The Left is highly selective about when the data matters, but when it decides it does, it expects everyone to draw all our conclusions based on the data alone.
When inclusion and exclusion criteria for datasets is in constant flux, any assignments of statistical variance within those datasets are rendered essentially meaningless.
Where Mr. Yglesias' prognostications are concerned, bland assertions delivered with a simulacrum of erudition are entirely unconvincing.
The maddening thing about statistics is when people use them to justify a wholly unrelated point. The most obvious example that comes to mind is when immigration activists cite illegal aliens as being less criminal than the overall population. Strictly speaking, I don’t doubt that’s true—most people would forgo a life of crime if a mundane, low-level offense like a speeding ticket opened the door to deportation. But it misses the more salient point: every crime committed by an illegal immigrant is one that would never have happened had the government enforced the border. Try telling any of those families that their daughters’ murders were a statistical anomaly and see how much goodwill that gets you.
That being said, I’m glad to hear the crime statistics report a downward trend, and I hope it continues. I won’t give either president credit for crime rates, but I will judge how our political parties influence the culture at large. While I think it’s dangerous to be completely deferential to the police—I think they need oversight and that we shouldn’t treat them as beyond reproach—I would argue it’s infinitely more dangerous to defund them and to empathize with criminals more than with their victims.
[Edit: now that I think of it, here’s an article Max would surely like, it’s right up your alley:
The gist is, the modern progressive is so hellbent on being seen as tolerant that they’ve surrendered their communities to antisocial assholes. The author cites an example of some guy who drives an extremely loud sports car through downtown Seattle in the wee hours of the morning, apparently for sport, and even the cops are afraid to cite him for anything, presumably because he’s black.]
Thanks for that Unherd piece. It looks outstanding. It's definitely required reading for me! I've already shared it with Rod Dreher; hopefully, he'll have something to say about it too.
I won't sugarcoat it at all: for all analyses of crime rates in America, you must compare young black male criminality to everyone else. Nobody else even comes close. They are the drivers of the statistics, for better or worse.
Noah is very smart, an economics PhD, and a liberal to progressive. He is the perfect distillation of the class of people who aren't driving anarcho-tyranny but will happily sit by while it happens as long as their they get their Starbucks and the Amazon drones still drop off cool stuff. I like Noah and I respect Noah, but he's too blinded by ideology and data to notice what's actually going on. However, I read Noah as a reminder that I may also be blinded by ideology, and getting outside your bubble is important.
I don't think that article is paywalled, and it's worth reading.
Thank you for sharing that article. I’ve never heard of this guy, but I thought his analysis was reasonable, even if he thumbed his nose at “MAGA people” like myself, lol.
One of the issues worth discussing is that a lot of things that used to be treated as crimes—drug use, gun possession, noise ordinance violations, petty theft, etc.—are either decriminalized or ignored by the authorities. So while I’m glad to hear that the official crime statistics are down, I still imagine a lot of people say their neighborhoods are less orderly than a decade ago. Then we end up with this scenario where the expert class keeps telling ordinary people that our perceptions are way off, because look what the FBI said!
Obviously Trump is incentivized to say things are going to hell and Biden is incentivized to say they’re improving. Truth be told, I don’t think the president has much effect on crime at all. And the folks pontificating on how crime may have risen because Trump is a jackass… well, let’s just say that reveals more about them than about their country.
The problem is that crime may be down, but it in no way changes the security landscape of the country. We're really no safer of a country today than we were this same day a year ago. The risks are the same, it's just that the average risk across the board has declined numerically. But this means as much as the average summer temperature going from 95 to 90 degrees. A 5-degree drop is statistically significant, but really; can you feel a difference between 95 and 90 degrees? This is the problem with looking at the world through a statistical lens.
The irony of the presidency: there's not much you can do to make things better, but there's plenty you can do to make it worse. What the president can do is at least provide leadership and be a calming influence. Trump obviously didn't provide either, but neither does Biden. I think Biden benefited from Trump-fatigue and the media obviously covers for Biden more than they did for Trump. But by any objective standard, Biden's rhetoric has been exceptionally divisive, he just lacks the stand-up comedian bombast of Trump, so it flies under the radar much easier.
While I don't necessarily blame Biden for the increasing disorder in the country, I also think he's been sowing it and actually benefits from it, for reasons I've explained numerous times on this blog.
Noah has me blocked on X. For that reason alone, I'm not inclined to read his article. However, since you're the one who shared it with me, I gave it a skim. It's precisely what I expected; pro-regime propaganda validated with fact.
However, this part did stand out to me as the most intellectually honest part of the piece:
"First of all, it now seems obvious to me that the recent crime wave was the result of social unrest. There were no obvious policy changes, economic factors, etc. that could have caused the rise, and popular long-term explanations like childhood lead poisoning and abortion rates just changed way too slowly to have caused such a sudden rise.
