"Similarly British Columbia is recriminalizing marijuana after a three year trial run amid growing reports of public drug use."
Marijuana for recreational use is legal Canada-wide, and has been since 2018. The BC government had decriminalized possession of hard drugs (the stuff that is still illegal) as part of a harm reduction campaign, and have backtracked on that.
This whole post just seems kinda crazy for someone who grew up in Germany. Where are the adults in the room? I've seen that police can work.
All of these things seem so easy to solve, yet it seems like these are characters from a high school movie.
I mean I actually understand each of the characters involved. (almost. I can't place the 'arrest illegal hot dog vendor but let illegal drug dealer go' character) Every character here is just playing their role, whether it be bully or scumbag or hopeless idealist who thinks you just need to double down one more time. But why does each side of the political spectrum allow such obvious dysfunction on their own side? Why don't the adults put a stop to that?
There are plenty of things that happen in Germany that boggle the American mind in similar ways too! People don't always want things to work, or don't want them to work the way you'd think we'd want them to work.
Lol. Would love a dedicated post about us 'boggling Germany/Europeans' :D Nuclear power, social security, free health care (most doctor-visits), no speed-limit, too many silly bike lanes, holy heat-pumps while A/C are anathema (similar physics).
I did some enforcing Corona-rules (having lost my job die to lockdown), our Polizei und Ordnungsamt can boggle minds, too (spend 30 minutes checking a German hair-salon, were told to ignore the Arab barber-shop - the boss did not want to look xenophobic in the news)
Lol. Would love a dedicated post about us 'boggling Germany/Europeans' :D Nuclear power, social security, free health care (most doctor-visits), no speed-limit, too many silly bike lanes, holy heat-pumps while A/C are anathema (similar physics).
I did some enforcing Corona-rules (having lost my job due to lockdown), our Polizei und Ordnungsamt can boggle minds, too (spend 30 minutes checking a German hair-salon, were told to ignore the Arab barber-shop - the boss did not want to look xenophobic in the news)
Everyone knows the game, and there are individual police officers who have become celebrities as "encounter specialists" with body counts in the dozens.
I don't think it's something we want to emulate in the US, but the political popularity of the practice shows that the public's support for due process will only go so far.
It sometimes doesn't go very far at all. In places like El Salvador and the Philippines political candidates honestly said "I will violate due process to control crime" and they got elected by wide margins.
With regards to speeding enforcement: automatic enforcement by camera is hate-worthy but very effective for prosecuting egregious offenders. This suggests that they can be used for Good. (I know because I hate them but I pay the damn tickets.)
Here's a (quickly sketched, not well thought-out) example of how I would structure the system for non-commercial motor vehicle operation, and make it clear to all stakeholders that this IS how the system works (no hidden or fuzzy rules).
Highways: No cameras. Speed limits are suggestions. You will only get stopped by a human cop if you are going 15mph over and get a wrist slap fine. Driving 30mph over is a reckless driving citation with steep fines but no criminal penalties unless you are doing this during peak traffic hours. Yes, this means you can drive 90mph legally in some places if you really like piling on the micromorts or are pissing your pants.
Main roads: automatic and visible camera enforcement at major junctions. Speed limits are suggestions and cameras only enforce at 10mph+.
Residential streets: speed bumps and cameras that enforce at 10mph+ violations.
School zones and hospital areas: cameras everywhere, speed limits are strict LIMITS and instantly enforced.
"OK, but if someone just ignores a giant pile of tickets what happens to them?"
It escalates:
- one outstanding ticket: it just sits there. You get one "freebie" and annoying email reminders.
- 2-3 outstanding tickets: hold on registration and DL renewal until paid.
- 4+ outstanding tickets: cops allowed to impound your car, parking enforcement allowed to boot it.
Crucially, the fines do not go up. We don't punish people for being poor or time-strapped, but we do punish them exponentially for repeated offenses.
So, to recap: basically you have speed limit signs that give sane suggestions. You are able to use your human judgment to go past that speed to a certain point. Beyond the point where the externality you are creating for your fellow humans crosses a threshold: panopticon ticket. The first one is a freebie, but the penalties go up with repeated infraction.
