Shhhh. Don't say unpleasant truths like this too loudly. Fathers are different than mothers, and the genders are not interchangeable? American black culture is broken and dysfunctional and creating a significant share of its own problems? We must go on pretending that such things cannot be! Besides, that's just, like, your opinion, man! What's this based on? Math? Like, that's a western white supremacist patriarchal construct! I'm reporting you and anyone who agrees with you to the thought police. Maybe they can convince you it can only be the guns causing this problem. Fatherless criminals from dysfunctional homes who join street gangs don't kill people, guns do!
After my many decades of full-time employment ended, I got a part-time seasonal job, three seasons a year over six years, in a children's farm in NYC that saw upwards of 4500 visitors per day during the busiest times and mostly serving NYC public school children. Most of those children were minorities and many came from the poorest neighborhoods.
What I saw, I saw consistently, season after season, year after year. So my generalizations are based on that. I started off every tour by asking for the cooperation of the grownups, and especially that one of them should be stationed at the very end of the group of kids so when I saw that person, I knew I had everyone with me. It was important that we moved on my prompts so the kids got to see and do everything.
If I had a tour group including white fathers, my day was pretty wretched. Those daddies were the feeblest collection of manhood I'd ever seen, and they couldn't keep the kids together.
If I had a tour group including black mothers, my day was pretty wretched too. They took the tour guide as an antagonist whose instructions were an insult to their autonomy.
If I had a tour group including black daddies, I was in paradise. They recognized the logic of my request immediately. They kept the kids in order without yelling. I only needed to catch one of the fathers' eyes for them to get everybody moving behind me again. They were an absolute joy to work with and it was very clear how good it was for the kids.
Now--about the teachers? Most of them regardless of ethnicity were appallingly bad. But the black entirely female teachers? They were often quite vicious to the little black boys, shaming them and sometimes grabbing them roughly for behaving exactly like little children thrilled to have a day in "the country." Those were the teachers who *apologized to me because the children were "bothering" me with questions.*
After that job, I no longer had quite as much contempt and loathing for HS thugs. School itself was the gangster factory. The littlest kids full of enthusiasm and affection in kindergarten and 1st grade had learned, by third grade, that most grownups didn't give a damn about them and should be entirely ignored.
You really had to see it. Nothing I wrote can convey the reality.
Unfortunately, bringing up these issues gets you labeled as "racist" and shouted down. If it's anything outside of the official narratives, it's deemed incorrect and not worthy of debate. So how do we move past this nonsense that saying anything about race is "racist"? Ultimately, we need more discussions like this in public spheres. The question is how do we move from "winning at all costs" politics to the "betterment of society"?
Unfortunately, probably by doing it entirely outside the political sphere. Politics is the problem, not the solution. Too much of our social lives has become political, sadly.
And that is why the black community needs leaders that preach family rather than equity. Life here on earth is truly unfair because the “natural man” seeks only for himself. That is simply the way the universe operates. If life for black Americans and white Americans and Latino Americans and Asian Americans and every other type of American is to get better, everyone needs to understand that families are the key to individual, community, and national progress. Pertinent to this topic in general, I recommend reading the 1995 LDS “The Family: A Proclamation to the World”.
Interesting that the BLM Marxists were also against the nuclear family. Almost like they instinctively recognize that their political power emerges from black criminality, which in turn requires broken families to foster.
The “antifascists” of the 1930s (Wilhelm Reich in particular) were quite explicit in their hatred of the family as the core of the authoritarian state. They succeeded beyond their dreams.
See the head quotation at the start of Mary Harrington’s article Normophobia.
thanks for the read. who would have guessed? wokesters, activists and apologists combine their wisdom and political clout to perpetuate misery in black ghettoes/inner cities through recharacterizing harmful behaviours as virtuous. Quite a few delusional chestnuts, my favourite: 'nuclear family is a toxic, white construct not worthy of emulating'.
Let me introduce you to (my) fiscal-sink hypothesis. Governments under-police localities which are fiscal sinks—are localities which are net drains on revenue. Single mothers mean high welfare/low revenue localities, so are under-policed, so have high homicide rates.
In much of Latin America, there are no-revenue urban localities due to lack of formal land ownership.
