More XBox, Less Crime

September 16, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Crime was down in 2009. When the preliminary data came out four months ago, newspapers ran headlines like

• Crime Rates Fell in '09 Despite Economy (NYT)
• Why is crime down, in spite of the recession? (CSM)

The idea that unemployment leads to crime hasn’t had much support from the data. Criminologists have known this for a half century or so. But everyone else won’t let it go.* Apparently, the idea just too appealing. The logic is clear and simple: people who are out of work will commit crimes to get the money they need.

But that’s not the way it works. If there is a link between unemployment and crime, it is indirect. More important, it works not at the individual level, but at the neighborhood level. Neighborhoods with persistent high unemployment will have higher rates of crime, but not because jobless people are turning to illegal sources of income (though no doubt some are), but because people in those neighborhoods cannot exercise the necessary informal social control; they cannot ride herd on the teenagers.

Anyway, here’s the graph from the UCR.


The decline is real – not just a CompStat-inspired suppression of data by the police. Murder and motor vehicle theft are the two most accurately counted crimes, so we can take those changes pretty much at face value; robbery too. So what’s going on?

I don’t know. But Lawrence Katz has an interesting explanation – video games. Those wild kids, instead of going out and stealing actual cars,** are playing Grand Theft Auto. Their behavior is more virtual, also more virtuous.

(David Leonhardt, back in May, discussed this and linked to some research on a similar effect of movies in his Times Economix blog.)


*Not quite everyone. Conservatives like the idea that crime is unrelated to economics. They see crime as a product of bad people with bad morals. Crime rises when insitutions that instill morality (church, family) decline; and crime falls when those institutions gain strength. I suspect that conservatives also reject the economics-crime link because it implies there are no social costs, the government need not do anything about unemployment and poverty.

** Also, cars have become harder to steal thanks to various technological advances – criminologists call this “target hardening.” Car theft is becoming a crime better left to professionals.

HT: Mark Kleiman

Mosques, Danger, and Purtiy

September 14, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Marty Peretz concluded his recent anti-Muslim rant with this.

I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

This is blatantly wrong. Freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion are not privileges that the government grants to “worthy” people and faiths. These are the rights of everyone, rights that the government is Constitutionally bound to protect.

Nine days later, after a New York Times column had called him out on it, Peretz realized his error and issued an apology. But how could someone who has spent his life writing about government, mostly US government, even teaching about it at Harvard, compose and publish that sentence in the first place?

Peretz was writing to decry a Times editorial that called for tolerance, specifically for the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque, the one that is to be built a couple of blocks away from Ground Zero.

When it comes to the mosque, and to anything related to Islam these days, it seems that we are no longer in the realm of rational political discourse – discussions of policies and their effects. We are in symbolic territory, the realm of Purity and Danger. For Peretz and those of a similar mind, danger is paramount. He speaks of

anxiety about the dangers of Islamism, and anger at the refusal of certain politicians and commentators to adequately grasp those dangers,

Danger calls for a hardening of boundaries and a mentality of Us vs. Them. We need to be sure that everyone on our side is with us and that we have cast out all impurities, i.e, those whose loyalties are the least bit suspect. So Peretz refers to

Muslim or Arab interests or their commitments to foreign governments and, more likely, to foreign insurgencies and, yes, quite alien philosophies.

and

the increasing number of both naturalized and native-born citizens who enlist in the Islamic terror networks of our time, here and abroad.

As the Times says, this thinking equates all of Islam and all Muslims with terrorism. Or in Peretz’s words,

the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood.

My only consolation is that we’ve been here before. Other religions and other ethnic groups have been similarly vilified and feared. You can probably go back through US history and find language that sounds like what we now hear from the Tea Party and Peretz and the rest, with feared alien agents not Muslims but Catholics, Jews, Italians, Irish, Chinese, and many others. But despite the antipathy of “real Americans,” these groups became mainstream, no longer the objects of fear and suspicion. You can even find some of them at Tea Party demonstrations or writing anti-Muslim screeds for right-wing publications.

The Peretz phrase I find most ominous, I think, is this one:

Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.

Ominous because when we say that some group thinks life is cheap or doesn’t value human life the way we do, it’s often prelude to our killing them in very large numbers.

Divanalysis

September 10, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Quantitative methods for cultural analysis.

Jay Caspian Kang at The Awl:

. . . my crack team of consultants, statisticians and graphic designers have assembled DIVA-OFF 2010, a highly scientific (we used computers!) evaluation of the greatest divas of the past twenty-five years. A list of divas was evaluated on eleven levels of diva-ness, and, because each diva characteristic is not created equal, we scaled the values in the hopes of creating an aggregate diva number that will serve as a reference point for future generations.

Here, for example, are the results in the Hand Gestures category:

Admittedly, rater subjectivity may be a factor:

Of all the diva characteristics, Hand Gestures is the most open to personal preference. I certainly don’t like Celine’s slow-motion-deodorant-commercial hand gestures, but who am I to tell your mom that they aren’t cool? And while I always liked how Mariah would point out the notes in her runs, I can also see why your mother might find this to be a bit show-offy. One thing your mother and I can agree on, though: Carrie Underwood will never ascend to diva status because of her awful, awful work in this category.

Read the whole post (unless, of course, you’re a big Jordin fan), and watch the accompanying videos (with the sound off for the Hand Gestures).

Victims and Blame

September 9, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Blaming the victim.” William Ryan wrote the book and coined the phrase forty years ago to characterize explanations of poverty that ignored large social and economic forces and instead looked only at the behavior of poor people. If only they would anticipate the consequences of their choices in education, work, and family, theorized the victim-blamers, they would make other choices and rise from poverty. (My post on a very recent example is here.)

Now Courrier International, a Paris weekly with the tagline “L'anticipation au quotidien” takes blaming the victim to a new level. Here’s the English language version.


DesignTaxi comments:

In the latest instance, Saatchi & Saatchi France used an image of the New York skyline with a shorter twin towers, two airplanes flying innocuously over the buildings. The tagline? “Learn to anticipate”.

HT: Polly, who, hélas, is no longer in Paris and not blogging so much.