Similar Not-Completely-Evil-Surveillance-State solutions could be leveraged on a lot of problems, including shoplifting, property damage/vandalism and public transportation fare evasion.
Seems over-engineered. Just put speed cameras almost everywhere. People will adapt, and repeat speeders will be much less sympathetic if everyone knows it results is almost guaranteed tickets.
Just wait till someone steals your car and speeds away, and you get the ticket because the camera caught the license plate but not the face. There's a reason they are not legal in most of the US.
In Spain we just receive the ticket and then prove we were not driving, so the traffic administration either goes for that person if you can identify them (your children, if you lent them the car) or just look for them themselves (stolen car)
Yup, and it is the "prove a negative" that is the problem here. In the US you generally (unfortunately not always) have to be proven guilty, not prove yourself innocent. An alibi is nice, but not one you have to have when it is claimed "Your car was seen speeding" because people commit the crime, and so specific people get charged, not whomever happens to own the vehicle.
In most jurisdictions they work like parking tickets - they are assigned to the car, not to the driver. That has limitations (can't add points to driver's licenses, etc.) but it's administratively straightforward and eliminates the requirement to prove who was driving.
Incentives are mostly correctly aligned. If someone is consistently getting speeding tickets in a car you own, you'll probably stop letting them drive it.
If you file a police report for a stolen car, that should be sufficient to dismiss the ticket. There's a similar process for parking tickets already.
I will note (beyond the question of whether taking human judgment out of enforcement is efficient) that if you give automatic tickets over 60mph and post a sign that says speed limit 50mph, the speed limit is 60. So you want a consistent system at minimum (e.g. it's always +10) rather than making people guess.
The signs would not be known as Speed Limits in this system, but Speed Suggestions. They are meant to be used as additional information. A sign outside a school zone would look different (more red?) and clearly state that it is a speed limit.
But yes, this proposal was a first-pass and as another commenter noted, overengineered. The current system is terrible and fuzzy and randomly/inconsistently enforced, but at least it is straightforward at first glance.
I had a friend in Switzerland who loved fast cars. He bought an over-powered Porsche and crashed it (no other people or property involved). He lost his license for six months and paid a fine in proportion to his (substantial) yearly salary. Calmed him the fuck down.
Generally, I think this is a bad outcome: you want to be able to sell people cool products that they can use to their full extent. But it depends on where he was putting his rocket car to the test. If he was driving it recklessly in a place where there was a reasonable chance he could have hurt someone else, then he deserves it.
"There are obvious libertarian objections to a universal DNA database."
Can someone spell these out? Like what liberties are specifically curtailed by such a database's existence? Is the idea that we want to countenance some degree of committing crime and getting away with it in the sense of "every dog gets one free bite?"
People complained about driver's licenses too, and probably license plates. Whatever new thing will be complained about until everyone is used to it. This isn't to say the complaint isn't without merit. Once the power has been given it might be used in ways you don't like. Better ways of catching criminals would be good, and sometimes the worse ways are there because the good ways cannot be used... But then you might end up the one with pseudoscience being used against you. Or suddenly the state can enforce laws in the privacy of your bedroom. If in the 90s they had found a gene for homosexuality, and there was a genetic registry... That would have made some people who today we see as blameless even worse off.
You CANNOT base the safety of a city only on its official crime rate.
If people are willing and able to significantly adjust their behavior to avoid crime in a certain city, that doesn't mean the city magically became safer.
If every woman in a given city stayed at home by themselves, locked the doors, and never went outside, the rate of violence against women would plummet, but nobody with any sense at all would say that that city has become safer for women.
If women in new york behaved the way women in Tokyo did, the crime rate in new York would explode. This means that in reality, new york is a wildly, egregiously more unsafe place than Tokyo, vastly in excess of what crime rates indicate.
If people have to radically alter their lives to avoid crime, such as not living in inner city areas, this means that American cities are extremely unsafe.
All of this is fixable, but the left doesn't want to fix it. It really is as simple as that. Even high murder rate red states, this is black people killing each other, often in blue cities, and red state politicians are too scared of the left to actually do anything about this (because 'blsck lives matter' applies to police or non-blacks, not to black people shooting one another).
