I don't know what the answer to problems like this is but I have spent a fair amount of time studying (both formally and informally) issues like poverty and pondering how to effectively address really thorny problems. I have concluded that government programs designed "to help the poor" generally do more harm than good. Part of the problem is with a) requiring recipients to psychologically identify themselves as "the poor" and b) the fact that the very design of such programs tends to reward people for having problems and punish them for trying to resolve their problems. A chief example is Welfare which was designed to "help poor single mothers". It was designed when most poor, single mothers were people we would classify as "the deserving poor": widows. But the way it was designed changed the social contract and actively encouraged women to choose to become poor, single moms in order to qualify for assistance. The result: Welfare actively grew the population of poor, single moms. Not remotely the original intent.
So I have concluded that if you REALLY want to "help the poor", you have to start by removing "poor" from your program definition and qualifying requirements. Instead, ask yourself: what would help the people generally and do so in such a way that, coincidentally, poor people would benefit significantly? For example, countries that help parents generally, regardless of marital status or income, seem to get better results than the American Welfare system.
Exactly. Assistentialism is easy to defend, hard to attack ("you mean you should NOT help them?"), and spreads very easily, but totally fails to help, most of the time.
A government shouldn't build hospitals for the poor, or schools for the poor in the same sense it shouldn't have buses with separate benches for black people ("affirmative action" programs face the same problem). It a big problem of democracy as a form of government that it encourages "for show", high-visibility/low-impact, governing, and assistentialism and affirmative action fit the bill perfectly. Most rulers are not trying to help the poor, but to show that they are helping the poor.
Back where I com from, a few decades ago, there was a system of informal government called "coronelism". Affluent farmers or city politicians, called "coronéis", would build informal support networks around themselves (paying for a bright poor kid's education here, paying for a poor woman's surgery there, etc), and make it so that for most poor people they were the only way into having access to basic services of civilization. It was a crooked incentives game, and they elected themselves like this while laundering taxpayer money and sabotaging any sort of project that would provide real education, health care, etc, to the poor people, as a form of keeping control. The rest of the country needed to move forward a lot before this could be suplanted.
I feel most affirmative action programs work in the same way. You can't criticise hospitals or housing for poor people in the same way you can't criticise the "coronel" for putting that bright poor kid through college and making a lawyer/doctor/engineer out of him, but neither of these actions actually change anything in the scale of society in the long term.
"I have concluded that government programs designed 'to help the poor' generally do more harm than good."
The problem is that in most countries the poor are people who can't buy anything, whereas in the US the poor are people who can't be sold anything. They're like the spent fuel rods of capitalism. You can try to recycle them, or try to bury them, but moving them from place to place only causes trouble.
And I would say that the problem is with viewing them primarily through the lens of their economic value to begin with, which puts them in the position you describe. That is a big part of why programs designed by the American government to help the poor typically get such dreadful results.
This article is a bit stale, but it's true. Anyone who has lived near section 8 housing will tell you the same.
For every family that wants to escape, there are a thousand who are mad that their check is late, and scream racism at their neighbors when told to pick up their own trash.
I actually used to live in section 8 housing growing up. Once I was old enough, the path seemed so clear on how to get far removed from that environment. I'm not sure why others don't see it and continue to accept their situation as unchangeable.
It seems to me that it is unchangeable in the aggregate. A certain level of unemployment is simply part of our system; the workers are literally incapable of changing the economic variables which create that level. Moreover, a large proportion of the employed are poorly-paid retail workers or laborers; again, it is not possible for the actions of this group to change the size of the different segments of the job market. As such it is a game of musical chairs as to who ends up with the shit jobs, who ends up without a job. The fact that an individual can escape by outdoing his peers only masks the fundamental hopelessness of the situation.
This is likely the other way around. Keep in mind that the one who screams racism or complains about their check being late is liable to make a much stronger impression on you than the many who simply lead quiet lives in poverty. And even in a crime-ridden neighborhood, the statistics show that most of the crime is attributable to a small fraction of the population.
People discussing this, please dispute the data, offer solutions, talk about root causes, etc. Please don't fall into the trap of calling the data racist.
About three paragraphs in I thought, "Yeah, that's section 8" and was preparing to be unsurprised when it didn't mention it. But it did.
