There’s an idea that the COVID-era economic boom just pulled forward economic activity that would have happened in 2022-2023 anyway. That’s not absurd when you look at the data. GDP growth (and stocks) went crazy in late 2020 and into 2021. Then 2022-2023 were a bit anemic by historical standards, and today we’re back at baseline. So there was some approximate amount of value creation that was going to happen in 2020-2025, and rather than change that total amount, COVID’s social epiphenomena mostly just reallocated how much of that value creation was going to happen in which years.
A nice little toy idea, and not crazy when you look at the data. We could think about what else this “it just pulled things forward” idea works for. But obviously it has limits. It wouldn’t work for something like, say, murder rates….
Oh.
Now, that’s a tidy theory but it’s absurd as an explanation. There’s no reason to think that a preordained number of murders had to happen in 2020-2025, and therefore there’s no reason that more murders in 2020-2022 would cause fewer murders in 2025.
But it is interesting that the worst US murder rates in 20+ years are now being immediately followed by the lowest murder rate in modern history. It would be weird if those two things were completely unrelated.
Jeff Asher is doing great work on the data here:
(Side note, someone should write a paper on why Fort Worth’s murder rate is up 23% in a year when ~everyone else’s is down and when half an hour away, Dallas’s murder rate is down 36%.)
We don’t have a magical explanation here, but here are some theories and their counterarguments.
Maybe it’s better violence interruptor programs. But in every city, all at the same time?
Maybe it’s rebounded investment in community programs after a lot of them were crippled during COVID. But those programs didn’t tend to have such dramatic effects before.
Maybe it’s the phones, and in the same way that teens aren’t having sex and doing other risky things as much as they used to, they’ve also stopped joining gangs and shooting each other. But phones were already very much a thing pre-COVID, and murder rates were in fact ticking up in the late 2010s.
Maybe murder is a social contagion passed generation by generation from older teens to younger teens, and the 2020 murder spike killed so many would-be superspreaders that the contagion went subcritical. But could such an entrenched contagion really be that sensitive?
There is one explanation that nobody has tried: “it’s because of strict gun control and lower gun ownership”. Nobody has tried it because it would be a tough case to make. Since the 2020 murder spike, gun laws got more free and gun sales reached unprecedented highs:
Here’s the solution matrix that gun control groups normally use:
That bottom-right square is inconvenient, because its existence invalidates the whole idea of tying guns to murders. The clearest writeup of this is from Handwaving Freakoutery years ago:
The punchline is that guns don’t drive the murder rate up or down. They’re uncorrelated.
Low murder rates are good first and foremost for the people who would otherwise have been killed. Secondarily for society. And they also have this under-discussed side benefit of taking the “it’s the guns” talking point off the table. It’s not the guns, and now everyone can see that for themselves.
This week’s links
“Australia was once the gold standard for gun safety. Experts say it’s losing control.”
Trifecta in this article:
Guns as haram. “Losing control” means that guns exist.
H/t to Unban Twin on our Discord, who said, “Even with the level of stricture and licensing in a country like Australia, there is still opposition to any ownership of guns and a desire for continued ratchet effects of ever more prohibition.”
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The solution matrix is great