A high rate of African diaspora, especially African ex-slave diaspora, population makes a locality more vulnerable to under-policing, but it is the under-policing of localities (due to them being fiscal sinks) that is the problem. Single-motherhood tracks being fiscal sinks.
That's a fascinating theory. Its name implies that government chooses to under-police these areas, though, and I think it's equally likely that police funding goes towards places that fund police because the places that fund police want the police where they are. Pretty high police coverage rate in Beverly Hills.
Maybe "funding centered policing" might be a better name for the phenomena.
Thank you for your thoughtful suggestion, which gave me something to consider on my morning walk.
“Funding centred policing” is a perfectly reasonable label. However, I am going to stick with fiscal-sink because, just like violent crime is very strongly a tail effect within the population, so it is across localities.
There is generally very little difference in rates of violent crime between high income/upper class and middle income/middle class neighbourhoods. Violent crime tends to be very strongly concentrated in particular localities. This is, in part, a result of the population-tail effect as lower executive function tends to be socially sorted downwards and be strongly heritable.
This also means that such localities actively require more policing. So, given that violent crime by locality is not an even gradient (based on revenue, average income or funding) but shows such intense spike patterns, I will stick with the label fiscal-sink hypothesis. But I do need to make the funding follows social clout point more explicitly in future, ta.
I thought that the analyses done found far less correlation with income than the other factors mentioned in the piece. EX, poor white communities vs poor black communities would experience the same police funding incentives, but exhibit different crime rates due to non-income based reasons.
Perhaps I'm confounding income and wealth (property)?
He is proposing an explanation for the correlation with violent crime to be stronger for single parent than for low income.
The premise is that the direct cause to high violent crime rates is low policing. Then a low income but complete family would contribute more to funding the policing (taxes), while a single parent home will contribute less (being on welfare).
At introductory level it makes sense, recent years have shown that reduced policing (defund the police) correlated strongly to increased violent crime. But it would take extensive analysis to validate if the policy funding has causation to violent crime rates.
Apr 21, 2023·edited Apr 21, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
Daniel Patrick Moynihan came to much the same conclusion in 1965 while serving as an Assistant Secretary for Labor under President Lyndon Johnson when he published “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action.”
In now what is now commonly known as The Moynihan Report, Moynihan urged that the Federal Government adopt a national policy for the reconstruction of the Black family, arguing that the real cause of the American Black’s troubles is not so much segregation, or a lack of voting power, but the circumstance that the structure of the Black family is highly "unstable and in many urban centers. . .approaching complete breakdown." This is so, stated Moynihan, because of the increasingly matriarchal character of American Black society, a society in which a husband is absent from nearly 2 million of the nation's 5 million Black families and in which, too, some 25 per cent of all births are illegitimate. Moreover, Moynihan pointed out, children, especially boys, who grow up in fatherless homes tend not to adjust to this country's essentially patriarchal society, particularly when their problems are complicated by poverty and racial prejudice.
Yep. HWFO Slack had a very long conversation about the Moynihan Report before this piece was published, and I chose to avoid mentioning it because it's got a tremendous amount of culture war baggage, and associating it with this piece would pollute the argument.
I have not read the MR yet. I don't want to take an official position on it before reading it.
Apr 20, 2023·edited Jan 29Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
Well, the biocalvinists would still attribute this to genetics. They'd say that the cause isn't the fatherlessness, but that the kind of men who won't stick around tend to provide poor genetic material.
I love it how just about everybody here wants to discuss solutions, as if they had the power to implement them... but nobody wants to really dig in to how it got to be this way. Was it all just honest mistakes and unintended consequences? Is this a self-entrenching "wicked problem" that just spiraled out of control? Or do you suppose it might have been engineered? Means, motive, opportunity?
I ask not so much because I can't take off my tinfoil, but more because it seems to me that any real steps toward real solutions to problems of this nature and scale would require a grounded analysis of their cause. Different causes will necessitate different approaches. Otherwise, I feel it's pretty tasteless subject matter for speculative "if I was Emperor" style wankery.
I think identifying a problem and developing a solution are good and necessary things for the Mistake Theorists to be doing. I agree with you though, that the Mistake Theorists have to concede that they aren't in charge, and never will be, because our system puts Conflict Theorists in charge.
