The Hydrangea lining my windows are arched skyward after a droopy summer. They are interesting to me because all summer as they drooped, they maintained an impenetrable field of color I could not look down and through. Now though they strain toward heaven and my view is more stem than flower. My take is that the Hydrangea are finally freed from nagging desiccation since we have had several rounds of heavy rain after a dry spring and summer. My take is that they are corpulent and full of vim and vigor, water coursing through their trunks. They are emboldened. My wife’s take is that they are dying, and the long stretch of their necks is a last desperate reach for the dwindling sun. She is right, of course. I can tell this by the freckles on the leaves that are growing in size and coverage. They are not brave soldiers returning to the front, their fighting spirit renewed after some well-earned R&R. They are dying. Still, their spirit makes me smile. I’ll mourn them when they are stalks.
I’m working on a Long EssayTM these days. Each Long EssayTM is a novel experience. When I am WorkingTM on my job I can really only do one thing at a time. Full concentration, no fooling around. But when I am WritingTM thoughts come in waves, and in sets of waves, but more unpredictably than down the shore. That’s a surfing metaphor, sort of, but it's wrong. WritingTM is more like hiking in the Appalachians where you live in a tunnel of green with trails branching this way and that, each bringing its’ own tunnel, each with more trails and spurs. Each trail more appealing than the identical trail you are on. That’s the right metaphor. But anyway, at some point you have to just put your head down and finish the Long Essay. But. Not yet.
In that spirit, here are four interesting diversions I’ve been exploring. Long EssayTM to follow, eventually.
Violence is Down
This week, the FBI announced 2022 crime data [checks watch] a mere 289 days after 2022 ended. From 2021 to 2022, the rate of homicide per 100,000 dropped a little more than 7% and aggravated assaults dropped a little more than 1%. This is all very good news. And it previews what looks to be an even larger decline in 2023.
When crime is up, there’s lots of interest in why. When it’s down, no one’s asking why. So, even though no one is asking, I want to make three lightning-fast points.
The idea that the giant leap in violence in America in 2020 was due to some factor other than the pandemic is decisively countered by these data. Because if it were some transient factor (like the George Floyd protests) the increases would have also been transient. Instead, violent crime trends show a huge, nationwide behavioral change with a slow return to normalcy. Does that remind you of any other facets of American life between 2020 and 2022?
The decline in homicide from 2021 to 2022 is identical to the drop in homicide rate from 1997 to 1998 (6.8 per 100,000 to 6.3 per 100,000). However, two gigantic forces are at work that will make it unlikely that the present drop will be followed by 15 years of downward trends. Since 1998 more than 200 million guns have been purchased in the US and some proportion of legally purchased guns inevitably leak into the crime market. And the opioid/fentanyl crisis continues to rage with the attendant violence black market exchange.
A failure of some places to share in the crime decline of the 1990s certainly paved the way for the COVID-era spikes in violence. For instance, the peak homicide rate in the 1980s and 1990s in Indianapolis was 19.4 per 100,000—in 2022 it was 25.0 per 100,000. Detroit peaked at 62.8, in 2022 it was 50.0. Chicago peaked at 33.1 and was 36 in 2022.1 (The US homicide rate in 2022 was 6.3 per 100,000). It’s not hard to find big American cities that did not experience much a violence decline in the 1990s and 2000s and those cities fell hard during the pandemic.
On Tuberculosis
I like to think I have a lot in common with famous American author John Green. We are both named John. We both attended Kenyon College and we both like to write. We also sell a lot of books! John Green has sold 30 million books and I have sold almost 1,500, which is about the same if you think about the world both logarithmically and asymptotically. Most importantly though, we are both interested in big social phenomena that highlight how terrible disparities and inequities have been sustained and we try and move people to respond to the problems we identify. John Green has mobilized thousands of his readers to force Johnson and Johnson to give up a claim to an insane Tuberculosis patent that would have denied life-saving medication to millions of people. Similarly, I give talks that are often attended by several other researchers and one time I talked to Katie Couric.
I came across this video of John Green talking about his next book, also on tuberculosis. And here I wanted to nudge that area of inquiry in an extremely specific and under-attended-to direction. As John Green points out, tuberculosis has long been essentially conquered in rich, developed nations and attention to the problems of tuberculosis is rightly focused on global disparities. But there is one glaring area of American exceptionalism with respect to tuberculosis: prison and jail.
