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Marie Kennedy's avatar

So, I attempted to answer some of the questions Matt has related to 2020's murder surge: https://postwoke.substack.com/p/20000lives

A few points:

-The FBI data will be nice, but the MCCA quickly released data for most of the major cities (Jeff Asher manually collected more and so did I just based on local news; error-prone I'm sure)

-Major cities account for almost half of annual murders (less that I would have thought) but murders are highly concentrated

-Across the reporting cities, murders went down slightly in a few, but mostly up, up to a 200% increase, with an average of 30%. Asher assumes suburban and rural deaths went up less; hence 25% conservatively nationally

-In these cities, there was NO correlation between the increase in murders and poverty, or the rate at which police were funded/defunded, or the number of guns bought in the state. (Fair warning, I used Excel and auto-linear regressions, don't hate.)

-I didn't bother comparing what party was in charge of cities or states bc it's a dumb idea

-The biggest jumps happened in cities where there was a high-profile police killing and large protests after (or, in the case of Seattle and Portland, just the protesting)

Questions I was left with:

-Why did murders stay flat in Baltimore? Are they just maxed out on it? Are people leaving the inner city in droves?

-Why did they go up so much in Ft. Worth?

-Was most of 2020's jump comprised of black victims, or was it proportional across racial groups? (Black victims made up more than their fare share of 2015-2019's increase in victims)

-Assuming this is driven by a breakdown in community-policing relationships, is it mostly on the community side, or the police side? Or totally mutual?

It does seem insane that we have to wait 10 months for important data.

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Ant Breach's avatar

>But unfortunately, as best I can tell, descriptive work is low-prestige across broad swathes of academia.

This is the buried lede of the piece. It's really bad that social science academia wastes loads of time trying to establish causality for things that don't matter! Providing better descriptive evidence of stuff people care about is a much better contribution to the sum of human knowledge than conducting RCTs and natural experiments for things nobody cares about. Scatters > Regression tables.

And this is something common to both economics and most of the rest of social science academia. Ideology doesn't come into it - the problem is their priorities and incentives.

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