That's a nice distinction, succinct and productive.
But, if Conflict Theorists are in charge of policy, and if policy actually produces outcomes... well, there you have it. Blame can (and must!) be assigned, and change must be fought for, strategically and tactically, not just planned out. An enemy must be identified and understood.
The old Black men I've known all have some pretty pointed theories about what happened to their communities, but I won't presume to speak for them. The CIA / crack thing is pretty well documented, at least. Gary Webb gave us those receipts.
The funny thing about that page is that I recognize myself in both descriptions. So I must be some sort of Mistake Conflict. Or possibly just a conflicted mistake.
Aid to Families with Dependent Children was a big factor back in the day. Government agents would go into homes to check to see if Dad was home. If so, no more government money.
And based on my rumor mill, there are quite a few single moms that aren't truly single. Dad is just using the grandparent's address so they can be unmarried for welfare purposes. Change the economic incentives and the number of Dads at home will bump up rather quickly.
So step one to stop the problem is to make Glenn Beck cry: have an unconditional citizen dividend to make the jump from welfare to work much easier. This dividend would replace the child tax credit, the earned income credit, and the standard deduction for wage earners. Welfare programs should be cut by the value of the dividend. The actual cost to the government would be thus quite small. The reduction in the enormous marriage penalty among the very poor would be huge.
Step 2 would be to replace the tax free nature of employer provided health insurance with vouchers for everyone which have the value roughly equal to the tax savings of professional class workers. This would decouple employment from health insurance, making life much easier for part time workers, day laborers, and seasonal workers.
Step three would be to enforce the national picket line to bring up the "market" minimum wage. Tax imports by the same amount we tax domestically made products. Don't provide the citizen dividend to guest workers.
I agree with most of this. Unconditional citizen dividend means even an unemployed man can bring something to the table, and the government gets out of family business. Also, easier to commit because it's easier to get out due to having some guaranteed income.
It, really depends on the size of the dividend whether you can cut all those things you mentioned; the risk is that people end up getting less than they had before. Obviously, not having a work penalty is very helpful WRT maintaining the labor force, and decoupling health insurance from employment is a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned.
It's possible that the citizen dividend would, itself, push wages up, freeing us from the market distortions caused by strikes, although if it didn't, I have nothing against strikes if necessary.
Wondering what your thinking is with respect to the guest workers. I'm pretty agnostic regarding that.
We are over 30 trillion dollars in debt. Extending the U.S. welfare system to the entire planet is not feasible.
You should have to be a *net* taxpayer to come here. You should have to pay catchup Social Security tax in order to get citizenship. And it is the job of immigrants to integrate into U.S. society, not the other way. around. (And the converse is true for U.S. expats...)
I can be this selfish about keeping the U.S. for the cultures that founded the U.S. and still be an
international saint compared to the current administration. Stop dropping so many bombs to "spread democracy." Stop the drugs at the border; don't fund wars in the jungle to get rid of coca bushes. Don't buy oil on the international market; poor countries need that oil. Drill here until we truly have a replacement for oil. (If you're worried about carbon emissions, the first place to start is to replace coal plants with nuclear power plants.)
I agree in general with your ideas, though not on some of the specifics. I don't think continuing to prosecute the drug war is a good idea, and I don't think a UBI is a good idea. To solve the "welfare cliff" problem, I'd more suggest not killing welfare benefits as early or as sharply. Make it a 2:1 or 3:1 (or some other ratio I'm not in the mood to do the math on right now) so that your welfare dollars drop off by 1 for every 2 or 3 you earn, for example. My primary objective to the drug war continuation (aside from the fact that it's entirely unconstitutional) is that it exacerbates the missing fathers problem. I am in full accord with your thoughts on immigration.
I'm with Timothy Leary on the recreational drug issue. Make the lighter drugs over the counter, and require a license for the harder drugs. Though I have to admit as I get older, I tend to think the license requirements for fentanyl and meth would be effective illegality for most people. On the other hand, dilute forms of natural opium and coca leaf should be available for those who can handle their high.
But there is a difference between what I want and what is politically feasible. So my fallback is IF you are going to make a drug illegal, do the enforcement at the border, not in other countries or in residential neighborhoods.
