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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   20554 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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Here is a graph of both traffic and homicide deaths by race and time. Here are the black deaths by week, in which we see that both kinds of deaths spiked at the exact same time: immediately following the death of George Floyd. (Both graphs courtesy of Steve Sailer, the only person of note I've seen discuss the traffic component of the Floyd Effect.)

The simplest explanation is that it is still 100% the Floyd Effect. Police pull over black drivers less than they used to so dangerous drivers stay on the road until they kill themselves or others (as well as it possibly affecting deterrence and so on). The alternative explanation is that it was the Floyd effect originally but some other effect has taken over since then. I haven't looked at the most recent data, if you wanted you could check if it has become less racially skewed than the period covered by those graphs. But with the timing I'm not going to give credence to any explanation in which it was never the Floyd Effect and the spike just happened that week and primarily among black people by coincidence.

In many places the police have totally stopped enforcing traffic regulations period (e.g. SF). I wonder if the other lines on that graph have moved up in the past two years.

Assuming this data is accurate, then yes, I think we've solved the mystery. Case closed. In the end, it's less interesting than I thought.

Is the black rate jumping from 15 to 23 on the chart, given the proportion of drivers who are black, enough to have the statistical effect the OP discusses @sodiummuffin?

The OP discusses a 25% rise in overall fatalities. The post-Floyd jump on Sailer’s chart, assuming white and Hispanic levels stay the same, would have to be significant for 14% of the population to effect a 25% rise in the overall vehicular death rate.

Yes. If the black fatality rate went from 15->23 then the rate per mile driven would be more like 15->30. Keep in mind that the race-divided chart ends in December 2021.

So if a group responsible for 14% of deaths in 2019 becomes twice as dangerous in 2020 that could lead to a 14% increase of its own.

Note that the chart also shows a similar massive increase in the Hispanic fatality rate, and a smaller increase in the white fatality rate.

So, I do think Sailer's chart is consistent with the data showing a 20% increase in fatalities by mile driven in 2020.

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