There was also tremendous social cohesion. As a member of the Oklahoma Medical Reserve Corps, I worked as a full-time volunteer in the Tulsa Covid-19 POD, vaccinating 2,000 patients/day.
Half of the POD were Tulsa County Health Department workers, the other half retired nurses and physicians. Many, like myself, weren’t yet fully vaccinated, but masked and gloved-up.
Retired nurses, at their own time and expense, drove across the state to single-handedly operate Covid-19 PODs in remote, underserved counties. It was an amazing experience working with dedicated, talented professional who had a sense of mission.
Yet, the mainstream media gave very little coverage to extraordinary people -- of all types of religion, politics, sexual orientation, gender-identity -- who came together as strangers to provide care for anybody who came through the POD.
The light in the Dark Age of Covid-19, the best of the U.S., went underreported.
Noah Smith said: “ Those years . . .cemented a negative mood in the minds of the American people that will take a while to heal. But the healing is underway,"
Noah, I think you have finally hit the right note in evaluating the last few years. We are not passionless Homo economicus—we are people who have been through the mill.
Also, don't you think the 9% income gain by the bottom quartile means infinitely more to that group than the 2% income loss for the top quartile?
It's *supposed to*, at least according to most people's stated values, but the to quintile has a bigger megaphone.
At an anedoctical level, the only times I hear about labor markets is tech workers complaining about layoffs. If I hear about "the other half" (more like the other 80%), it's indirectly, with those same tech workers and similar complaining about doordash costing too much and hairdressers being impossible to find.
I fear the decline of mass active politics has made the poor too easy to care about in theory but ignore in practice. Props to this admin and all those who care anyway.
I'm curious what Noah's take is on one of the root causes of the current culture war ravaging American society, namely that Black and Hispanics continue to lag behind their Asian and white counterparts across a wide range of life outcomes. This is clearly one of the primary reasons why meritocracy has been slowly dismantled across this country over the past decade or so in the name of promoting racial equality.
I'm surprised that so few American pundits talk about the elephant in the room. Data suggests that by the 2040s, Black and Hispanic Americans will constitute a combined majority of the American population. Yet on educational metrics such as SAT or PISA scores, large racial disparities remain. When I looked into 2020 SAT math data reported by the Brookings Institution for instance, I was taken aback to learn that Asian Americans are slightly more likely to score above a 700 on the SAT math than Black Americans are to score above a 500. There's basically a 2 standard deviation difference in mean perform between the two groups, suggesting that only about 2% of Black students score as high as the average Asian student on the math portion of the SAT.
America's inability to resolve its enduring racial disparities has resulted in significant social strife and I would argue has contributed to this country moving in a decidedly anti-meritocratic direction. America thus far has been a country with a market dominant majority. Can the nation survive if these racial gaps persist and America becomes instead a country with a market dominant white and Asian minority? I don't claim to be an expert in these matters, but my reading of the horrors perpetuated against market dominant minorities around the world from the works of people like Thomas Sowell and Amy Chua give me significant pause that such a future state of America could remain a stable equilibrium.
Our neoliberal pundit class loves obsessing over China and complaining about its supposedly unethical and unfair practices, while adamantly insisting that the only way to defeat China in competition is by letting in even more elite Chinese immigrants. I've observed a curious phenomenon of American pundits bashing or complaining about various Asian countries while simultaneously advocating for elite immigration from those same countries. At least when the bashing isn't directed at China specifically, people like Noah have the good sense to refer to it as "punching down". Meanwhile the woes of the Black and Hispanic population in this country are totally ignored.
I'm actually not very optimistic that America can survive long term with a majority Black and Hispanic population where racial disparities remain as large as they've been. This doesn't strike me as a stable equilibrium. I'm also deeply skeptical that the solution is to basically pretend the problem doesn't exist while advocating for endless elite immigration from Asia. At some point that well is going to dry up, especially given the recent geopolitical tensions between the US and China.
In light of the woke and anti-meritocratic trends of the past decade, I find it to be a massive oversight that this particular issue isn't being discussed more. Far too many pundits focus on the glitzy and glamorous discussions of EVs and semiconductors and the geopolitical battle over the commanding heights of the 21st century, while ignoring the painfully obvious fact that a substantial minority and soon to be numerical majority of the population lags behind in the American race for educational and life achievement. That this structural deficiency wouldn't have a meaningful impact vis-a-vis our long term competition with China strikes me as pollyannish at best.
Ok? This seems like a naive response to a serious concern. The problem is one of changing demographics + white/asian people becoming a market dominant minority (owning most of the wealth). The unemployment gap only helps a little bit with that.
In the Southwest from Texas to Southern California, the Hispanic population does not tend to intermarry. Instead, their numbers just grow until they will soon become plurality in the region.
1. A long history certainly, because there's been Hundreds of years of coexistence, but a long history does not necessarily mean a high percentage. For instance, early American male settlers in the southwest often married Hispanic women or Indian women because there just weren't any white women around.
2. I haven't done the RESEARCH myself to determine the percentage of hispanic-non Hispanic marriages. My impression is simply based on my 24 years of residence in Houston and my travels through the southwest.
Well, perhaps I over generalize. The two Hispanics from South Texas I know did not stay there to live and both married Anglo men. But I never meant to say that no two Hispanics ever married and had children.
Fun, not particularly relevant story: In 1966 I had just returned from two years in Bolivia with the Peace Corps and had spent a lot of time outside and was deep tanned. And I had a Pancho Villa mustache! I was visiting a girlfriend in Del Rio Texas and we were invited to a friend's apartment that had a swimming pool. Later I learned that the friend got flack for bringing a "Mexican" to swim in their pool. I had also been thoroughly searched on entering the US from Nuevo Laredo.
Guess you're a darn POC. I've lived in Houston TX for 24 years and I find it surprising to encounter a Hispanic married to a non Hispanic. Maybe I don't get out enough.
