Cell phones didn't cause decline in crime, plus a rant on pundits

Steve Sailer floats the idea that the greater presence of cell phones could have been a key factor in the '90s crime decline. Here is a graph that shows the number of cell phones per capita (data here), along with the homicide and violent crime rates (data here). Click to view full size.



The crime rate isn't measured on the same scale as cell phones per capita, so I divided the crime rate data by its maximum. The curves look the same as the original ones, but now they fit onto the same graph as the cell phone curve. Here is a table of the cell phone data, to better see the small numbers early on:

year	cells/cap
1984	0.0004
1985	0.0014
1986	0.0028
1987	0.0051
1988	0.0084
1989	0.0141
1990	0.0212
1991	0.0300
1992	0.0433
1993	0.0621
1994	0.0927
1995	0.1286
1996	0.1660
1997	0.2067
1998	0.2561
1999	0.3156
2000	0.3890
2001	0.4507
2002	0.4888
2003	0.5458
2004	0.6203
2005	0.7011
2006	0.7783

The crime rate slows throughout the late '80s, peaks in '91 - '92, and declines afterward. Cell phone prevalence increases steadily from 1984, but not to a high enough level to affect crime. Between '92 and '93, only about 5% of Americans had cell phones, and these were obviously the richest 5%, not people who would frequent the bad sides of town to report crime in progress. Most victims wouldn't have had one.

Remember the 1995 movie Clueless? A running joke is that in Beverly Hills, people are so filthy rich that everyone has a cell phone. And in the 1996 movie Scream, the police make a big deal out of a suspect who has a cell phone -- it being very unusual. In fact, a contemporary review of the movie describes the character as "Sidney's cellular-phone-toting boyfriend Billy," as though you're as likely to carry a cell phone as a gun. None of the victims have cell phones to call for help. If they were still considered queer through 1996, they couldn't have been common enough to affect crime much.

What percent of people need cell phones before they could make a dent in crime rates? I don't know, a little less than a majority? Between 2000 and 2001, 40% of people had cell phones. In the 2000 movie Urban Legend 2: Final Cut, many of the characters have cell phones, and they're just normal college students this time. They all try to call for help using them when the killer is approaching. But by this point in time, the bulk of the decline in crime had already happened.

In general, the problem with every guess about why crime declined in the '90s is the it can't account for why crime declined in the '30s through the '50s, why it rose during the 1910s and '20s, as well as during the '60s - '80s. See this graph of the homicide rate during the 20th C. Crime rates rise and fall periodically, so we don't need an ad hoc explanation for why crime decline or rose in a certain period -- it's just going to. It's like asking why a pendulum went left, stopped, then went right -- there's no outside intervention, that's just what pendulums do. The interesting question is why do crime rates rise and fall?

For that, we build a system of differential equations that models how criminals, police, and victims interact with each other. It's pretty easy for such models to show oscillations like we see in the crime rate. They don't have to, though. It may be that only if the parameters satsify some inequality, there will be oscillations -- the parameters being things like "the average cost criminals incur when caught," or "the average benefit criminals reap by getting away with a crime," or "the size of the police population," etc. I'm sure there are people doing this, because physics and biology are too overcrowded, and mathematically trained people are starting to spread into uncolonized lands -- uncolonized by anyone who knows how to keep track of flow rates, that is.

Some criminologists are just dumb. Others are smart and know a lot more about the literature than I do. It must be that this kind of thinking -- look right before X happened to find its cause, and find a separate cause for each effect -- is hardwired into us. It probably didn't pay much in Darwinian terms to build models of crime rates, or other things that are complicated and need a fancy model to understand. Our brains are designed to answer simple cause-and-effect questions like, "Why did Bungo die? He was hit with an arrow." Or "I touched that plant, and then got a rash."

For some reason, anything that oscillates, we can't understand intuitively, even when it's really simple. Take fashion -- fashions change just to be different from what was popular before. Nothing more. And yet, most people ignore that truism and seek some deeper immediate cause -- women are wearing low-rise jeans as a reflection of their sluttier behavior (the purported cause didn't happen), or sideburns on men are fading away because they want to look cleaner. No, they don't want anything -- except to look different from how they looked before.

But why don't most people who get paid full-time to understand crime not get it? The reason is that a clever theory is sexier than figuring out how something works, and People who Publish are 99% attention whores who just want a big audience. So, sexy trumps correct.

