Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=89120&post_id=187622533
Anyone see Scott's latest post on crime stats and have a significant disagreement with it? It feels culture war worthy and I'd like to discuss it, but I don't feel like I know the counter viewpoints well.
Some criticisms:
People in cities don’t report their car being broken into, and this rate of reporting will decrease as social trust decreases. So the property crime metric may not be accurate.
The National Crime Victimization Survey is a mail-in survey. People living in low-trust (high-crime) areas of the country increasingly have no interest in filling out government surveys, having no trust in the government and having less familiarity with filling out mail. It would not be “an extraordinary coincidence if they exactly matched the proposed reporting bias to police”, as Scott asserts, because habits follow environment — those raised in a high-trust environment will fill this out at a higher level, and high-crime areas gradually reduce in trust.
One reason for the decline in car thefts may be that, on average, they have been more difficult to steal and get away with the theft due to omnipresent surveillance.
It’s strange to me that people trust surveys from phone calls, emails, and the mail. Academics must have zero familiarity with how the lower class and lower middle class feels. It would be better to go to Walmart and run a survey, or hop on voice chat in a popular video game and ask the users if they would ever in a million years fill out a mail survey. They really think someone smoking weed every day in a high crime area is going to fill out a government survey or answer a government questionnaire (in their mind no distinction between an institute and the government)? These are not accurate assessments of a bulk of the population, and they are increasingly inaccurate. You are surveying the most productive remnants of the common flock who still possess the time, trust, sense of social duty, attention, and conscientiousness to answer your survey.
This would be a good study: go to a lower-income school and and make them answer some questions from someone who looks to be in the same class. Ask them if they would ever fill out out a government surcey or answer a phone number they don’t know or answer an email survey. Some second-gen Asian students who happen to live in the area will say yes and everyone else will say no.
With that said, I do think crime is decreasing, and that the crime rate is a red herring wrt what people about (“is there a menacing person playing his music loudly on my commute”)
I wonder if we have data on the average response rate for such surveys? Are they getting as many responses back in 2025 as in 1990? If that’s the case then my hypothesis is disproven, but if it’s the case then they have to narrow it by income and test hypothesis
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