Anyway, the whole point of Section 8 was to move the riffraff from the too-close-to-rich-people city areas to the suburbs, in a Parisian style setup. The suburbs, of course, were where middle class people fled to when the cities were originally ravaged by similiar population movements years ago. The eventual white flight (ie, ethnic cleansing) from the suburbs was baked into the cake and none of the other unexpected consequences were in the least unexpected.
I'm probably one of the flamier liberals here on HNN, but I have to agree with this one - I landlorded for a short time before realizing it's not easy money, and one of my tenants was a nice young lady on Section 8. Before she moved on, she (or her live-in boyfriend) left holes in the walls, the garden shed literally stuffed full of trash, the carpets full of fleas and a big hole in the yard from the dog not permitted in the lease, dirt ground into the kitchen floor that took me a day and a half to scrub out (like, bus-station-level gum), and a street full of really, really pissed neighbors.
Poverty is endemic, and Section 8 doesn't help, even though I really wish it did. However, eliminating Section 8 won't help, either, I suspect.
You indeed sound an awful lot like my (ex-)neighbor who decided to "move up in the world" to a nice house in a much richer neighborhood, while keeping your existing home (in our (til then) quite nice upper middle class neighborhood) for income purposes. And, like either (a) a flaming liberal, or (b) someone to whom the higher rent from Section 8 tenants, and the fact the Uncle Sugar was writing the rent check, was mighty appealing, decided to rent to Section 8.
Yes, I would would be one of your VERY VERY PISSED OFF neighbors. I hope it cost you plenty, but I'm sure Uncle Sugar made you whole with our tax dollars (if they didn't, word would get out that Section 8 landlording was a losing proposition, and the 'crats can't have that! Anyway, it's not their money).
This is a long article, here are some of the key points.
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Crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20percent a year.
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The demolition of the city’s public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal “Section8” rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.
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In 1976, letters went out to 200 randomly selected families among the 44,000 living in Chicago public housing, asking whether they wanted to move out to the suburbs. A counselor went around the projects explaining the new Section8 program, in which tenants would pay 25percent of their income for rent and the government would pay the rest, up to a certain limit.
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Starting in 1977, in what became known as the Gautreaux program, hundreds of families relocated to suburban neighborhoods—most of them about 25miles from the ghetto, with very low poverty rates and good public schools.
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Cisneros floated the idea of knocking down the projects and moving the residents out into the metro area.
The federal government encouraged the demolitions with a $6.3billion program to redevelop the old project sites, called HOPE VI, or “Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere.” The program was launched in the same spirit as Bill Clinton’s national service initiative—communities working together to “rebuild lives.” One Chicago housing official mused about “architects and lawyers and bus drivers and people on welfare living together.”
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In the most literal sense, the national effort to diffuse poverty has succeeded. Since 1990, the number of Americans living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty—meaning that at least 40 percent of households are below the federal poverty level—has declined by 24percent. But this doesn’t tell the whole story.
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George Galster, of Wayne State University, analyzed the shifts in urban poverty and published his results in a paper called “A Cautionary Tale.” While fewer Americans live in high-poverty neighborhoods, increasing numbers now live in places with “moderate” poverty rates, meaning rates of 20 to 40 percent.
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In 2003, the Brookings Institution published a list of the 15 cities where the number of high-poverty neighborhoods had declined the most. In recent years, most of those cities have also shown up as among the most violent in the U.S., according to FBI data.
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The University of Louisville criminologist Geetha Suresh was tracking local patterns of violent crime. She had just arrived from India, had never heard of a housing project. Suresh noticed a recurring pattern, A particularly violent neighborhood would suddenly go cold, and crime would heat up in several new neighborhoods. In each case, Suresh has now confirmed, the first hot spots were the neighborhoods around huge housing projects, and the later ones were places where people had moved when the projects were torn down. From that, she drew the obvious conclusion: “Crime is going along with them.”
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In some places, the phenomenon is hard to detect, but there may be a simple reason: in cities with tight housing markets, Section8 recipients generally can’t afford to live within the city limits, and sometimes they even move to different states. New York, where the rate of violent crime has plummeted, appears to have pushed many of its poor out to New Jersey, where violent crime has increased in nearby cities and suburbs. Washington, D.C., has exported some of its crime to surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia.
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In 2005, another wave of project demolitions pushed the number of people displaced from public housing to well over 20,000, and crime skyrocketed.