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I prefer a citizen dividend to assorted tax deductions in part because it simplifies life for employers. Flat tax with prebate for 95+ percent of the country. Additional brackets for the elite.
This was the original intent behind the income tax. It was supposed to be a surcharge on the wealthy. But having lots of people paying zero tax breaks the self-checking of the system. So make the bottom bracket wide and flat, and use a prebate (aka citizen dividend) to avoid overtaxing the bottom classes.
Employers should not have to determine their employee's tax brackets. Just withhold 10% for everyone. Let the IRS send a bill to those in higher brackets. If my electric company can send a monthly bill, so can the IRS.
(Last I checked, employers have to calculate EIGHT different taxes for every employee. This is ridiculous.)
I wouldn't make it a "tax deduction", my thought was more along the lines of self-reporting to the welfare agency. I have the (fortunate?) experience of having been all over the bloody map when it comes to economics. I've held six figure jobs, and I've been on SNAP. Sometimes in the same year. When I had my severe midlife crisis and left computer jocking to drive tractor trailers, I had to report to the SNAP and Medicare folks how much I was making when my income changed. This was done through a web interface. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable burden to me.
When you bring in a flat tax... I haven't done the numbers, it may well be a simplification to do a UBI. Though that presumes that everyone *has* an employer, or I have possibly misunderstood your logistics chain.
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As far as harder drugs, having been an EMT in a state with a significant opiate issue, I don;t think most people want fentanyl at all. Fentanyl is an artefact of the drug war and it simply being easier to smuggle in something that's 100 (fentanyl) or 1000 (carfentanil) times stronger than basic heroin, and then the cutting process being done by retards.
If we just straight up legalized heroin, nobody would *ever* touch fentanyl. Heroin addicts are actually remarkably good at moderating their own doses when they have a well regulated (in the original 2A sense) supply. For the most part, they don;t want to die, and know how much to take to not kill themselves. The "opiate crisis" is entirely self-inflicted.
We have a zero income tax bracket now: it's whatever falls below the standard deduction. For an employer to deduct properly, an employer needs to know how much total income you are likely to make including income from other jobs, and spousal income. Employers also have to calculate employer/employee portions of FICA and Medicare. Employers also have to compute state income tax, federal unemployment insurance, and state unemployment insurance.
For a big corporation this can be sunk overhead cost. For a tiny part time startup, this is a really BIG DEAL. Back in my Libertarian days, I tried creating economies of scale for slogan oriented T shirts, bumper stickers and the like. Compliance was the biggest cost of the business by far. Employing someone else to do part of the work was more work than doing it all myself.
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As for fentanyl, you may be correct. But if the voters don't buy it, correct isn't good enough. Back in 1999 I had this fight with the leadership of the Libertarian Party over "Legalize Hemp" vs. "Legalize Drugs." I "won" the argument by footing the bill myself for print runs of Legalize Hemp bumper stickers and yard signs.
Today, Sean Hannity is pushing hemp products. I feel a Nana nana naa naa coming on every time he does so. (Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project deserves at least two orders of magnitude more credit than me, of course. This doesn't stop me from wanting to neener dance, however.)
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Going forward, I'd push for legalizing poppies and coca leaves. If someone is hardcore enough to concentrate poppy gum into heroin or coca leaves into cocaine, let them do so as long as they can handle their high. Neglect your kids or poop on the sidewalk, however, and it's off to the brutalist architecture government run cold turkey rehab clinic.
This is a program I believe I can sell to the Right today. America survived cocaine in Coca Cola, and some of the Founding Fathers were doing opium laced liquor while writing the Constitution.
I used to be a huge UBI person until 2020 and rereading Hoffer True Believer. Now I think UBI is a recipe for violent revolution, because it creates a caste of comfortable bored poor.
I know you weren't asking me, but I'll throw in a thought: UBI implies an income you can live on. Having the government fund lazy hippies is annoying.
This is why I use Citizen Dividend. There are lots of people who get dividends who still go to work. I'm shooting for Citizen Dividend + Market Minimum Wage = Living Wage. And by living, I mean enough to frugally support a family and pay for normal medical and legal expenses. Special government aid or charity should be for special situations.
