Brief: Trust and crime

I've been thinking more about trust and its effects on all areas of social interaction and culture. It's at the root, really: if you don't trust others, you will try to get by on your own. Sociability requires a certain level of trust, and in a social species like ours there are gains to be had by interacting with others -- especially in a modern market economy where you can outsource so many things to others in the market instead of doing them yourself. You don't make your own shoes, grow your own food, manufacture your own computer, or gather your own news about the President. Sounds great -- why would you possibly withdraw from that sociability?

If you trust others, you're making yourself vulnerable to exploitation. The more trusting people there are in a population, the easier it will be for exploiters to thrive, and that will drive up their numbers. The exploiters may become so numerous, and their effects so offensive, that people start to withhold their trust lest they become the next statistic. That state-of-mind could show up in behavior by simply not venturing out into the public sphere where they'd be vulnerable, hiding out in the safer personal sphere.

But then when there are far fewer trusting people, that dries up the resource that exploiters had been thriving on. Now there are lots of them competing to exploit a shrinking number of trusting people. So that will drive down the numbers of exploiters. Eventually people will realize how safe things have become and extend their trust once again, which will in turn drive up the numbers of exploiters as before, and the cycle repeats.

This variant on a model of how hosts and parasites, or predators and prey, interact in ecology suggests looking at data on how trusting people have been over time, and what the crime rate has been like. Before I showed that people rationally respond to changes in the homicide rate by becoming more afraid when it's going up and less afraid when it declines, with about a 2-year lag. So we know that perceptions are affected by crime levels -- but could crime levels be affected by perceptions, i.e. how trustworthy you think other people are?

The General Social Survey asks respondents whether other people can be trusted, cannot be trusted, or that it depends. Here is a plot over time of the percent of respondents who said that other people can be trusted (in black), together with the homicide rate (in red):


Clearly the relationship is less stark than it was for fear resonding to crime, where the correlation within a year was +0.74. Still, the correlation here is +0.53, meaning that indeed higher crime rates are associated with higher levels of trust. And as in the case of fear and crime, that understates the strength of the relationship since there is a time lag. In particular, trust levels started falling steadily before the homicide rate did so. So the predicted relationship is there: crime rates are high throughout the '70s and '80s, and at some point in the mid-late-'80s, people have had enough and start trusting others less and less. With far fewer trusting people to exploit, criminals start scaling back or dying off: the homicide rate peaks in 1991 and starts falling steadily afterward.

We will have to wait a few more decades to see if the rest of the story pans out -- whether with such low crime rates, people will assume it's safe to start trusting people again, and whether those higher levels of trust (if they did happen) would be followed by a rise in the crime rate.

Criminologists and others debate what causes crime to go up or down -- tougher or more lenient punishment by the government, technology that makes it easier or harder to report crimes, etc. I have only a passing familiarity with the range of causes they discuss, but as far as I know, how trusting the average person is does not get much attention, although there may be some minority contingent that does look at it. Perhaps it is as simple as a rise in crime following an increase in the number of people who criminals would consider "suckers," and a decline in crime following a contraction in the numbers of "suckers," just as we see between a host species and a parasite species. The logic is hard to argue against, and the graph above shows that it has some modest empirical support as well.

GSS variables used: trust, year

Brief: Is the "culture of fear" irrational?

We hear a lot about how paranoid Americans are about certain things -- people in the middle of nowhere fearing that they could be the next target of a terrorist attack, consumers suspicious of everything they eat because they heard a news story about it causing cancer, and so on.

Of course, we could be overreacting to the magnitude of the problem, as when we panic about a scenario that has a 1 in a trillion chance of occurring but that sounds disastrous if it did happen. It's not clear, though, what the "appropriate" level of concern should be for a disaster of a given magnitude and chance of happening. So the charge of irrationality is harder to level using this argument about a single event.

But we also get comparisons of risk between events wrong, for example when we fear traveling by airplane more than traveling by car, even though planes are safer. Here the case for irrationality is straightforward: for a given level of disaster (say, breaking your arm, dying, or whatever), we should panic more about the more probable ways that it can occur. The plane vs. car example makes us look irrational.