I can see that my "sample" is biased by being middle class immigrants and upwardly mobile (post university) people in the WDC area. The Latina woman in my choir married to a gringo (and a Protestant! :)) is a lawyer with the DOJ
My people came to East Texas from the old county in Alabama, [thought with no evidence at all I claim Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith's tutor, as a forbearer] but I'm still a bit darker than my Colombian wife!
I was born and raised in WDC and still have family there and go back frequently. There's a lot more churn in Washington DC because almost everyone is an import to the area.
WDC was a small town until WW II. In 1940, the population of Fairfax County was 41,000 today it is 1.1 million.
It's not that the people of Houston don't like each other and get along well, but each ethnic group tends to have its own neighborhoods, restaurants, and churches. The population of Houston seems to "clump" quite a bit more than the population of WDC in my experience.
According to the census, Hispanics became the largest group in Texas in 2022 (40.2%) Inching past whites (39.8%.). My favorite AI search engine could not tell me what percentage of Hispanic Texans marry non Hispanics.
Well off people of all races are well off by definition! It's the disparity in the percentage of people within different groups who are well off that's the issue. Note that I'm not pointing this out to suggest anything nefarious. Rather, my point here is that large racial disparities in life outcomes in multiracial countries has rarely if ever remained a stable equilibrium. I'm basing this conclusion off of the works of people like Amy Chua and Thomas Sowell.
We can quibble over the semantics of whether or not Blacks and Hispanics are struggling in this country, but the fact that large racial disparities exist has clearly engendered significant social strife and fanned the flames of the culture wars ravaging America.
This is one of my frustrations with the elite pundit class who are fixated on the prestige of EVs and semiconductors and the high human capital coastal bubbles where they live, while basically ignoring the fact that Blacks and Hispanics lag significantly behind their white and Asian counterparts across a wide range of life outcomes, a fact which has more or less set the America of ordinary Americans on fire.
I'm imagining an elderly Amy Chua coming out with a sequel to her book World on Fire a couple of decades from now titled America on Fire, a sobering and clear eyed analysis of how in our myopic competition against China over the commanding heights of the 21st century, we somehow missed the trees for the forest and found ourselves left with a conflict driven society fueled by aggrievement towards the market dominant minority.
Actually you raise a good point. My characterization above was somewhat glib. We have two classes of pundits in this country. The first is obsessed with anti-racism and DEI. The second is obsessed with ensuring American preeminence in the battle over the commanding heights of the 21st century. From what I can tell these two groups rarely communicate directly with each other.
If they did, I believe fruitful discussions would result. We might realize for instance that we have a massive ticking time bomb on our hands, as I've alluded to above. To be fair, I see that Noah does tweet about the culture war stuff from time to time, but I wonder if he's drawing the correct implications of what it all portends for the future of this country.
You'd first have to disaggregate your successful BIPOCS by race, then compare relative numbers of the successful to to the whole in order to reach your ("it's not race") conclusion.
Not about smarts, about doing some statistical legwork to back up your conclusion that Yan Shen is wrong. By the way, Yan Shen is almost NEVER wrong in my experience—one sharp cookie.
Crime isn't falling at all. Between de-policung, de-funding, non-prosecirion by Soros DAs, & massive retirements of officers, there is an epidemic of NON-REPORYED crime. Start with the knock out game, which victims don't waste their time. Real crime is at an all time high, greatly resembling the "crisis of law and order" in the 1850s. Jimmying crime states does no one any good.
I disagree with Larry here but I do think it's very important to distinguish between violent crime and "events where nothing went down but sure felt sketchy".
In NYC a common media narrative the past year is "violent crime is falling, why do people feel unsafe". As someone who takes the subway, it's endlessly frustrating when politicians or journalists conflate the two. It should be blindingly obvious to anyone actually living in NYC that:
1) violent crimes are rare enough that small changes in their rate do not impact most peoples daily lives.
2) events that make you feel unsafe (person shooting up, homeless dude telling people he's going to kill them, blatant shoplifting) occur frequently and dominate people's perception of safety
So when murder rates go down but (2) goes up, people feel less safe.
The answer isn't to point to the violent crime rate and say "you shouldn't feel unsafe, violent crime is down", because that's not why most people feel unsafe. The answer is to reduce the events that are actually making people feel unsafe.
I care that my commute feels safe, I don't care about some nebulous statistic that doesn't reflect my daily experiences (this is a bit of an exaggeration, obviously I am glad violent crime is down).
I think that part of the problem there is that the density in cities will still contribute to that general unease even when crime statistics go down. If you live on an apartment block that has 24 shootings per year, and it drops by 50% to 12 shootings per year, the stats should indicate that you ought to feel way safer being on that apartment block, but all you know is that you still see cops showing up every month for another shooting. The fact that it went from seeing them twice per month to once per month in that crowded location isn't going to really make you feel more safe even though statistically you are safer.
Whereas if you go into a countryside community with the same crime rate per capita, but it's only 2 shootings per year, and that drops to 1 shooting per year, that community will feel that drop more acutely. Or more likely, you'll see a community with the same crime rate per capita, but it's going from 1 shooting per year to 1 every two years.
Population density undermines our perception of crime rates going down.
I don't think density is what's driving the perception of increase in violence. When people complain about crime, they're comparing their experience now to their experience in the same place 5 years ago. Although I don't doubt people frequently fail to account for population size when comparing between cities, say when deciding where to move.
The cities at the focus of this debate (NYC, SF) are cities which haven't seen much densification over the past decade. Both SF and NYC have lost population over the past few years. In NYC, the areas that have grown more dense are the nicer, safer neighborhoods because they usually are more expensive.
For what it's worth. Homocides in Western Europe is ticking up a little bit due to immigration. But it seems to stay mostly flat. I am keeping an eye on it tho, as a general benchmark of 'the health of society'. Frankly, I think small nation states like Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands have much more accurate crime reporting than the USA. So, if homocides aren't trending upwards in western europe in these countries I think that's a good signal of health of 'The West', and so far that is the case.
Somewhere in between? We have a police blotter report in our local newspaper here in San Francisco, I have never seen this amount of crime in decades. And that's just a reported, we don't even call anymore for broken windows and other theft.