The fatal flaw in all of YIMBYist and urbanist ideology in the US is the refusal to admit that that vast amounts of crime and anti-social behavior from non-asian minorities is THE biggest reason urbanism can't work. These people either deny this problem exists at all, call people racist for thinking it IS a problem, or dogmatically claim building high rise apartments on every square inch of land will fix this problem (despite race predicting violent crime rate better than income, education or employment level). They continue to demand that US cities be more like European cities or East Asian cities without addressing this fundamental demographic difference between them. If Tokyo were 25% black, its night-life would be totally destroyed. It would simply too unsafe and unpleasant to live the way people in Tokyo currently live.
The economic cost of all of this and the lefts refusal to actually do anything about insane levels of minority crime is absolutely staggering. Literally holding the country back at a fundamental level, and its only getting worse - they're not even willing to support illegal immigrant criminals being deported. And then they have the gall to tell us not to worry about crime. Go to hell, honestly.
Send your wife to walk around south bronx by herself at night. If you're unwilling to do that, then this blessedness is obviously horseshit.
This is not a first world country. People have to radically alter their behavior for even the current level of crime to be maintained. This doesn't happen in Tokyo.
The REAL reason Americans perceptions of crime don't match crime rates is because they know this. They know they have to adjust their behavior to avoid crime. And they're not so stupid as to think this means that a place is safe the way people like you apparently expect them to. Or that they're supposed to tolerate criminality because it's not at the third world country levels of 1970s new york. This is pure hostility and malevolence directed at working people from a sneering elite. Keep wondering why the trumps of the world are popular.
The problem from arguing from the perspective of "the official numbers are a lie because..." is that if your only evidence is vibes, how MUCH should we adjust the official numbers by?
Does this behavior effect mean 10 percent more crime than officially reported, or like you claim, "third world country" levels of crime?
Your examples of Tokyo also may be cherry picked from specific areas of the city, where young women can be seen at night behaving like you say. The USA has areas where this happens, Miami, party streets in California cities, etc. There's generally an army of policy to make this possible. In Japan I wouldn't think it would be safe everywhere, such as in the proximity of Yakuza hangouts.
Anyways I really just wanted to point out the issue here. Suppose we take some policy change like you desire and want to know if it worked. If you have no credible numbers and no data, just vibes, you cannot improve the situation.
To be fair, yes the evidence is vibes but also revealed preferences, but more importantly the fact that the official numbers are numbers doesn't make them more likely to be true. If I claim to have a million dollars in quarters in my barn and you, seeing said barn, say "Eh... that doesn't seem close to being right." it isn't a point in my favor that you can't say precisely how much less than a million dollars I have. There is not a "first to state a number" advantage here. Governments, even ours, often misstate or otherwise give wrong numbers; for example, unemployment numbers are frequently "adjusted" after they are reported, strangely rarely in a way that makes the government look bad. Almost as though they release err on the side of favorable reporting when checking their numbers is difficult.
While I lack the time/energy to go through years of jobs reports, I did find a list of the reports in 2012 that was attached to an article explaining why we have the initial jobs reports and 2 months of adjustments. Maybe 2012 was an unrepresentative year for some reason, but in only 3 months did they adjust the reported jobs created down after 3 months. The other 9 months more jobs were reported in the 3rd month compared to the original report. So in 9 months, the first numbers looked worse than the final numbers. Doesn't support your assumption. The reason the numbers are adjusted is because at the time of the first numbers only abut 75% of the payroll numbers are in. It's not a conspiracy to make the government look good. Confirmation bias is a thing, and it's a worse thing when you discount the numbers because of a preexisting assumption.
"If you fully legalized Fentanyl, putting it into Category 1, the price would go to almost zero, which would not be pretty." --Confusing sentence, it's currently Schedule 2, ie effectively legal but regulated same as every other legal opiate. It's the opiate of choice for most surgeries and is not without legit outpatient use which is why suggesting it be made Schedule 1 would be pretty disruptive (tho imo they ought to just do it anyways, there's plenty of alternatives and life will go on).
The biggest contrand problem we had when I was contracted with the state prisons was mobile phones, being smuggled in via drone air drops.