It's the difference between what a priest does and what an auto mechanic does. Who gets more props? And who actually knows what he's doing, and can prove it? We don't want our social world to be dissected like a car engine, so we ignore people who can figure stuff out. We look at social life as a precious living thing, something that has a deep secret essence that only a select few can peer into. We call them priests, pundits, or whatever, and listen in rapt attention to their charismatic tea-leave readings.

Luckily, modern states have neutered the religious priesthood from fucking stuff up, were their visions taken seriously. Unfortunately, our punditocracy get to hobnob with those in power, whisper their visions into their ear, and get us into a big mess. Once I'm elected dictator, I'll choose policy advisers like I would engineers for a nuclear power plant: if you can prove you know what you're talking about, and you're better than chance in predicting things, you're hired. Otherwise, Smithers, release the hounds.

Data show young people want to grow up faster than older people want them to

The idea that kids these days don't want to grow up, but instead remain irresponsible adolescents, is wrong. I've already shown that young people are OK with 14 - 16 year-olds growing up by having sex, while older people want them to wait forever to make that transition. In fact, 18 year-olds would gladly surrender their iPods and digital cameras if it meant they could live in "my own apartment" with "my own stuff" -- omg, that would be like SO rad. (I don't know if they'd trade in their cell phone or Facebook, though.) That's why college students try to move off-campus, buy their own home decorations, and cook their own food as soon as they can.

In 2002, the GSS asked respondents by what age a person should have made a variety of transitions to adulthood -- getting married, working full-time, etc. To get decent sample sizes (more than 40 people), I've pooled people into six-year age groups, each one represented by the halfway point: 20.5, 26.5, 32.5, 38.5, 44.5, 50.5, 56.5, 62.5, and 68.5. Below is a series of graphs that show the percent of a certain age group that thinks young people should grow up "fast." One answer is given by most people, so I consider "young" to be any answer before that age. For example, across all age groups, the most common response to "when should people get married?" is 25. So, I count any answer below 25 as "getting married young."



For "being able to support a family," the "grow up fast" responses are pretty constant across age groups, except for the very oldest respondents. For all other major adult transitions, the "grow up fast" responses decline as you go from college-aged people to middle-aged people. For some, the oldest respondents are actually more in agreement with the whippersnappers than with the middle-aged. Because the question was only asked once, I can't separate age effects from generation effects.

None of the responses reflects narcissism or materialism -- they are about real adult responsibilities -- moving out on your own, working, having children, and so on. So it's just false that young people would prefer to enjoy the benefits of adulthood without paying the costs, e.g. by sponging off of their parents while having their own car, no curfew, etc. Most young people find it humiliating to live at home past a certain age -- broadcasting to everyone in their larger social group that they've basically fucked up.

Call them cocky and reckless, but young people want to become adults as soon as possible, and they understand that you have to pay to play. It's hard to escape the conclusion that all of the talk about adolescents wanting to just play with their toys forever is the same old self-serving, fact-free, "kids these days" whining that aging people are prone to.

At the risk of spewing up psycho-babble, perhaps the Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers are simply projecting their own generation's anxieties about growing up onto a different age group. The youngest age group in the data here were 18 - 23 in 2002, and so were born between 1979 and 1984 -- too young to be Gen X, which ends with those born in 1978. This doesn't cover Millenials, who are born no farther back than 1987, but I recall the bitching and moaning about perpetual adolescents back in 2003, just a year after this survey was done.

GSS variables used: FININD1, OWNHH1, EDDONE1, FTWORK1, SUPFAM1, HAVCHLD1, GETMAR1, AGE.

Bush and Obama to divert more public funds for covering uninsured illegal immigrants

Remember that whenever you hear about "the uninsured," it's usually a euphemism for illegal immigrants. The American health care system may not be the best in the first world, but it's hard to be completely without health care -- unless you're here illegally.

So when I read the headline for this NYT article, I immediately suspected to find the usual circumlocutions that tell us a whole shitload of public money is going toward the project of keeping illegals here, rather than give them incentives to go back. Perhaps because they expect most readers to be too distracted by Christmas and New Year's to read the newspaper, they're actually quite frank about who stands to gain the most:

In Nashville, United Neighborhood Health Services, a 32-year-old community health center, has seen its federal financing rise to $4.2 million, from $1.8 million in 2001. That has allowed the organization to add eight clinics to its base of six, and to increase its pool of patients to nearly 25,000 from 10,000.

Still, says Mary Bufwack, the center's chief executive, the clinics satisfy only a third of the demand in Nashville's pockets of urban poverty and immigrant need.

