7 ms·

Don't Americans realize that there might a point where it is cheaper to provide (or more exactly, force) better education and social security on those at risk,

Don't Americans realize that there might a point where it is cheaper to provide (or more exactly, force) better education and social security on those at risk, than increasing the police force and incarceration rates? That was the theory pushed fairly successfully by many social reformers in the 60's and early 70's. The net result, or at least the concurrent event, was a massive crime wave. The fact of the matter is that Americans are not Scandinavians. For homicides where the offender is known, more than half are committed by a demographic group that is pretty much nonexistent in Scandinavia. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_3_murder_offenders_by_age_sex_and_race_2012.xls http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/c... Further, within the US, people tend to behave more similarly to where they come from (even if it was many generations back) than to some American average. I don't have data for any Scandinavian nations, but Tino Sanandaji has some data comparing Swedish Americans (a group which apparently self-identifies enough to be statistically significant) to Swedes: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/super-economy-in-one-picture.html http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/super-economy-in-o... So it's very unclear that a Scandinavian approach would work here.

vidarh 12y ago
> That was the theory pushed fairly successfully by many social reformers in the 60's and early 70's. The net result, or at least the concurrent event, was a massive crime wave. The US have never invested in social security levels anywhere near the Scandinavian countries. > more than half are committed by a demographic group that is pretty much nonexistent in Scandinavia. Except that when you control for factors that correlate strongly with social status, the race effect disappears almost entirely. The US has a poverty problem first and foremost.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  The US have never invested in social security levels anywhere near the Scandinavian countries. How much spending do you believe is necessary to control crime via social security/etc? Is there some consumption level at which crime is expected to vanish? Note that the US currently spends 60% of it's budget on redistribution and 4% on police protection. What would the optimal spending levels be? http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2012_US_total http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2012_US_total Except that when you control for factors that correlate strongly with social status, the race effect disappears almost entirely. What factors? Most of the obvious ones that I can think of (poverty, government dependence, unemployment) fail for this purpose since blacks do not make up anything close to 50% of people suffering from them. Could you please state concretely what these factors are and why you believe the effect vanishes?
  - vidarh 12y ago
    > How much spending do you believe is necessary to control crime via social security/etc? Enough to mostly eradicate poverty. I don't know what the cost of that would be in the US, but as long as you have widespread poverty I don't see a reason to assume you have tested the effect this would have on poverty. At least nothing like Scandinavian levels. The US presently have a poverty rate about 3 times that of Norway (about 15% vs about 4.5%), despite Norway putting the poverty "bar" much higher - in Norway you are officially considered poor if your income is below 50% of the median. In Oslo that currently means about $24k/year. The US official poverty line for a single person in the continental states is $11,670 (which isn't that far from 50% of the median in the US either, but the cost of living in Norway is not twice that of the US), rising to $23,850 for a family of 4. With directly comparable numbers, the difference would be much greater. Then you have to expect to wait at least a generation for reduced poverty to filter through to increased education levels, even assuming you fund the education system well enough that anyone who puts in the work can complete university for free. Then you can start to get an idea whether or not Scandinavian level social security and education would make a difference in the US. > Note that the US currently spends 60% of it's budget on redistribution The problem is that you've created a system that causes so large differences in the first place. 