Thanks. It's a definition issue; I think a UBI can be any amount, and thought maybe the wording was changed to uncouple it from Andrew Yang. Just having something to count on and the ability to work part-time would be good. Unpaid emotional labor is real!
It's a combination of what's probably basic old school protestant work ethic and some notion that the math doesn't work out in the end. Though frankly, it might if we got rid of the Fed and the stupid fiat currency and the inflation effects. Still, I think subsidizing sloth is probably overall a poor idea.
I dunno. I have been *in the dirt* at times. It is currently still less than 30 days since I stopped being homeless. But I still think that it is best to encourage people to be in some way productive. At least until we get to a point where we hit true post-scarcity. But that's basically AI style singularity, so who can say what happens then or if the species even survives it.
So I guess the short answer is "I think the social incentives and mathematics don't work out". I am open to being convinced otherwise, but I have seen a lot of arguments both for and against and I am still on the "against" side. I know that's not a very concrete of an explanation for my position.
A lot of it is probably personal sense of not being particularly happy *myself* when I'm being supported and not supporting myself. So I recognize that this is very much an "anecdote and not data" position, in some ways. I am simply a happier person when I pay my own rent and buy my own food. I feel more accomplished and more successful at being an adult human.
Seems to me the best way to destroy the drug trade is to remove the demand for escape through drugs, rather than restrict the supply, which increases prices, incentivizing people to produce in the black market.
It's a manifestation of a machismo / dis culture, that, as you say, has limited countervailing force in the form of fathers or father figures. And the mothers and sisters seem to prefer this manifestation of "manliness" because of their own warped honor code.
In the view of Thomas Sowell, the problem is, at least in part, due to Black Rednecks. That is, American Blacks adopted the redneck culture of the South and carried it to the cities of the North, where it is ensconced as "black culture" (and therefore cannot be attacked by Whites).
That may be the dumbest take I've ever heard from Sowell. Especially considering we don't see elevated homicide rates among white rednecks, we see elevated suicide rates.
I think it makes sense if you think of it not in terms of homicide among white rednecks, but fighting as a way to resolve interpersonal disputes rather than going to the police.
I think it works a lot better if we remember he was referring to redneck culture from the late 19th and very early 20th century. That culture seems to have largely dissolved away as time and assimilation pulled it into the mainstream, but had holdouts in the urban ghettos where it managed to metastasize due to the drug war driven narcotics market. That's my take at least, having grown up in a rather rednecky part of the Appalachians where the culture was a bit of a hold out (not the violence fortunately, but all the rest Sowell described). The similarities are pretty striking.
Hmm, I'll have to review that. My experience with white redneck culture is that it does not express its honor code with homicide, but more along the lines of hyper sexuality and partner abuse. Interesting theory!
Maybe they carried the violent traumas of slavery from the South, which they reenacted with their children and peers, who reenacted it with their children and peers, which became part of their culture. Although of course we started out with the caveat that this was not about blacks being more violent than whites, and obviously it's more complicated than that.
Also, there's a way that it's self-perpetuating. Violent men don't make good partners, leading to boys from single-parent families who also don't make good partners. They had to stop mandatory jailing for domestic violence because black men were more likely to go back and kill the woman if they had been jailed. Pretty big disincentive to get married.
Very frequently two dudes who are fighting both welcome the fight being broken up as it creates a win-win scenario: nobody gets seriously injured, but both preserve their honor.
In the rarer occasion when women physically fight, they’re doing it because they want to harm the other person. This type of fight among males is simply outnumbered by the macho/honor fight.
Another factor has to do with the response to experiencing trauma, which often is addiction. That pretty much takes the dad out of the picture/workforce a lot of times.
I mean... maybe? I live in New Mexico, and it's *pretty* prominent here. But hell, maybe it's even worse elsewhere. But I know I got a lot of "You dissin' me, homie?" when I was younger that took some talking to get my way out of.
Apr 20, 2023·edited Apr 20, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
Mr. Campbell, I deeply respect your work because you ground it so solidly in the data. If we, as a society, are consciously avoiding the data because it does not line up with our view of how we want to world to work, we will never have the world that we want to live in.