"Immigrant need"? If we don't get to cast votes in Mexican elections, their citizens aren't entitled to our health care programs. If you're soft-hearted, then just send them medical supplies, allow their doctors to be trained here, or pay for them to relocate to a less pathogen-infested part of the world.

Anything but bring them here, which carries the lovely externalities of having their kids join gangs and run amok, paying for bilingual accommodations, and having a larger fraction of our population that isn't smart enough to get through life without continual support from the government. The welfare state should be like a shot of adrenaline pumped into a failing heart, not a steady flow of heroin into the veins of an incurable junkie.

In Mr. Bush's first year in office, he proposed to open or expand 1,200 clinics over five years (mission accomplished) and to double the number of patients served (the increase has ended up closer to 60 percent). With the health centers now serving more than 16 million patients at 7,354 sites, the expansion has been the largest since the program's origins in President Lyndon B. Johnson's war on poverty, federal officials said.

Well with a fine pedigree like that...

"They're an integral part of a health care system because they provide care for the low-income, for the newly arrived, and they take the pressure off of our hospital emergency rooms," Mr. Bush said last year while touring a clinic in Omaha.

With federal encouragement, the centers have made a major push this decade to expand dental and mental health services, open on-site pharmacies, extend hours to nights and weekends and accommodate recent immigrants -- legal and otherwise -- by employing bilingual staff. More than a third of patients are now Hispanic, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers.

In light of all the care they require, Third World immigrants are rather like zoo animals in the minds of the Stuff White People Like crowd. They don't want to actually be around them most of the time, but hope that large sums of public cash will be there to prop up these ghetto zoos. When they get the urge to gawk at the exotic, they can drop by and -- while clamping their noses shut -- sample the Mexicans' culinary sleeper hit, bathtub cheese, their bodies soon feeling all warm and tingly inside as they succumb to tuberculosis.

At $8 billion, the Senate measure may be considered a relative bargain compared with the more than $100 billion needed for Mr. Obama's proposal to subsidize coverage for the uninsured. If his plan runs into fiscal obstacles, a vast expansion of community health centers may again serve as a stopgap while universal coverage waits for flusher times.

I guess that answers Steve Sailer's question about whether or not the benefits of Obama's public works will be restricted to U.S. citizens. But I mean, the fundamentals of our economy are like totally sound -- and so if the government could just get into the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Mexiraguans. Hell, we've already bailed out enough other morons who made risky business decisions -- why not give everyone a big do-over?

In hard times, pets of economically unfit owners suffer

People who can't find a way to shave $50 off of their monthly budget to take care of their pets are simply abandoning them. There's a 1/2 chance that these will be euthanized.

When I am elected dictator, not only will the stupid be prevented from breeding, but they won't be allowed to be in charge of animal life either. As humiliating to the animals' self-esteem as upper-class pet fashions may be, at least they're not in the pitiable state that animals in lower-class areas are. If you've been through a poor area and seen the scrawny dogs and cats whose fur is stained by filth, you know what I mean.

How long will the recession last -- two years, if it's as bad as the early '80s? So you go into minor debt at worst for two years, and then pay it back in better times. I'm sure your pets will be thankful when they're still living. Goddamnit, what's next -- abandoning your kids because you can't afford diapers for two years?

If there's any justice in the world, the abandoned pets will sense what's up, turn on their owners, and feed off of their obese carcasses until they can find adopters.

Recession slays Bridezilla

If the NYT had any sense of humor, that would have been the headline for an article in the Fashion section about brides slashing their bloated wedding budgets during the recession.

As the financial condition of the country worsens, the wedding industry, so long considered recession-proof, is seeing fairy-tale weddings stripped of their sprites, their sparkle and everything else that suggests splurge.

That's interesting if true. If something is recession-proof, that's usually a code for having a short shelf-life, so that whether you like it or not, you have to keep buying it. Gas is a typical example: you may decrease gas spending during a recession, but you still have to go places, so the average person will still be buying a fair amount of gas.

You see the opposite for things with long shelf-lives, like cars. During a recession, you don't need a new car because the old one is fine, maybe with a few repairs, and anyway, you can buy a new one in five years. So the average person really cuts down on their "new car" spending. That's why the American auto industry has been clobbered harder than American oil companies.

If weddings used to be recession-proof, that means that the average bride and groom viewed it like filling up their car -- like gas in the tank, the fulfillment that the wedding provides won't last long. They'll view it as something comparatively cheap and disposable. And if weddings are now getting rocked by the recession, that means the typical couple view it like buying a new car or new house -- one of those Really Big Purchases that is supposed to fulfill you for a very long time. Since when has a wedding been considered a font of boundless joy?