Honest question, wouldn't SF be a bit outside of the norm? I don't spend a lot of time there, but what I hear about it makes me think that Noah could be right about the US as a whole and SF could be an exception to this positive development.
Actually I think you're being vastly unfair here. Even progressive shows like the Young Turks have started highlighting the insanity of criminal reform in states like California and New York that have turned felonies into misdemeanors and allowed violent repeat offenders back onto the streets where they terrorize even more victims. Noah focuses on homicide ostensibly for statistical reasons, but honestly even that sort of misses the point.
Our large cities are suffering because the political class in those cities constantly side with the rights of criminals as opposed to that of victims. We're told that the solution to combating crime is to address the long term "root causes", while letting criminals run amok in the here and now with impunity. Bail reform in California and New York has allowed dangerous people back onto the streets repeatedly with little repercussions. Homicide might be the worst crime there is, but many lesser crimes both violent and non-violent have vastly reduced the quality of life in many of our major cities.
We're often told that this is just how things are and that we should suck it up and complain less, least we engage in right-wing fear mongering. Yet anyone who's spent any amount of time in major cities in East Asia knows that the idea that rampant crime is part and parcel of life in the big city is an absolute lie. I'm actually surprised that Noah cited crime as a reason for Americans to be optimistic. When I came back from vacation in Tokyo last year I actually felt a bit depressed by how much worse American cities were compared to cities in Japan.
In the past Noah has described America as the city on that hill that ostensibly people from around the world aspired to move to. I certainly can't claim to speak for everyone, but as a Chinese American immigrant who has at least some knowledge of the pulse of the immigrant Asian community on these matters, I can tell you that factors like crime are among the major reasons why many people in countries like China view America with a healthy degree of skepticism.
Regardless of whether or not violent crime is falling, its still absurdly high in our big cities compared to violent crime in places like China or Japan. Jimmy Kimmel recently visited Japan for the first time with his family and observed startling differences between America and Japan, although as some critics have pointed out he didn't delve deeper into trying to understand the reasons behind those differences.
We don't even compare well to our neighbor to the north. Shared border, shared language, shared English cultural ancestry. Canada has guns and diversity and Canadians don't shoot each other in the street.
America has a younger median age than Japan or China, which makes a big difference, because most violent crime is committed by men between the ages of 15-40. Older societies may be more peaceful, but imo they suffer from a lack of business dynamism, entrepreneurs, or cultural change than for instance young people, who have less to lose and everything to gain by changes in society. American gun ownership also plays a role, because it means that disputes or arguments are more likely to result in someone pulling a gun than in other countries .
I'm fairly certain that the age adjusted homicide rate for America is still substantially higher than for places like China or Japan. But as commenter Slaw points out below, violent crime is disproportionately concentrated among certain demographics.
This is one of the curious features of American political discourse. Whenever people discuss crime rates or PISA scores, they invariably leave out the fact that huge racial disparities exist across the board. Blending these disparities together tends to obscure the more relevant statistical truths at hand. Noah points out that America is a violent country, but leaves out the reasons why that's the case. Likewise Jimmy Kimmel recently observed that Japan was much cleaner and safer than America without considering the underlying reasons for that as well.
I do agree with you though that Americans are crazy when it comes to the 2nd amendment and gun rights.
It's rich with data and the thesis is that violence is regional. The nut graf of Woodard's thesis: "The geography of gun violence — and public and elite ideas about how it should be addressed — is the result of differences at once regional, cultural and historical. Once you understand how the country was colonized — and by whom — a number of insights into the problem are revealed."
It's a culturally determined explanation because culture, in this sense meaning a social arrangement, binds modern societies to ideas and actions that a long-dead social arrangement has solved.
It's enlightening and problematic all at once. Woodard is arguing that the South has the highest rates of gun violence because it was based in honor culture and the domination of slaves, and this violence is programmed into culture and inescapable. Or New York City is statistically safe because it inherited WASP values.
China, S. Korea, and Japan are Buddhist/Confucian cultures based on the concepts of harmony and order. While there is more "policing" there, there is also less need for confrontation and a broad respect for "law and order." Their communal culture is more tolerant of social conformity than our individualist "each man for themselves." Increasing worldwide population density probably favors the Asian approach in my opinion. https://johnhardman.substack.com/p/asian-century
If anything there's too much policing, America is always getting closer and closer to a police state and I don't think being able to buy guns make people more violent
That's wrong. All of those cities are in the WSJ article that I linked to. Homicides fell by 28% in DC, 15% in NYC, and 7% in Chicago, and rose by 14% in LA.
We need to implement best policy practice. Such as community policing, #BanAllProhibition and obviously, all the things it takes to create a fair and just high standard of living high quality of life society. That’s the way to reduce crime. Fucking policing has not much to do with it other than the policy practices I mentioned. Get a grip
Go the fuck away with your bullshit. Either provide a credible source with a citation or shut the fuck up. That’s how this works. Random dude on the Internet just saying shit is the least credible source on the planet.
😂🤪. Good self-awareness score! Get your score up to a 3.0 and then you are allowed to use Google to check DC murder stats by year. Right now these are all just shiny buttons for you - I understand. Learning how to swear is a difficult first step. Keep working on that and maybe with some gene therapy the rest will come.
“Jimmying crime states”? I’m assuming you meant statistics. That’s nothing more than the arsonist returning to the fire. That is what your lame ass attempt at agitprop bullshit is.
Now, get the fuck out. GOP Putin fluffer boi’s not welcome!
I didn’t insinuate anything about per capita, let alone, make a claim.
We are over policed. If we #BanAllProhibition make a commitment to public schools and provide economic opportunity, as a decent state and federal government should, along with best policy practice such as #CommunityPolicing, 1/3 of all cops, prosecutors, judges, incarceration facilities, cop cars, laptops, court clerks and so on would be useless. Not able to justify their own existence.
The prescient point ?