My current job does a lot of work with detox patients and I have a post going up later in the week complaining about how many frequent fliers we have. The treatment paradigms for addiction are pretty questionable imo and basically none of them involve meaningfully removing the addictive substance. For example/another story from when I worked for the state prisons: the state has a MAT addiction program that allows inmates to get time off their sentences that mostly provides inmates with suboxone strips, which they now use as currency. And so, how many people in the program would you expect aren't even addicts, and like, who would say no if you got free prisonbux and time off your sentence?
The lead stuff seems very vulnerable to reverse causation. NYC banned lead paint in 1960, so people have known for a while that eating lead is probably bad for kids. So which kids eat more lead, controlling for X, Y, and Z? The ones with particularly inattentive, or apathetic, parents, controlling for X, Y, and Z.
The children of particularly inattentive or apathetic parents will be worse off in all kinds of ways, via both nature and nurture, which seems impossible to untangle from any biochemical effects of low dose lead in itself.
Lead poisoning, with clinically noticeable symptoms in individual cases, was from long ago associated with eating lead paint chips in deteriorating housing, as that causes much higher blood lead levels than atmospheric exposure.
As concern grows that sub clinical lead exposure could be damaging as well (Silent Spring era) concerned parents would start worrying about lead from gasoline ending up in soil and dust near heavily trafficked roadways, and then about kids breathing the exhaust fumes directly.
So who are the parents whose kids then eat more dirt and dust and spend more time outside near heavily trafficked roadways? Not the most attentive and engaged ones. The same reverse causation problem applies.
I am a little surprised you didn't mention either the role of extremely anti-law prosecutors more, or the tendency of crime to go down as the law abiding shift behaviors to prevent certain crimes and criminals shift towards less reported/costly crimes. You mention the lower rate of homicide due to victims just not dying as much, but if people just stop owning cars, pay more for guarded garages, or just everyone learns to never keep anything in the car ever that "lowers crime" and the number of replacement glass requisitions, even though the danger is still there. Over time the response of would be victims to the threat of crime should make crime go down, all else equal, even without considering cases of not bothering to report crimes.
"With crime this legal in so many ways we are fortunate that there are not (vastly more) organized bands going around taking all the things all the time." I feel you are super close to a bigger insight there.
Cannabis has tremendous potential for physical and mental health, not for everyone but my estimate is that >50% of the adult population can benefit bigly at some point in their lives. Also there are now many different cannabinoids readily available, naturally occurring and recently also synthetic. We should not shy away from the challenge of figuring out how to harness these compounds, I think you might be a little bit too comfortable in your well-adapted cognition and hence you might struggle to imagine a mode of cognition where chronic cannabis use is adaptive?
I would admit that for many chronic cannabis users there may be better alternative coping strategies and many are getting stuck in less than ideal circumstances / chronic cannabis use may often be a local optimum. But taking it every now and then it's like the gentle goddess of mild dissociation, putting things for you into perspective, turning up divergent thinking for some time.
On the subject of visible crime vs actual crime, I have seen the argument that prohibition was a “success”, in the sense of lowering total crime, because the decrease in drinking led to a big decrease in domestic violence, even if this was partially offset by increased gangster violence; but because the gangster violence was more legible, the policy was a failure politically.
Zvi, you seem to be arguing that such an outcome doesn’t actually count as “success”, because legible crime is more important, is that right?
> Story of a mostly homeless guy who scammed Isaac King out of $300.
I think this link is wrong. Unless nitter is broken again.
(But I'm 80% sure I've read the story you're talking about. He hired someone to do work and then just fled with his upfront payment, right?)
Yeah, basically. Details of this particular example aren't important, many such cases, etc. I've heard personal versions.
"Similarly British Columbia is recriminalizing marijuana after a three year trial run amid growing reports of public drug use."
Marijuana for recreational use is legal Canada-wide, and has been since 2018. The BC government had decriminalized possession of hard drugs (the stuff that is still illegal) as part of a harm reduction campaign, and have backtracked on that.
Podcast episode converting this post into a multi voiced reading. It would be *criminal* for you not to tune in.
