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I honestly couldn't tell which one of you was being truthful? I thought maybe you were trying to make Chicago seem better than it is or maybe HN User "jostmey"

I honestly couldn't tell which one of you was being truthful? I thought maybe you were trying to make Chicago seem better than it is or maybe HN User "jostmey" was being a bit alarmist. Anyway, I had to google thee historical violent crime data myself. Turns out neither of you are being entirely honest. GP is definitely wrong when he asserts that crime has skyrocketed from "three decades ago". Would have been late 80s, early 90s and historical data says crime was much higher at that time. (Multiple times higher actually. So "jostmey" was not a little off, but way off on that assertion according to data.) And you're not being entirely honest when you say demographics have changed and imply that means a change in crime rates. At least, the rate of decrease of violent crime has gone nowhere over the past 30 years or so. It's decreasing at the same rate today, as it was in 2009, and in 1999. Meanwhile, demographic rate of change was near constant until it ratcheted up around 2008 apparently. (And then only in downtown, and only in the income dimension. Not racially.) So, following your implication, the rate of decline in, say, violent crime, should have ratcheted up around that time as well. The really interesting thing though is that even if I had validated either of your assertions in the data, neither of your explanations shed much light on plausible reasons for the disparity the article mentions. It's like you two just took your preferred world views and started arguing with each other without regard to what the data actually stated, or even what the original question actually was. I mean, OK, we get it. You like Chicago. Fine. Just say that and leave it at that, don't try to snow us. Same with "jostmey". We get it. You don't like Chicago. Just say that and leave it there. Why try to blow smoke up our collective rears?

moorhosj 7y ago
According to Census ACS from 2017, the city went from 35% Black in 2010 to 30.5% in 2017. That is a pretty rapid shift in under s decade. Hard numbers fell from 930k to 830k. Most of the population loss is concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods. There are also plenty of South Side neighborhoods that are doing quite well (Hyde Park, Beverly, Mt Greenwood, Kenwood, Woodlawn, McKinley Park, Chinatown, Pilsen, Bridgeport, Garfield Ridge, and a few more). Those places don’t get the news coverage so everyone lumps an entire 1/3 of the city into “dump”. ==https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Sigh. OK moorhosj, let's try to step through this. What does that have to do with Chicago's life expectancy disparity being 30 years? Are you saying then, that what we should really be doing is comparing the life expectancy of people in Chinatown, with people in Chinatown, instead of comparing people across your whole city? Because what I'm trying to explain to you guys is that, this is not how the rest of us outside Chicago think. If you were to ask me, I would say, yeah, it seems totally reasonable to compare life expectancies across the entire city of Madison for instance. (I'm from Wisconsin.) I'd wager if you'd ask someone from Nebraska, they'd say, "Yeah, it seems reasonable to compare life expectancies for people across the entire city of Lincoln." We're not coming up with some off the wall metric to try to make Chicago look bad here. You and this "jostmey" guy are doing that for us. Finally, look, for the average person, we see a black guy, we're gonna say he's black. Not "Two or more races". Not "Black with hispanic origin". Etc etc etc. So, going back to the original point, we didn't get hung up on that stuff 3 decades ago. In 70, 80,90, whatever, we, even the census,just called people black. (Maybe we might have called them mixed if they were mixed, but that's certainly not how our censuses would have counted them back then.) So, you throw the 2 or more ethnicities or whatever group in and you get, what? 33, 34% of what we in 1980 would have simply called "black"? I'd be willing to bet money that the two or more races / hispanic census stuff started right around the same time that the percentage of blacks in the census declined. Point being, these ratios aren't really changing much. Only society's definitions of what is black has changed. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, maybe that's neither? The point I'm making is that demographics aren't changing much from 80, 90, 00 whatever. At least racially. Fewer total people, yes. But the ratios seem to be relatively constant. Now if you go back further, obviously you get radical change. But the original post said "last three decades". So you have to look at the last 3 decades, and not cherry pick.
  - moorhosj 7y ago
    Except that you are doing the same cherry picking that you accuse others of. I showed data from 2010 to 2017 to illustrate how significant the demographic change has been. For some reason, you decided to go back to 1980 to make a counter-point. Our definitions haven’t changed since 2010, so I’m not sure that’s a valid point. To the rest of your point, test we should compare these things across cities, that is how we see the disparities. That point is more relevant to the original article and not the specific point I was responding to.
api 7y ago
Wait... you actually looked something up! That's not how you Internet! You make things up to argue your personal biases. Duh.
- dang 7y ago
  Would you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? You used to do this a lot, and then your contributions got somewhat better. Please don't backslide.

moorhosj 7y ago

According to Census ACS from 2017, the city went from 35% Black in 2010 to 30.5% in 2017. That is a pretty rapid shift in under s decade. Hard numbers fell from 930k to 830k. Most of the population loss is concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods. There are also plenty of South Side neighborhoods that are doing quite well (Hyde Park, Beverly, Mt Greenwood, Kenwood, Woodlawn, McKinley Park, Chinatown, Pilsen, Bridgeport, Garfield Ridge, and a few more). Those places don’t get the news coverage so everyone lumps an entire 1/3 of the city into “dump”. ==https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...

bilbo0s 7y ago
Sigh. OK moorhosj, let's try to step through this. What does that have to do with Chicago's life expectancy disparity being 30 years? Are you saying then, that what we should really be doing is comparing the life expectancy of people in Chinatown, with people in Chinatown, instead of comparing people across your whole city? Because what I'm trying to explain to you guys is that, this is not how the rest of us outside Chicago think. If you were to ask me, I would say, yeah, it seems totally reasonable to compare life expectancies across the entire city of Madison for instance. (I'm from Wisconsin.) I'd wager if you'd ask someone from Nebraska, they'd say, "Yeah, it seems reasonable to compare life expectancies for people across the entire city of Lincoln." We're not coming up with some off the wall metric to try to make Chicago look bad here. You and this "jostmey" guy are doing that for us. Finally, look, for the average person, we see a black guy, we're gonna say he's black. Not "Two or more races". Not "Black with hispanic origin". Etc etc etc. So, going back to the original point, we didn't get hung up on that stuff 3 decades ago. In 70, 80,90, whatever, we, even the census,just called people black. (Maybe we might have called them mixed if they were mixed, but that's certainly not how our censuses would have counted them back then.) So, you throw the 2 or more ethnicities or whatever group in and you get, what? 33, 34% of what we in 1980 would have simply called "black"? I'd be willing to bet money that the two or more races / hispanic census stuff started right around the same time that the percentage of blacks in the census declined. Point being, these ratios aren't really changing much. Only society's definitions of what is black has changed. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, maybe that's neither? The point I'm making is that demographics aren't changing much from 80, 90, 00 whatever. At least racially. Fewer total people, yes. But the ratios seem to be relatively constant. Now if you go back further, obviously you get radical change. But the original post said "last three decades". So you have to look at the last 3 decades, and not cherry pick.
- moorhosj 7y ago
  Except that you are doing the same cherry picking that you accuse others of. I showed data from 2010 to 2017 to illustrate how significant the demographic change has been. For some reason, you decided to go back to 1980 to make a counter-point. Our definitions haven’t changed since 2010, so I’m not sure that’s a valid point. To the rest of your point, test we should compare these things across cities, that is how we see the disparities. That point is more relevant to the original article and not the specific point I was responding to.

api 7y ago

Wait... you actually looked something up! That's not how you Internet! You make things up to argue your personal biases. Duh.

dang 7y ago
Would you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? You used to do this a lot, and then your contributions got somewhat better. Please don't backslide.