Instead, social unrest — most commonly referred to as the “Ferguson Effect”, after the 2014 Ferguson protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s death — is the overwhelmingly likely explanation for the rise in crime. In fact, the “Ferguson Effect” is really two effects — 1) police scaling back their policing effort, and 2) people being mad about the incidents that sparked the unrest."
I agree with this assessment, but the reason I still can't give him credit is that he follows up this great assessment with the accusation that conservatives and MAGA are the ones who aren't being nuanced. Meanwhile, the Left is peddling false narratives of cops "hunting" Blacks, murdering unarmed Blacks, and crime being basically fake and crime rates being forever at 2014 levels (which, in relative terms, were still high by global standards). Were they being nuanced?
Yes, the Right overstates the problem. Sometimes, the Right even misunderstands the problem. But the Left has done far, far more damage with its own lack of nuance. This isn't up for debate. The Right's problems with nuance haven't led to crime waves. They haven't led to deaths, injuries, and millions of dollars in property damage. We all need to be more nuanced, but for Noah to suggest the Right's lack of nuance is a big problem is an absurd level of intellectual dishonesty.
He then says:
"Maybe Biden’s calming, grandfatherly presence in the White House helped cool the passions unleashed by the Trump era — but if so, we’ll never really know."
LOL. Like I said in the article, all this implies is that Biden is basically a mob boss who knows how to reel his thugs in. Not something praise-worthy.
As for Biden funding police departments as though it were out of his own pocket, all this validates is that yes, defund the police was a real thing, and Biden was basically making up for what was clearly a problematic political effort. I honestly don't see how this makes Biden any kind of hero, though I certainly understand he's the greatest president the Left ever had. In fact, Biden's MO this entire presidency has been to gaslight or simply not talk about a problem, act like he can't do something about it, then suddenly do something and expect everyone to thank him for it.
That’s a reasonable take. It’s funny how the author gives Biden a ton of credit for trying to solve a problem by throwing money at it… when it’s his own party that has probably done the most damage by questioning the necessity of the police and turning a blind eye toward blatant lawlessness. Oh well.
When inclusion and exclusion criteria for datasets is in constant flux, any assignments of statistical variance within those datasets are rendered essentially meaningless.
Where Mr. Yglesias' prognostications are concerned, bland assertions delivered with a simulacrum of erudition are entirely unconvincing.
The maddening thing about statistics is when people use them to justify a wholly unrelated point. The most obvious example that comes to mind is when immigration activists cite illegal aliens as being less criminal than the overall population. Strictly speaking, I don’t doubt that’s true—most people would forgo a life of crime if a mundane, low-level offense like a speeding ticket opened the door to deportation. But it misses the more salient point: every crime committed by an illegal immigrant is one that would never have happened had the government enforced the border. Try telling any of those families that their daughters’ murders were a statistical anomaly and see how much goodwill that gets you.
That being said, I’m glad to hear the crime statistics report a downward trend, and I hope it continues. I won’t give either president credit for crime rates, but I will judge how our political parties influence the culture at large. While I think it’s dangerous to be completely deferential to the police—I think they need oversight and that we shouldn’t treat them as beyond reproach—I would argue it’s infinitely more dangerous to defund them and to empathize with criminals more than with their victims.
[Edit: now that I think of it, here’s an article Max would surely like, it’s right up your alley:
https://unherd.com/2024/06/california-has-surrendered-its-streets-to-assholes/
The gist is, the modern progressive is so hellbent on being seen as tolerant that they’ve surrendered their communities to antisocial assholes. The author cites an example of some guy who drives an extremely loud sports car through downtown Seattle in the wee hours of the morning, apparently for sport, and even the cops are afraid to cite him for anything, presumably because he’s black.]
Thanks for that Unherd piece. It looks outstanding. It's definitely required reading for me! I've already shared it with Rod Dreher; hopefully, he'll have something to say about it too.
I won't sugarcoat it at all: for all analyses of crime rates in America, you must compare young black male criminality to everyone else. Nobody else even comes close. They are the drivers of the statistics, for better or worse.
Our country's inability to come to terms with this fact is another reason why we're coming apart. Reality bites, but living by lies will destroy you.
Max, on the same day as your article, this one appeared from Noah Smith: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/yes-of-course-crime-is-way-down
Noah is very smart, an economics PhD, and a liberal to progressive. He is the perfect distillation of the class of people who aren't driving anarcho-tyranny but will happily sit by while it happens as long as their they get their Starbucks and the Amazon drones still drop off cool stuff. I like Noah and I respect Noah, but he's too blinded by ideology and data to notice what's actually going on. However, I read Noah as a reminder that I may also be blinded by ideology, and getting outside your bubble is important.
I don't think that article is paywalled, and it's worth reading.
Thank you for sharing that article. I’ve never heard of this guy, but I thought his analysis was reasonable, even if he thumbed his nose at “MAGA people” like myself, lol.
One of the issues worth discussing is that a lot of things that used to be treated as crimes—drug use, gun possession, noise ordinance violations, petty theft, etc.—are either decriminalized or ignored by the authorities. So while I’m glad to hear that the official crime statistics are down, I still imagine a lot of people say their neighborhoods are less orderly than a decade ago. Then we end up with this scenario where the expert class keeps telling ordinary people that our perceptions are way off, because look what the FBI said!
Obviously Trump is incentivized to say things are going to hell and Biden is incentivized to say they’re improving. Truth be told, I don’t think the president has much effect on crime at all. And the folks pontificating on how crime may have risen because Trump is a jackass… well, let’s just say that reveals more about them than about their country.
The problem is that crime may be down, but it in no way changes the security landscape of the country. We're really no safer of a country today than we were this same day a year ago. The risks are the same, it's just that the average risk across the board has declined numerically. But this means as much as the average summer temperature going from 95 to 90 degrees. A 5-degree drop is statistically significant, but really; can you feel a difference between 95 and 90 degrees? This is the problem with looking at the world through a statistical lens.
The irony of the presidency: there's not much you can do to make things better, but there's plenty you can do to make it worse. What the president can do is at least provide leadership and be a calming influence. Trump obviously didn't provide either, but neither does Biden. I think Biden benefited from Trump-fatigue and the media obviously covers for Biden more than they did for Trump. But by any objective standard, Biden's rhetoric has been exceptionally divisive, he just lacks the stand-up comedian bombast of Trump, so it flies under the radar much easier.
While I don't necessarily blame Biden for the increasing disorder in the country, I also think he's been sowing it and actually benefits from it, for reasons I've explained numerous times on this blog.
Noah has me blocked on X. For that reason alone, I'm not inclined to read his article. However, since you're the one who shared it with me, I gave it a skim. It's precisely what I expected; pro-regime propaganda validated with fact.
However, this part did stand out to me as the most intellectually honest part of the piece:
"First of all, it now seems obvious to me that the recent crime wave was the result of social unrest. There were no obvious policy changes, economic factors, etc. that could have caused the rise, and popular long-term explanations like childhood lead poisoning and abortion rates just changed way too slowly to have caused such a sudden rise.
Instead, social unrest — most commonly referred to as the “Ferguson Effect”, after the 2014 Ferguson protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s death — is the overwhelmingly likely explanation for the rise in crime. In fact, the “Ferguson Effect” is really two effects — 1) police scaling back their policing effort, and 2) people being mad about the incidents that sparked the unrest."
I agree with this assessment, but the reason I still can't give him credit is that he follows up this great assessment with the accusation that conservatives and MAGA are the ones who aren't being nuanced. Meanwhile, the Left is peddling false narratives of cops "hunting" Blacks, murdering unarmed Blacks, and crime being basically fake and crime rates being forever at 2014 levels (which, in relative terms, were still high by global standards). Were they being nuanced?
Yes, the Right overstates the problem. Sometimes, the Right even misunderstands the problem. But the Left has done far, far more damage with its own lack of nuance. This isn't up for debate. The Right's problems with nuance haven't led to crime waves. They haven't led to deaths, injuries, and millions of dollars in property damage. We all need to be more nuanced, but for Noah to suggest the Right's lack of nuance is a big problem is an absurd level of intellectual dishonesty.
He then says:
"Maybe Biden’s calming, grandfatherly presence in the White House helped cool the passions unleashed by the Trump era — but if so, we’ll never really know."
LOL. Like I said in the article, all this implies is that Biden is basically a mob boss who knows how to reel his thugs in. Not something praise-worthy.
As for Biden funding police departments as though it were out of his own pocket, all this validates is that yes, defund the police was a real thing, and Biden was basically making up for what was clearly a problematic political effort. I honestly don't see how this makes Biden any kind of hero, though I certainly understand he's the greatest president the Left ever had. In fact, Biden's MO this entire presidency has been to gaslight or simply not talk about a problem, act like he can't do something about it, then suddenly do something and expect everyone to thank him for it.
I award Biden no points.
That’s a reasonable take. It’s funny how the author gives Biden a ton of credit for trying to solve a problem by throwing money at it… when it’s his own party that has probably done the most damage by questioning the necessity of the police and turning a blind eye toward blatant lawlessness. Oh well.