I have no reason whatsoever to disbelieve any of this analysis. But what is the next step? I have seen other work that demonstrates a causal link between single mother families of all demographics due to the unintended consequences of federal and state welfare policies. Under many programs, folks lose benefits if they get married. I believe strongly that folks are not poor because they are mentally deficient. Lower income folks are no different than other demographics in that they respond quite well to economic incentives of all sorts. So if the incentives are in place to punish marriage, guess what the result will be? But assuming this is true, how do we fix it?
Increasing the marriage rate and the two parent household rate are tasks that require, in my opinion, a large scale reversion back to certain elements of traditional value sets. They cannot be implemented by government, they have to come through cultural realignment, and the trads have been losing, and are currently losing, and may continue to lose, the culture war.
My solution for this, going back to 2014 and before, is to cook up some version of Religion 2.0 to plug the growing religiosity gap. Only recently (2018) did I realize that's literally what the Woke program was, and then I became much more afraid of any sort of Religion 2.0 stopgap system that wasn't properly thought out. Right now I don't know what the best solution is, but I think a Religion 2.1 rooted on modernism instead of postmodernism might work. But it's hard to turn an animal like that loose without knowing where it's going to go. All 21st century religions are going to have feed based update mechanics and that makes them wild and uncontrollable.
I think it would be a good first step to change the welfare state such that it stops being quite so damaging to the institution of marriage. I don't think that would fix it alone, but "stop making things worse" would make later changes to culture a lot easier to implement.
Just try taking those cheques away! palatable might be a temporary and diminishing value style ubi that includes training or childcare for the recipient, that bumps up job income to a living wage. no problem recognizing special needs, with single motherhood not being a special need. The word incentivizng is a good one when trying to modify behaviour.
I partly disagree here. I think you can see a revision back if you removed the welfare that subsidizes those communities. That being said, the political toxicity from that would make it impossible. Subsidize, imo, 2 parent households with 2, or less, children. That works out with less poverty and better parental engagement (over fewer children). I have no data to back this up. Just a thought.
I wonder if it would be as easy as just changing the wording that requires the father to be absent (or requiring a single head of household, whatever) in the relevant laws. One could sell that as loosening the restrictions to the left and ceasing to penalize better family situations to the right.
“First, it was the last good year the FBI has data on, because they changed their data collection scheme in 2020 to make it so burdensome that half the police agencies in the country stopped giving them data.“
Of course the woke activists and journalists would leave some thing like that tidbit out.
Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
After reading the first few lines I was going to recommend RCA's old blog post. Then you linked to it.
When I was researching/debunking the lead crime hypothesis, I found an article on crime rates by IQ, in Sweden. Large cohort size, not much racial confounding:
They found that dropping IQ by 15 points doubled the violent crime rate.
So, we do have a B/W gap of ~15 points in the US (for whatever reasons). But the crime ratios aren't 2X, they are more like 6-10X. It seems like even the people who believe in genetic differences need a better theory.
I like your theory. Though I suppose you also need to establish that the marriage gaps cause higher crime, not that both are secondary to another factor. And you might want to look back in time to see if crime ratios increased as marriage broke down. Marriage rates were much higher 60 years ago, but I think the crime ratios were similar.
I grew more doubtful as i researched it, but the thing that really clinched it for me was the 5th graph in section 3.
The increase in crime in the 60s was a period effect, not a cohort effect. Every age group became more violent at the same time, they weren't lead poisoned one after another.
Analyzing by cohory also helps to understand the peak of crime in the late 80s/early 90s. You can rule out the abortion/crime hypothesis the same way.
I should say it's hard to call either theory completely debunked -- lead or abortion could both have some subtle (10%?) effect on crime and it would be hard to prove or disprove that. But neither one is the kind of unifying theory of crime rates that it promises to be.
Shhhh. Don't say unpleasant truths like this too loudly. Fathers are different than mothers, and the genders are not interchangeable? American black culture is broken and dysfunctional and creating a significant share of its own problems? We must go on pretending that such things cannot be! Besides, that's just, like, your opinion, man! What's this based on? Math? Like, that's a western white supremacist patriarchal construct! I'm reporting you and anyone who agrees with you to the thought police. Maybe they can convince you it can only be the guns causing this problem. Fatherless criminals from dysfunctional homes who join street gangs don't kill people, guns do!