They are the tip of the spear for the morally bankrupt mass incarceration complex.
nah mate, you want a strong police force. You guys aren't Denmark (I'm from Denmark). The USA is a violent place, without police it will be more violent. Western Europe is increasing its police presence substantially since the crime wave of refugees and immigrants; and it has the effect that you'd expect --> Crime goes down again.
USA will never be Denmark. Our situation is an anomaly in the world.
Exactly. Mine is currently on track to either match last year's record (nearly one a day), or surpass it. You would have a tough time convincing anyone here that any sort of crime is going down.
You would have a tough time convincing critical thinkers that you know what you’re talking about. Ancillary bullshit means nothing unless you provide a credible citation from a reputable source, you’re just random dude on the Internet saying shit. Really stupid agitprop shit
Great news. I knew or suspected some ( crime) but the last- that younger generations were doing good was very surprising. Maybe no Civil War after all.
Well said. The reason millennials/Gen Z feel less prosperous is primarily due to housing costs outpacing income gains, which has both material and psychological effects.
Even if real incomes are higher now, the fact that homes were much more affordable to past generations and that many young people today can’t afford to buy at the same age their parents did makes any income gains feel inconsequential.
I continue to believe there is something fishy about the "Gen Z is wealthier than previous generations" math. I'd like to see somebody try to actually control for differential inflation issues here, particularly around housing. To the extent that Gen Z is "wealthier" on paper because the house they scrimped to buy is worth a bigger amount of money, but then they have less capacity to either to spend money on anything that isn't the house, or to save up in other forms that can be spent for food and medicine in retirement -- that doesn't really seem like being wealthier. Sure, you could sell the house and live on that. But _where_ are you going to live on that, if every other house is just as expensive?
As Felix Salmon likes to say, you're born short one house. Inflated housing prices don't mean that owning a house makes you wealthier; it means it costs you more to cover your short.
If the price of fruit and vegetables started rising by double digits per year, offset by falling prices for sugar, wheat, and other staple commodities, that would have serious implications for people’s diet and health.
To just shrug and say “well the price of food is stable” would be pretty unresponsive to the actual situation, which is that a normal person is either going to see the quality of their diet erode or else the share of their income going to food rise.
Critically, this is not inflation.
I am a stickler here just like I’m a stickler about immigration and wages, because it’s really important for policymakers not to lose the plot on the need for aggressive monetary policy to generate full employment.
That being said, these relative price shifts are also bad.
And in this case it’s a fake example. But here are some real facts about how relative prices have changed:
[chart, which you can view if you follow the link]
This chart is telling you the plain truth, which is that if you took a healthy, childless person from 2000 and teleported them to 2020 and showed them Spotify and Netflix on an iPad Pro their mind would be totally blown. And an iPad Pro plus a magic keyboard costs less in nominal terms than an iBook did in 1999. Your guy would be extremely impressed with the IT revolution and the information superhighway.
But then if you bring forward another guy who’s got three kids — ages 4, 2, and six months — and tell him what his new child care costs are going to be, he’s gonna be really sad.
</blockquote>
Basically, I find it very hard to believe that the guy with kids here is wrong to feel sad. If you claim that the average 40-something married couple with three kids is "wealthier" today than they were in my parents' generation, I have questions about what you mean by "wealthier".
On a different note from the debating of crime statistics, are the cross sectional GDP growth data adjusted for foreign born workers for the countries other than the US? Italy instituted a very attractive tax regime for high income immigrants post pandemic. While the number of immigrants may be small as a percentage of population relative to the US, it is likely they are 1-2 orders of magnitude on average higher income than the typical US immigrant. Would really appreciate your perspective on this.
I had to squint pretty hard to understand the immigration and crime charts. For example, Violent crime is not structurally falling and is still outrageously high relative to peer countries.
My sixth thing is that YIMBYs are gaining momentum and achieving victories.
“. . . there was massive social unrest. . .”
There was also tremendous social cohesion. As a member of the Oklahoma Medical Reserve Corps, I worked as a full-time volunteer in the Tulsa Covid-19 POD, vaccinating 2,000 patients/day.
Half of the POD were Tulsa County Health Department workers, the other half retired nurses and physicians. Many, like myself, weren’t yet fully vaccinated, but masked and gloved-up.
Retired nurses, at their own time and expense, drove across the state to single-handedly operate Covid-19 PODs in remote, underserved counties. It was an amazing experience working with dedicated, talented professional who had a sense of mission.
Yet, the mainstream media gave very little coverage to extraordinary people -- of all types of religion, politics, sexual orientation, gender-identity -- who came together as strangers to provide care for anybody who came through the POD.
The light in the Dark Age of Covid-19, the best of the U.S., went underreported.
True
And a sixth, the Noahpinion blog. It brings some measure of joy :)
Awwww thank you ♥️
Please make this a monthly or at least a quarterly piece. and expand it to include items outside of the U.S.
Noah Smith said: “ Those years . . .cemented a negative mood in the minds of the American people that will take a while to heal. But the healing is underway,"
Noah, I think you have finally hit the right note in evaluating the last few years. We are not passionless Homo economicus—we are people who have been through the mill.
Also, don't you think the 9% income gain by the bottom quartile means infinitely more to that group than the 2% income loss for the top quartile?
Yes.
It's *supposed to*, at least according to most people's stated values, but the to quintile has a bigger megaphone.
At an anedoctical level, the only times I hear about labor markets is tech workers complaining about layoffs. If I hear about "the other half" (more like the other 80%), it's indirectly, with those same tech workers and similar complaining about doordash costing too much and hairdressers being impossible to find.
I fear the decline of mass active politics has made the poor too easy to care about in theory but ignore in practice. Props to this admin and all those who care anyway.
I'm curious what Noah's take is on one of the root causes of the current culture war ravaging American society, namely that Black and Hispanics continue to lag behind their Asian and white counterparts across a wide range of life outcomes. This is clearly one of the primary reasons why meritocracy has been slowly dismantled across this country over the past decade or so in the name of promoting racial equality.