Still, there's another way we could measure how sensible our response is, only instead of comparing two sources of danger at the same point in time, comparing the same source of danger at different points in time. That is, for a given level of disaster, any change in the probability of it happening over time should cause us to adjust our level of concern accordingly. If dying in a plane crash becomes less and less likely over time, people should become less and less afraid of flying. When I looked into this before, I found that the NYT's coverage of murder and rape has become increasing out-of-touch with reality: while the crime statistics show the murder and rape rates falling after the early 1990s, the NYT devoted more and more of its articles to these crimes. So at least at the Newspaper of Record, they were responding irrationally to danger.

But what about the average American -- maybe the NYT responds in the opposite way that we might expect because when violent crime is high, people see and hear about plenty of awful things outside of the media, so that writing tons of articles about murder and rape wouldn't draw in lots more readers. In contrast, when the society becomes safer and safer, an article about murder or rape is suddenly shocking -- just when you thought things were safe! -- and so draws more readers, who start to doubt their declining concern about violence.

The General Social Survey asks people whether there's any area within a mile of their house where they're afraid to go out at night. Here is a plot of the percent of people who say that they are afraid to go out at night, along with the homicide rate for that year:


Clearly there is a tight fit between people's perception of danger and the reality underlying that fear. The Spearman rank correlation between the two within a given year is +0.74. That's assuming that people respond very quickly to changes in violence; it might be even higher because there appears to be somewhat of a lag between a change in the homicide rate and an appropriate change in the level of fear. For example, the homicide rate starts to decline steadily after a peak in 1991, but people's fear doesn't peak until two years later, when it too steadily declines. That makes sense: even if you read the crime statistics, those don't come out until two years later. To respond right away, you'd have to be involved in the collection and analysis of those data. The delay is more likely due to people hearing through word-of-mouth that things are getting better -- or not getting negative word-of-mouth reports -- and that it takes awhile for this information to spread throughout people's social network.

Putting all of the data together presents a mixed picture on how rational or irrational our response to the risk of danger is. But here is one solid piece that average people -- not those with an incentive to misrepresent reality, either in a more negative or more positive way -- do respond rationally to risk.

GSS variables used: fear, year

Brief: When statesmen weren't elderly

A book that I'm reading casually mentioned that the English politician Bolingbroke became Secretary at War in 1704 -- at age 26. When something seems like it's from another world, it probably reflects the massive changes that the West has seen since making the transition to a society characterized by open entry and competition in both the economic and political spheres. To check this, I've plotted over time how old the entering British Secretary at War was (or whatever new title he may have had, such as Secretary of State for Defence). Here are the results:


Sure enough, up through the first quarter of the 18th C., the Secretary at War's age hovers around 30. By the end of the century, his age has moved to the upper 30s and 40s. During the 19th C. there is more variance, with a handful of Secretaries in their early 30s, but the trend is still upward into the 40s and 50s. After 1900, the youngest has been 38, the oldest 73, with the average at 52. The men with heavy war responsibilities are about 20 years older in post-industrial than in pre-industrial times.

One reason may be that everyone started living longer with industrialization, not just the statesmen. But when you think about it, that cannot explain things. Presumably the 17th C. counterparts of today's lead singers of a rock band were also in their 20s. Elite athletes were likely also in their 20s, as they are today. If there were supermodels back then, you can bet they would have been in their 20s as well. Instead, there has been a shift in what type of people are considered fit for war secretary, which in turn reflects a change in the job description itself.

Violence and Social Orders, the book I'm reading, posits a framework for understanding history through the lens of controlling violence. In a primitive social order, such as those of hunter-gatherers, there is continual violence, no state, and mostly no social organizations beyond kin networks.

The limited access order (or "natural state") controls violence by using the state to create rents for elite members of a dominant coalition. Each elite gets his own piece of turf to extract rents from, and each elite respects the turf of the others because otherwise violence will break out, and that disorder would destroy the rent-creation. To make sure that the rents are sufficient to persuade elite members to refrain from violence, access to the elite is restricted -- if it were open, lots of people would pour in and shrink the amount of the rents going to each person. Still, the shadow of violence always looms over the society, since the means of violence are spread out over the entire elite -- not monopolized by the state -- and they only refrain as long as no one trespasses against them. The threat is always there.

