inclusive. They are more likely to intermarry across race and faith lines. They are less violent.
The data is patchy but I have yet to come across an exception to this rule.
If this is true, why does America have a bad reputation on so many of these measures. Simpson's Paradox! All individual groups in America do better than their peers elsewhere but there are still material differences between groups with different ethnic origins. We are religiously, culturally, ethnically, professionally, heterogeneous to a degree seen almost nowhere else.
And to confirm a key point - this is cultural rather than racial. Igbo Nigerians in America do, on average, better than their Igbo peers in Nigeria. They also do materially better than American whites. And dramatically better than American blacks. It is not race but culture but often we have to use race as a proxy for culture due to an absence of data specificity.
Which brings us to my Asia Pacific friend's outrage and naive recommendations. He does not know or see what is a little more clear within the US.
Just as with my Belfast friend all those years ago, heterogeneity makes things hard to understand. The individual is not the average and the average does not reflect the individual.
Violence, and especially gun violence is highly concentrated in the US by geography and by demography. Most murders occur in cities and in Black neighborhoods. Some 55% of all American murders fall into that narrow population.
If I am a White American, my experience of gun violence is much better than almost anyplace in Europe. Same with Asian Americans (compared to anywhere in Asia). Same with Hispanics. Same with Black Americans.
It is only when compared with one another that the tragic differences emerge. Under broadly the same gun laws across the nation, different communities suffer at staggeringly different levels. Which ultimately suggests that there is something different going on than anything to do with gun control per se.
It is almost certainly the case that local culture, behaviors, policing policies, and especially conditions of mental health and substance abuse are far more determinative of gun violence outcomes than is the simple issue of access to guns. It seems impossible to believe if you come from a relatively homogenous culture of low violence and high state authoritarianism, but that does not make it untrue.
A huge fall in American crime, but particularly violent crime, began in the mid to late-1990s. And broadly continued for twenty-five years until a couple of years ago when it rebounded in particular cities. Restrictive gun control was far more prevalent in the 1990s than in the post Heller decision in 2008. The recent rebound in crime is concentrated in certain cities and is associated with changes in policing policies, not changes in gun control.
It is clear that there are social policies that can work and it also very unclear that crime fell owing to presence or absence of guns. None of this would my Asia Pacific friend know.
The majority of mass killings almost always involve one or more of three factors - 1) the perpetrator has a known prior history of mental illness with associated ideation around violence and/or suicide; 2) the perpetrator is already known to law enforcement owing to past threats and/or past crimes; and 3) the perpetrator acquired weapons illegally.
There is an additional factor. The most suggested gun control solutions proposed after such tragedies almost inevitably would have not actually made a difference. The overwhelming majority of American gun deaths are from handguns and yet the great majority of gun control proposals relate to long guns. Two thirds of American gun deaths are suicides, not murders. Most mass murderers are already known to law enforcement even without Red Flag laws.
We do need changes in public policy and in laws but they do need to be Constitutional, pragmatic, consented to by the electorate, and effective.
What those changes might be certainly warrants discussion and invested effort. We lose 15,000 each year to murders and 30,000 to suicide. And in the background, we lose 100,000 to drug overdoses.
The prize is great if we are able to effect even a fraction of improvement. The longer we spend focusing on gun control policies which are contested and likely ineffective, the less time we spend where it is likely to yield the greatest result. It is clear that mental health assessment, care and services is at least one part of the equation (mass murders, murders, suicides and drug overdoses). Law enforcement also seems a critical element. Regardless of gun control laws, violent crime rises and falls based on policing policies.
But back to my friend. With none of this knowledge but with an abundance of moral outrage, how can there even be a meeting of minds. Certainly not in a social media discussion. These are discussions to be had face-to-face, voice-to-voice. Still a challenge to abate the outrage and reach some sort of common knowledge and common agreement on direction and possibly policy.
Hard but doable. Over time.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment