What should we be worried about? I’ll skip right to the conclusion. In my opinion we don’t have a lot to be worried about. However, the few things we should be worried about will be very difficult to deal with.
First, we shouldn’t be worried about violent crime.
Hat tip: New Geography
But what about the homicide rate in Chicago (I hear somebody ask)?
Both of the graphs above were derived using statistics from the FBI.
I don’t think we should be worried about either mass shootings or Islamist terrorist attacks in the United States. Fortunately, per Gallup a majority of us aren’t:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — More Americans are “very” or “somewhat” worried that they or a family member will become a victim of an Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack (47%) than they are about becoming a victim of a mass shooting (38%). But a majority of Americans say they are not worried about either potential event.
Why the enormous flurry of news reports? I believe it’s because politicians are very risk averse. If our leaders weren’t responding like infants, IMO even fewer Americans would be concerned about mass shootings or terrorist attacks than are.
IMO we shouldn’t be overly concerned about DAESH’s operations in Syria or Iraq, international terrorism, Iranian nuclear weapons development, North Korean military power, Russian military power, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, or China’s economic power.
I think that Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and the Gulf States should be very concerned about DAESH. Unfortunately, they’re divided with Turkey and Saudi Arabia actually supporting DAESH while Syria, Iraq, and Iran oppose it. Fortunately for us, we are not Syria, Iraq, Turkey, etc. Why are we supporting Turkey and Saudi Arabia? It’s a mystery to me.
Europe, particularly Germany, is the natural destination for immigrants from the Middle East whether refugees or economic migrants so the countries of Europe have substantial reasons to worry about DAESH and international terrorism. We are not the European countries. As long as we resist the temptation to create problems for ourselves by importing DAESH and international terrorism, they pose less of a threat to us than they do to the European countries or, obviously to Syria and Iraq and we should behave accordingly.
Why are our leaders so hysterical on these subjects? See above. They’re risk averse. They would rather spend trillions of dollars that could be used for any number of more worthy objects than take the risk they’ll be voted out of office for not acting.
As Gallup documents I am out of step with most Americans on the subject of these threats. Why do American politicians insist on strategies that have no hope of accomplishing the objectives they even more vehemently insist are vitally necessary? That’s another mystery to me.
What do I think are legitimate concerns? With most Americans, as Gallup notes, I think that the growth of government is a grave threat. I’m astonished, however, that so many Americans distinguish between Big Government, Big Labor, and Big Business. They’re all the same thing.
I think that we should be concerned about an economic downturn. As the historical review at the National Bureau of Economic Research shows, the last peak in the business cycle was in 2007. That we have not already passed the peak in the present cycle nine years later is simply incredible. Basically, we’re due.
Why should we be concerned? Because it’s highly likely that Europe and China are already in recession and will be looking to the U. S. to drag them out. They want to pull themselves up by our bootstraps. And the recovery from the Great Recession has been phlegmatic by practically any standard. We still haven’t created enough jobs to bring those who were thrown out of work during the Great Recession back. We can only speculate on what an economic downturn at this point would look like.
I think that we should be concerned that immigration is making the rich richer and keeping the poor poor. We have imported millions of mostly Mexican workers and, coincidentally, our society is coming to resemble Mexico’s than at any time during our history. Don’t blame Obama for the poor state of race relations. If you want an explanation look up “All you Americans are fired“.
I think that we should be concerned that trade is also making the rich richer and keeping the poor poor. Do we really care if trade increases GDP if the increases in income and wealth that result are all going to a very small cohort of wealthy Americans while other, poorer Americans are losing their jobs? I don’t think so.
Religion is no longer the opiate of the masses. War is.
As long as we resist the temptation to create problems for ourselves by importing DAESH and international terrorism, they pose less of a threat to us than they do to the European countries or, obviously to Syria and Iraq and we should behave accordingly.
What you mean “we”, pale face? I don’t find the prospect of Syrian refugees terribly tempting. Our imperial lords and masters, on the other hand, apparently want to import the entirety of the MENA to the US.
Certainly. What could possibly go wrong?
What could possibly go wrong?
I remember when people asked that question sarcastically instead of naively.
I think that we should be concerned that immigration is making the rich richer and keeping the poor poor.
You are so wrong. Matthew Yglesias explains it:
I like that Yglesias and the self-appointed EXPLAINERS OF EVERYTHING at Vox are stupid enough to they think that a slight economic benefit from immigration actually gets distributed completely equally on a per cap basis across the entirety of US society. Or perhaps they’re just lying their asses off for the people stupid enough to believe anything Vox writes. Hard to say.
