At Illinois Policy Patrick Andriesen and Jon Josko report that violent crime has risen in Chicago over the last year:

Chicagoans experienced 7.2% more violent crime from August 2023 through July 2024 than during the previous 12 months, with cases of aggravated assault, aggravated battery and robbery reaching five-year highs.

Residents reported 30,375 violent crimes through July. Cases of violent crime increased but the arrest rate for these felonies dropped to just 12.8%, the second-lowest level in the past five years.

Overall, robberies were the most common violent crime, accounting for 36% of incidents. Batteries and assaults were an additional 57% of cases.

That’s probably understated. As I have documented before a significant number of 911 calls requiring a police response go without such a response. That means that they are not even included in the police statistics. If that happens enough people stop reporting crimes.

So-called “smash and grab” robberies are a multiple times nightly occurrence, sometimes a dozen times a night or more. Recently, these have taken the form of using a truck or SUV, frequently stolen, and chains to tear the doors off a store or restaurant. Frequently, the robbers get very little from such robberies and the damage is much more costly than the robbery itself.

Whether homicides have risen or declined depends the period over which you are looking. They are down relative to a year or two ago, up relative to five years ago, down relative to seven years ago, and considerably up relative to a decade ago.

When people feel insecure they vote not necessarily at the ballot box but with their feet. Chicago’s population is the lowest it has been in a century. Much of the flight has been from the South and West sides.

I’ve already given my prescription: law enforcement, City Hall, the states attorney’s office, and the judiciary all need to be pulling in the same direction. What good does it do for a police officer to arrest a suspect if City Hall bloviates about root causes, the states attorney won’t prosecute and, if prosecuted, judges won’t convict.

Rather than leading off this post with the commentary that caught my eye this morning let’s begin with a local news story. From ABC 7 Chicago:

FOREST PARK, Ill. (WLS) — A 30-year-old Chicagoan has been charged after four people were shot and killed while asleep on a CTA Blue Line train early Monday, police said Tuesday.

Rhanni S. Davis faces four counts of first-degree murder, Forest Park police said.

Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins said the victims were sleeping when they were shot.

“Every loss of life is tragic, regardless of what their circumstances were. You know that they were special to somebody,” Hoskins said. “This was an incredibly unfortunate act, a criminal act, the loss of life that we all grieve for.”

The four adult victims are three men and one woman, police said. Three of the victims were found shot in one train car and one was found in another. Police said the victims were not robbed.

In another words a young man approached several people who were sleeping on an L train and murdered them. It has been suggested that one or more of the victims was homeless. The murders were not done for gain. The perpetrator apparently did it because he could.

I can think of several possible motives. Maybe the shooter was high on something. Maybe it was part of some gang initiation. Maybe he hates people sleeping on trains.

Now on to this post at the American Institute for Economic Research by David C. Rose on our fraying cultural framework:

The rise of civilization is the story of people living in ever-larger groups. In places like America, culture evolved even further, producing the moral belief that we should never do moral don’ts and use government, if necessary, to enforce them. Meanwhile, obeying the moral dos is to be treated as a purely private matter. In other words, we should mind our own business. This is so deeply ingrained in the American ethic that for us it’s like water to fish.

Being confident that, in most contexts, no harm would come to us led to a habit of extending trust to strangers unless there was a good reason not to. That is the essence of a high trust society. Since trust is a powerful catalyst to voluntary cooperation, this unleashed the power of freely directed cooperation as never before in human history.

Tocqueville’s own thesis for American success notes that many of our mediating institutions are highly trust dependent. These institutions were voluntary associations which is why they were epiphenomenal with a culture of freedom. It is difficult to imagine that such voluntary associations would last long if everyone in them was highly suspicious of everyone else.

Gallup has found declining levels of trust in most institutions and professions.

He continues:

Here from Statista is a snapshot of the decline in CTA ridership:

It’s clear what impelled the decline—COVID-19. That, too, is a form of decline in trust. People don’t trust that the person sitting next to them won’t give them a potentially fatal disease.

Will feral young men murdering people on trains increase trust in the trains, decrease trust in the trains, or have no effect?

I think that Charles Murray has hold of the wrong end of the stick in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “The Roots of STEM Excellence”. Much of the op-ed is devoted to identifying young people capable of learning science, technology, and mathematics early by standardized testing and admitting them to top tier institutions of higher learning based on that. Here’s a snippet:

In the 1970s, Johns Hopkins psychologist Julian Stanley established the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth by administering the SAT to 12- and 13-year-olds. Some 2,000 of the participants have been followed throughout their careers.