A search of the NYT shows that the term "Bridezilla" surfaced once in 2001, and became common only when we came out of the dot-com recession in 2003. The phrase "bachelorette party" in its current usage first turns up in 1990, but only becomes common after 1995. So despite the hype that has always gone along with weddings within the past -- I don't know, 50 to 100 years maybe -- it does seem like outright wedding mania is a very recent cultural shift. But since the article doesn't mention anything about longer historical trends, for all we know, we're returning to a pattern of 200 or 300 years ago.

At any rate, if you're going to get married, now is the time to do it on the cheap and have an easy excuse. If your wife eventually complains about how her right to have a glamorous wedding was violated, and how you definitely need to have a second, ostentatious wedding -- at least you get a clear signal that the marriage is doomed and that you should eject, or at least start dating a refreshing younger girl, if you must stay together. It's better to figure this out by getting one obvious signal rather than having to read into a million subtle signals.

Disapproval of teenage sex across the lifespan

We always hear about how young people don't want to mature, against the best efforts of their elders to make them grow up. This is wrong. Young people themselves are eager to become adults quickly, while their adult supervisors wish they would remain in limbo forever, preferably by overeducating or otherwise overqualifying themselves.

I have more graphs to back this up, which I'll post soon, but for now let's just look at how approving people are of sex between teenagers who are between 14 and 16 years old. By disapproving, the person is saying that they're not adult enough -- that they should delay growing up, despite being capable of growing up now. It's like, "Yeah, you can work full-time right now -- but you should wait 5 to 10 years until you're through with your education." The GSS asks people the following question (TEENSEX):

What if [a male and female] are in their early teens, say 14 to 16 years old? In that case, do you think sex relations before marriage are always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all?

Most people say "always wrong," so I'll just look at that response and how it varies by the respondent's age, from 18 to 85 (click for better view):


No surprise that responses are highly predictable by age for a question about what a certain age group should or shouldn't do. The Spearman rank correlation is +0.96, two-tailed p less than 10^(-6). Those hotheaded 18 year-olds are the only demographic group I could find where a majority don't think teenage sex is always wrong. You can project the line to the left to see how the 14 to 16 year-olds themselves would respond. Hey, if the so-called victims don't think it's wrong...

This is just one case of the elders wanting to shield anatomically adult people from the harsh realities of Adult World, but there are similar trends for the proportion who think that people should get married young, should have children young, and so on. Older people don't want people passing any such milestones while young -- they'd prefer if young people delayed becoming adults -- while young people are eager to pass them sooner rather than later.

I'll also post a follow-up to this post at GNXP.com, looking at how disapproval of teen sex varies by four indicators of social class, and why it varies the way it does.

No more serial killers?

[Updated]

While reading the news about the police naming Adam Walsh's killer, I was struck by the date -- 1981 -- and tried to think of the last time there was a high-profile serial killer. The Beltway Snipers... and that's about it. Son of Sam, the guy who killed Adam Walsh (Ottis Toole), and Jeffrey Dahmer at the latest.

So I went to Wikipedia's list of serial killers in the US, and it seems like most of them operated in the 1970s and '80s, peaking in the early '80s, with some in the mid-late '60s and early '90s. In other words, during the upward portion of the most recent cycle of violent crime. After looking through all of the American serial killers' entries, by a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I estimate that the period from 1940 to 1960, and from 1995 until now, show only 40% - 50% as many serial killers as you'd expect if they occurred at a constant rate.

That may not seem surprising, since the crime statistics show these trends for homicide and forcible rape, and serial killing is a special case of these. Still, serial killers just seem weirder -- they're not stabbing a guy to get his wallet or shooting a rape victim to keep her from testifying. And it's not an in-the-heat-of-the-moment murder like when a barroom argument escalates. They also tend to target marginal groups who can't easily come forward to the police -- children, the elderly, prostitutes, etc.

This shows that the recent decline in crime is not primarily due to putting more cops on the beat, which would only deter crimes like barroom brawls, street-corner drug deals, and so on. An academic article on the decline in all forms of child abuse since the early '90s stresses this point. (Follow-up data show the downward trend has continued after the article was published.) They also emphasize that the increasing use of the death penalty doesn't explain it either, since most crimes that declined were not punishable by death, or even close to it.