I'm surprised that so few American pundits talk about the elephant in the room. Data suggests that by the 2040s, Black and Hispanic Americans will constitute a combined majority of the American population. Yet on educational metrics such as SAT or PISA scores, large racial disparities remain. When I looked into 2020 SAT math data reported by the Brookings Institution for instance, I was taken aback to learn that Asian Americans are slightly more likely to score above a 700 on the SAT math than Black Americans are to score above a 500. There's basically a 2 standard deviation difference in mean perform between the two groups, suggesting that only about 2% of Black students score as high as the average Asian student on the math portion of the SAT.
America's inability to resolve its enduring racial disparities has resulted in significant social strife and I would argue has contributed to this country moving in a decidedly anti-meritocratic direction. America thus far has been a country with a market dominant majority. Can the nation survive if these racial gaps persist and America becomes instead a country with a market dominant white and Asian minority? I don't claim to be an expert in these matters, but my reading of the horrors perpetuated against market dominant minorities around the world from the works of people like Thomas Sowell and Amy Chua give me significant pause that such a future state of America could remain a stable equilibrium.
Our neoliberal pundit class loves obsessing over China and complaining about its supposedly unethical and unfair practices, while adamantly insisting that the only way to defeat China in competition is by letting in even more elite Chinese immigrants. I've observed a curious phenomenon of American pundits bashing or complaining about various Asian countries while simultaneously advocating for elite immigration from those same countries. At least when the bashing isn't directed at China specifically, people like Noah have the good sense to refer to it as "punching down". Meanwhile the woes of the Black and Hispanic population in this country are totally ignored.
I'm actually not very optimistic that America can survive long term with a majority Black and Hispanic population where racial disparities remain as large as they've been. This doesn't strike me as a stable equilibrium. I'm also deeply skeptical that the solution is to basically pretend the problem doesn't exist while advocating for endless elite immigration from Asia. At some point that well is going to dry up, especially given the recent geopolitical tensions between the US and China.
In light of the woke and anti-meritocratic trends of the past decade, I find it to be a massive oversight that this particular issue isn't being discussed more. Far too many pundits focus on the glitzy and glamorous discussions of EVs and semiconductors and the geopolitical battle over the commanding heights of the 21st century, while ignoring the painfully obvious fact that a substantial minority and soon to be numerical majority of the population lags behind in the American race for educational and life achievement. That this structural deficiency wouldn't have a meaningful impact vis-a-vis our long term competition with China strikes me as pollyannish at best.
The Black-White unemployment gap is the smallest it's ever been!
https://fortune.com/2023/04/07/unemployment-gap-black-white-shrinks-record-low/
Ok? This seems like a naive response to a serious concern. The problem is one of changing demographics + white/asian people becoming a market dominant minority (owning most of the wealth). The unemployment gap only helps a little bit with that.
The Hispanic population is perpetually dissolving into the majority because of intermarriage. It may be a while before that is the case with "Blacks."
In the Southwest from Texas to Southern California, the Hispanic population does not tend to intermarry. Instead, their numbers just grow until they will soon become plurality in the region.
Really? When I search, I find precisely the opposite.
“Hispanics and non-Hispanics have a long history of intermarriage in the Southwest.” (P. 10 of https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2013/demo/2013-19.pdf )
1. A long history certainly, because there's been Hundreds of years of coexistence, but a long history does not necessarily mean a high percentage. For instance, early American male settlers in the southwest often married Hispanic women or Indian women because there just weren't any white women around.
2. I haven't done the RESEARCH myself to determine the percentage of hispanic-non Hispanic marriages. My impression is simply based on my 24 years of residence in Houston and my travels through the southwest.
Well, perhaps I over generalize. The two Hispanics from South Texas I know did not stay there to live and both married Anglo men. But I never meant to say that no two Hispanics ever married and had children.
Fun, not particularly relevant story: In 1966 I had just returned from two years in Bolivia with the Peace Corps and had spent a lot of time outside and was deep tanned. And I had a Pancho Villa mustache! I was visiting a girlfriend in Del Rio Texas and we were invited to a friend's apartment that had a swimming pool. Later I learned that the friend got flack for bringing a "Mexican" to swim in their pool. I had also been thoroughly searched on entering the US from Nuevo Laredo.
Guess you're a darn POC. I've lived in Houston TX for 24 years and I find it surprising to encounter a Hispanic married to a non Hispanic. Maybe I don't get out enough.
Wow! What a difference in perception.
I can see that my "sample" is biased by being middle class immigrants and upwardly mobile (post university) people in the WDC area. The Latina woman in my choir married to a gringo (and a Protestant! :)) is a lawyer with the DOJ
My people came to East Texas from the old county in Alabama, [thought with no evidence at all I claim Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith's tutor, as a forbearer] but I'm still a bit darker than my Colombian wife!
I was born and raised in WDC and still have family there and go back frequently. There's a lot more churn in Washington DC because almost everyone is an import to the area.
WDC was a small town until WW II. In 1940, the population of Fairfax County was 41,000 today it is 1.1 million.
It's not that the people of Houston don't like each other and get along well, but each ethnic group tends to have its own neighborhoods, restaurants, and churches. The population of Houston seems to "clump" quite a bit more than the population of WDC in my experience.
According to the census, Hispanics became the largest group in Texas in 2022 (40.2%) Inching past whites (39.8%.). My favorite AI search engine could not tell me what percentage of Hispanic Texans marry non Hispanics.
Higher income BIPOCS are doing just fine. It's not race, it's income.
Well off people of all races are well off by definition! It's the disparity in the percentage of people within different groups who are well off that's the issue. Note that I'm not pointing this out to suggest anything nefarious. Rather, my point here is that large racial disparities in life outcomes in multiracial countries has rarely if ever remained a stable equilibrium. I'm basing this conclusion off of the works of people like Amy Chua and Thomas Sowell.
BIPOCs aren't struggling by definition, either. They simply occupy the lower rungs in disproportionate numbers. Why? I for one blame the elites.
We can quibble over the semantics of whether or not Blacks and Hispanics are struggling in this country, but the fact that large racial disparities exist has clearly engendered significant social strife and fanned the flames of the culture wars ravaging America.