Well, its the increase that matters, indiscriminate mass murder (IMM) has increased by a factor of ten from 1960 and 2010. Peter Turchin His hypothesis is that IMM (not limited to guns) is a form of political violence rooted in rage, whether it be due to economic changes (particularly for males), increased social competition and/or political polarization.
The reason we care about this:
1. These are attacks against society, we are all intended victims or recipient of the message.
2. They are increasing at a steady clip, showing no sign of abatement.
3. A portion of these attacks are from cultural groups that are legitimizing and encouraging more IMMs. There are designs to keep increasing the number of incidents.
4. To the extent, as Turchin argues these are ultimately political acts, I cannot help but notice groups like the 9/11 hijackers are a reaction to political events largely generated outside of the U.S. I fully expect foreign-based IMMs to generate more outrage.
Ellipsis:
One of the many things that the “self-appointed EXPLAINERS OF EVERYTHING” fail to understand is that having a reasonable expectation of an ongoing supply of unskilled labor changes the society. Imagine that there are two ways of sorting widgets. You can buy a widget-sorting machine or you can hire people to do it by hand. When you hire people to do it by hand, after doing it for a while, they probably think they deserve a raise, altering the economics in favor of buying a widget-sorting machine.
But when you know that there will always be more workers coming willing to work for minimum wage you won’t buy that widget-sorting machine.
We’re still the world’s greatest designers and manufacturers of widget-making machines. Buying more widget-making machines means more jobs for Americans designing and building widget-making machines. Note, too, Mead’s observations (mentioned in an earlier post) that there are decreasing returns to scale in maintaining our cities, roads, etc., costs that are shared among all of us whether we benefit from them or not.
That’s the choice. Being a very, very large country with a handful of very wealthy people, a struggling middle class, and a large lower class continually fortified by new immigrants living in mega-cities we are decreasingly willing to support (think: Metropolis) or a smaller country with a handful of somewhat less wealthy people, a large, prosperous middle class, and a small and shrinking lower class.
PD:
It’s hard to respond to your remarks about indiscriminate mass murder in any sort of succinct way in a comment to a blog post. One thing you might want to consider is the U. S. population has nearly doubled since 1960.
But let’s look at the chart from the post to which you linked. You can chart anything. I’m not sure it makes sense to chart something that occurs at the rate of one or two incidents per year. But let’s assume that it does. And let’s assume that the incidents of IMMs per 100,000 is actually concerning.
What is that chart actually graphing? I think it’s graphing immigration.
However, I think that Peter Turchin is drawing a pound of conclusions from an ounce worth of data.
It’s not unreasonable to conclude that there’s a civil war going on within Islam. IMO the solution to that as far as we’re concerned is to stop inviting ’em to carry it on here. There’s more than one way to do that, some obvious, some less so. One less obvious remedy would be to ban foreign support of imams (i.e. make them register as foreign agents).
That’s the choice.
Yeah, but it isn’t my choice or your choice, is it? Those that decide have made their choice, and it doesn’t much matter what we want.
From Professor Turchin article liked by @PD Shaw:
… During the 5-year period … that ended in 1960 there were 3 rampages, while in the 5 years that ended in 2010 there were 54. …
He includes very few numbers, and even those, he uses them in obscure ways. His per capita numbers are relative. I assume because dividing 3 by 180,000,000 or 0.000000016 rampages per capita in 1960 compared to 54 by 310,000,000 or 0.000000174 rampages per capita in 2010 looks non threatening, and since this in not anual, we need to divide by 5.
We are left with a problem of 0.000000003 rampages per capita in 1960 to 0.000000034 rampages per capita in 2010. Any problem that begins with, “pick the 4 people among your 10 million relatives and friends …” Now, a 10.4 increase is something the Malthusian, Population Explosion, Peak Oil, “Housing Bubble? I don’t see no stinking Housing Bubble.”, “Recession, What recession? It’s smooth sailing as far as the eye can see.”, and the AGW crowd can all get behind.
In other news, it looks like Saudi Arabia has decided it prefers US troops in the Middle East, or they are trying to give ISIS its next target – ISISI. Maybe the Saudis are counting on the next US president to protect them.