Rates of tuberculosis in Americans prisons are astonishing. More than 2 percent of all TB cases in the US are recorded in a correctional facility even though much less than one percent of Americans are incarcerated. Put another way, TB rates in correctional facilities are four times higher (or more) than in the rest of the US. And the rates are disproportionate: Black people in prison and jail experience more than half of TB cases. And, two states: Texas and Alabama account for most of the TB clusters.
Source: CDC.gov: TB and People Living in Correctional Facilities in the United States
Someday I also want to write about the genius of finding themes that explain large trends in accessible ways. I think Steve Levitt does this remarkably well. Levitt’s tool of choice is the instrumental variable, which allows you to break apart complex problems where the thing you are interested in explaining causes the thing that most likely explains it. Figuring out how much crime is prevented by police is really tricky in this way since more police also detect and report more crime (drugs, weapons, prostitution, etc.). Levitt’s genius is in finding something that moves up and down at the same pace with the explanation but is not itself affected by the outcome you are trying to explain. For instance, Levitt notes that the number of firefighters a city funds moves really similarly to the number of police it funds. So you can look at the changes in firefighters to understand the effect of policing. I’ve looked for these instruments and let me tell you, they are really hard to find.
John Green has done something with tuberculosis that I think is even harder. I’ve been looking for a long time for a theme that runs through the crime spike of the 1960s and 1970s and the crime decline of the 1990s that helps to explain, in particular, how racial disparities drive so much of the story. And let me tell you, these are also really hard to find. In thinking about tuberculosis, Green has found that theme.2 <Tips hat>.
The Tyranny of the Underclass(Men)
I had a laugh at the outrage over Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) wildly self-indulgent takedown of Shakespeare. If you missed it, Michael Lewis, who is an astonishingly gifted storyteller, misread the room and wrote a SomewhatFawningTM nonfictionnovel on the glories of being SBF. SBF being the young guy who made tens of billions of dollars doing something with Bitcoin, or something. Anyway, one passage seems to have grabbed the literati by the gullet and squeezed. This is fun, so let’s take some shots at SBF, because he is, as the military planners like to say, a rich target.
So, SBF said
I could go on and on and about the failings of Shakespeare…but I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1960 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate—probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere.
What SBF really meant to say but didn’t quite have the cajónes to say out loud (because of how preposterous it sounds when you say it directly) I will now present in a series of conjectures:
I (SBF) am smarter than Shakespeare.
There are many more people alive and literate now than when Shakespeare was alive.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, I am more of a statistical anomaly than Shakespeare.
Admire my peacock-like beauty.
When I read the actual quote, all I could think was, boy that sure does sound like the idiotic things we used to say to each other in college! Then Mr. Lewis adds a juicy footnote that in fact SBF did say this when he was in college (although the footnote assures you dear reader that SBF is evenmoreofaprodigy than that): to wit, “From a blog Sam wrote as a college sophomore, but he’d made this argument as a high school junior.”
As I look around me at the smoldering ruins of our American society and culture, it occurs to me that the hand holding the match might be a simulacrum3 of a college sophomore. From the Ayn Randian libertarians to the narcissistic nihilists to the, well I don’t want to make any fellow travelers mad, but you can imagine the flip-side pretty readily I suspect, these are all arguments we tasted early in our halcyon days of college. And then firmly rejected. This is the source of our confusion—why did these folks fail to evolve. And why are we held in their sway? Spoiler: The Atlantic may hold the answer in their expose on the prevalence of people holding the dark triad.
Personally though, when I find myself in times of trouble, etymology comforts me.
The original derivation of ‘sophomore’ comes from the word ‘sophist’, which according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, is “a master of one’s craft… one clever in matters of daily life.” However, more commonly, sophomore is a folk etymology derivation. So, sophomore derives from the Greek Sophos (meaning wise) and the Greek Moros (meaning moron).
I think that explains everything.
Once There was Such a Life as Mine
I would argue that a eulogy is the purest art in writing. As a medium, it is unusually boundary-spanning. Yes, the facts matter. Yes, a narrative, perhaps even a plot, is necessary. But in terms of structure, it is limitless. It can be a play in one act or three. A poem or a lyric or statement of facts. It can be the beginning or the end.
And while the quality of the speaker and the speech matters, it is a uniquely communal act. While there are inspiring commencement speeches, noble addresses, great soliloquies, and monstrous confessions, those speakers are well known and often cited. But great eulogies, more often than not, are anonymous because they are in service of the community.
I am reminded of all of this because in the news a little, peeking around the corners, are the things that are really important that are also burning because Congress has self-immolated.4 One of those things is US support for PEPFAR, which among many things, provides antiretroviral drugs to millions of adults and children in Africa. This should not be controversial or partisan—PEPFAR was created by President George W. Bush in 2003 and “PEPFAR is credited with saving millions of lives and helping to change the trajectory of the global HIV epidemic.” The latest five-year US commitment expires this year and needs reauthorization. It cannot be reauthorized because Congress, at the moment, does not exist.
