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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Wrote a substack post on how the recent rise in homicide in the US was higher in ‘Democrat-run cities’.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/107605777

  • -11

I reran the data except instead of using the variable "to this point in the year" that was all different dates and a series of arbitrarily selected cities, I used the year-end data for all cities in the top 75 US Cities by population plus Buffalo plus whatever else was in the list you had. Then I got rid of any cities that had fewer than 10 murders in either year because any movement there can be chalked up to random variation and not trends (though the numbers were so low I can add it back in if you want; it won't make much of a difference). I also cut Riverside because Rusty Bailey is an independent and I couldn't tell whether he leaned liberal or conservative (for the few other independents it was pretty obvious that they all leaned liberal, but I can take them out if you'd like; it won't make a difference). Then I used your methodology and I came up with... a 23.58% increase in Democratic cities and a 34.33% increase in Republican cities.

Percent increase seems unreasonable.

If country X has GDP of 1m and Country Y has GDP of 1t a 3% increase in country X is likely easier than Country Y.

Run into the same problem here.

Smaller absolute numbers are still more likely to be outliers. The very first iteration of this argument I saw was trying to make the opposite point (that R cities had a bigger increase than D cities), and it did so by cherry-picking out some random tier 3.5 cities with an R mayor that went from 4 murders to 8, and weighed that "100% increase" against the "50% increase" from major cities depicting hundreds of excess murders. Hundreds of discrete murders is obviously going to offer more statistical reliability than something like "This year had an unusually lethal driveby shooting". Similarly, it would be asinine to look at stats from the early 2000's and count 2001 as having an extra 3000 murders in NYC.

You really can't, because the largest city with a Republican mayor is Jacksonville, Florida and has less than a million people. For really large cities there's no basis for comparison.

The problem is that large cities may be different than smaller ones in ways that do not scale linearly with population.

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That's fair. If we really wanted to answer the question, given the disparity in mayorships for big cities, we might want to do something like find the 50 largest Republican-run cities, and then compare that to the 50 Democrat-run cities with the closest demographics.