If I were a Saudi citizen or a royal, I think I would rather have Donald Trump protecting me than Hillary Clinton. I would take a look at Libya and Syria, and unless I was a head chopping terrorist, I would go with Trump.
TB:
Your observations about the extreme rarity of the phenomena being analyzed is analogous to the point I made but not identical to it. Let me put it this way. When dealing with a population in the hundreds of millions and incidence of the events under consideration in the couple of score, speaking of trends is empirically suspect. Return to the chart. Were there really twice as many “rampages” in the 5 year period 1965 to 1970 or was there one more?
This entire issue of asymmetric warfare at the lone wolf level worries me. With media’s power to magnify and the power of modern weapons and explosives, one nut with a gun and an agenda can tie up a city. Doesn’t matter if it’s ISIS or some crazy person sniping from the trunk of his car. I worry about its impact on civil liberties. And I worry about that same problem at the international level.
I’m all for cutting the Middle East loose. We can live without the only useful thing they’ve got, oil. I liked the Islamic Theme Park idea of yours Dave, but it presupposes I think that we cut off all immigration from the MENA. You’ve seen the reaction to that idea on the Left.
It also would require at the very least Canada to go along and their new Trudeau is doing just the opposite, importing large numbers of completely un-vetted Syrians who will soon have Canadian papers and thus unfettered access to the US.
Failing the Theme Park idea I don’t think we can walk away. So most likely we’ll just keep digging that hole, hopefully avoiding yet another invasion.
@Dave Schuler
I was more responding to the nutty professor’s justification of his original Freakonomics article, and his response to the, in his words, “violently negative comments” and “violent reaction” at Freakonomics. I am not sure what a violently positive comment would be, and I am not exactly sure how a comment can be sure.
(I do understand the “safe-space” concept, and my PR-24 helps to keep all micro-aggression out of it. For the macro-aggression, we increase the party goers.)
The actual numbers should indicate random chance is just as likely, and the data is so rough he has to use 5 year periods. The Freakonomics comments take him to task because his population is drawn from NYT reporting over the years he covered. As they pointed out, there is really no way to take anything useful from his data except that the incidents of rampage shootings reported by the NYT increased by a factor of 10 from 1960 to 2010.
Just because the NYT did not report it does not mean it did not happen.
Why do people misuse language so? When I strongly disagree with you, it’s vehemence. It’s not violence until I punch you in the nose or wring your neck. Conflating violence and vehemence is, to use Sam Clemens’s turn of phrase, confusing the lightning with the lightning bug.
Yes, they’re
messianicWilsonian. They just want to save the world from the convenience of their armchairs.Of course, given the security of the U. S.-Canadian border, that definitely poses no security issues whatever.
A strong candidate for most stupid article of the year:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-04/yellen-s-job-puzzle-why-are-20-somethings-retiring-
Mass murder incidents have increased significantly. People are not crazy to believe they have. The fact that the overall homicide rate is dropping, while this subset is increasing is part of what is striking.
Dave: The numbers are small, but the trend looks significant. Your chart shows Chicago currently at 15 homicides per 100,000 per year, down from 33 per in the early 90s. The tend shows this isn’t a fluke. Going from 0.6 IMM per 100,000 per year to 10.8 IMM per 100,000 per year similarly looks like a significant trend. Granted we don’t have access to Turchin’s database, but I would bet we will have closer to 10.8 next year than 0.6.
Tastybits: Using a per 100,000 rate is standard in criminal statistics, see Dave’s stats. He used five-year running averages to smooth the stats — perhaps this gives an impression that the trend is more certain than it really is. (I also suspect Dave’s first graph has been smoothed) I wish he’d given individual numbers though, as well as the number dead each year.
My point was that when the numbers are that small you can’t project trends at all. There is no way to distinguish between more reporting and higher incidence rate.
“They just want to save the world”
With 10,000 refugees.
Steve
“There is no way to distinguish between more reporting and higher incidence rate.”
That’s a critical point, something the intelligence community calls “collection bias.”
Part III of the series addresses reporting bias. I would note that the increased reporting of incidents in the 20s and 30s could support an immigration-related hypothesis, but I think its probably just one of many factors.
@PD Shaw
OK. I will play along. Instead of “0.000000034 rampages per capita in 2010”, I should have written: “For the five year period ending in 2010, there were 0.0034 rampages per 100,000 individuals per year of that period.”
