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Right wing news media today reporting a "quiet" revision to FBI crime statistics, revealing that violent crime rose in 2022, contrary to their initial September 2023 report (and broadly contrary to a recent historical trend).
As the linked article notes, adjustments of this nature are not uncommon, but this particular adjustment flies in the face of fact checks and hit pieces directed against right wing media and political candidates who, apparently, knew better than the FBI. I have been unable to find any retractions thus far, however (and of course do not expect any).
The FBI's process for assembling crime statistics has been under revision for a couple of years, leading to a variety of difficulties for those (like reporters) accustomed to relying on the statistics to establish the truth of perceived trends. As far as I can tell, the initial revisions were motivated by the same sort of social engineering goals that led realty websites to remove crime maps from home search tools. But now maybe some of those changes have been rolled back? It's not totally clear to me what's happening there, beyond a government bureaucracy seemingly looking for ways to prevent the unvarnished truth from generating too much wrongthink while also staving off accusations of being even more useless than usual.
(Or maybe there's a "Schrodinger's Violence" problem, where they need to show increased violence to make strong arguments against the Second Amendment, while also showing decreased violence to bolster
Biden'sHarris' claim tore-electability?)While violent crime is still much lower, per capita, than it was ~35 years ago, it is of course still much higher than it was circa 1960, when the United States was a very different place, demographically. The 21st century nadir seems to be around 2012, and the trend since has been a slight but relatively persistent rise.
Will the FBI's adjustment make a difference in the race for the White House? I guess I'm skeptical; left wing news outlets don't appear to be reporting on the adjustment at all, and since it's about 2022, it's "old news" anyway. The falsehood is out there, its work is done; the truth has only just managed to lace its shoes, and here the race is almost over.
I remember other discussions on this forum. Inflation and unemployment data. Long arguments about not trusting the economic data. This is why. These figures are totally arbitrary. There is no neutral competent adults-in-the-room authority anymore. Everything is this bad.
I have a friend who used to work at the Fed. He says to the extent that the figures weren't made up, they hsve basically no basis to reality. The numbers they report just reflect the process of the people creating them, which is bureaucratic and dull.
Yeah, a lot of government economic stats feel super fake.
For example, the rate of inflation depends on so-called "hedonic adjustments". I'll admit that this is a valid methodology. For example, a TV today is miles better than a TV from 2002. But, as I've written before, these hedonic adjustments DON'T take into account other things like the degradation in service quality. In 2002 the Starbucks bathroom wasn't locked. Today it is. Where's the hedonic adjustment for that?
When we remove hedonic adjustments, inflation is much, much higher than the official numbers. The official numbers also just don't pass the smell test.
Then we get to "unemployment". It's super fake. The male, prime age employment rate was nearly 95% in 1968. Today, it is just 86%. That's 9% of men age 25-54 who are not employed. But they are not counted as "unemployed" either. It's all fugazi.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSA156S
It's trivial to change any methodology to get bigger or smaller numbers. The question is if the new number is more meaningful than the old one.
Truflation estimates 26.27% inflation since January 2020. CPI has increased 21.23%. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if CPI is an obviously wrong estimate.
https://truflation.com/marketplace/truflation-us-aggregated
Again, why is U3 fugazi just because you can get a bigger number with another methodology? Especially when you're looking at a subgroup analysis. If we look at prime age LFPR for the entire population, it was 70% in 1968 and now it's 84%.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
Yes, total labor force participation is up due to women entering the workforce. It now takes 2 incomes to do what a single income did before. This phenomenon led to the one good idea Elizabeth Warren ever had: "The Two Income Trap". This is not a signal of prosperity, far from it.
But men have been leaving the labor force in large numbers. Whereas only 5% of prime age males weren't employed in 1968, today it's nearly 14%. And, of course, this doesn't even reflect the rise of part-time labor.
Because U3 only reflects short-term fluctuations in the labor market, and not the disastrous long term changes which have occurred over the last 50 years. And the media reports on U3 but not on the things that matter more.
The two income trap isn't that women enter the workforce, it's that people live paycheck to paycheck on two incomes rather than one, meaning that there's less slack in the household.
Things are obviously generally not twice as expensive in real terms as they were in the 1960s, though housing is a notable exception. However, the price of housing clearly is being driven by factors other than people having more income.
Okay, but women have been entering the labor force in larger numbers.
By the way, you are equivocating between "employed" and "participating in the labor force". There are not the same concept.
You've yet to show that it's disastrous, unless all you care about is minmaxing prime age male LFPR.
Yes, I think
minmaxing prime age male labor participation rate is a good thing.We don't need more hikikomori and drug addicts who don't work. (I will acknowledge that part of the change is due to people who are studying past the age of 25. But this is also bad).
There is nothing good about the number of men not working going from 5% to 14%.
Conversely, I think we'd be much better off with lower female labor participation. Many women who would prefer to stay home with children feel that they need to work, either for money or for social acceptability reasons.
I have the seeds of an effortpost about women’s socially conservative preferences conflicting with the situation on the ground. But so far, it’s just the seeds.
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