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/crime-and-punishment-1?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
This whole post just seems kinda crazy for someone who grew up in Germany. Where are the adults in the room? I've seen that police can work.
All of these things seem so easy to solve, yet it seems like these are characters from a high school movie.
I mean I actually understand each of the characters involved. (almost. I can't place the 'arrest illegal hot dog vendor but let illegal drug dealer go' character) Every character here is just playing their role, whether it be bully or scumbag or hopeless idealist who thinks you just need to double down one more time. But why does each side of the political spectrum allow such obvious dysfunction on their own side? Why don't the adults put a stop to that?
You deal with the hot dog vendor and the business with a fixed address because they're easier to find.
For most workers throughout human history, the primary motivation is not wanting to work very hard.
There are plenty of things that happen in Germany that boggle the American mind in similar ways too! People don't always want things to work, or don't want them to work the way you'd think we'd want them to work.
Lol. Would love a dedicated post about us 'boggling Germany/Europeans' :D Nuclear power, social security, free health care (most doctor-visits), no speed-limit, too many silly bike lanes, holy heat-pumps while A/C are anathema (similar physics).
I did some enforcing Corona-rules (having lost my job die to lockdown), our Polizei und Ordnungsamt can boggle minds, too (spend 30 minutes checking a German hair-salon, were told to ignore the Arab barber-shop - the boss did not want to look xenophobic in the news)
Lol. Would love a dedicated post about us 'boggling Germany/Europeans' :D Nuclear power, social security, free health care (most doctor-visits), no speed-limit, too many silly bike lanes, holy heat-pumps while A/C are anathema (similar physics).
I did some enforcing Corona-rules (having lost my job due to lockdown), our Polizei und Ordnungsamt can boggle minds, too (spend 30 minutes checking a German hair-salon, were told to ignore the Arab barber-shop - the boss did not want to look xenophobic in the news)
"Encounters" in India are an interesting example of "Extralegal and Illegible Enforcement": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_killing
Everyone knows the game, and there are individual police officers who have become celebrities as "encounter specialists" with body counts in the dozens.
I don't think it's something we want to emulate in the US, but the political popularity of the practice shows that the public's support for due process will only go so far.
It sometimes doesn't go very far at all. In places like El Salvador and the Philippines political candidates honestly said "I will violate due process to control crime" and they got elected by wide margins.
I have seen gang enforcers openly carrying sawed off shotguns in the streets in Uttar Pradesh. Among crowds. That part of India is nuts.
With regards to speeding enforcement: automatic enforcement by camera is hate-worthy but very effective for prosecuting egregious offenders. This suggests that they can be used for Good. (I know because I hate them but I pay the damn tickets.)
Here's a (quickly sketched, not well thought-out) example of how I would structure the system for non-commercial motor vehicle operation, and make it clear to all stakeholders that this IS how the system works (no hidden or fuzzy rules).
Highways: No cameras. Speed limits are suggestions. You will only get stopped by a human cop if you are going 15mph over and get a wrist slap fine. Driving 30mph over is a reckless driving citation with steep fines but no criminal penalties unless you are doing this during peak traffic hours. Yes, this means you can drive 90mph legally in some places if you really like piling on the micromorts or are pissing your pants.
Main roads: automatic and visible camera enforcement at major junctions. Speed limits are suggestions and cameras only enforce at 10mph+.
Residential streets: speed bumps and cameras that enforce at 10mph+ violations.
School zones and hospital areas: cameras everywhere, speed limits are strict LIMITS and instantly enforced.
"OK, but if someone just ignores a giant pile of tickets what happens to them?"
It escalates:
- one outstanding ticket: it just sits there. You get one "freebie" and annoying email reminders.
- 2-3 outstanding tickets: hold on registration and DL renewal until paid.
- 4+ outstanding tickets: cops allowed to impound your car, parking enforcement allowed to boot it.
Crucially, the fines do not go up. We don't punish people for being poor or time-strapped, but we do punish them exponentially for repeated offenses.
So, to recap: basically you have speed limit signs that give sane suggestions. You are able to use your human judgment to go past that speed to a certain point. Beyond the point where the externality you are creating for your fellow humans crosses a threshold: panopticon ticket. The first one is a freebie, but the penalties go up with repeated infraction.