60% to redress that is little more than window dressing. Further, that 60% number is nonsense. A large proportion of that 60% - whichever slices you've added up to get at it - provides benefits for at least parts of those that pay into it in the first place, so the actual amount that is net redistribution is far smaller. > What factors? Most of the obvious ones that I can think of (poverty, government dependence, unemployment) fail for this purpose since blacks do not make up anything close to 50% of people suffering from them. Poverty rate certainly does account for a substantial part of it, with African-Americans being substantially more likely to be poor than non-hispanic whites, at ca. 27.2% and <12% respectively. http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq3.htm http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq3.htm Tack on education levels, unemployment, family cohesion and you get most of the way there.
    - wyager 12y ago
      >Enough to mostly eradicate poverty. What does that mean? A homeless person today can afford food, often (temporary) shelter, frequently a cell phone... I'd say poverty has effectively been "mostly eradicated" already by production technology.
woah 12y ago
What crime wave?
tehwebguy 12y ago
I'm pretty sure that Scandinavian countries have males
rmxt 12y ago
> For homicides where the offender is known, more than half are committed by a demographic group that is pretty much nonexistent in Scandinavia. > Further, within the US, people tend to behave more similarly to where they come from (even if it was many generations back) Is your implication really that black/brown people everywhere are (or would be) inherently more murderous? Perhaps I am incorrectly reading between your lines.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  I don't know what you mean by "inherently". I do believe many traits are strongly demographically linked and that demographics tend to drown out other factors. I don't know the particular cause beyond that - I've seen very little convincing evidence one way or the other.
  - rmxt 12y ago
    If by "linked" you mean correlation, then sure, I agree there are links between demographics and crime/poverty in the USA. However, your implication seems to be that if Scandinavian countries had substantial black/brown populations, then they too would have murder rates comparable to America. That was what I was attempting to get at by "inherently". How does your conclusion follow?
    - yummyfajitas 12y ago
      My specific claim: some crime causing factors live within subpopulations. If country A has a high crime subpopulation and country B does not, it's a little silly to point to a policy in country B and blame the high crime in country A on the lack of that policy. I'm simply rejecting the idea that differences in crime rates between the US and Scandinavia are due solely to policy. Demographics matter too. A little googling suggests there are wild disparities in crime rates based on demographics even in Scandinavia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime
      - IkmoIkmo 12y ago
dragonwriter 12y ago
> That was the theory pushed fairly successfully by many social reformers in the 60's and early 70's. The net result, or at least the concurrent event, was a massive crime wave. It wasn't even a concurrent event, it was a preceding event -- the rising crime wave began roughly concurrent with the end of WWII, rose in a fairly smooth unbroken trend (With a few interruptions -- which started in the 1970s.) If any result in crime rates resulted from social reforms advocated in the 1960s and 1970s (which is questionable), its more like it was the interruptions in the long-running trend of increasing crime rates, not the increase that started more than a decade before the reforms were advocated. Demographics in the key criminal age demographic -- both from the demobilizations after the WWII and Korea, and then the Baby Boom, is probably the key factor driving the increase (and subsequent decrease as that demographic bulge passed that age band.)
happyscrappy 12y ago
The Scandinavian approach could work in the US if the citizens were all of the type that would not cross an empty street against the light.