So, this is just a gentle reminder that Congress is not just another division of Worldwide Wrestling EntertainmentTM but a potentially useful enterprise to do good in the world. So with that, and since a eulogy can be the beginning or the end, here is a beautiful eulogy for PEPFAR.
“A memory from the AIDS crisis. It was 2005, the year that global AIDS deaths peaked at 2.3 million. At the end of a dirt road in Kericho, Kenya, I visited Sister Placida, an energetic nun caring for a few dozen equally energetic AIDS orphans. She showed me several “memory boxes” that dying mothers had prepared for their children, holding photos, letters, a few mementos. The exercise struck me as forlorn — a short life poured into a shoebox — but also as defiant. Facing an absurd death sentence, these women wanted to be recalled not as victims but as humans. They wanted to leave a mark, to make a statement: Once there was such a life as mine.”
Words Matter
We live in a moment when words matter a lot. While there’s a lot of focus on which words matter and how they are defined, what has gotten a little lost is the larger construct that we live in a moment where words matter and that has not always been true. In my youth, words didn’t seem to matter much, and casual insults and jaw-dropping overgeneralizations were the norm. Traditional media’s ‘standards’ gets a lot of the blame from me—the cult of elite groupthink that overgeneralized their own power and overgeneralized the rest of us to hold others down. That this has been at least partially defeated is on-balance a good thing.
Since we are taking on the elites, I’d like to challenge the elites—particularly economists—to rethink some keywords. Here, I pick three that I think are really important—the word for getting the government to privilege your narrow interests at the expense of everyone else, the word for understanding whether a comparison is really a fair one, and the word for the thing that you compare the new thing too. It’s easy to toss off the idea that we really should teach statistics in high school instead of geometry, but maybe a good place to start is by making key words more accessible.
Like all jargon, these words are intentionally exclusionary, but that’s only part of the issue. The rest of the issue is that these three words mean the opposite of what a regular person would intuit about them if they were unfamiliar with the term. In addition to be a little annoying on these grounds, it is also inefficient and leads to suboptimal policy. Rather than inventing a whole new school curriculum, let’s leverage the words-matter moment and fix these
Rent-Seeking. Rent-seeking is really bad but it sounds kind of fun. Are you going apartment hunting this weekend? No, that’s too violent, we are going rent-seeking! The idea here is that through the creation of a monopoly, through bureaucratic and other regularity pressures, and through intellectual property laws, companies can distort the rules governing business behaviors to benefit themselves (and punish their competitors). This is really bad for consumers. We should call it something else that reflects how insidious it is.
Identification. In social science, making an apples-to-apples comparison is key to testing hypotheses about causes and effects. Mostly this means shining up an orange so it looks apple-like. Identification is just a term for how well you shined up the orange. There’s another word for this and that’s validity—which means, does your measure actually measure the thing you are measuring? Economists don’t need to have their own word, use one that means the thing it is supposed to measure.
Counterfactual. The worst of the bunch, counterfactual does not mean ‘against facts’ in the same way the field of prevention science is not concerned with preventing science. No public-facing paper should ever use counterfactual.
I started with Levitt’s 2004 study (Levitt, Steven D. "Understanding why crime fell in the 1990s: Four factors that explain the decline and six that do not." Journal of Economic Perspectives 18, no. 1 (2004): 163-190) that reports the highest crime rate for 25 selected cities during the late 1980s/early 1990s and the homicide rate reported here is drawn from that source. For 2022 homicide rates, I relied on Altheimer, Irshad, Venita D'Angelo, and Libnah Rodriguez. "2021 Homicide Statistics for 24 US Cities." Technology 585 (2022): 475-6299. Now, it could be argued that I cherry-picked these data—I did. However, the point I think remains valid even with convenience data—there are big cities in the US that experienced very few of the benefits of the Great American Crime Decline and they seem to be doing very poorly in the COVID era.
Someday I would also like to write about the tyranny of labelling books as young adult and thus convincing adults that they shouldn’t read them. This Side of Paradise, A Separate Peace, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc., would all be ‘young adult’ fiction today. Yo, fellow middle-aged dudes who only read civil war histories, read John Green, you’ll be glad you did.
I use the word simulacrum here because it is a word college sophomores really like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum
I did look to see if there was a German word which means “to inadvertently catch another thing on fire” but there does not seem to be.