This is one of my frustrations with the elite pundit class who are fixated on the prestige of EVs and semiconductors and the high human capital coastal bubbles where they live, while basically ignoring the fact that Blacks and Hispanics lag significantly behind their white and Asian counterparts across a wide range of life outcomes, a fact which has more or less set the America of ordinary Americans on fire.
I'm imagining an elderly Amy Chua coming out with a sequel to her book World on Fire a couple of decades from now titled America on Fire, a sobering and clear eyed analysis of how in our myopic competition against China over the commanding heights of the 21st century, we somehow missed the trees for the forest and found ourselves left with a conflict driven society fueled by aggrievement towards the market dominant minority.
The "elite pundit class" are also whacking their opponents with this issue. Like they care. All Are Welcome Here my a**
Actually you raise a good point. My characterization above was somewhat glib. We have two classes of pundits in this country. The first is obsessed with anti-racism and DEI. The second is obsessed with ensuring American preeminence in the battle over the commanding heights of the 21st century. From what I can tell these two groups rarely communicate directly with each other.
If they did, I believe fruitful discussions would result. We might realize for instance that we have a massive ticking time bomb on our hands, as I've alluded to above. To be fair, I see that Noah does tweet about the culture war stuff from time to time, but I wonder if he's drawing the correct implications of what it all portends for the future of this country.
Not if you account for income. I don't think the Huxtables were afraid of getting murdered.
You'd first have to disaggregate your successful BIPOCS by race, then compare relative numbers of the successful to to the whole in order to reach your ("it's not race") conclusion.
Could you restate? I'm not that smart : )
Not about smarts, about doing some statistical legwork to back up your conclusion that Yan Shen is wrong. By the way, Yan Shen is almost NEVER wrong in my experience—one sharp cookie.
Crime isn't falling at all. Between de-policung, de-funding, non-prosecirion by Soros DAs, & massive retirements of officers, there is an epidemic of NON-REPORYED crime. Start with the knock out game, which victims don't waste their time. Real crime is at an all time high, greatly resembling the "crisis of law and order" in the 1850s. Jimmying crime states does no one any good.
Crime is falling. Underreporting is exactly why I use murder rates, because those are very accurately reported.
I disagree with Larry here but I do think it's very important to distinguish between violent crime and "events where nothing went down but sure felt sketchy".
In NYC a common media narrative the past year is "violent crime is falling, why do people feel unsafe". As someone who takes the subway, it's endlessly frustrating when politicians or journalists conflate the two. It should be blindingly obvious to anyone actually living in NYC that:
1) violent crimes are rare enough that small changes in their rate do not impact most peoples daily lives.
2) events that make you feel unsafe (person shooting up, homeless dude telling people he's going to kill them, blatant shoplifting) occur frequently and dominate people's perception of safety
So when murder rates go down but (2) goes up, people feel less safe.
The answer isn't to point to the violent crime rate and say "you shouldn't feel unsafe, violent crime is down", because that's not why most people feel unsafe. The answer is to reduce the events that are actually making people feel unsafe.
I care that my commute feels safe, I don't care about some nebulous statistic that doesn't reflect my daily experiences (this is a bit of an exaggeration, obviously I am glad violent crime is down).
Somewhat related from today's NYT:
Most Major Crimes Are Down. Why Are Assaults Up? https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/nyregion/assault-rates-new-york-city.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
I think that part of the problem there is that the density in cities will still contribute to that general unease even when crime statistics go down. If you live on an apartment block that has 24 shootings per year, and it drops by 50% to 12 shootings per year, the stats should indicate that you ought to feel way safer being on that apartment block, but all you know is that you still see cops showing up every month for another shooting. The fact that it went from seeing them twice per month to once per month in that crowded location isn't going to really make you feel more safe even though statistically you are safer.
Whereas if you go into a countryside community with the same crime rate per capita, but it's only 2 shootings per year, and that drops to 1 shooting per year, that community will feel that drop more acutely. Or more likely, you'll see a community with the same crime rate per capita, but it's going from 1 shooting per year to 1 every two years.
Population density undermines our perception of crime rates going down.
I don't think density is what's driving the perception of increase in violence. When people complain about crime, they're comparing their experience now to their experience in the same place 5 years ago. Although I don't doubt people frequently fail to account for population size when comparing between cities, say when deciding where to move.
The cities at the focus of this debate (NYC, SF) are cities which haven't seen much densification over the past decade. Both SF and NYC have lost population over the past few years. In NYC, the areas that have grown more dense are the nicer, safer neighborhoods because they usually are more expensive.
For what it's worth. Homocides in Western Europe is ticking up a little bit due to immigration. But it seems to stay mostly flat. I am keeping an eye on it tho, as a general benchmark of 'the health of society'. Frankly, I think small nation states like Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands have much more accurate crime reporting than the USA. So, if homocides aren't trending upwards in western europe in these countries I think that's a good signal of health of 'The West', and so far that is the case.
Unless underreporting fell.
And if overall crime is falling, underreporting may well fall, because then crimes are more rare and reporting them has more of an effect.
Someone is watching too much Fox News Entertainment. I'll go with Noah's data rather than your opinion.
Somewhere in between? We have a police blotter report in our local newspaper here in San Francisco, I have never seen this amount of crime in decades. And that's just a reported, we don't even call anymore for broken windows and other theft.
That applies only to the uninsured. A small demographic. Zip it
Honest question, wouldn't SF be a bit outside of the norm? I don't spend a lot of time there, but what I hear about it makes me think that Noah could be right about the US as a whole and SF could be an exception to this positive development.
Actually I think you're being vastly unfair here. Even progressive shows like the Young Turks have started highlighting the insanity of criminal reform in states like California and New York that have turned felonies into misdemeanors and allowed violent repeat offenders back onto the streets where they terrorize even more victims. Noah focuses on homicide ostensibly for statistical reasons, but honestly even that sort of misses the point.