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If replacing housing projects with vouchers had achieved its main goal—infusing the poor with middle-class habits—then higher crime rates might be a price worth paying. But today, social scientists looking back on the whole grand experiment are apt to use words like baffling and disappointing.
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a follow-up to the highly positive, highly publicized Gautreaux study of 1991—produced results that were “puzzling,” said Susan Popkin of the Urban Institute. In this study, volunteers were also moved into low-poverty neighborhoods, although they didn’t move nearly as far as the Gautreaux families. Women reported lower levels of obesity and depression. But they were no more likely to find jobs. The schools were not much better, and children were no more likely to stay in them. Girls were less likely to engage in risky behaviors, and they reported feeling more secure in their new neighborhoods. But boys were as likely to do drugs and act out, and more likely to get arrested for property crimes. The best Popkin can say is: “It has not lived up to its promise. It has not lifted people out of poverty, it has not made them self-sufficient, and it has left a lot of people behind.”
buildings where a lot of bad-behaving people lived were closed and/or residents were forced/incented to move out. After they moved to new buildings, sometimes in more suburban areas, many of those same people continued behaving badly, and thus the crime rate rose there. The overall net impact on behavior/crime was often neglible or actualy worsened. A large percentage of the people engaging in the bad behaviors were, for whatever reasons, black.
the OA title sucks because it's not about a murder mystery. I only clicked through because I'm doing research on actual murder mysteries for a side project of mine. So I was a bit disappointed to discover it was just about crime trends and social factors, not a specific murder case.
This article kind of misses the point. That is, it seems to focus too much on the effect of dismantling the projects and moving people around, and not at all on why they got there. And it accepts at face value the proposition that these cities were moving those people out of the projects, sometimes out of city limits, for the purpose of improving their lives and in that way fighting poverty, crime, etc. I find it truly hard to believe that any city in the US would undergo that kind of effort to help out poor black people. The idea should strain anyone's credulity. More likely that more affluent white folks want to live in the city these days, and cities want that tax revenue. Sure, efforts were made in some cases to try to improve the lives of the people being displaced, but as an afterthought and not as the prime motivator. I mean, this demographic shift has been underway for a while now, where folks are leaving the suburbs and moving back to the cities, and property values are going up there, and generally life is improving in the cities. I can't tell if it's the intent, but this article almost seems to lay responsibility for all this on some changes to a federal housing program. It's nonsense. And the idea that mayors and city councils nationwide don't want to hear about the damaging effects of this displacement because it disproves their theories on poverty is certainly complete horseshit. They don't want to hear it because they've got their shiny new neighborhood, crime is down, and whatever happens in the suburbs they don't give a shit because it isn't their problem anymore. And regarding their theories on poverty, well they haven't got any of those. They're politicians, not sociologists. They have elections.
So what this article should have been about, but isn't, is why we still have so many poor black people committing so many crimes and taking up so much space in so many prisons, over 40 years since the civil rights movement, and in spite of the fact that most of America can apparently get its shit together enough to vote for a black man for President anyway.
The answer to that one is pretty straightforward, well known, and easy to understand. And it has little to nothing to do with race. America is simply not an egalitarian society. It never really has been, but over the past 30 years or so it's moved away from it faster than ever. The gap between rich and poor in America is remarkably high, and with that fact come all sorts of social ills (see below). And not just for the poor either, but quality of life tends to decrease across the board. The libertarian position that a rising tide will lift all boats, or that income distribution doesn't matter as long as average wage continues to increase, this idea that remains popular across the political spectrum in the US, and that is wholly within the sphere of consensus in the US media, does not pass scientific muster. It is absolute shit. And as Americans seem incapable of even discussing this simple fact yet, the problem of poverty and social dysfunction in America, among blacks as well as whites, et al, will remain unsolved.
Based in part, as I recall, on Irish family history.
The "America is simply not an egalitarian society" simply doesn't explain how blacks uplifted themselves for nearly a century after the Civil War ... and then it ground to a halt or I think worse, such that Moynihan could write about this in 1965.
Note also that "The gap between rich and poor" is seldom a concern for "the poor" if they're well off enough. [ Insert usual statistics on calorie consumption, TV and car ownership, etc. ].
You claim the poor are worse off on an absolute scale; that's not true to my knowledge and I'd like to see some evidence of that (before the Great Recession, of course; in the rest of argument you are saying the gap is the problem.
