Crime and the Democrats

Posted on July 2, 2023 by Luke Ford

William Voegeli writes:

Take the contention that no other advanced democracy has an incarceration rate approaching America’s. It is rhetorically powerful but intellectually shoddy to make international comparisons of incarceration practices without also comparing countries’ crime situations. Doing so implies that a nation’s prison population depends simply and solely on how punitively it chooses to respond to a generic level of criminality. No serious person would contend that Anchorage spends an excessive amount on snow removal by pointing out how well Miami gets by without spending anything at all.

Data provided at World Population Review’s website allows for comparing nations’ incarceration rates to their murder rates. If we treat the latter as an imperfect but serviceable proxy for the severity of a nation’s crime problem, then the ratio between the two gives us an interpretation of incarceration rates that takes crime levels into account. Thus, for every person who is a murder victim in the United States, the number of people incarcerated is 127. Is that a little or a lot? It turns out to be near the middle of the distribution. Switzerland, widely considered a humane and well-governed nation, has a ratio of 124-to-1: America’s incarceration rate is 8.6 times as high as Switzerland’s—but our murder rate is 8.4 times as high. Other countries in which the prison population is less than 127 times as high as the number of murder victims include the United Kingdom (117), France (99), Germany (74), and Canada (59); while those with a higher prisoner-to-murder-victim ratio than the U.S. include Japan (142), Italy (160), Australia (188), and New Zealand (222).

Some nations have higher murder rates and lower incarceration rates than the U.S. But this combination is more plausibly ascribed to civic dysfunction than enlightened forbearance in the face of mayhem. Mexico, for example, imprisons just six people for every one that is murdered. While some Americans will be impressed that Mexico’s incarceration rate is only one fourth of ours, I submit that a much larger number will be alarmed that its murder rate is nearly six times as high. Nigeria is an extreme case, with an incarceration rate of 32 per 100,000 and a murder rate of 34.5 per 100,000. In other words, you’re more likely to be murdered in Nigeria than you are to be sentenced to prison for any crime. The simplest explanation for this phenomenon is that Nigeria has so many murderers largely because it has so few prisoners.

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The First Ladies of Country Music: Listening to Patsy, Tammy, Loretta, and Dolly

Posted on July 2, 2023 by Luke Ford

Scott Yenor writes:

* Pop music both expresses and shapes popular values. Anyone listening to the radio in the 1960s and ’70s received a pretty comprehensive commentary about men, women, and all that might pass between them. And while much of rock ‘n’ roll encouraged boys and girls to traipse lightly through a series of casual encounters, country music explored the heartache and the rewards of love sincerely pursued. Among the ladies of the genre there emerged a distinctively American portrait of womanhood, juxtaposing female strength—especially in Loretta’s songs (in country music, most everyone is on a first-name basis)—with vulnerability, as seen best in Tammy Wynette’s heart-achers. Their lyrics were unromanticized and sometimes even unromantic. They were candid about what made a man attractive, and how his attractiveness could make married life challenging. All the same, in the last analysis these women still managed convincingly to extol the virtues of marriage and fidelity. Their example can help provide an important counterweight to the extreme dysfunction of our modern sexual ethos.

* At the fundamental level, the women of classic country acknowledged—with a forthrightness that is now all but forbidden—how important love is to a woman’s happiness. The melancholy lyrics of Patsy Cline could never gain mainstream favor today, since they suggest that female happiness arises chiefly from love and marriage rather than career or partying. Her greatest hits depict lonely, regretful women who missed their chance at love.

* It speaks volumes that Cline’s brand of loneliness has all but disappeared among female country singers. More women over 45 are unmarried today—both as a percentage and as an absolute number—than at any time in our history, and the number is climbing. Yet feminine loneliness and regret have declined as musical themes and in art generally. Either women simply do not mind their newfound solitude, or an entire domain of female experience is going unspoken and repressed. Rising rates of female depression and medication would suggest the latter: women have not lost their longing for love, just their outlets for expressing it. Today’s songs insist on celebrating women’s bravery while minimizing or ignoring their regrets. But does refusing to acknowledge vulnerabilities make one stronger, or weaker?

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CROB: The Affirmative Action Regime How diversity derailed the Constitution

Posted on July 2, 2023 by Luke Ford

Jesse Merriam writes:

* racial diversity makes us so divided that we need the government to be involved in managing our most intimate affairs and teaching us how “to live together and unite in common purpose.” No one asked why something that requires constant governmental meddling and intervention is somehow still a strength and not a weakness.

* Harvard had to institute a roughly 200-point preference on the SAT for black applicants, as Jerome Karabel details in his book, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (2005).

* An example can be found in the diversity report cards used by ESPN. For the racial diversity of its players, the National Basketball Association gets a higher diversity grade than Major League Baseball, despite the fact that the NBA is one of the most racially homogeneous sports leagues, whereas MLB’s racial breakdown closely matches the nation’s percentages. The only way to make sense of this ranking is that the NBA is considered more diverse than MLB because it is less white (the NBA is around 18% white, whereas MLB is around 62% white). To be more diverse is to be less white.