After my many decades of full-time employment ended, I got a part-time seasonal job, three seasons a year over six years, in a children's farm in NYC that saw upwards of 4500 visitors per day during the busiest times and mostly serving NYC public school children. Most of those children were minorities and many came from the poorest neighborhoods.
What I saw, I saw consistently, season after season, year after year. So my generalizations are based on that. I started off every tour by asking for the cooperation of the grownups, and especially that one of them should be stationed at the very end of the group of kids so when I saw that person, I knew I had everyone with me. It was important that we moved on my prompts so the kids got to see and do everything.
If I had a tour group including white fathers, my day was pretty wretched. Those daddies were the feeblest collection of manhood I'd ever seen, and they couldn't keep the kids together.
If I had a tour group including black mothers, my day was pretty wretched too. They took the tour guide as an antagonist whose instructions were an insult to their autonomy.
If I had a tour group including black daddies, I was in paradise. They recognized the logic of my request immediately. They kept the kids in order without yelling. I only needed to catch one of the fathers' eyes for them to get everybody moving behind me again. They were an absolute joy to work with and it was very clear how good it was for the kids.
Now--about the teachers? Most of them regardless of ethnicity were appallingly bad. But the black entirely female teachers? They were often quite vicious to the little black boys, shaming them and sometimes grabbing them roughly for behaving exactly like little children thrilled to have a day in "the country." Those were the teachers who *apologized to me because the children were "bothering" me with questions.*
After that job, I no longer had quite as much contempt and loathing for HS thugs. School itself was the gangster factory. The littlest kids full of enthusiasm and affection in kindergarten and 1st grade had learned, by third grade, that most grownups didn't give a damn about them and should be entirely ignored.
You really had to see it. Nothing I wrote can convey the reality.
> You really had to see it. Nothing I wrote can convey the reality.
I mean, I'm sure you're correct, but I can definitely envision it pretty well, having gone through that meat grinder.
Refreshing and informative perspective
More a grim recounting of a destructive reality.
yes, for sure
Unfortunately, bringing up these issues gets you labeled as "racist" and shouted down. If it's anything outside of the official narratives, it's deemed incorrect and not worthy of debate. So how do we move past this nonsense that saying anything about race is "racist"? Ultimately, we need more discussions like this in public spheres. The question is how do we move from "winning at all costs" politics to the "betterment of society"?
Unfortunately, probably by doing it entirely outside the political sphere. Politics is the problem, not the solution. Too much of our social lives has become political, sadly.
i agree, unfortunately some of the best ideas discussed here require a change to gov policy.
And that is why the black community needs leaders that preach family rather than equity. Life here on earth is truly unfair because the “natural man” seeks only for himself. That is simply the way the universe operates. If life for black Americans and white Americans and Latino Americans and Asian Americans and every other type of American is to get better, everyone needs to understand that families are the key to individual, community, and national progress. Pertinent to this topic in general, I recommend reading the 1995 LDS “The Family: A Proclamation to the World”.
Interesting that the BLM Marxists were also against the nuclear family. Almost like they instinctively recognize that their political power emerges from black criminality, which in turn requires broken families to foster.
…or they realize that they can’t solve the problem, which is sad.
The “antifascists” of the 1930s (Wilhelm Reich in particular) were quite explicit in their hatred of the family as the core of the authoritarian state. They succeeded beyond their dreams.
See the head quotation at the start of Mary Harrington’s article Normophobia.
Figure out why black families are disproportionately likely to have no father present as compared to other racial demographics...
Lyndon Baines Johnson.
We have a winner!
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-black-family-40-years-of-lies
thanks for the read. who would have guessed? wokesters, activists and apologists combine their wisdom and political clout to perpetuate misery in black ghettoes/inner cities through recharacterizing harmful behaviours as virtuous. Quite a few delusional chestnuts, my favourite: 'nuclear family is a toxic, white construct not worthy of emulating'.
Let me introduce you to (my) fiscal-sink hypothesis. Governments under-police localities which are fiscal sinks—are localities which are net drains on revenue. Single mothers mean high welfare/low revenue localities, so are under-policed, so have high homicide rates.
