Tyler Cowen linked today to a Substack post that he teased with the question, "Why are there so many right-wing scams?" The comments are a hoot all by themselves, but naturally I got suckered into clicking the link. I was amused to find that the essay starts off with an attack on the lead-crime hypothesis:
Liberals today blame lead poisoning. Of course they do, since the only alternative theories for what happened imply that liberals are wrong with regards to everything they believe about the causes of social problems.
....Regardless of whether liberals are correct, we eventually removed lead from the atmosphere, and yet never went back to the low rates of divorce, illegitimacy, drug use, and crime that we saw before the Great Society and the left-wing takeover of institutions.
There's a danger to making offhand comments without checking first. Here is divorce:
Here is teen pregnancy:
Here is crime:
I didn't bother looking up the numbers for drug use since I already know they aren't correlated. Drug use is kind of weird and faddish, and it hardly seems to be correlated with much of anything. But I could have added, say, high school dropout rates or IQ scores if you wanted a few more things to blame on lead.
And while it may be true that things haven't literally returned to their 1950s levels—though measurements from 70 years ago are iffy—they've come pretty close. It's this very fact—that antisocial behaviors went up but then went down—that makes the lead hypothesis so powerful. After all, it's not as if the left-wing takeover of institutions has abated, has it? Ditto for racism, poverty, breakdown of the family, moral decay, and other favorite explanations of crime from both liberals and conservatives.
As for why right-wing scams are so common, the answer appears to be that Republicans have gotten too much like Black people. Or something. That remained a little unclear to me.
Shouldn't the denominator for divorce incidence be the number of marriages, not the number of people?
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There are so many right-wing scams because social conservatives are aculturated from birth to be utterly gullible, naive and self-confident.
The ideal suckers.
Tyler Cowen sounds like the kind of guy who querulously demands to know why, if humans are descended from apes, are there still apes.
Indeed… there is a lead poisoning problem. This doesn’t seem all that impulsive.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/04/video-reveals-fatal-shooting-of-nyc-teen-prince-shabazz/
In the early 1970s the US population was just over 200 million. Now it’s over 330 million but we have the same rate of come per 100,000 people. You know… that’s a lot more actual crime. And that’s what people see.
"Now it’s over 330 million but we have the same rate of come per 100,000 people"
Exactly! Which is why so many americans (who watch fox news) are clamoring for something to be done about the terrible increase in the absolute number of birthday parties--you know, that's a lot more actual birthdays. And that's what peolple see.
Violent crime remains more than twice as high as it was in 1960. (Your crime chart doesn't go back to the 1950s...) That is "pretty close?!?" With lead levels 1/2 what they were circa 1937, the time-shifted comparison point for the violent crime chart.
I think Kevin is right that we have to consider how comparable old violent crime statistics are to more recent ones. If you know that the police will do nothing about a crime report, why bother? If you think the police are the enemy, you want to stay away from them. If getting raped is going to destroy a woman's reputation, will she report it? All of these things are problems today, but they were way worse in the past.
Societies where you can't trust the police or the courts or the government in general to protect your or your property develop what are called cultures of honor. In such cultures, you have to make sure others believe that you will use force to protect or avenge yourself or you family. That was true everywhere in the 18th century, hence dueling amongst the wealthy. It remains true in various sectors of the US today. But, it was much more true the farther back in time you go.
I think this at least partially explains why white Southerners have higher murder rates than white New Englanders and why black Southerners have higher murder rates than white Southerners. If the state is useless, you have to use violence yourself if you want justice. You're not going to report anything to the police.
Anyway, I think there are plenty of reasons that violent crime would have been under-reported in the past. For one thing, it seems like there was a higher societal tolerance to violence. Hell, it wasn't that long ago that raping your wife was not a crime.
If that is indeed true, and violent crime was actually higher “back in the day” it weakens the presumed correlation with increasing lead levels because “actual crime” as it were was already higher.
Violent crime remains more than twice as high as it was in 1960.
Homicide is not nearly "twice as high" as it was in 1960. It appears to about 20% higher than 1960 after the spike of the last few years, and still down something like 40% from its peak circa 1990. Violent crime statistics are far more vulnerable to definitional and procedural anomalies than murder, which is why the latter is a "cleaner" datapoint then overall violent crime for purposes of time comparisons of the incidence of violent crime. And in any event the environmental lead/crime hypothesis holds that we would expect violent crime to spike about 30 years after 1960, so not about sure the relevance of comparing 1960 and 2022.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Homicide_rates1900-2001.jpg
Apparently according to popular movies, in the 1950s and before, it was ok for students to assault each other on and off school property, for women who didn’t behave properly (including dressing conservatively, not drinking & not traveling alone) to be sexually assaulted with no recourse, for wives to be raped also with no recourse and for black people to be terrorized and hanged (or worse) for simply existing. Possibly one reason why crime in the distant past was so low is the same as the reason why there’s little mention of abortions or homosexuality occurring in the distant past… because nobody was interested back then in recording “crimes” where the victim was deemed socially inferior or worthless. Improved equality between different groups of people may have resulted in more crimes being recorded that in the past would’ve been suppressed or ignored.
