Data can help clarify complex problems

Oh, dear.  Inquisitive Bird is pecking at one of those dangerous third rails.  From Racial Homicide Disparities Since 1910 by Inquisitive Bird.  (S)He is stitching together a signal across different data sets over different time frames.  Even if one were dealing with something mundane like milk production, that constructing of data sets from multiple sources is always empirically fraught.  It is challenging in all sorts of ways, known and unknown.

But if the issue is consequential enough, sometimes it is worth both the time and money to do so and the risk of being embarrassingly wrong.  

Read the piece to understand the compromises made in order to arrive at a usable assembled data set.  Can we rely on it?  Plenty of reasons for having concerns.  Is it the best available?  Quite possibly.

And while there are plenty of other good goals out there (education, nutrition, health, environmental safety, etc.) reducing the murder rate seems like a viable good objective.  And to reduce the murder rate, we need to measure it.  And we know that our current methodologies are incomplete and frequently inconsistent.    And that is just data for the past thirty years.  What if we want to look at trends over the past century?  Hence the effort to jury-rig a data-set.

Inquisitive Bird proceeds through that empirical minefield and then casually wanders into the restricted zone of inter-race comparisons.  Yikes.  But to be fair, if we want to bring these death rates down, as I believe we would want, we do need to ask these questions.  And providing a centuries worth of data does begin to answer some questions.  

Here is the output from the stitching together of data sets.

Click to enlarge.

While there are many reasons for concerns and the means of creating the data set, this actually looks reasonably close to what I would have expected based on other research.

Thomas Sowell looked at a range of socio-econometric measures from 1900 or so till 1970 and observed that white-black gaps on many of those measures were closing for decades up till 1965 when they began to widen again.  And certainly that is what we see in this data related to murder.  

The fall in murders from a peak in the early 1990s is well known.  I am not sure I would have confidently told you that that was overwhelmingly a fall in murders among African-Americans.  It is clear, when examined closely, that there is a fall in the murder rate among whites as well but the great majority of the variance is in the black data.  

What this data begins to show us is that some of the more popular and lazier explanations simply won't do.

If we explain murder rates as a consequence of poverty, that Just So story has to be dismissed.  Financial well-being among all groups is multiples greater in 2020 than in  1900.  If poverty drives violent crime, then the murder rate should have plunged.

If structural racism is responsible for violent crime, then again the story does not hold water.  The US, especially after immigration reform in the mid-1960s is racially and culturally much more varied in 2020 than it was in 1900 and much less traditionally white.  If structural racism drives violent crime, then increasing diversity ought to driving violence up and we don't see that in the data.

Inquisitive Bird does not look at the ethnic data in detail post-1965 but Amu Chu and Jed Rubenfeld do so in their book, The Triple Package.   As America has become more racially diverse with increased immigration from abroad, different cultural groups have experienced differential outcomes independent of race.  In other words, African immigrants and black Caribbean immigrants to the US appear to do well, not against African Americans, but against the American average and even against the average for white Americans.  

Structural racism seems not to be an answer compatible with the data.

Nor does lax gun laws.  

Looking at the ebbs and flows of murder rates, it does not appear to match well across a century with relative degrees of gun control.

In the US in 1900, about 60% of the population lived on farms or in rural areas.  Places where guns were plentiful because they were necessary tools.  Across two world wars and with the emergence and increasing importance of the FBI and ATF, more and more laws, both federal and local, came into being controlling and restricting gun ownership and usage.    

The tide of gun control turned sharply in 2008 with the Heller decision and control of guns across the nation has become weaker and weaker since then.  

The correlation between the degree of gun control and the rate of murder just doesn't seem to be there, especially when broken out by race.  The worst rise in violent crime was in years when gun control was also rising.  In the past two decades murder rates have dropped while gun control has been rolled back.  The post-Floy rise in murder rates is completely uncorrelated with gun prevalence.  

So it does not appear to be poverty, or structural racism, or gun prevalence which are singularly or collectively driving murder rates.  So what is?

What this data suggests, to the degree that it is usefully accurate, is that none of the popular public policy nostrums are usefully true.  If we want to bring down the murder rate, we have to look at things beyond reducing poverty rate, increasing gun control or smashing the last vestiges of structural racism.  There might be other reasons for continuing to focus on those nostrums but they will not likely affect the murder rate.

Might a refocusing on social norms, improving policing, and reinforcing a functioning judicial system help?  That is not addressed in this research but there are reasons to suspect so.  Are there other public policy choices that might make a difference which are not even being considered but ought to be?  Almost certainly.  

But to do so we need to quit chasing that which does not work and Inquisitive Bird nudges us in that direction.  It is not enough to want to solve a problem.  We have to be brave enough to choose to solve the problem.