Crime and Main Street

I testified before the House Small Business Committee last week on trends in crime and victimization and their effects on small businesses. As they say on the Hill, I would like to revise and extend my remarks. Well, not revise, but I’d like to make one small point that comes up a lot in the kinds of events, but that didn’t happen to come up in this one. Which is, both data and storytelling matter in crafting policy. Here’s the metaphor.

In physics, the study of the largest forces in the universe falls under the umbrella of cosmology. The study of foundational units of matter, the smallest bits of the universe, is studied in particle physics. It turns out though, that finding a unified theory that explains how we get from the smallest forces to the largest, and the largest forces to the smallest, is not that straightforward.

If you were to take the foundational principles of participle physics and apply inductive reasoning to generalize from your specific knowledge about quarks and bos…