Similar Not-Completely-Evil-Surveillance-State solutions could be leveraged on a lot of problems, including shoplifting, property damage/vandalism and public transportation fare evasion.
Seems over-engineered. Just put speed cameras almost everywhere. People will adapt, and repeat speeders will be much less sympathetic if everyone knows it results is almost guaranteed tickets.
Just wait till someone steals your car and speeds away, and you get the ticket because the camera caught the license plate but not the face. There's a reason they are not legal in most of the US.
They are common in Europe I believe. How do they deal with that?
In Spain we just receive the ticket and then prove we were not driving, so the traffic administration either goes for that person if you can identify them (your children, if you lent them the car) or just look for them themselves (stolen car)
Yup, and it is the "prove a negative" that is the problem here. In the US you generally (unfortunately not always) have to be proven guilty, not prove yourself innocent. An alibi is nice, but not one you have to have when it is claimed "Your car was seen speeding" because people commit the crime, and so specific people get charged, not whomever happens to own the vehicle.
Speeding cameras are very common across the US?
In most jurisdictions they work like parking tickets - they are assigned to the car, not to the driver. That has limitations (can't add points to driver's licenses, etc.) but it's administratively straightforward and eliminates the requirement to prove who was driving.
Incentives are mostly correctly aligned. If someone is consistently getting speeding tickets in a car you own, you'll probably stop letting them drive it.
If you file a police report for a stolen car, that should be sufficient to dismiss the ticket. There's a similar process for parking tickets already.
I will note (beyond the question of whether taking human judgment out of enforcement is efficient) that if you give automatic tickets over 60mph and post a sign that says speed limit 50mph, the speed limit is 60. So you want a consistent system at minimum (e.g. it's always +10) rather than making people guess.
The signs would not be known as Speed Limits in this system, but Speed Suggestions. They are meant to be used as additional information. A sign outside a school zone would look different (more red?) and clearly state that it is a speed limit.
But yes, this proposal was a first-pass and as another commenter noted, overengineered. The current system is terrible and fuzzy and randomly/inconsistently enforced, but at least it is straightforward at first glance.
I had a friend in Switzerland who loved fast cars. He bought an over-powered Porsche and crashed it (no other people or property involved). He lost his license for six months and paid a fine in proportion to his (substantial) yearly salary. Calmed him the fuck down.
Generally, I think this is a bad outcome: you want to be able to sell people cool products that they can use to their full extent. But it depends on where he was putting his rocket car to the test. If he was driving it recklessly in a place where there was a reasonable chance he could have hurt someone else, then he deserves it.
"There are obvious libertarian objections to a universal DNA database."
Can someone spell these out? Like what liberties are specifically curtailed by such a database's existence? Is the idea that we want to countenance some degree of committing crime and getting away with it in the sense of "every dog gets one free bite?"
So privacy isn't a thing?
If you haven't done anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide!
People complained about driver's licenses too, and probably license plates. Whatever new thing will be complained about until everyone is used to it. This isn't to say the complaint isn't without merit. Once the power has been given it might be used in ways you don't like. Better ways of catching criminals would be good, and sometimes the worse ways are there because the good ways cannot be used... But then you might end up the one with pseudoscience being used against you. Or suddenly the state can enforce laws in the privacy of your bedroom. If in the 90s they had found a gene for homosexuality, and there was a genetic registry... That would have made some people who today we see as blameless even worse off.
You CANNOT base the safety of a city only on its official crime rate.
If people are willing and able to significantly adjust their behavior to avoid crime in a certain city, that doesn't mean the city magically became safer.
If every woman in a given city stayed at home by themselves, locked the doors, and never went outside, the rate of violence against women would plummet, but nobody with any sense at all would say that that city has become safer for women.
If women in new york behaved the way women in Tokyo did, the crime rate in new York would explode. This means that in reality, new york is a wildly, egregiously more unsafe place than Tokyo, vastly in excess of what crime rates indicate.
If people have to radically alter their lives to avoid crime, such as not living in inner city areas, this means that American cities are extremely unsafe.