* …if Harvard admitted students according to a purely academic index (as we would expect an academic institution to do without racial diversity pressures), Harvard would be only 0.76% black (assuming that a selective institution like Harvard would not need to go beyond the top 10% of applicants). But with Harvard’s racial preferences, more than 15% of the admitted class was black.

* Despite the fact that whites constitute around 60% of the nation’s population, the undergraduate programs at Yale, Princeton, and Stanford are, respectively, 38%, 41%, and 26% white.

* Between 1963 and 1966, Princeton had a roughly 200-point SAT difference for black students and the overall student population (for this period, Princeton’s black students averaged 550 verbal and 590 math on the SATs; the class overall averaged 650 verbal and 695 math). Not to be outdone, Harvard admitted 90 black freshmen in 1969, almost 8% of the student body. Princeton pushed ahead in 1970, using racial preferences to increase blacks to 10.4% of the student body, the highest percentage of any of the Big Three. Princeton thus went from being a school that did not admit a single black student for three consecutive years in the 1950s to being more than 10% black in 1970.

* a [1967] Harvard study on race and SAT performance concluded that “only 1.2 percent of the nation’s male black high school graduates could be expected to score as high as 500 on the verbal section of the SAT and a mere three-tenths of one percent as high as 550.” To put that in perspective, that same year the median SAT scores for Harvard-admitted students were 697 verbal and 708 math. Only about 1% of the nation’s black male students were able to score on the SAT roughly 400 points below Harvard’s average at the time.

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CROB: Ungovernable France: A divided country lurches toward nationalism

Posted on July 2, 2023 by Luke Ford

Christopher Caldwell writes:

A number of things are converging to make French people decidedly uneasy about immigration. Africa is going to double in population in the next generation, to 2.5 billion. That’s about a billion more people than the continent has hitherto shown itself able to support. Much of Africa is French-speaking. French people assume that a Malian coming ashore on a trafficker’s speedboat in southern Italy will be less inclined to throw himself on the tender mercies of Calabrian tomato farmers than to seek fraternal help from a Malian diaspora that now numbers in the hundreds of thousands in the rich cities of France. All told, there are hundreds of thousands of immigrants arriving every year in this growing country of 68 million with a shrinking native population, and 41% are African. How this traffic is handled, who answers maritime rescue calls, where asylum seekers are allowed to debark—these questions have become a significant source of diplomatic friction between Italy and France.

After years of hearing immigration downplayed by official apologists, the French now realize just how much mass migration has changed the country. A report released by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies in late March revealed that a third of the people in France now have a “tie” to immigration—meaning they are either immigrants or immigrants’ children or immigrants’ grandchildren. Le Figaro runs stories about the “ultraviolence” of immigrant gangs in Marseille. This seems unrelated to Macron’s pension reform, but a lot of protestors bring it up. They sense that they are losing two years of retirement not because the system itself is unworkable, but because the nation has squandered the resources on the wrong things—offering to immigrants a welcome beyond its means, for example.

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CROB: Mass immigration’s self-destructive effects

Posted on July 2, 2023 by Luke Ford

From the Claremont Review of Books:

* Garett Jones has written a scandalous book. The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left reviews a generation of social science research on why some countries prosper economically and enjoy good governance while others do not. Jones shows that countries that have a long history of advanced governmental structures and have adopted agriculture early tend to do better. But even more powerful predictions include the number of individuals whose ancestors lived in technologically advanced societies in the year 1500—and these societies tend to be European and East Asian.

* As Jones concludes, “[I]f the only thing you knew about each nation on the planet was the fraction of that nation with ancestors of European descent, and you did the best job you could trying to predict average modern income per person using just that fact, you’d be able to predict two thirds of all global income differences.”

* Peoples matter more than governments or institutions—or, as Jones claims, deep cultural determinants transmitted by families are the most powerful predictors of current national wealth and sound government.

* Next, he asks whether cultural diversity promotes economic growth and good governance. Business management literature shows that culturally diverse work forces are less effective, though skill diversity aids economic growth. As Jones relates, the relevant sociological literature, particularly the work of Robert Putnam, shows that cultural diversity degrades social trust, leading to weaker civil society, lonelier people, and possibly less effective government. Finally, Jones examines the endemic nature of racial and ethnic conflict. Cultural diversity is not necessarily our strength.

Using Jones’s own empirical predicates, immigration skeptics might argue that immigration to wealthy countries does not improve the economic well-being of those already living there. Further, increased cultural diversity could weaken countries economically, degrade social trust and civil society, and raise the always prevalent threat of civil strife.

* immigration creates less cohesive, lonelier societies, which are also poorer, at least on a per capita basis… Degrading civil society is an enormous tax on individuals. People who are less connected—who are not active in church groups, local sports clubs, or simply have fewer friends—live diminished lives.

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