Tag Archives: demographics

People leaving Puerto Rico may never return.

The recovery effort trudges along after the Category 4 storm destroyed what Irma spared, flattening buildings and tangling power lines. More than 100,000 people live in the U.S. territory, and many of them are now waiting for power, medicine, and fuel.

“It will be a while before this place returns to a semblance of normalcy,” National Guard Chief Joseph Lengyel told Fox News.

Public school buildings are too damaged for students to attend classes, the New York Times reports. The main hospitals will have to be torn down and rebuilt. The power might not be back until December. And authorities have advised residents to boil their water before consumption, fearing contamination.

Making recovery harder is the nearly $2 billion in debt the Virgin Islands is carrying. That’s more per capita than Puerto Rico.

“The economy evaporated pretty much overnight,” one restaurant owner told the Times. Tourism makes up a third of the islands’ gross domestic product. The biggest resorts will stay closed until at least next year, meaning fewer customers for restaurants and bars and fewer jobs.

While attention is focused on the humanitarian crisis affecting millions in Puerto Rico, 40 miles to the west, the Virgin Islands remain mostly out of mind.

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People leaving Puerto Rico may never return.

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Will Orange County Finally Turn Blue This Year?

Mother Jones

Orange County, California. Conservative suburbia. Reagan country. Ground zero for decades of cold warrior political domination. And above all, a reliable generator of Republican votes and Republican fundraising. But just as the demographics of America have been changing, so have the demographics of this famous conservative bastion:

In 1990, whites made up nearly two-thirds of the county’s population. Now, they are a minority. The county’s Latino and Asian populations have grown enormously—some in low-income neighborhoods, particularly in Santa Ana, but many in newly diverse, affluent communities.

As the region has grown more diverse, GOP margins have narrowed…Trump’s disparaging rhetoric about Mexicans and Muslims, his breaks with past Republican stands on trade and the overall tone of his campaign seem likely to create the final tipping point this month.

There are only seven days to go before we find out if Trump manages this historic task. It would be fitting if he’s the one to put the final nail in the coffin of 80 years of GOP domination of my hometown. Only seven days!

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Will Orange County Finally Turn Blue This Year?

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Why Is the US Economy Sort of Sluggish?

Mother Jones

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A new paper from a trio of Fed researchers suggests that our recent sluggish growth is mostly a result of demographic changes and technological slowdown. The retired share of the population has increased, which means the working share of the population has decreased. Since workers are the ones who produce goods and services, it makes sense that GDP growth will slow down in an economy with fewer adults of working age. Ditto for an economy in which technological progress is slackening.

I’ve pointed out the same thing before in the case of Japan, and it makes sense. But how about in the US? The easiest way to see the rough shape of the river is to simply look at GDP per working-age adult. That eliminates most of the demographic issues. When you do this for the US, you get a trendline that still shows a decline in GDP growth: it’s down by about one percentage point since 1978.

You can also look at total factor productivity, which gives us an idea of the effect of technological change that’s independent of demographics. Over the past 60 years, it’s been pretty flat.

Both of these are volatile series, so take them with a grain of salt. That said, productivity hasn’t changed much, but GDP per working-age adult has steadily decreased anyway. This suggests that neither demographics nor technological progress really explains things. So what does?

NOTE: This bit of amateur economics was made possible by a grant from the Committee to Prevent Endless Blogging About Donald Trump. The author thanks them for their generosity.

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Why Is the US Economy Sort of Sluggish?

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Trump’s Response to the New York Bombing: Racial Profiling on a Mass Scale

Mother Jones

Donald Trump used the weekend bombings in New York and New Jersey to amp up his call for profiling of Muslims. “You know, our police are amazing—our local police, they know who a lot of these people are,” Trump said in a Monday appearance on Fox & Friends, referring to terrorists. But, he said, “they’re afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling, and they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things.”

Only a few days after picking up the endorsement of the nation’s largest police union, Trump was, without evidence, making an incendiary accusation about some of his most important supporters—that police are knowingly letting terrorists walk free because they’re too politically correct. (In reality, the Elizabeth, New Jersey, police department that apprehended the alleged bomber was not familiar with the suspect, although the family’s chicken shop had received noise complaints.)

Just as notable is what Trump proposed instead. As an example of what more effective policing would look like, the Republican presidential nominee pointed to Israel. “You know, in Israel they profile,” he said. “They’ve done an unbelievable job, as good as you can do.” If a person looks suspicious in Israel, “they will take that person in.” He added, “They’re trying to be politically correct in our country and this is only going to get worse.”

There are many components to Israeli-style profiling, but a key aspect is racial profiling. Being of “Arab nationality” is enough to get you flagged by screeners, interrogated, and maybe strip-searched at an Israeli airport. The US State Department’s travel advisory page for Israel even includes a warning about the country’s racial profiling: “Some U.S. citizens of Arab or Muslim heritage have experienced significant difficulties and unequal and hostile treatment at Israel’s borders and checkpoints.” Case in point: Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, who is of Lebanese descent, was detained and interrogated at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport in 2010, despite having just returned from a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump, for his part, has previously made clear that he’s interested in profiling Muslims specifically. “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before,” he told Yahoo News in November when asked if he’d consider warrantless wiretapping of American Muslims. He added, “We’re going to have to do things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.” In that same interview, he declined to rule out creating a database of Muslims in the United States and suggested the government should conduct more surveillance of mosques. He proposed hiring ex-New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, whose department’s “Demographics Unit” spied on select “ancestries of interest” and even infiltrated a Muslim Students Association rafting trip. (For its years of work, Kelly’s Demographics Unit produced a total of zero terrorism indictments and was ultimately shut down as a result of a lawsuit.) Trump even entertained the idea that the government could shut down mosques.

