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I disagree that "staring at a 'blm graph'" adequately responds to the argument.
BLM was a social movement that took direct and powerful action to alter our society, ranging from mass protests to large-scale violence to widespread social shaming to a whole spectrum of other activities. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that its touch was felt in every facet of adult life nation-wide. It directly impacted my personal relationships. It changed the content of the sermons I heard at church. It changed the art I'm paid to make. It changed every show I've watched on stream since. It directly caused and then publicly justified large-scale lawless violence and criminality, and attacked the role of police in our society without a modicum of restraint. It was the largest-scale social intervention of my lifetime, powerful enough to cause obviously-connected harmful effects on the other side of the world for no reason but sheer social inertia.
The law-enforcement systems it was directly and unambiguously aimed at experienced the largest-magnitude change ever recorded, almost immediately after these interventions began.
There is clearer causation between the BLM movement and our current murder rate than there is between any social-science intervention and any given result in living memory. If the causation is not clear enough in this case, it is obviously not clear enough in any other case either, and we should admit that statistics don't work and the very concept of "social science" is invalid.
...For the record, I'm making bold claims here because I think the evidence is overwhelming. Can you point to a stronger intervention, or a greater-magnitude result? A shorter timeframe? A closer linkage?
Unless you are very young, or have no exposure to any kind of religious organization this seems highly unlikely. Religion is an ancient and ongoing social intervention that directly and indirectly impacts some 5 billion (or more!) people around the planet at a conservative estimate just today. Even if we just limit it to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism, the social interventions have touched possibly almost every single person on the planet over the last 50 years. Impacting behaviors and laws and more.
BLM is a mere blip in comparison. Even further limiting it to the US in my lifetime (55 years) Religion is pretty clearly the unequivocal winner in social interventions for sheer scale and the behavioral changes it encourages. Just because it's old and is the status quo does not stop it being an intervention.
I think you can even argue neo-liberalism dwarfs BLM given the impacts on the economy and social decisions to put money before the American people (in some ways) and knock on impacts on the Rust Belt through the destruction of social fabric as whole towns and cities just rot away. That's just looking at the negative social impacts. Trillions upon trillions of dollars, countless lives impacted. Then if you look at the additional wealth at the winners of neo-liberalism and the knock on impacts of spending that wealth in a positive way, I can't see any way that BLM can match it either positively or negatively.
Just to be clear I am a supporter of neo-liberalism, I think it overall was a positive thing, but I think there is no doubt that it also impacted many working class Americans in a very negative way over the past 40 years.
This appears to be a language dispute. I would say that religions are social structures, in the same way that, say, the Police system is a structure. They shape society, but they are generally stable long-term, and so one presumes their effects are also stable long-term.
By contrast, a dramatic change in church doctrine or practice, or a dramatic change in police doctrine or practice, would be an intervention, an acute change in how we do things, usually with the goal of improving our results. The civil rights act and the end of segregation are examples of large interventions. The institution of miranda rights, banning of stop and frisk, the passing of major gun control laws and their repeal or sunsetting, the rise of home-manufactured firearms, these are interventions, changes to the system intended to or plausibly suspected of changing the trend of social outcomes.
My claim is not that BLM is the most impactful social system in existence. It was the most impactful intervention, the biggest, most abrupt change of conditions. It was absolutely a blip. If you're looking for explanations for why the murder rate has abruptly gone through the roof, a blip, an abrupt, unprecedented event, is exactly what one would expect to find.
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Eh sure, but BLM is just one tiny facet of progressivism. Progressivism/universalism has transformed every facet of adult life, as opposed to touched.
Basically - 'X was very important' and 'Y was very important', together with 'maybe X caused Y', does not prove 'X certainly caused Y'. I agree it's plausible and worth investigating.
why do people make these arguments so much? This is (sort of) true because social science is garbage, not because BLM caused the murder rate. This only works in a sense that it lets you win an argument against some hypothetical interlocutor who likes social science, it doesn't prove anything else.
There's no way BLM was the largest change ever to US law enforcement. Surely something during e.g. the civil war was larger-magnitude. This doesn't address this specific point, but generally your arguments seem to be ... very presentist, making very grand statements about very current politics, instead of understanding things in a way that can be used to affect the systems involved. Yeah, BLM was very significant and not very nice, but what does that tell us about how BLM worked, or why it accomplished what it did, or how we can understand its effects or interact with similar movements in the future? Your claims are quite vague and very nonspecific, compared to the sort of detailed, specific evidence I'd like to see!
Articles like this one (from the Guardian, no less) would point to a pretty direct connection between BLM and overall law enforcement policy (which is even more enduring that personnel shortages, changes in tactics, etc.) You quite literally had DA candidates for one of the biggest metropolitan jurisdictions in the US interacting with BLM activists.
That is relevant, but the 'soft on crime left-wing DA' existed long before BLM, and this still doesn't characterize or illuminate the connection between the policing change and the magnitude of the murder increase
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Investigating how? What constitutes solid evidence on a question like this one, in your view?
Because people stubbornly persist in treating social science as though it was science. Even here. I maintain that the level of skepticism needed to keep this an open question renders any other discussion of social science or social policy pointless. If you already think such all such arguments are pointless, fine. Others evidently do not.
poorly phrasing on my part. Allow me to clarify: the outcomes of the law enforcement system saw the largest change ever recorded. Literally, the murder rate has never gone up this much in the given time period since the day we began recording statistics. If you're aware of a change in outcomes, I'd be interested to hear about it. Maybe one exists.