Open access orders are the ones we live in today, where there is political control of the military, the state is used to provide public goods for the masses rather than private rents for the elites, and where the economically powerful earn their money through profits -- doing something productive -- rather than parasitizing rents from the peasants under their control. Violence is rare because the state monopolizes the legitimate use of violence, rather than every elite member being a violence specialist himself or closely allied with one. Elites compete on the basis of the price and quality of the goods and services they provide -- not based on who can defeat whom in a violent battle.

My guess for why open access orders have older statesmen is that since the shadow of violence has been largely removed, you don't need people running military affairs who are itching to pick up arms and go kick some ass. Being a hormone-crazed young person is great in a natural state -- your hair-trigger emotions are suited to a world where you always have to be prepared to fight, and your choleric temper provides a credible threat to would-be trespassers during peacetime. For example, Alexander the Great became King of Macedon at 20 and had conquered much of the known world by his death at 32.

But in open access orders, violence has been stripped from the broad elite and concentrated in the state, and civil war -- that is, intra-elite war -- is rare. So, too, are elite uprisings against the state -- before, these resulted from elites losing their rents and going after the people who were supposed to be providing them. So in these societies hot-headed young people are only going to threaten the peace. The elites are no longer constantly prepared to battle each other, so we only require a calm person to make sure everyone continues to get along. A 26 year-old in charge of the army, by contrast, would grow bored with peace so quickly that he'd want to stir things up "so we at least have something to do."

It's funny that we worry today about how to control young males' violent impulses, which threaten the peace. Only 300 years ago, we would have been grateful to have a young violent male in our social circle -- he would've been extracting rents from us, but at least we'd have someone to protect us from all those other specialists in violence. We truly live in a different world.

Brief: Do people vote selfishly when it comes to vices?

In Bryan Caplan's eye-opening book The Myth of the Rational Voter, he devotes some time to the literature showing that voters do not vote their narrow self interests. The well-to-do favor social safety net programs, men are typically more pro-choice, and so on. In general, people claim to and do vote for what they believe will make society better off. He says that the exceptions are personal vices, such as smokers being much more against smoking bans than are non-smokers. I went to the General Social Survey to see what other examples I could dig up on this pattern.

First:


Those who saw an x-rated movie last year, compared to those who didn't, are much more likely to want to keep pornography legal for adults, rather than ban it altogether.

Second:


Among married people, those who have cheated on their spouse are much more likely to want easier divorce laws. The idea is that if we had stricter laws, their vice could be more harshly punished, say by having to pay massive damages in divorce court if it were uncovered.

Next:


The more sex partners a woman has had in the past year, the more willing she is to support abortion for any reason whatsoever. The idea is that for such women, abortion is one form of birth control, and lacking this method of last resort would constrain their ability to indulge their vice of sleeping with a variety of men.

Finally, an exception to the "vice leads to selfish voting" rule:


These two graphs show that illegal drug users feel the same way as non-drug users about how well our drug policy is doing, rather than view it as too harsh or unjust, as we might have expected from the previous three cases. This case is different in that the vice is illegal, while the other three vices are perfectly legal. Obviously they could not vote selfishly because there are no "legalize it" pieces of legislation on the table.

But even when you just ask them their opinion, they still don't espouse the view that promotes their own self-interest. Perhaps the vices that we criminalize, on average, really are more harmful than those that we don't criminalize -- shooting heroin really is more ruinous than cheating, sleeping around, or watching porn. If that's so, then the heroin addict doesn't view his vice as something that's unobjectionable, and so doesn't view tough drug laws as an untenable constraint on his liberty, in the way that a porn addict would view his own vice and the attempts to criminalize it. He probably recognizes that shooting heroin is something that people should be protected from by making it harder to try out. The porn addict, by contrast, realizes that it never really hurt anyone, so people should not be protected from a false menace.

So, by experiencing how destructive illegal drugs are first-hand, users put on their "do what's best for society" hat and confess that current drug laws aren't as bad as ivory tower detractors might think. The other vices don't appear to destroy society, so those who indulge in them don't think about what's best for society -- you only get into that mindset when you perceive that something is a real problem that needs to be solved.

