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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29357 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Yeah, "The Wire" portrays the drug market structure of the period when David Simon was a beat reporter and not in the period it's actually set in. Control of "corners" is less relevant in the cell phone era when dealers can set meets with customers in a variety of locations rather than needing to hold down a single location to maintain contact. There was an interesting paper on this which relates cell phone tower density to murder rates and finds a strong correlation.

There was an interesting paper on this which relates cell phone tower density to murder rates and finds a strong correlation.

That's asking to get burned by the population heat map effect.

Do you have a link to the paper? I want to know if they controlled for population density, which I imagine would be a major confounder.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25883/w25883.pdf

I think I misspoke in the original post, they find that cell phone towers reduce murders. They're correlating murders per capita with a measure of antenna density for each county. They use the 1970's as a kind of "placebo" because cell towers were being constructed, with obvious non random relationship to population density, in preparation for cell service being offered but cell service wasn't being offered so it wouldn't have an effect on murder rates yet. They break the data down by decade in Table 4 and find no significant relationship in the 70's, a negative relationship that isn't borderline significant in the 80's, a negative coefficient that is significant in the 90's and a coefficient approaching 0 in the 2000's, which maps on to the theory of cell phone adoption altering the structure of the drug market significantly in the 80's and 90's and reaching saturation in the 2000's.

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