vidarh 12y ago

> That was the theory pushed fairly successfully by many social reformers in the 60's and early 70's. The net result, or at least the concurrent event, was a massive crime wave. The US have never invested in social security levels anywhere near the Scandinavian countries. > more than half are committed by a demographic group that is pretty much nonexistent in Scandinavia. Except that when you control for factors that correlate strongly with social status, the race effect disappears almost entirely. The US has a poverty problem first and foremost.

yummyfajitas 12y ago
The US have never invested in social security levels anywhere near the Scandinavian countries. How much spending do you believe is necessary to control crime via social security/etc? Is there some consumption level at which crime is expected to vanish? Note that the US currently spends 60% of it's budget on redistribution and 4% on police protection. What would the optimal spending levels be? http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2012_US_total http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2012_US_total Except that when you control for factors that correlate strongly with social status, the race effect disappears almost entirely. What factors? Most of the obvious ones that I can think of (poverty, government dependence, unemployment) fail for this purpose since blacks do not make up anything close to 50% of people suffering from them. Could you please state concretely what these factors are and why you believe the effect vanishes?
- vidarh 12y ago
  > How much spending do you believe is necessary to control crime via social security/etc? Enough to mostly eradicate poverty. I don't know what the cost of that would be in the US, but as long as you have widespread poverty I don't see a reason to assume you have tested the effect this would have on poverty. At least nothing like Scandinavian levels. The US presently have a poverty rate about 3 times that of Norway (about 15% vs about 4.5%), despite Norway putting the poverty "bar" much higher - in Norway you are officially considered poor if your income is below 50% of the median. In Oslo that currently means about $24k/year. The US official poverty line for a single person in the continental states is $11,670 (which isn't that far from 50% of the median in the US either, but the cost of living in Norway is not twice that of the US), rising to $23,850 for a family of 4. With directly comparable numbers, the difference would be much greater. Then you have to expect to wait at least a generation for reduced poverty to filter through to increased education levels, even assuming you fund the education system well enough that anyone who puts in the work can complete university for free. Then you can start to get an idea whether or not Scandinavian level social security and education would make a difference in the US. > Note that the US currently spends 60% of it's budget on redistribution The problem is that you've created a system that causes so large differences in the first place. 60% to redress that is little more than window dressing. Further, that 60% number is nonsense. A large proportion of that 60% - whichever slices you've added up to get at it - provides benefits for at least parts of those that pay into it in the first place, so the actual amount that is net redistribution is far smaller. > What factors? Most of the obvious ones that I can think of (poverty, government dependence, unemployment) fail for this purpose since blacks do not make up anything close to 50% of people suffering from them. Poverty rate certainly does account for a substantial part of it, with African-Americans being substantially more likely to be poor than non-hispanic whites, at ca. 27.2% and <12% respectively. http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq3.htm http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq3.htm Tack on education levels, unemployment, family cohesion and you get most of the way there.
  - wyager 12y ago
    >Enough to mostly eradicate poverty. What does that mean? A homeless person today can afford food, often (temporary) shelter, frequently a cell phone... I'd say poverty has effectively been "mostly eradicated" already by production technology.

woah 12y ago

What crime wave?

tehwebguy 12y ago

I'm pretty sure that Scandinavian countries have males

rmxt 12y ago

> For homicides where the offender is known, more than half are committed by a demographic group that is pretty much nonexistent in Scandinavia. > Further, within the US, people tend to behave more similarly to where they come from (even if it was many generations back) Is your implication really that black/brown people everywhere are (or would be) inherently more murderous? Perhaps I am incorrectly reading between your lines.

yummyfajitas 12y ago
I don't know what you mean by "inherently". I do believe many traits are strongly demographically linked and that demographics tend to drown out other factors. I don't know the particular cause beyond that - I've seen very little convincing evidence one way or the other.
- rmxt 12y ago
  If by "linked" you mean correlation, then sure, I agree there are links between demographics and crime/poverty in the USA. However, your implication seems to be that if Scandinavian countries had substantial black/brown populations, then they too would have murder rates comparable to America. That was what I was attempting to get at by "inherently". How does your conclusion follow?
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    My specific claim: some crime causing factors live within subpopulations. If country A has a high crime subpopulation and country B does not, it's a little silly to point to a policy in country B and blame the high crime in country A on the lack of that policy. I'm simply rejecting the idea that differences in crime rates between the US and Scandinavia are due solely to policy. Demographics matter too. A little googling suggests there are wild disparities in crime rates based on demographics even in Scandinavia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime
    - IkmoIkmo 12y ago

dragonwriter 12y ago

> That was the theory pushed fairly successfully by many social reformers in the 60's and early 70's. The net result, or at least the concurrent event, was a massive crime wave. It wasn't even a concurrent event, it was a preceding event -- the rising crime wave began roughly concurrent with the end of WWII, rose in a fairly smooth unbroken trend (With a few interruptions -- which started in the 1970s.) If any result in crime rates resulted from social reforms advocated in the 1960s and 1970s (which is questionable), its more like it was the interruptions in the long-running trend of increasing crime rates, not the increase that started more than a decade before the reforms were advocated. Demographics in the key criminal age demographic -- both from the demobilizations after the WWII and Korea, and then the Baby Boom, is probably the key factor driving the increase (and subsequent decrease as that demographic bulge passed that age band.)

happyscrappy 12y ago

The Scandinavian approach could work in the US if the citizens were all of the type that would not cross an empty street against the light.