[EDIT] - actually, no, I did ask for bigger interventions, and I'd definately agree that the civil war and reconstruction were bigger ones. I did say that this was the biggest intervention in my lifetime, though, and I think the 1960s and desegregation would be the most recent intervention of a similar magnitude. That one had more follow-through, of course, and likewise correlated with a very large increase in the homicide rate... but rather slower than this one.
I have been arguing with people over the American murder rate and the policies designed to minimize it for my entire adult life. We now have the largest increase in that murder rate ever recorded, immediately following a very large and highly controversial attempt aimed specifically at changing the murder rate. I was able to predict this outcome in advance, because I'd seen it happen in a smaller scale previously in Ferguson. I think that's reasonable grounds to state that we actually have some understanding about the systems involved, given that we've now successfully predicted highly significant changes.
All of those are reasonable and interesting questions, ones I've delved into at length elsewhere. But none of those questions are needed for the questions at hand here:
What went wrong with American law enforcement in the summer of 2020? And given the scale and acute nature of the problem, why does no one appear to care? Most tellingly, what do the answers to these questions tell us about the nature and operation of the society we're living in?
My claims are:
BLM was the strongest social intervention of my lifetime.
The murder rate increase is the most dramatic change in social outcomes in my lifetime.
The murder rate increase began immediately after BLM went viral.
There exists a likely chain of causation between BLM's actions and the increase in the murder rate.
What about these claims is vague or non-specific? The increase in the murder rate is exceedingly well documented. So are the actions of BLM: the riots, the demands for diminished policing or the outright abolishment of the police as an institution, the establishment of common knowledge within the police force that any error in policing has the potential to destroy not only an officer's career, but their entire city. The long-term effects of the rioting we saw in 2020 are not a matter of speculation; the long-term civic blight is easily predictable from previous examples in the 60s, 70s, and 90s. The results of BLM's general strategy were well-known from the example of Ferguson. The mechanisms by which BLM was organized and the outrage it harnessed was generated likewise can be tracked quite easily, from methodology to results.
Which of these topics appear vague or non-specific to you?
I'm not flying the BLM flag here. Pulling back policing to be antiracist and humane to criminals is bad, aggressively preventing and punishing theft and assault and homicides are good, progressive DAs are bad, harsh punishment for crime good, etc. 'BLM increased the murder rate' is not necessary to think BLM is bad, and BLM was not materially correct about anything whatsoever. This isn't a motte and bailey where with a high standard for your causes and a low one for mine.
But how can we exclude that, e.g. the pandemic - or another exogenous factor - caused some shift in the interactions / social dynamics of criminal communities, which then increased the murder rate? Maybe depolicing increased the murder rate by 3%, and the other cause did 45%.
An example of such a phenomena (which I am not claiming is the cause, and I agree there's much less evidence for this as a cause than BLM) is given here - law enforcement crackdowns on large gang structures have made gangs less organized and less effective, but (supposedly) that lack of organization leads to more violence.
Human societies are incredibly complicated. A single person's spiritual revelations changed the direction of the roman empire. There have been dozens of economic recessions, some with much more societal impact than BLM, and each with complicated and contested causes. It'd be very easy to, in 2005, say "there will be a recession soon because of , and it'll be caused by ", and then have both X and Y happen, and be completely wrong. I don't think causation is established here.
I gave some examples, but they were very vague. Understanding complex things is just hard. What "constitutes solid evidence" just depends on the topic.
Most of your argument above is of the form "BLM was very big, and very liberal, and very bad". This paragraph, from your post:
Has one sentence about police and violence with the rest being about how BLM was a big bad. While I think this overemphasizes BLM's importance, in that "progressivism is even more important than that but BLM was one of the ten coats it wore this year", I agree that the broader trends BLM represented are that significant and that bad. But this is not good evidence for BLM's impact on the homicide rate. That's what I meant by vagueness and broadness.
Yeah, correlation doesn't establish causation, two things can happen at the same time, and not cause each other, even if someone predicted said causation beforehand. See any miracle drug that people swear is curing their colds.
Yeah, nobody cares because of the sixty-year-long reign of antiracism, progressivism, universalism, where they care more about the poor impoverished blacks, and where imprisoning criminals is racist. I agree with that! But that doesn't prove causation in this specific scenario. This again doesn't make sense as a reason for causation, just as a way to make a hypothetical enemy look hypocritical.
Your claims:
I don't understand what "social intervention" means here. Intervention implies an intervener. Sure, BLM had small groups of activists and political networks pushing it, and most people following it were just understanding and amplifying. But that's true of almost everything humans do. And we don't call other political movements 'interventions'. And "social" covers basically all human activity. Was BLM a stronger intervention than ... the mobile phone? Kpop? Both of those seem larger-scale, and if BLM was an "intervention", then so were they, given their use was driven by centralized marketing. Again, I agree that BLM is bad, just disagree with the emphasis.
I don't think this is true as a matter of fact, unless "dramatic" means "it happened in the span of a year" - e.g. the increase in drug overdose deaths in the US over the past decade seems larger in scope, despite also being about dead people. And the "happening over the span of a year" restriction does not give it the moral / political weight that "most dramatic change in outcomes" seems to imply.
I'm not sure if this is exactly true or not, but won't contest it. Timing increases in statistics is much prone to error than noting increases.
If "likely" here means "it is plausible and worth looking into", sure. But if likely means "the muder rate increase is due to BLM and they should be blamed for it", that requires more than "likely"!
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