Matthew Yglesias writes on his Slow Boring* substack:
The 2020 murder surge wasn’t about Covid
Covid was global, the crime wave was only in America
MATTHEW YGLESIAS
OCT 31Paul Krugman wrote a column last week on public perceptions of crime versus crime realities with some analogies to and implications for public perceptions of the economy.
I’m in agreement with probably 80 percent of what he writes. But I think the remaining 20 percent exemplifies why liberals have a hard time securing the public’s trust on this issue, which exacerbates the misperceptions that Krugman is nervous about. The stylized facts about crime he is working with are that murder (and non-fatal shootings, but murder is the best-measured offense) went up a lot in 2020 and up a bit more in 2021. We then had a decent murder drop in 2022 and another one in 2023 that is now on track to leave the 2023 murder rate lower than the 2020 rate. Dark Brandon reversed the Trump crime wave.
So what happened in 2020?
I think most people are aware that George Floyd was arrested and then killed by a police officer in Minneapolis while several of the officer’s colleagues stood around and watched. That touched off a massive and multi-dimensional social upheaval about race and racial equality that had a particular locus of concern around questions of policing and criminal justice. And then crime spiraled out of control.
Or as Krugman puts it:
Unlike the somewhat mysterious decline in crime in previous decades, this crime wave wasn’t too hard to explain. The Covid-19 pandemic led to a lot of isolation and disruption, plus a lot of psychological stress, making it plausible that some Americans became disconnected from the social bonds that usually keep most of us law-abiding.
In other words, he not only thinks the 2020 crime wave had nothing to do with Floyd and the post-Floyd reaction, he thinks this is so obviously the case that he doesn’t even need to argue about it. The causes of the 2022-2023 murder decline, according to Krugman, are obvious—the virus went into remission. The only question is why don’t people realize murder is down.
My view is that there are, actually, a lot of valid and unanswered questions about why murders spiked in 2020, and almost all of those questions center around Floyd and the Floyd fallout. The reason there’s a fair amount of mystery is that it’s challenging to pin down exactly what about the Floyd fallout was responsible for the large increase …
As I’ve been arguing for a long time, the Floyd Effect is not that mysterious: it’s the Ferguson Effect on steroids.
After Michael Brown’s death at Ferguson, MO, there was a huge amount of criticism of the police for being racistly mean to blacks. So the cops retreated to the donut shop during the last two years of the Obama Administration, which led to blacks both driving worse and packing illegal handguns more often, which led to blacks dying by both motor vehicle accidents more and by gun homicide more.
The exact same thing happened in 2020:
We can see this in the CDC death count weekly data:
This is likely the most spectacular finding—that Deaths of Exuberance (murders and traffic accidents) soared among blacks after the triumph of Black Lives Matter when George Floyd died on May 25, 2020—in American social science since Case and Deaton’s 2015 finding that Deaths of Despair among the white working class have soared in this century.
But almost nobody knows this because I was more or less the first to figure it out. So even public-spirited intellectuals like Scott Alexander don’t want to mention this finding.
This is much to my horror. I am an extremely public-spirited intellectual, so I assumed that when I decided to devote my life to public service that my findings would be of service. But, instead, like in a nightmarish Black Mirror episode, everything I discover, like the murder-car crash link, therefore becomes off-limits for the Serious Intellectuals. The non-serious intellectuals like Nobel laureate Paul Krugman get to lie shamelessly, while the serious intellectuals like Scott and Matt don’t get to cite the best evidence because that would prove they read me.
It’s horrifying.
“*” Slow Boring is no doubt self-criticism of Matthew Yglesias’ somewhat pedantic turn of mind, but it’s also an impressive callback to German sociologist Max Weber’s eloquent praise of the liberal reformist turn of mind:
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth—that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today.
Would Max Weber have cited Deaths of Exuberance? I like to think so, but who really knows?