It's like there's some infectious disease that spreads and burns out like an epidemic. It doesn't have to be germs of course -- although it could be. Interactions between predators and prey, or hosts and parasites, can show cyclical behavior, and criminals and the law-abiding population are an awful lot like parasites and hosts. The point is that it's a single, general thing that spreads and burns out -- not a million different trends in crime, each with their own particular causes for rises and fall-offs.

Update. Here's a graph showing how often the phrase "serial killer" has appeared in the NYT, as a fraction of all articles during a year:


The first time the phrase appears is 1981, but doesn't really take off until the late '80s. It stays steady throughout the '90s, and increases more still after 2000. As with other examples that I've discussed here and at GNXP.com (such as "sex predator" and "pedophile"), this is more consistent with a delayed reaction -- by about a decade or so, and without checking crime statistics to see if the increasing coverage is justified by an increase in the crime rate. [End update]

Further evidence for the decline in serial killers is that no one makes movies about them anymore. The Wikipedia entry for slasher movie shows that most were made in the 1970s and '80s, that they peaked in 1983, and died off in the early '90s. The only ones since then are movies about previous slasher movies -- real serial killers are so out of the public mind that we can only make movies that are "meta" and self-referential. Yeah, there are those movies like Saw that aren't like that, but they're not common -- compare to 1984, when A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, and Silent Night, Deadly Night came out, among others.

I remember as a middle-schooler staying up late at friends' houses to watch Sleepaway Camp or My Bloody Valentine on Showtime, and just attributed my lack of interest in those types of movies afterward to growing up. But the teenagers who followed didn't seem to dig them at all. Someone who's 25 now was still in elementary school when the crime wave began subsiding, and throughout their adolescence and adulthood, they've known nothing but safety. It must be hard to sell slasher movies to a generation of young people who aren't terribly afraid of that stuff happening in real life.

The slasher movies, where teenagers are always running off into the woods to fuck, also show how much more widespread adolescent sluttiness was back then, whereas it has been declining since at least the early '90s. The worst thing now that could happen to teenagers making out is that someone might film it and upload it to YouTube. Why, back in my day, we had to keep one eye over our shoulder to look out for the ax-wielding maniac! You spoiled kids.

Eating other people's junk

Eco-friendly people delight in putting down the deep-fried, greasy, sugar-soaked convenience food that provides most of a lower class American's calories. If only we could open our minds to the simpler ways of the uncivilized world, we would enjoy the many benefits of living off of leaves, nuts, and berries.

Nevermind their words, though -- judge them by their actions. Just plop them in a foreign restaurant and see how their chosen foods compare to KFC, Whoppers, and glazed donuts. Without exception, they will be more deep-fried -- falafel, samosas -- more greasy and messy -- gyros -- and sugary -- gulab jamun, baklava. But don't forget: it's another culture's deep-fried, street-vendor junk food, so wolfing it down your piehole is not only OK -- it's enlightening.

Let's face it, though: some of your middle and upper class peers won't get it, so you'll need a little PR to keep them from asking too many annoying questions. For example, rather than describing the taste as "salty," go for "savory." And instead of "sugary," use "decadent." Nothing is "greasy" or "artery-clogging" -- it's "hearty." In place of "deep-fried," try "kettle cooked." Using this term in particular will score bonus points because of its sophisticated, wary view of technology. You see, an electricity-using deep fryer is too stained by the legacy of modernity, while a kettle harks back to the Eden of honest cooking when peasants huddled around a cauldron full of sludge at dinner, for want of tables.

What if the food doesn't have any taste at all? That's OK -- just call it "artisanal." By valuing the purity of the process rather than the yumminess of the result, you'll tap into your friends' views on everything from standardized testing to bad lovers. Indeed, how it got made is so important that many corporations include a mission statement on the container about how organically it got into your supermarket:

Our pupusas come from completely free-range, soy-fed Salvadoreans, 100% guaranteed to be free of growth hormones and antibiotics. Unlike corporate farmers, we place our consumers first: our artisans are carefully inspected for cholera and dysentery before hand-crafting your pupusas. Expect no less from Applebottom Valley Organic Farms.

You might naively think that the food of any old rural culture unspoiled by the dominant, mainstream culture would do -- but you would be mistaken at your next dinner party to serve the cuisine of West Virginia. The chow of Italian bumpkins is permissible, but you should really munch the slop of a dark-skinned community, just to be safe.

Dying her hair blond as a way to cope with aging?

Read my post at GNXP that shows that older Playboy Playmates are more likely to have blond hair than the pretty young things. Comments closed here; take it over there.