Our large cities are suffering because the political class in those cities constantly side with the rights of criminals as opposed to that of victims. We're told that the solution to combating crime is to address the long term "root causes", while letting criminals run amok in the here and now with impunity. Bail reform in California and New York has allowed dangerous people back onto the streets repeatedly with little repercussions. Homicide might be the worst crime there is, but many lesser crimes both violent and non-violent have vastly reduced the quality of life in many of our major cities.
We're often told that this is just how things are and that we should suck it up and complain less, least we engage in right-wing fear mongering. Yet anyone who's spent any amount of time in major cities in East Asia knows that the idea that rampant crime is part and parcel of life in the big city is an absolute lie. I'm actually surprised that Noah cited crime as a reason for Americans to be optimistic. When I came back from vacation in Tokyo last year I actually felt a bit depressed by how much worse American cities were compared to cities in Japan.
In the past Noah has described America as the city on that hill that ostensibly people from around the world aspired to move to. I certainly can't claim to speak for everyone, but as a Chinese American immigrant who has at least some knowledge of the pulse of the immigrant Asian community on these matters, I can tell you that factors like crime are among the major reasons why many people in countries like China view America with a healthy degree of skepticism.
Regardless of whether or not violent crime is falling, its still absurdly high in our big cities compared to violent crime in places like China or Japan. Jimmy Kimmel recently visited Japan for the first time with his family and observed startling differences between America and Japan, although as some critics have pointed out he didn't delve deeper into trying to understand the reasons behind those differences.
We don't even compare well to our neighbor to the north. Shared border, shared language, shared English cultural ancestry. Canada has guns and diversity and Canadians don't shoot each other in the street.
America has a younger median age than Japan or China, which makes a big difference, because most violent crime is committed by men between the ages of 15-40. Older societies may be more peaceful, but imo they suffer from a lack of business dynamism, entrepreneurs, or cultural change than for instance young people, who have less to lose and everything to gain by changes in society. American gun ownership also plays a role, because it means that disputes or arguments are more likely to result in someone pulling a gun than in other countries .
I'm fairly certain that the age adjusted homicide rate for America is still substantially higher than for places like China or Japan. But as commenter Slaw points out below, violent crime is disproportionately concentrated among certain demographics.
This is one of the curious features of American political discourse. Whenever people discuss crime rates or PISA scores, they invariably leave out the fact that huge racial disparities exist across the board. Blending these disparities together tends to obscure the more relevant statistical truths at hand. Noah points out that America is a violent country, but leaves out the reasons why that's the case. Likewise Jimmy Kimmel recently observed that Japan was much cleaner and safer than America without considering the underlying reasons for that as well.
I do agree with you though that Americans are crazy when it comes to the 2nd amendment and gun rights.
There's also the cultural determinist explanation, which is pretty provocative.
For an example, this piece last year by Colin Woodard published in Politico: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/23/surprising-geography-of-gun-violence-00092413
It's rich with data and the thesis is that violence is regional. The nut graf of Woodard's thesis: "The geography of gun violence — and public and elite ideas about how it should be addressed — is the result of differences at once regional, cultural and historical. Once you understand how the country was colonized — and by whom — a number of insights into the problem are revealed."
It's a culturally determined explanation because culture, in this sense meaning a social arrangement, binds modern societies to ideas and actions that a long-dead social arrangement has solved.
It's enlightening and problematic all at once. Woodard is arguing that the South has the highest rates of gun violence because it was based in honor culture and the domination of slaves, and this violence is programmed into culture and inescapable. Or New York City is statistically safe because it inherited WASP values.
China, S. Korea, and Japan are Buddhist/Confucian cultures based on the concepts of harmony and order. While there is more "policing" there, there is also less need for confrontation and a broad respect for "law and order." Their communal culture is more tolerant of social conformity than our individualist "each man for themselves." Increasing worldwide population density probably favors the Asian approach in my opinion. https://johnhardman.substack.com/p/asian-century
And, the Rohingya are Muslim and clash with the predominantly Buddhist culture. I am not sure of your point.
Under policing (to few and too many of them dealing with traffic and public order instead of crime) and availability of guns.
So true- the whole force is focused on traffic.
Obviously makes people want to kill more
If anything there's too much policing, America is always getting closer and closer to a police state and I don't think being able to buy guns make people more violent
The stats conveniently omit NYC, LA, DC, Chicago. Crime is not falling, it’s being misrepresented.
That's wrong. All of those cities are in the WSJ article that I linked to. Homicides fell by 28% in DC, 15% in NYC, and 7% in Chicago, and rose by 14% in LA.
Crime IS falling. It's not being misrepresented.
Bullshit. Straight up bullshit. You just making shit up. Either cite a credible source for your claims or be quiet.
My sense from DC is that it IS. Still way too high. Still need more and better policing, but the arrow is pointing down.
We need to implement best policy practice. Such as community policing, #BanAllProhibition and obviously, all the things it takes to create a fair and just high standard of living high quality of life society. That’s the way to reduce crime. Fucking policing has not much to do with it other than the policy practices I mentioned. Get a grip
Violent crime was up nearly 40 percent in 2023 vs 2022. So far this year it has fallen back a bit toward 2022’s very high rate.
In 2023 the number of murders was essentially double the 2016-2017 rates.
DC is still a mess
Go the fuck away with your bullshit. Either provide a credible source with a citation or shut the fuck up. That’s how this works. Random dude on the Internet just saying shit is the least credible source on the planet.
😂🤪. Good self-awareness score! Get your score up to a 3.0 and then you are allowed to use Google to check DC murder stats by year. Right now these are all just shiny buttons for you - I understand. Learning how to swear is a difficult first step. Keep working on that and maybe with some gene therapy the rest will come.
Allow me to completely obliterate your false, intentionally disingenuous bullshit narrative.
We have more full-time police officers now than any time in the history of our sovereign.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191694/number-of-law-enforcement-officers-in-the-us/
If there is an epidemic of nonreporting, how would you know? Don’t even hear yourself?
“Real crime is at an all-time high” absolute proof of your stupid lying agitprop drivel.