GSS variables used: pornlaw, xmovie, divlaw, evstray, abany, partners, sex, natdrug, hlth5, evidu

Climate and civilization among Blacks

In a previous post showing that colder climates favor civilization among Whites, I looked only at Whites in order to avoid a confound between climate and racial composition. (Razib's follow-up post showed the same trend even when looking at particular White ethnicities.) But now let's see what effect temperature has on degree of civilization among American Blacks. The data come from the same sources as before: average annual temperature, Audacious Epigone's estimates of average Black IQ by state (see his methods here) -- which this time include only 39 of the 48 continental states -- Statemaster's list of states by degrees awarded to non-Hispanic Blacks per capita, and this study on percent of non-Hispanic Blacks who are imprisoned. For these last two variables, there are data from all 48 continental states.

Here are the plots:




The Pearson correlation coefficient between heat and Black IQ is negative though not significant (r = -0.22, p = 0.19), although perhaps with reliable data on the 9 states left out, we might obtain a lower p-value. (The 9 states are all in the Northeast or northern part of the Mountain states, so unfortunately we're missing key data on how Blacks perform in pretty cold areas.) Nor is it significant between heat and percent of Blacks in jail (r = +0.03, p = 0.83).

However, it is significant between heat and degrees awarded to Blacks per capita, although in the opposite direction as for Whites -- hotter states award more degrees to Blacks per capita (r = +0.72, p = 7 x 10^(-9)). I don't think this is entirely due to the fact that most of the "historically Black colleges and universities" are in the Southeast, since hot and cold climates are also found in the middle and western parts of the country, and the pattern shows up there too.

It my seem strange that heat appears not to significantly affect average Black IQ, but here is another piece of evidence that Blacks and Whites do not respond equally strongly to the same the same climate. The Pearson correlation between Black IQ and White IQ across states is only +0.48 (p = 0.002, two-tailed). At least states with higher White IQ also tend to have higher Black IQ, but the agreement is not perfect. Note that the correlation between heat and Black IQ is not positive either -- as it would be if Blacks had higher IQs in the hotter climates that they're more biologically adapted to. Rather, the non-significant trend is what we see among Whites -- hotter climates are associated with lower IQs. In any case, below is a map of Black IQ. The only pattern I see is that coastal areas do better than inland areas.


We see something similar with the non-effect of heat on imprisonment rates of Blacks, whereas heat was significantly positively correlated with White crime. Again, the Pearson correlation between White and Black statewide imprisonment rates shows us that we shouldn't expect to see as strong of a relationship: it is +0.43 (p = 0.002, two-tailed), meaning that states with high White crime tend to have high Black crime, but the agreement is far from perfect.

Turning to the most significant result, it may seem odd that heat has the opposite effect on the per capita rate of degrees awarded to Whites vs. Blacks, though again the Pearson correlation between White and Black state degree rates shows that we should expect opposite effects: it is -0.40 (p = 0.005, two-tailed), meaning that states with higher rates of Whites earning degrees tend to have lower rates of Blacks earning degrees. As far as graduating college goes, Blacks appear to do much better in hot rather than cold environments.

So what do these new data on Blacks tell us? Mainly, that Blacks and Whites don't respond the same way to climate: heat either makes little or no difference among Blacks (IQ, crime) or actually helps Blacks (degrees), while it impairs Whites (IQ, degrees, and crime). I interpret this as further support for my contention that it is something about the climate per se that causes differences among Whites. Blacks are better adapted to hot climates than Northern Europeans, so they should not be as adversely affected by the insults of the hot climates that plague most of the US -- recall that Northern Europe lies north of America, while New York City lies at the same latitude as Barcelona and Rome.

Regarding mechanisms, if they have to do with heat per se, Blacks may become less fatigued or dehydrated by high temperatures. It's the middle of summer now, so you know how foggy your mind can get on a hot day. Furthermore, we already know that Blacks have built up a far greater suite of genetic defenses against infectious diseases, so they may be better protected against the myriad pathogens that are found more in the hotter parts of the US.

Lastly, it may seem counterintuitive that the colder climates appear not to encourage Black civilization so much, given all we're taught in school about the Harlem Renaissance and the blues of Chicago. But these outdated images may mislead us -- we ought to think more of Atlanta when we imagine a flourishing predominantly Black metropolis, to which Blacks have been returning in droves after living for decades in the northern US. Updating our picture of the Black world, these results don't seem so unbelievable after all.