America’s safer streets: why is elusive

[Bill Moore]

The fudging of the numbers is an enduring political behavior. We of course do the same thing in Afghanistan to paint the picture we want people to believe. This is one reason I'm strongly opposed to our over reliance on measures of effectiveness, it is just another vehicle for the brass to mislead the American people and Congress, which in turn provides more support for ill conceived policies and strategies. Until we as a nation learn to value the truth we will not effectively evolve our approaches to address serious security problems whether they be crime or insurgencies.

[Majormarginal]

"over reliance on measures of effectiveness" is a great phrase.

[Dayuhan]

"over reliance on measures of effectiveness" is a great phrase.

If you torture statistics enough they will tell you whatever you want to hear.

[Fuchs]

Statistics don't lie to people.
People lie to people.

[Bill Moore]

People lie to themselves.

[slapout9]

Adult Warning Label! this is considered controversial by many people but the research is supposedly top notch.


Link to University of Chicago explanation of the crime drop.
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levi...alized2001.pdf

[carl]

Maybe rather than looking at why crime dropped, it would be more fruitful to look at why crime increased in the 60s and 70s. Those were the years the welfare state really took off and with it corrosive effects upon family structure. Those were also the years affected by the Warren court and the sort of change in view about what caused crime. If I remember correctly crime had been diminishing during the years prior to those decades.

So perhaps one of the reasons crime has been going down lately is it just took the country some time to get back on the track it had been on prior to the 60s and 70s.

I am listening to Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed and that prompted this thought (he may have actually said that but I haven't finished it yet).