As for your initial paragraph, yep, cui bono, that's an elephant in the room, although I don't think it's quite as dire or racist as you posit. More an issue of class and politicians and those connected to them making a buck (and for the more ideological, trashing the hated suburbs)), but the article was long enough as it was.
Note also the mention in passing of "urban renewal", a "great social experiment" somewhat like this one (or so I gather, I've not studied it).
You've obviously thought very hard about all this. But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America? The answer has everything to do with race. Most people on HN belong to another ~ 10x crime group. We're males. I personally don't mind my tendencies that much. But to say they're cultural? Stop pretending it's the sixties. The blank slate is dead. Science killed it.
There are still things to be done about crime. Concentrating poverty (the projects) turns out to have been one of those really stupid progressive ideas. Crime rates for blacks in the south tend to be lower than in the north (I'll pass on that one). The post-1950s destruction of the black family (eclipsing slavery's destruction of it) seems to have been a bad thing. There are things you can fix. Just don't expect the effect to be huge.
> But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere
I don't understand why this rules out cultural reasons. In most of the places where black people live today outside africa their immigration was mainly based on slavery and subjugation, and this comes with a really heavy cultural baggage both for the black people themselves and for the rest of the local society. And racial slavery took a few centuries to fade away, which helped build a lot of other sociological prejudices and rituals around it. At least here in brazil this is pretty obvious. That's very different from jewish immigration worldwide (based on commerce and a looser form of persecution), mexican immigration in the united states (also marginalized, but far less), asian immigration, etc. You can't discount these factors.
I've never been to africa, so I can't say why (and if) this phenomenon happens there, but I think european imperialism and colonialsm might be a good place to start looking for a reason. Before you think I'm a liberal nut, if the structure of a society was built for a long time around foreign domination, most people living in it will adapt to it. Inferiority complexes are hard to overcome, even discounting factors such as ghetto areas, bad infrastructure, and the "social inertia" that makes it easier to raise traumatized kids if you've been traumatized yourself.
You've obviously thought very hard about all this. But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America? The answer has everything to do with race. Most people on HN belong to another ~ 10x crime group. We're males. I personally don't mind my tendencies that much. But to say they're cultural? Stop pretending it's the sixties.
What are you talking about? It's not race. That is, genetics means shit here. It's all socioeconomic. The incidence rate of poverty is also a lot higher in blacks than whites.
The blank slate is dead. Science killed it.
If you want to have a nature vs. nurture debate you need to actually post some science. Until then you've simply violated a fundamental law of statistics: correlation is not causation.
African-Americans make up about 12% of the US population and, for all crimes, about 28% of arrests. This is out of proportion to their population (and other subthreads can pick up the argument about why that disparity exists), but if black crime were ten times the rate of white crime, and if the racial proportions of who got arrested reflected this (which is of course another issue), then African-Americans would make up about 58% of arrests.
You've obviously thought very hard about all this. But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America? The answer has everything to do with race. Most people on HN belong to another ~ 10x crime group. We're males. I personally don't mind my tendencies that much. But to say they're cultural? Stop pretending it's the sixties. The blank slate is dead. Science killed it.
It's very plausible, and indeed pretty much undeniable, that male behaviour is different to female behaviour (eg higher aggression) for biological reasons. Males and females have been under vastly different selection pressures for millions of years, so it makes sense that the survival/reproduction strategy for males should be different to that for females.
However, it's only been <100,000 years since the various ancestral lineages of modern humans split off from one another, and only in the last few thousand years that life in Europe or China has been significantly different to life in Africa (apart from the climate). Huge differences in behaviour between the different lineages are very unlikely.
At first glance, that may provide some evidence for your theory.
However, an alternate theory that I prefer could be stated something there is an inverse relationship between income and likelyhood of committing violent crime.
2.7 * 3 = 8.1, which is actually less than the 7 times offending rate cited above. (Yeah, I know there are some pretty big assumptions in that big of math. Still, the point remains that there is a real relationship between poverty and crime rates)
Sure, in America there are at least three independent lines of evidence for the 10x figures. DOJ arrest rates, DOJ violent crime victim surveys, and simply by looking at the race of murder victims (50% are black -- most murder in the US seems to be intraracial).
The numbers in Africa look bad, but South Africa is really the only place in Africa together enough to do statistics on this stuff. Of course, they also have the highest murder rate in the world (one assumes that other parts would have them beat handily if they could count it all). Jamaica also tops the list in our Hemisphere. The rate cited there for Haiti is half as high as I've seen it elsewhere, but Haiti isn't a great place for accurate data collection, of course.