Measures of productivity varied substantially within the top percentile, equivalent to an IQ of 135 or higher. Those in the top quartile of the top 1%, equivalent to IQs of 142 and higher, were more than twice as likely to earn a doctorate or be awarded a patent as those in the bottom quartile and more than four times as likely to publish an article on a STEM topic in a refereed journal. There was no plateau. Greater measured cognitive ability was correlated with greater adult accomplishment throughout the range.

These results suggest that we should be thinking in terms of at least the top half of the top percentile of ability when defining the set of people who have the potential to make major contributions in a STEM field. The U.S. has around 130 million people of prime working age: 25 to 54. For any given talent, therefore, about 650,000 are in the top half of the top percentile of ability. That’s a lot of people.

The task is to identify those with STEM talent when they are young. The good news is that standardized tests expressly designed to measure cognitive ability are an efficient way to do so. They are accurate, inexpensive, resistant to coaching and demonstrably unbiased against minorities, women or the poor. Those conclusions about the best cognitive tests are among the most exhaustively examined and replicated findings in all social science.

The bad news is that admissions offices of elite universities ignore this evidence.

I’ll present my reactions in the form of a number of bullet points followed by an anecdote or two.

• IQ testing does measure something real
• There is a correlation between the cognitive ability represented by IQ and the ability to learn science and mathematics
• There used to be a good correlation between SAT scores and IQ. That correlation no longer appears quite as strong.
• There are abilities other than IQ which are more closely correlated with success (however measured) in life than IQ
• There is a weak correlation between income and IQ
• Compensation, like most other prices, is determined based on supply and demand
• The rate at which jobs for physicists is increasing is less than the rate at which the population is, even the population of people with the cognitive abilities to be good physicists, and that has been true for 50 years
• Lawyers and physicians tend to have IQs above normal but by less than three standard deviations
• There aren’t a lot of jobs in mathematics and the sciences that pay enough to lead a middle class lifestyle

The smartest guy I know (he has an IQ four standard deviations above normal) is a brilliant mathematician. He has a doctorate in mathematics and an IQ four standard deviations above normal. After trying for years he finally gave up getting a tenure track position teaching in a university and became a computer programmer. One of the smartest guys I know is a successful creative writer. Before that he held minimum wage jobs. I don’t think these anecdotes are out of the ordinary. Extremely smart people tend not to be lawyers, physicians, or in finance. They find those positions too boring or require interpersonal skills other than those they have.

There are several things we could do to encourage “excellence in STEM” but we aren’t doing them. One of the most important is ensuring that the people capable of excelling at STEM earn enough to make it worth their while.

I rarely quote posts at Cato but I found this one by Jeffrey Miron, which largely consists of a lengthy quote from a previous Cato post, worth noting. It’s about the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017:

In brief, the corporate income tax changes generated substantial benefits, but several claims about these benefits (only a minimal reduction in revenue, with a large increase in wages) were significant exaggerations.

This passage is particularly interesting:

Second, taxes matter for corporate investment. Firms facing larger corporate tax cuts invested more than firms facing smaller cuts. Three empirical approaches indicate that the tax cuts increased total tangible corporate investment by 8–14 percent. This response was far too small to offset the forgone tax revenue.

which is almost exactly what I’ve been saying for the last six years. To remind you I supported cutting the corporate tax cuts on efficiency and competitive grounds. The economically most efficient corporate tax rate is zero. Claims about “corporations paying their fair share” is political posturing rather than sound economic policy. However, I have thought that the revenue losses from the cuts in the corporate tax rate needed to be made up by increases in not just personal income tax rates but revenue from personal income taxes. That was irresponsible.

I also think that we need considerably more business investment than at present but for that to happen much more narrowly targeted policies would be required. I doubt that the wealth taxes being proposed by some would accomplish that.

The graph above from the St. Louis Federal Reserve illustrates the annual percent change in real gross domestic product. The way I read it with the exception of recessions (including the brief COVID-related recession) it’s noisy but it has been essentially flat.

That is exactly what you’d expect as services become an increasing component of the economy. Unless those providing services provide more of those services or the number of service-providers increases, there is unlikely to be a lot of GDP growth.

The news story of the day, of course, is the six young Israelis killed by Hamas. James Joyner has a post on the subject at Outside the Beltway:

Hamas terrorists murdered these hostages. Quite obviously, it is they who bear full responsibility.

Could Netanyahu have secured their return in exchange for ending the war effort? Maybe. But his negotiating partners committed the largest terrorist attack in Israeli history and the largest on a per capita basis in the modern era. On what basis can one negotiate in good faith with them? There is no politically saleable outcome in which Yahya Sinwar and architects of the October 7 massacre remain at large.

