One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

Consider these countries:

Country	Density per km2	Population	Area
France	122	66,548,531	547,557
Germany	242	84,552,242	349,360
Italy	201	59,342,867	295,720
United Kingdom	286	69,138,192	241,930
United States	37	341,730,701	9,147,590

One of those countries is quite different from the other four. Keep that in mind.

Noah Smith’s most recent post was motivated by the murder of Iryna Zarutska on a commuter train in Charlotte. Its title is “Good cities can’t exist without public order”.

After quoting several people claiming that incidents like that are why we can’t have good public transit in the United States, Mr. Smith observes:

These people are overstating their case, but when you get right down to it, they do have a point. America’s chronically high levels of violence and public disorder are one reason — certainly not the only reason, but one reason — that it’s so politically difficult to build dense housing and transit in this country.

For many years, I’ve been involved with the urbanist movement in America. I want to see my country build more dense city centers where people can walk and take the train instead of driving. That doesn’t mean I want to eliminate the suburbs; I just don’t want to have San Francisco and Chicago and Houston feel like suburbs. If we have dense cities and quiet suburbs, then every American will get to live in the type of place they want to live in. Currently, the only dense city we have is NYC.

But I think my fellow urbanists are often a bit naive about what it’ll take to get more dense, walkable city centers in America. They often act as if car culture is an autonomous meme that just happened to develop in America, and that real considerations like violent crime played no role in driving Americans — both white and nonwhite — out of urban cores in the 20th century.

He then proceeds to state his case that a) we have more violent crime, homicides in particular, than “other rich countries”; and b) that’s because we have fewer police officers per 100K population than “other rich countries”, e.g. France, Germany, etc.

I only have two observations. The first is that you cannot discuss homicides in the United States intelligently without bringing up race. Half of all homicides in the U. S. are blacks killing other blacks. Interracial homicides, like that of Ms. Zarutska, are terribly sad but quite rare.

As quoted by Mr. Smith the U. S. homicide rate per 100K population is 5.8 but 1.3 for France, .8 for Germany, etc. That sounds pretty bad. However, the white homicide rate in the U. S. per 100K population is 3.2. That’s not far from India’s or Canada’s.

My second observation is that the major difference between the United States and Japan, Mr. Smith’s favorite counter-example, is social cohesion. Japan is very homogeneous, highly cohesive, and generally consensus-based, almost a large extended family. The U. S. is, well, not.

My claim would be that (at least until rather recently) France, Germany, Italy, and the UK were largely ethnic states with high degrees of social cohesion. 20% of the people in the U. S. don’t speak English at home; 10% don’t speak English at all. In France 3% of the people don’t speak French at home. IMO that is due to modern France’s insistence on the French language and that builds social cohesion.

I would further claim that you cannot have the high level of social cohesion that Japan does in a country as large and diverse as the U. S.

Consequently, my retort to Mr. Smith would be that even if the United States had the large number of police officers he proposes we would still have more crime than “other rich countries” because we don’t have the social cohesion that they do. I would also stick out my tongue and assert that you can’t compare us with “other rich countries” because we aren’t much like them. We’re more like Brazil (and have a lower homicide rate).