Inequality and the murder rate

Yesterday in the NY Times Economix blog, there was a post by Catherine Rampell about inequality by county.

I felt that there wasn’t anything that useful in there. It’s easier to do this analysis by State. So look at this Wikipedia article listing the Gini coefficient by state.

And then look at this chart showing the murder rate by state.

Notice that there is a very strong correlation between having a low Gini coefficient (which means less inequality) and having a low murder rate. So if people ask, what’s the benefit of having less inequality, the answer might be that it significantly decreases the chance that you will be murdered.

West Virginia is an interesting state to look at. Most of the states with a low murder rate and low Gini coefficient are white states, but West Virginia is one of the top-four whitest states along with Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. But West Virginia has both a higher Gini coefficient and a higher murder rate than the three other whitest states.

There are two factors that increase the Gini coefficient of a state; poor people and rich people. I suspect that West Virginia, although there aren’t many rich people there, has a lot of poor white people living there. This poor white trash commits crime and increases the Gini coefficient.

Vermont is an outlier state because it has a much lower murder rate than is predicted by its average Gini coefficient. Unlike West Virginia which has inequality caused by a lot of poor people, the inequality of Vermont is caused by too many rich people.

Alaska is another interesting outlier state. Alaska has a low Gini coefficient, yet a high murder rate. Maybe it's caused by the labor shortage which causes people who would be poor in any other state to have a middle-class salary. This demonstrates the truth of HBD: you can give a poor person a higher-paying job, but he still acts like a poor person.

I think the lesson of Alaska and Vermont is that people with bad genes cause crime and not inequality, but that getting rid of the people with bad genes tends to lower inequality because then there are fewer poor people around.

Comments

[Dr. Doak]

"what’s the benefit of having less inequality, the answer might be that it significantly decreases the chance that you will be murdered."

Slow down pal. It hasn't yet been established that inquality *causes* anything.

[Victor]

I am surprised they tricked you HS. Those numbers are meaningless without breaking up by race, as having manyminorities’ leads to more unequally and higher crime.

West Virginia *whites* have an incarceration rate per 100.000 people slightly lower than the national white average.

Nationally, Whites: 412 (blacks 2290)
West Virginia, Whites: 392 (blacks 2188)

http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_stateratesofincbyraceandethnicity.pdf

[Camlost]

The murder rate in Alaska is probably high because of alcohol-addicted native Americans and because of the high population of transient males who move there for very difficult manual labor work.

[superdestroyer]

Alaska supposedly has a lot of felons who are semi-hiding about or working in a place where people do not ask questions.

Also, Alaska has a high level of alcohol use. Murder probably goes along with alcohol use for lower educated people.

[Half Canadian]

I'm wondering if the age of the population plays a role here as well. I believe that Vermont is one of the older states in the union (based on the mean age).
Basically, violent crime is a young man's game.

[Jay M]

As unfortunate as the propensity those of low birth have towards committing crimes, remember that many nevertheless achieve greatness.

For example, Jack London taught himself how to write, Steve Jobs founded Apple (and was refused employment by Hewlett-Packard on the grounds that he lacked a college degree) and Larry Ellson founded Oracle.

Such is not the norm, and such genes being sucked up out of the working class will exacerbate the cognitive gap between the classes.

[Darwin's Sh*tlist]

I've always heard that Alaska has a low female/male population ratio. If so, that likely contributes. I'd think that having lots of unattached men, especially in a macho blue-collar culture, probably weakens a lot of impulse control.

[Anonyia]

To be fair, at least most of the violent crimes in West Virginia are probably just being committed against personal acquaintances. Poor whites are mostly dangerous to eachother...

[Conquistador]

Half Sigma what's your position on all those MRA sites getting labeled as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center?

The leftist thought police coming after you is a badge of honor. Do you share this view? Is the alt-right making an impact?

[WRB]

You have to control for other variables.

There are many reasons why Alaska is an outlier.
Some of them are below the radar.
Journalists and politicians almost never mention this, but in Alaska ONE MALE IN EIGHTY is a registered sex offender. That's about ten times as many as in lower 48. When you look lat racial classification, the offenders are almost always listed as "Alaskan Native or Pacific Islander."

[Peter]

Other things being equal, states with high rates of gun ownership will have higher murder rates than states where guns are less common. Even without looking up any statistics I'll hazard a guess and say that Alaska's gun ownership rate is at or near the top. West Virginia's is probably pretty high too.