A few weeks later, Trump took his religious profiling several giant steps further, unveiling his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Trump has never clarified how such a ban would be enforced, but it would by definition entail wide-scale profiling by customs officials. That proposal is still posted on his website. Trump revisited the subject in June, after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando. “I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” he said, invoking Israel as an example of a successful program. He has repeatedly cited racial profiling—or fear of being accused of racial profiling—in his discussion of the shooters in the 2015 San Bernardino attack, alleging that neighbors of the couple had seen bombs scattered across the floor but not done anything. This was, again, baseless; there is no evidence that anyone ever saw the bombs.

Trump’s positions on many issues have fluctuated wildly. But his solution to threats against Americans has been uncharacteristically consistent, if alarming to many observers: an expanded, unconstitutional police state targeting a religious minority.

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Trump’s Response to the New York Bombing: Racial Profiling on a Mass Scale

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Is Broken Windows a Broken Theory of Crime?

Mother Jones

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The “Broken Windows” theory suggests that tolerance of small acts of disorder creates an environment that leads to rising amounts of serious crime. So if police crack down on small offenses—petty vandalism, public lewdness, etc.—crime reductions will follow. George Kelling was one of the originators of the theory, and NYPD police commissioner Bill Bratton is one of its strongest proponents. Here’s what they write about it:

New York City’s experience has suggestively demonstrated the success of Broken Windows over the last 20 years. In 1993, the city’s murder rate was 26.5 per 100,000 people….While the national murder rate per 100,000 people has been cut in half since 1994, the rate in New York has declined by more than six times.

….Broken Windows–style policing was pivotal in achieving these results. Left unchecked, street corners can degenerate into criminogenic environments. The bullies take over. They drink alcohol and take drugs openly, make excessive noise, intimidate and shake down honest citizens….By cracking down on low-level offenders, the police not only made neighborhoods more orderly….In the next four years, annual shootings fell by nearly 3,300 incidents—or about two fewer shootings per day.

….Current crime levels don’t stay down by themselves because of some vaguely defined demographic or economic factor. Crime is actively managed in New York City every day.

So here’s the thing: this is almost certainly wrong. Not even controversial. Just wrong: broken windows policing may well have been helpful in reducing New York’s crime rate, but there’s just flatly no evidence that it’s been pivotal. It’s true that crime in New York is down more than it is nationally, but that’s because crime went up more in big cities vs. small cities during the crime wave of the 60s through the 80s, and it then went down more during the crime decline of the 90s and aughts. Kelling and Bratton can dismiss this as ivory tower nonsense, but they should know better. The statistics are plain enough, after all.

Take a look at the two charts on the right. The top one shows crime declines in six of America’s biggest cities. As you can see, New York did well, but it did no better than Chicago or Dallas or Los Angeles, none of which implemented broken windows during the 90s. The bottom chart is a summary of the crime decline in big cities vs. small cities. Again, the trend is clear: crime went up more during the 80s in big cities, but then declined more during the 90s and aughts. The fact that New York beat the national average is a matter of its size, not broken windows.

Now, none of this is evidence that broken windows doesn’t work. The evidence is foggy either way, and we simply don’t know. My own personal view is that it’s probably a net positive, but a fairly modest one.

But this gets us to the core of the issue. Kelling and Bratton write that the “academics who attribute crime drops to economic or demographic factors often work with macro data sets and draw unsubstantiated, far-fetched conclusions about street-level police work, which most have scarcely witnessed.” Why such contempt? Because Kelling, and especially Bratton, want to believe that the things they do affect crime. After all, if crime has declined because of demographics or gasoline lead or the end of the crack epidemic, then all of Bratton’s work—along with that of the cops he manages—is pretty much useless. He’s just been spinning his wheels while huge, impersonal forces have been acting invisibly.

Nobody wants to believe that. What’s more, we don’t want people to believe that. Police officers, like all of us, work better if they think that they’re having an impact. And their bosses, if they want to keep their trust, had damn well better insist that this is the case. When Bratton says that broken windows works, he’s not just saying it because he believes it. He’s saying it because he has to. If he doesn’t, he’d lose the trust of his officers.

Still, the truth is almost certainly more complicated than Bratton says. Crime is down for multiple reasons, and if I had to guess I’d say about 70 percent is due to big, impersonal forces and 30 percent is due to changes in policing, including broken windows. That may not be a very satisfying explanation, but it’s most likely the true one.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, did you know that the link between gasoline lead and crime was the “trendiest crime decline hypothesis in 2014”? I didn’t. But that’s kind of cool. You can, of course, read more about that here.

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Is Broken Windows a Broken Theory of Crime?

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