My heart goes out to the families of these young people.

If you have a solution for the situation in Gaza, please produce it. I’m at a loss. I think that practically everyone here in the United States is imagining a different Israel and a different Gaza than the ones that actually exist.

I haven’t commented on this in the past but there is something that has visibly changed here in Chicago over the last several months. There are beggars at almost every major intersection. They are overwhelmingly Hispanic and most are children.

I’m sure that everyone has their own explanation for it but here’s mine. I think these are kids who’ve been brought into this country by coyotes, in some cases masquerading as parents. Now the coyotes are insisting that they be paid back.

At Foreign Affairs Stephen Biddle, as puzzled about Ukraine’s strategic objectives as I, counsels against overestimating the effects of deep strikes into Russian territory:

Of course, conducting more extensive deep strikes would help Ukraine. Damaging factories or infrastructure inside Russia might help boost Ukrainian morale, for example, as a small U.S. bombing raid against Tokyo in 1942 did for American morale in World War II. But now, as then, the capability will not transform the military situation on the ground.

With that in mind, Kyiv’s partners should now ask whether the modest military benefits are worth the escalatory risk. The answer will turn on assessments of the likelihood of expanding the conflict and on the risk tolerance of Western governments and publics. The latter is ultimately a value judgment; military analysis alone cannot dictate where to draw the line. What it can do is forecast the battlefield consequences of policy decisions. If the West lifts its restraints on Ukrainian deep strike capability, the consequences are unlikely to include a decisive change in the trajectory of the war.

I can’t help but wonder whether shoring up the motivation of Ukraine’s western supporters might not be Ukraine’s strategic objective in deep strikes into Russian territory.

Well, I was wrong. Recently, I asserted that by and large Democrats don’t believe in markets. As it turns out a recent poll conducted by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce found that Americans, generally, have an overwhelming belief in markets and Democrats in particular believe in markets 2-1:

In a new poll conducted on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a majority of American voters reported they are concerned about state governments micromanaging private business in a way that could hurt taxpayers. Fifty-four percent (54%) of all voters indicate they are more concerned about government micromanaging private business versus allowing business to make decisions they think are best for their customers — even if they don’t align with the personal views of the respondents (46%).

“This poll underscores the growing disconnect between the American electorate’s support for the free market and efforts by government officials to micromanage business decisions,” said U.S. Chamber Executive Vice President, Chief Policy Officer, and Head of Strategic Advocacy, Neil Bradley. “The costs of greater political interference in the free market will be borne by taxpayers as these efforts increase the cost of government and reduce wages for workers.”

Naturally, that fills me with questions. What do they mean by “free markets”? What do they mean by “overreach”? How do you define “micromanage”? I think this definition of the free enterprise system from Jeffrey A. Tucker is at the Brownstone Institute is a pretty good one:

…the system of voluntary and contractual exchange of otherwise contestable and privately owned property titles that permits capital accumulation, eschews top-down planning, and defers to social processes over state planning

I suspect that both “overreach” and “micromanage” are meaningless. What is overreach to me may not be overreach to you. Same with micromanagement.

Consider the growth in government as a percentage of national GDP over time:

In 2021 that had declined to 41% and by 2023 to 37%. I would suggest that for “believing in markets” to mean anything you must believe in an absolute limit to the percent of GDP represented by government at all levels.

Now consider these recent quotes from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy:

… policymakers should bolster support for child care financial assistance programs such as child care subsidies and child income tax credits; universal preschool; early childhood education programs such as Early Head Start and Head Start; programs that help nurture healthy family dynamics such as early childhood home visiting programs funded by the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program; and services and support for family caregivers like Healthy Start Programs and the Lifespan Respite Care Program.

and

Establish a national paid family and medical leave program and ensure all workers have paid sick time… Invest in social infrastructure at the local level to bring parents and caregivers together…
Address the economic and social barriers that contribute to the disproportionate impact of mental health conditions for certain parents and caregivers. Priorities should encompass poverty reduction, prevention of adverse childhood experiences, access to affordable neighborhood safety, and improving access to healthy food and affordable housing. Policymakers should also prioritize programs that support eligible households in gaining access to crucial services and supports, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Medicaid, Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) benefits, child care support, and home visits, among others…

My primary objection to the progressivism which in its present form includes a majority of Democrats is that it is not self-limiting.

That’s my challenge to the progressive Democratic leadership: how much should the government spend? What are the limits?