[robert61]

Vermont, NH and Maine are populated by the descendants of Puritans, with an increasing admixture of French as you go north. West Virginians are much more likely to be Scots-Irish hillbillies, who definitely have their virtues, but are more violent than New England WASPS.

[destructure]

Peter writes, "Other things being equal, states with high rates of gun ownership will have higher murder rates than states where guns are less common. Even without looking up any statistics I'll hazard a guess and say that Alaska's gun ownership rate is at or near the top. West Virginia's is probably pretty high too."

You're mistaken. I just went to a Washington Post article listing gun ownership rates by state. I then compared it to the article HS linked for murder rates by state. The ten states with the highest rates of gun ownership have an average murder rate of 3.47 per 100,000 people. And the ten states with the lowest rates of gun ownership have an average murder rate of 4.31 per 100,000 people. The Alaska and West Virginia murder rates are 3.3 and 4.4, respectively. That means Alaska's and West Virginia's murder rates are less than and about equal the average for the ten states with the lowest rates of gun ownership.

In fact, looking at the states with the highest and lowest rates of gun ownership showed me one similarity. Regardless of which gun ownership group those states were in, the states with the highest rates of murder were the most diverse. Guns don't kill people -- diversity does. We should legalize guns and ban diversity instead.

http://goo.gl/mkY1

[Dan Morgan]

"Other things being equal, states with high rates of gun ownership will have higher murder rates than states where guns are less common."

Pretty hard to prove actually. There are too many variables to correct in a model (race, urbanization, local culture, inequality, income, social class, ect.). Compare Washington DC to Montana for example.

Norway and Switzerland have very high gun ownership rates, but very low crime. Consider others internationally:

"If anything, a review of the European experience demonstrates more guns correlating with less murder. Nine European nations (including Germany, Austria, Denmark and Norway) have more than 15,000 guns per 100,000 members of the population. Nine others (including Luxembourg, Russia, and Hungary) have fewer than 5,000 guns per 100,000 members of the population. But the aggregate murder rates of these nine low-gun-ownership nations are three times higher than those of the nine high-gun-ownership nations."

http://gunowners.org/op0746.htm

[Jostein]

The real bummer is that Vermont is being steadily destroyed by...you guessed it! Low IQ "refugee" immigration. I went to public school in Burlington in the 90s and early aughts when classes were 90% white and 5% Asian. Half of students went to respectable or better colleges.

When the echo-boom faded though the teachers union needed warm bodies to fill the seats. Various African refugees were brought in for this end. Needless to say Burlington is on its way to becoming just another shitty American city.

[d]

Audacious Epigone did good analysis on this over a year ago. Race is BY FAR the dominant factor, even when when you combine inequality w/ poverty, lack of education, single parent households, etc...

Race counts more than all of those combined.

[Blue Willow]

As others have said, the high crime rate in Alaska is almost certainly because of the aboriginal population. The parts of Canada that have the highest crime rates are those with the highest portion of aboriginals. Nunavut, which is about 70% Inuit, has a violent crime rate six or seven times higher than the country as a whole. However it is not considered polite to talk about it.

[Dyeversity]

"Needless to say Burlington is on its way to becoming just another shitty American city."

Good. Fuck those hippy assholes.

[The majority of Vermont is prole whites, are are being screwed by the hippy retirees.]

[KOH+]

I'm surprised at the fact that you reached your conclusion solely on second-guessing yourself without any solid evidence.
You may say you believe this is the case of high murder rate. But going from Gini coefficient to HBD? Come on, give me a break.

[Kiwiguy]

One of the tricks in the book "The Spirit Level" is to omit highly unequal places like Hong Kong & Singapore which have very low crime rates & other social problems.

[Kiwiguy]

Further to the comment on 'The Spirit Level' here is Peter Saunders' paper on the claims made in that book:

"Knowing the racial composition of a state allows us to make a better prediction of its homicide rate than knowing both its income distribution and whether or not it is in the Deep South.128 Indeed, if we construct a model with all three of these measures as independent variables, only racial composition achieves statistical significance.129 Figure 27c summarises the relative explanatory power of these three variables as demonstrated by this multiple regression model.

Conclusion: Income inequality does not explain a state’s homicide rate; the size of its black population is the only predictor we need – and it is a strong one."

(2010: Beware False Prophets (Policy Exchange). My critique of 'The Spirit Level')

http://tinyurl.com/7hw5xps

[jay]

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/02000.html

Alaska is 48% female, 52% other.