Then it weakens the presumed correlation with increasing lead levels because “actual crime” as it were was already higher.
From 1990 on, the lead levels have been dropping (comparatively) very slowly, yet the 15-17 unwed conception rate has plunged dramatically.
And in the late 1950s/early 1960s the lead levels were flat, but the unwed conception rate for the corresponding time in the 1970s continued to increase seemingly unabated.
A good chunk of that is due to changes in the availability of birth control, especially for teenagers. It wasn't until 1972 that unmarried people were guaranteed the right to access birth control. Of course this right is now under fire from the newly empowered Supremes.
1990 is nearly a generation after 1972, and the other timeframe is well before it though.
I think the author of the substack answered the question of why there are more right-wing scams with his own motivations: he doesn't care if people on his side are scammed. Isn't that the whole thing right there? The R party is full of people who really don't care who gets conned or hurt. They assume it won't be themselves ( their circle of empathy is very tiny), and are much more focused on their hatred of the libs to care if some oldster is eating cat food.
If they get their way, we'll all be eating cat fud in a couple of years. Bastards.
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"As for why right-wing scams are so common, the answer appears to be"... not bothering to fact check their gut feelings that they know to be 100% true and not just blinkered thinking. Apparently.
Republicans have indeed gotten more like Black people: They feel they are victims of discrimination. The difference is that Black people really are discriminated against.
For divorce, there is also the complicating factor of age distribution. Divorces are more common among people in their 20s and 30s (see https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/allred-age-variation-div-rate-fp-19-13.html for data), so if there are more people in that age group, that in itself would increase the number of divorces per 1000 people. At the highest peak around 1970, there were more people in that age group.
But the more general point here is that Tyler Cowen should not be taken too seriously.
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Does Cowan even consider the fact that population is higher now than it was in the 1950s (the suburbs are basically just extensions of the cities) and gun density has increased a lot faster than population density. A pretty good percentage of the violent crime today is done by lunatics with easy access to extremely lethal weapons.
Teen pregnancy and illegitimacy are not the same thing! Some teens are married, some non-teens give birth out of wedlock. Show us the illegitimacy graph, please.
Lead exposure apparently peaked for people born in the late 60's (peak lead in 1970 for "pre-schoolers"). These people are now in their lower 50's and most of them are still around. Why would they all stop committing crimes in the 90's? If they were crazed by lead, why wouldn't they keep doing the bad things as they aged? Aside from total crime, the age data show absolutely no evidence of a criminal cohort passing through the population. For murder and several other kinds of crime there was a surge of crime among 19-year olds in the 90's and that's it. The modal age of the criminals did not increase during the crime surge
That 19-year old age in the 90's also does not agree with the peak lead date of 1970. People born in the late 60's would be several years older in the lower 90's at the time of the crime surge. Evidently Kevin does not understand what a cohort is, or chooses to ignore the age and other data which simply don't fit the lead hypothesis.
Lead exposure apparently peaked for people born in the late 60's (peak lead in 1970 for "pre-schoolers"). These people are now in their lower 50's and most of them are still around. Why would they all stop committing crimes in the 90's?
They didn't "all stop committing crimes" in the 90s. Who's claiming this? But they've certainly on average been engaged in less criminal activity as time goes by, because that's what happens as people age.
The lead-crime hypothesis hold that, due to its effect on the brain, environmental lead will tend to put upward pressure on the crime rate. The hypothesis doesn't claim that the deleterious impact of environmental lead swamps all other influences.
In short, brain-damaged 19 year olds will tend to commit more violent crime than non brain-damaged 19 year olds. And brain-damaged 54 year olds will tend to commit more violent crime than non brain-damaged 54 year olds.
And yes, brain-damaged 19 year olds will tend to commit more crime than brain-damaged 54 year olds.
For what you're implying to be valid, it would have to be the case that, not only does environmental lead cause brain damage (and a related increase in antisocial behavior, including violent crime) but that said brain damage obviates the natural tendency of people to be less violent and more law-abiding as they age. I've never heard such a claim being made.
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