“Choices about how to generate income are central to the link between wages and crime. Education and training increase skill levels and wage rates. It is expected that these increases will reduce criminal participation. Education leads to employment. Employment provides offenders with responsibility, personal value, independence, dignity, a stake in society, offers income, structure, and routine, an opportunity to increase social networks, and enhance self-esteem and psychological health. Not only does the offender benefit from employment, but the community also profits from the decrease in costs associated with recidivism.” - Gregory Magee
Comparative studies have shown that in most countries an increase of around 40 points in the PIAAC numeracy score leads to a wage increase of between 12% and 15% of the reference wage. (Hanushek et al, 2013). But the wage increase is as high as 28% in the United States. So if the reference wage was $20 an hour, a wage increase of 28% would bring that up to $25.60 an hour, or an additional $224 a week for full-time workers.
And one study found that an increase of around 40 points in the PIAAC literacy score was associated with a 6% increase in hourly wages, on average, across several developed countries, including the United States (Kankaraš et al, 2016).
In previous posts, I focused on the violent crime rates of 20 large cities, ten with Republican mayors and ten with Democratic mayors (here and here). I also looked at clearance rates for violent crimes in 19 of these cities (here), meaning the rate of violent crimes “solved for reporting purposes”, usually by arrest. The pattern I found was clear: the large cities with Republican mayors had lower violent crime rates and higher clearance rates than those with Democrat mayors. Interesting, but a pattern doesn’t establish causality.
“Crime is concentrated in small places, or ‘hot spots,’ that generate half of all criminal events. Hot spots policing focuses police resources and attention on these high crime places…Overall, it is more likely that hot spots policing generates crime control benefits that diffuse into the areas immediately surrounding the targeted locations than displacing crime into nearby locations.” - Hot spots policing of small geographic areas effects on crime
“The ‘No Excuses’ charter school model focuses heavily on high academic expectations, rigid and consistent discipline, extended instructional time, intensive teacher training, and increased parental involvement…No Excuses charter schools, on average, produced larger math and literacy achievement gains for their students than their public school peers—with higher gains for math.” - ‘No Excuses’ charter schools for increasing math and literacy achievement in primary and secondary education
The Campbell Collaboration is a nonprofit organization that promotes evidence-based policymaking through the production of systematic reviews, summaries and syntheses of policy-relevant evidence. Each post in this series includes excerpts from the Campbell Collaboration’s “Plain Language Summaries” in the subject areas of crime & justice, education, and social welfare.
My process is to start with an outcome that varies by the variable of interest and then explore possible causal pathways from the variable to outcome. In these posts, crime rates are the outcome, mayor’s political party is the variable of interest, and the possible causal pathways are policies and their cascading effects. For example, if Republican-led cities were more likely to meet police staffing goals than Democrat-led cities and they also had higher crime clearance rates and higher clearance rates were associated with lower crime rates, then we have a possible causal pathway. This is a gross simplification of course: whatever happens is likely the result of multiple interacting causal pathways. And even that is a gross simplification. I won’t elaborate further. Let’s just say it’s complicated. But complexity never stopped medical progress. Why should it stop progress in governance? Knowledge advances one baby step at a time.
High perceived control tends to soften the blows of outrageous fortune by activating action plans to make things better. Low perceived control sharpens the sting of adversity because it makes us feel helpless and hopeless. Individuals who chronically lack a sense of control tend to become angry and disengaged: there's nothing I can do to make a difference, so why bother?
In prepping for a previous post on social justice, I came across a great meta-analysis on the research and theory of "relative deprivation", which the authors define as "the judgment that one is worse off compared to some standard accompanied by feelings of anger and resentment" (Smith, Pettigrew et al, 2011, p 203). According to this meta-analysis, the experience of relative deprivation can be applied to the self or ingroup and requires…
Grievance involves feelings of deprivation, shame, humiliation, impotent anger, and being the victim of injustice. Grievance demands payback. Deep grievance demands big payback and may not be satisfied until the payback is proportionate to the harm done. Which may take forever.