I've got some estimates for crime rates of African populations in places where they are severe minorities (there's a figure on the internet that claim 80% of London gun crime is African/Caribbean), but it's really hard to be very exact about this sort of thing.
It's a mess of numbers, but there just doesn't seem to be much room for the case that America's problems are special (Brazil, for example, has somewhat similar population demographics, and broadly similar problems).
So your data are limited to the few places on Earth that there's a significant population of Africans; being the US, the Carribbean, Europe and (of course) Africa.
Now, it's also true that in all of these places, people of African descent are poor, and it's also well-observed that poverty is correlated with crime, so I'm not really convinced that your "black people commit more crimes because of a biological tendency to do so" hypothesis is any better than the more conventional "black people are poor for historical and cultural reasons, and poor people commit more crimes" hypothesis.
I wonder, where are people of African descent least poor? That is, if one made a list of countries sorted by wealth of their African-descent populations, what would be the first few items?
A table of homicide rates per country hardly counts as a "citation" for the statement, "blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America", let alone, "The answer has everything to do with race."
No doubt political correctness is a distorting factor in the discourse; so is garden-variety racism. Therefore it's important for honest inquirers to be careful about how they put things. As you said, "it's really hard to be very exact about this sort of thing".
Did you Google for the DOJ stats I mentioned? Regardless, here's what we know:
1) Blacks commit on the order of 10x the violent crime of non-Hispanic whites and Asians in the US. This is well documented.
2) Africa has tremendous murder rates compared to almost everywhere else in the world. Again, well documented.
3) In this hemisphere, the majority black countries all have very high murder rates (Jamaica, Haiti) and the one major country with similar demographics to America has a similar problem with their black murder rate. Again, very well documented.
If you need Googling help on any of this, you can ask. But, really? Come on.
As far as this "racism" bugaboo you bring up...I know you didn't directly call me a racist, but that's just so tired. The Hap-map alone destroys any contention that we're all the same. We're different in countless ways. To me, that makes for a much more interesting world than one where everybody is a WASP under the skin. In fact, it's the race-deniers, not the realists, that I find to be the ones with the really dangerous and bigoted ideas.
Different peoples have different criminal tendencies? Well yeah. Let's admit it and do what we can to alleviate it rather than pretending it isn't there and building huge "great society" projects (The Projects) that make lives worse for the very people we're trying to help. Hurting black people with your verified non-racist good intentions is a really lousy way of helping black people.
There is more genetic diversity among the different African native groups than there is among the rest of the world. The majority of “black” Americans have the genetic equivalent of at least one white great-grandparent. So what were you trying to prove about genetics, again?
You made a very strong claim: "blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America". (In fact, that claim is so over the top that it suggests 'troll', but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.) DOJ statistics do nothing to back up the "everywhere" part. And citing a summary table of countries with black populations does next to nothing.
As for the rest, you're projecting (I don't believe the things you're objecting to) and resorting to rudeness. It would be better to shrink the scope of your claims to what you can actually back up, and tone things considerably down. That doesn't mean not saying controversial things. It means saying them in a way that's cognizant of the context, makes respect a high priority, and resists venting.
I didn't suggest it was cultural. I don't think it is cultural. I can't imagine how you inferred that from my post. I didn't even use the word "culture" in it.
Maybe I am still misreading, what did you mean by "The answer to that one is pretty straightforward, well known, and easy to understand. And it has little to nothing to do with race. America is simply not an egalitarian society."
To me that looks like you're blaming the crime rate on our non-egalitarian social structure. Is that separate from culture in your book?
Most people on HN belong to another ~10x crime group: Americans, all those bombs and guns blowing up stuff all over the world to 'protect' capitalism...50% of American's taxes makes us individually responsible
it's the economy. this is the worst recession since the great depression. americans are without jobs. people without jobs are angry and sometimes have to resort to other means of providing for their families. most of the jobs are in the cities so you see this vacuum of life left over in some of the suburbs.
So I have concluded that if you REALLY want to "help the poor", you have to start by removing "poor" from your program definition and qualifying requirements. Instead, ask yourself: what would help the people generally and do so in such a way that, coincidentally, poor people would benefit significantly? For example, countries that help parents generally, regardless of marital status or income, seem to get better results than the American Welfare system.