All of this is fixable, but the left doesn't want to fix it. It really is as simple as that. Even high murder rate red states, this is black people killing each other, often in blue cities, and red state politicians are too scared of the left to actually do anything about this (because 'blsck lives matter' applies to police or non-blacks, not to black people shooting one another).
The fatal flaw in all of YIMBYist and urbanist ideology in the US is the refusal to admit that that vast amounts of crime and anti-social behavior from non-asian minorities is THE biggest reason urbanism can't work. These people either deny this problem exists at all, call people racist for thinking it IS a problem, or dogmatically claim building high rise apartments on every square inch of land will fix this problem (despite race predicting violent crime rate better than income, education or employment level). They continue to demand that US cities be more like European cities or East Asian cities without addressing this fundamental demographic difference between them. If Tokyo were 25% black, its night-life would be totally destroyed. It would simply too unsafe and unpleasant to live the way people in Tokyo currently live.
The economic cost of all of this and the lefts refusal to actually do anything about insane levels of minority crime is absolutely staggering. Literally holding the country back at a fundamental level, and its only getting worse - they're not even willing to support illegal immigrant criminals being deported. And then they have the gall to tell us not to worry about crime. Go to hell, honestly.
We forget how blessed we are? Seriously?
Send your wife to walk around south bronx by herself at night. If you're unwilling to do that, then this blessedness is obviously horseshit.
This is not a first world country. People have to radically alter their behavior for even the current level of crime to be maintained. This doesn't happen in Tokyo.
The REAL reason Americans perceptions of crime don't match crime rates is because they know this. They know they have to adjust their behavior to avoid crime. And they're not so stupid as to think this means that a place is safe the way people like you apparently expect them to. Or that they're supposed to tolerate criminality because it's not at the third world country levels of 1970s new york. This is pure hostility and malevolence directed at working people from a sneering elite. Keep wondering why the trumps of the world are popular.
The problem from arguing from the perspective of "the official numbers are a lie because..." is that if your only evidence is vibes, how MUCH should we adjust the official numbers by?
Does this behavior effect mean 10 percent more crime than officially reported, or like you claim, "third world country" levels of crime?
Your examples of Tokyo also may be cherry picked from specific areas of the city, where young women can be seen at night behaving like you say. The USA has areas where this happens, Miami, party streets in California cities, etc. There's generally an army of policy to make this possible. In Japan I wouldn't think it would be safe everywhere, such as in the proximity of Yakuza hangouts.
Anyways I really just wanted to point out the issue here. Suppose we take some policy change like you desire and want to know if it worked. If you have no credible numbers and no data, just vibes, you cannot improve the situation.
To be fair, yes the evidence is vibes but also revealed preferences, but more importantly the fact that the official numbers are numbers doesn't make them more likely to be true. If I claim to have a million dollars in quarters in my barn and you, seeing said barn, say "Eh... that doesn't seem close to being right." it isn't a point in my favor that you can't say precisely how much less than a million dollars I have. There is not a "first to state a number" advantage here. Governments, even ours, often misstate or otherwise give wrong numbers; for example, unemployment numbers are frequently "adjusted" after they are reported, strangely rarely in a way that makes the government look bad. Almost as though they release err on the side of favorable reporting when checking their numbers is difficult.
While I lack the time/energy to go through years of jobs reports, I did find a list of the reports in 2012 that was attached to an article explaining why we have the initial jobs reports and 2 months of adjustments. Maybe 2012 was an unrepresentative year for some reason, but in only 3 months did they adjust the reported jobs created down after 3 months. The other 9 months more jobs were reported in the 3rd month compared to the original report. So in 9 months, the first numbers looked worse than the final numbers. Doesn't support your assumption. The reason the numbers are adjusted is because at the time of the first numbers only abut 75% of the payroll numbers are in. It's not a conspiracy to make the government look good. Confirmation bias is a thing, and it's a worse thing when you discount the numbers because of a preexisting assumption.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/revisions-to-jobs-numbers.htm
“The reason the numbers are adjusted is because at the time of the first numbers only abut 75% of the payroll numbers are in.”
Yet that is when they report it, instead of waiting for all the numbers. Seems legit.