In order to get at least one whole number, you need to dive into statistics. Going from 0.0003 to 0.0034 does not get anybody worked up, and it usually has the opposite effect. You need to begin using ratios, averages/means/medians, the change over time, and the change of the change over time to get the really big scary headline numbers.
The actual numbers are too small too even be rounding errors. You need to up the scale to per 10,000,000, at least, or at 100,000,000, you should get a much better reaction. Now you can go from 3 to 34, and using 5 year intervals, you get 15 to 170. If you are speaking, you can get slick and mix time scales.
“There were 3 rampages per 100 million people in 1960, but by the 5 year period ending in 2010, there were 170. That is an increase well beyond 10 times when the population had not even doubled.”
I had to read it a few times to convince myself that I was using the numbers to create a lie. Like with the meaning what “is is”, it is all true depending upon how far beyond 10 is truly “well beyond”, but as an absolute number, 0.4 is huge compared to the others we are manipulating.
Let’s assume there’s something real in the reported increase in mass murders. It’s political in the Aristotelian sense that everything that human beings do is political. I would characterize the cause as loss of social cohesion.
To what factors might one attribute loss of social cohesion? Off the top of my head I’d say the Great Migration, immigration, increasing separation by income level, declining influence of mainstream religions, by the 1970s changing sexual roles and the effect of foreign trade on domestic jobs, centralization of power, improved transportation, enhanced communication and greater volume of news reporting.
We also shouldn’t ignore the effects of personal empowerment. More powerful weapons means that murderous incidents that previously wouldn’t have been classified as mass murder now do. At the rate of incidence we’re talking about a couple of extra deaths in a couple of murderous incidents increase the rate of incidence.
@Dave Schuler
I would generally agree with your list of reasons, but we are using something other than the raw data to guide our choices. I draw mine from history, philosophy, and psychology, but the conclusion is subjective no matter how many agree with it.
Over 5 years and in a population of 310 million, there have only been 54 rampages. This is rather astounding considering some of the nutjobs the US produces. Even with the dwindling use of paper, I suspect that there is at least one paper cut per business workday.
Between 1960 and 2010, a lot has occurred, and there is no way to correlate those trends to increased rampage trends: lead paint decreased, seat belt usage increased, automobile mileage increased, urban outward migration increased, pornography got smuttier, male wimpiness increased, and marijuana potency increased substantially.
Rampages may be a symptom of a growing problem, but I suspect that other related symptoms have manifested whether anybody wants to admit it or not. These other unacknowledged symptoms usually do not support the hypothesis, and even worse, they may support the opposite conclusion.
I skimmed through Part III, and I did not see him refer to the second derivative specifically. Almost all of the doomsday predictions are based upon taking the acceleration of the change in the number of something over time and projecting it into the future. They draw a conclusion, and they usually find the worst case to support the conclusion. This is a bad tactic because the worst cases are probably outliers, and they are going to really screw-up your dataset. (Altering datasets that do not fit the narrative. Now, where have I heard about that?)
@For those who want a simple example of this trick
Multiply your car’s acceleration (0-60MPH) by 25,020, and that is how many hours it will take to reach Earth’s escape velocity (speed). For a 2015 Toyota Camry XSE V6, it is about 71 hours (5.7 ft/sec^2 0-60MPH acceleration). There are online calculators for acceleration and foot to mile and MPS to MPH converters. It is a miracle nobody has been hurled into space yet.
The reason is because of the much beloved and ever feared feedback loop. The engine will blow a gasket or some other mechanical failure, especially due to extremely high heat.
Plotting a course to the Moon is extremely difficult, and any deviation would send the lunar spacecraft off-course into the depths of space. The first problem is getting the whole thing out into space. A rocket has no aerodynamic features, and it is naturally unstable. The stable flight trajectory is accomplished through small thrusters, and it is through feedback sensors the computer determines how to adjust.
Usually, the change predicted requires a sudden, unforeseen, and mostly unstoppable event which will overwhelm the feedback mechanisms. An asteroid the size of Manhattan hits Earth, and the dinosaurs are doomed. Keynesian dollars flood the system faster than asset values can increase to support the credit backing them, and the financial system Ponzi scheme collapses. An engineering defect in a structure becomes critical, and the structure fails catastrophically. The soaring stock market is really hollow, and when it begins dropping, there are no buyers causing prices to plummet.
A community organizer fundamentally transforms US foreign policy, and unsurprisingly, the world is singing “Springtime for Terrorists and Rogue States”.