So if I were to walk a random 10-acre area in Houston and San Francisco, which city would city would be more dangerous for me personally, considering only violent crime rate and crime density?
Last week there was a lot of brouhaha about a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) poll showing that Americans were less enthused about some pretty core principles and values, such as patriotism and hard work. Problem is, America’s apparent moral decline was based on only two polls, one in 1998 and one in 2023. That’s not enough data to declare a trend.
So I did some digging. Sure enough, there was a 1976-77 poll that asked the same questions - its results were actually provided on a WSJ document that summarized responses to the 1998 poll. Considering the 1976-77 poll results along with those for 1998 and 2023, can you spot the trend in, say, patriotism? …
Those alarmed at these poll results had three main concerns. First, endorsement of key values was less whole-hearted than they had been in the 1998 poll. Specifically, there were fewer “Very Important” responses to values such as hard work and community involvement, even though most respondents still considered these values at least somewhat important (94% and 80% in the case of hard work and community involvement). Second was the overall decline in valuing religion, having children, and patriotism, with 40%, 33%, and 27% of respondents considering these values as “not that important” or “not important at all” in the 2023 poll. And third, a whopping 90% of the 2023 respondents considered money an important value. What’s up with that?
“If we want to rebuild a shared public trust in expertise, we will need a more realistic and humane language to talk about scientific expertise and its place in our political life—an account of expertise that is worthy of the public’s trust. Such an account would affirm scientific expertise as a praiseworthy human achievement, indispensable to understanding the world around us and valuable for making political decisions. But it would also recognize the role of uncertainty and judgment in science, and thus the possibility of error and disagreement, including value disagreements, when using science for public policy. Reestablishing an appropriate role for science in our politics, in other words, requires restoring the central role of politics itself in making policy decisions.” - Unmasking Scientific Expertise, by M. Anthony Mills/Issues in Science and Technology
Intuitions about right and wrong clash in moral dilemmas. These dilemmas activate a moral trade-off system designed for resolving conflicts among moral values. Examples of moral values include fairness, reciprocity, responsibility, care, entitlement, merit, loyalty, and honesty. When asked to resolve moral dilemmas, many people made compromise judgments, which strike a balance between conflicting moral values by partially satisfying at least some of them. The moral tradeoff system delivers that solution as an intuitive moral judgment. (paraphrasing Guzman et al, 2022)
Why do some people seem more deserving of government assistance than others?
Social scientists have been exploring this question for decades. Much of the research has focused on the criteria people use to judge the “deservingness” of the vulnerable and poor.
In other words, if carrots and sticks change the behavior, then the person has at least some control over the behavior, which is another way of saying: if one is able to engage in goal-directed behavior (e.g. approach carrot, avoid stick), one is responsible to some degree for one’s actions and the outcomes of those actions…That’s where “stigma” comes in. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “stigma in the context of health is the negative association between a person or group of people who share certain characteristics and a specific disease, including mental illness”. And per the voluminous literature on stigma, a common stigmatizing stereotype associated with mental health disorders such as drug addiction is that people are responsible for their condition.
Moral hazard is a situation where individuals have an incentive to increase their exposure to risk because they do not bear the full costs of that risk. I’m guessing a possible moral hazard associated with needle exchange programs is that these programs would lead to greater drug abuse by reducing the perceived risks of needles. And with opioids, more drug abuse would mean a higher likelihood of death by overdose.
President Clinton eventually signed the the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, but he never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. That’s because the Senate had already made it crystal clear that the vote would not go well: just two years before the Senate has passed a resolution 95-0 telling Mr. Clinton not to sign any treaty that committed the US to cut emissions without also requiring undeveloped countries to do so.
“Accepted theories are the best explanations available so far for how the world works. They have been thoroughly tested, are supported by multiple lines of evidence, and have proved useful in generating explanations and opening up new areas for research. However, science is always a work in progress, and even theories change.” - How Science Works.