"If you fully legalized Fentanyl, putting it into Category 1, the price would go to almost zero, which would not be pretty." --Confusing sentence, it's currently Schedule 2, ie effectively legal but regulated same as every other legal opiate. It's the opiate of choice for most surgeries and is not without legit outpatient use which is why suggesting it be made Schedule 1 would be pretty disruptive (tho imo they ought to just do it anyways, there's plenty of alternatives and life will go on).
The biggest contrand problem we had when I was contracted with the state prisons was mobile phones, being smuggled in via drone air drops.
My current job does a lot of work with detox patients and I have a post going up later in the week complaining about how many frequent fliers we have. The treatment paradigms for addiction are pretty questionable imo and basically none of them involve meaningfully removing the addictive substance. For example/another story from when I worked for the state prisons: the state has a MAT addiction program that allows inmates to get time off their sentences that mostly provides inmates with suboxone strips, which they now use as currency. And so, how many people in the program would you expect aren't even addicts, and like, who would say no if you got free prisonbux and time off your sentence?
The lead stuff seems very vulnerable to reverse causation. NYC banned lead paint in 1960, so people have known for a while that eating lead is probably bad for kids. So which kids eat more lead, controlling for X, Y, and Z? The ones with particularly inattentive, or apathetic, parents, controlling for X, Y, and Z.
The children of particularly inattentive or apathetic parents will be worse off in all kinds of ways, via both nature and nurture, which seems impossible to untangle from any biochemical effects of low dose lead in itself.
Wasn't car exhaust the main source of lead poisoning for children, which would happen regardless of how attentive the parents were?
Lead poisoning, with clinically noticeable symptoms in individual cases, was from long ago associated with eating lead paint chips in deteriorating housing, as that causes much higher blood lead levels than atmospheric exposure.
As concern grows that sub clinical lead exposure could be damaging as well (Silent Spring era) concerned parents would start worrying about lead from gasoline ending up in soil and dust near heavily trafficked roadways, and then about kids breathing the exhaust fumes directly.
So who are the parents whose kids then eat more dirt and dust and spend more time outside near heavily trafficked roadways? Not the most attentive and engaged ones. The same reverse causation problem applies.
I am a little surprised you didn't mention either the role of extremely anti-law prosecutors more, or the tendency of crime to go down as the law abiding shift behaviors to prevent certain crimes and criminals shift towards less reported/costly crimes. You mention the lower rate of homicide due to victims just not dying as much, but if people just stop owning cars, pay more for guarded garages, or just everyone learns to never keep anything in the car ever that "lowers crime" and the number of replacement glass requisitions, even though the danger is still there. Over time the response of would be victims to the threat of crime should make crime go down, all else equal, even without considering cases of not bothering to report crimes.
Overall, a really interesting read.
"With crime this legal in so many ways we are fortunate that there are not (vastly more) organized bands going around taking all the things all the time." I feel you are super close to a bigger insight there.
Cannabis has tremendous potential for physical and mental health, not for everyone but my estimate is that >50% of the adult population can benefit bigly at some point in their lives. Also there are now many different cannabinoids readily available, naturally occurring and recently also synthetic. We should not shy away from the challenge of figuring out how to harness these compounds, I think you might be a little bit too comfortable in your well-adapted cognition and hence you might struggle to imagine a mode of cognition where chronic cannabis use is adaptive?
I would admit that for many chronic cannabis users there may be better alternative coping strategies and many are getting stuck in less than ideal circumstances / chronic cannabis use may often be a local optimum. But taking it every now and then it's like the gentle goddess of mild dissociation, putting things for you into perspective, turning up divergent thinking for some time.
> As noted in an earlier section, this makes one wonder, who are all the criminals we are locking up, in that case?
I have no evidence on this either way but surely the default answer is "the ones who would be doing the other 280% of the crime"?
On the subject of visible crime vs actual crime, I have seen the argument that prohibition was a “success”, in the sense of lowering total crime, because the decrease in drinking led to a big decrease in domestic violence, even if this was partially offset by increased gangster violence; but because the gangster violence was more legible, the policy was a failure politically.
Zvi, you seem to be arguing that such an outcome doesn’t actually count as “success”, because legible crime is more important, is that right?