We’re not even close to the period between 1970 and 91. Nowhere close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
“Jimmying crime states”? I’m assuming you meant statistics. That’s nothing more than the arsonist returning to the fire. That is what your lame ass attempt at agitprop bullshit is.
Now, get the fuck out. GOP Putin fluffer boi’s not welcome!
The number of Per-Capita police officers is what matters here. And that has trended down somewhat from 0.23 to 0.2%
I agree we are not on all time highs tho.
I didn’t insinuate anything about per capita, let alone, make a claim.
We are over policed. If we #BanAllProhibition make a commitment to public schools and provide economic opportunity, as a decent state and federal government should, along with best policy practice such as #CommunityPolicing, 1/3 of all cops, prosecutors, judges, incarceration facilities, cop cars, laptops, court clerks and so on would be useless. Not able to justify their own existence.
The prescient point ?
They are the tip of the spear for the morally bankrupt mass incarceration complex.
nah mate, you want a strong police force. You guys aren't Denmark (I'm from Denmark). The USA is a violent place, without police it will be more violent. Western Europe is increasing its police presence substantially since the crime wave of refugees and immigrants; and it has the effect that you'd expect --> Crime goes down again.
USA will never be Denmark. Our situation is an anomaly in the world.
Source? This guy.
Murder is falling in some cities.
Exactly. Mine is currently on track to either match last year's record (nearly one a day), or surpass it. You would have a tough time convincing anyone here that any sort of crime is going down.
You would have a tough time convincing critical thinkers that you know what you’re talking about. Ancillary bullshit means nothing unless you provide a credible citation from a reputable source, you’re just random dude on the Internet saying shit. Really stupid agitprop shit
This narrative needs much much more play
Great news. I knew or suspected some ( crime) but the last- that younger generations were doing good was very surprising. Maybe no Civil War after all.
Pretty sure this is why younger generations feel a certain apathy towards their economic prospects. Regardless of their actual wealth increasing (and the additional things they can buy with it), it won’t buy them a house if this continues: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Median-house-price-to-median-household-income-annually-1984-to-2016-Source-Data_fig5_343914927
Well said. The reason millennials/Gen Z feel less prosperous is primarily due to housing costs outpacing income gains, which has both material and psychological effects.
Even if real incomes are higher now, the fact that homes were much more affordable to past generations and that many young people today can’t afford to buy at the same age their parents did makes any income gains feel inconsequential.
Regarding “Younger generations are doing better than their parents”:
Does the graph look a bit funny to you?
-The income plots seem to have a left shift. Income should start at 18 years (high school graduation), not 15 years.
-Surprising that there are not increasing income lags after 18 years for more recent generations, which would reflect increasing college attendance.
-For GenZ, the oldest are now 27 years old, which gives 9 years of income history, but the graph eyeballs at closer to 12 years income history.
Maybe minor issues, and the graph is basically correct.
I continue to believe there is something fishy about the "Gen Z is wealthier than previous generations" math. I'd like to see somebody try to actually control for differential inflation issues here, particularly around housing. To the extent that Gen Z is "wealthier" on paper because the house they scrimped to buy is worth a bigger amount of money, but then they have less capacity to either to spend money on anything that isn't the house, or to save up in other forms that can be spent for food and medicine in retirement -- that doesn't really seem like being wealthier. Sure, you could sell the house and live on that. But _where_ are you going to live on that, if every other house is just as expensive?
As Felix Salmon likes to say, you're born short one house. Inflated housing prices don't mean that owning a house makes you wealthier; it means it costs you more to cover your short.
More on differential inflation: https://www.slowboring.com/p/inflation-contrarians
<blockquote>
Relative price shifts are a big deal
If the price of fruit and vegetables started rising by double digits per year, offset by falling prices for sugar, wheat, and other staple commodities, that would have serious implications for people’s diet and health.
To just shrug and say “well the price of food is stable” would be pretty unresponsive to the actual situation, which is that a normal person is either going to see the quality of their diet erode or else the share of their income going to food rise.
Critically, this is not inflation.
I am a stickler here just like I’m a stickler about immigration and wages, because it’s really important for policymakers not to lose the plot on the need for aggressive monetary policy to generate full employment.
That being said, these relative price shifts are also bad.
And in this case it’s a fake example. But here are some real facts about how relative prices have changed:
[chart, which you can view if you follow the link]
This chart is telling you the plain truth, which is that if you took a healthy, childless person from 2000 and teleported them to 2020 and showed them Spotify and Netflix on an iPad Pro their mind would be totally blown. And an iPad Pro plus a magic keyboard costs less in nominal terms than an iBook did in 1999. Your guy would be extremely impressed with the IT revolution and the information superhighway.
But then if you bring forward another guy who’s got three kids — ages 4, 2, and six months — and tell him what his new child care costs are going to be, he’s gonna be really sad.
</blockquote>
Basically, I find it very hard to believe that the guy with kids here is wrong to feel sad. If you claim that the average 40-something married couple with three kids is "wealthier" today than they were in my parents' generation, I have questions about what you mean by "wealthier".
On a different note from the debating of crime statistics, are the cross sectional GDP growth data adjusted for foreign born workers for the countries other than the US? Italy instituted a very attractive tax regime for high income immigrants post pandemic. While the number of immigrants may be small as a percentage of population relative to the US, it is likely they are 1-2 orders of magnitude on average higher income than the typical US immigrant. Would really appreciate your perspective on this.
I think wealth is a better financial gauge than income. And there, we are at peak inequality.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/an-open-message-to-the-top-01
I had to squint pretty hard to understand the immigration and crime charts. For example, Violent crime is not structurally falling and is still outrageously high relative to peer countries.
No. REPORTED murder is falling cuz of fewer police to report it.
They aren't even answering 9/11 calls at night in some cities.
Show your work.
Police don’t “report” murders, people do.
Is this guy playing a bit?
Bullshit. Stop with your Russian talking point agitprop. I don’t wanna see you fellating Vladimir.
So say you. Got some data to back it up?