In much of Latin America, there are no-revenue urban localities due to lack of formal land ownership.
A high rate of African diaspora, especially African ex-slave diaspora, population makes a locality more vulnerable to under-policing, but it is the under-policing of localities (due to them being fiscal sinks) that is the problem. Single-motherhood tracks being fiscal sinks.
https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/race-and-other-annoyances
That's a fascinating theory. Its name implies that government chooses to under-police these areas, though, and I think it's equally likely that police funding goes towards places that fund police because the places that fund police want the police where they are. Pretty high police coverage rate in Beverly Hills.
Maybe "funding centered policing" might be a better name for the phenomena.
Thank you for your thoughtful suggestion, which gave me something to consider on my morning walk.
“Funding centred policing” is a perfectly reasonable label. However, I am going to stick with fiscal-sink because, just like violent crime is very strongly a tail effect within the population, so it is across localities.
There is generally very little difference in rates of violent crime between high income/upper class and middle income/middle class neighbourhoods. Violent crime tends to be very strongly concentrated in particular localities. This is, in part, a result of the population-tail effect as lower executive function tends to be socially sorted downwards and be strongly heritable.
This also means that such localities actively require more policing. So, given that violent crime by locality is not an even gradient (based on revenue, average income or funding) but shows such intense spike patterns, I will stick with the label fiscal-sink hypothesis. But I do need to make the funding follows social clout point more explicitly in future, ta.
The fiscal sink hypothesis came to me while reading about the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck. (Yes, my mind works like that.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4381518/
I thought that the analyses done found far less correlation with income than the other factors mentioned in the piece. EX, poor white communities vs poor black communities would experience the same police funding incentives, but exhibit different crime rates due to non-income based reasons.
Perhaps I'm confounding income and wealth (property)?
He is proposing an explanation for the correlation with violent crime to be stronger for single parent than for low income.
The premise is that the direct cause to high violent crime rates is low policing. Then a low income but complete family would contribute more to funding the policing (taxes), while a single parent home will contribute less (being on welfare).
At introductory level it makes sense, recent years have shown that reduced policing (defund the police) correlated strongly to increased violent crime. But it would take extensive analysis to validate if the policy funding has causation to violent crime rates.
Watch your six. l. You’re starting to sound like Thomas Sowell.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan came to much the same conclusion in 1965 while serving as an Assistant Secretary for Labor under President Lyndon Johnson when he published “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action.”
In now what is now commonly known as The Moynihan Report, Moynihan urged that the Federal Government adopt a national policy for the reconstruction of the Black family, arguing that the real cause of the American Black’s troubles is not so much segregation, or a lack of voting power, but the circumstance that the structure of the Black family is highly "unstable and in many urban centers. . .approaching complete breakdown." This is so, stated Moynihan, because of the increasingly matriarchal character of American Black society, a society in which a husband is absent from nearly 2 million of the nation's 5 million Black families and in which, too, some 25 per cent of all births are illegitimate. Moreover, Moynihan pointed out, children, especially boys, who grow up in fatherless homes tend not to adjust to this country's essentially patriarchal society, particularly when their problems are complicated by poverty and racial prejudice.
Yep. HWFO Slack had a very long conversation about the Moynihan Report before this piece was published, and I chose to avoid mentioning it because it's got a tremendous amount of culture war baggage, and associating it with this piece would pollute the argument.
I have not read the MR yet. I don't want to take an official position on it before reading it.
Well, the biocalvinists would still attribute this to genetics. They'd say that the cause isn't the fatherlessness, but that the kind of men who won't stick around tend to provide poor genetic material.
"Biocalvinist" is today's new word. That's great. I'm stealing it. Is it your creation?
Yes. I coined it when describing Greg Cochran's position and noticing how much it resembled old Calvinist theology.
I love it how just about everybody here wants to discuss solutions, as if they had the power to implement them... but nobody wants to really dig in to how it got to be this way. Was it all just honest mistakes and unintended consequences? Is this a self-entrenching "wicked problem" that just spiraled out of control? Or do you suppose it might have been engineered? Means, motive, opportunity?
I ask not so much because I can't take off my tinfoil, but more because it seems to me that any real steps toward real solutions to problems of this nature and scale would require a grounded analysis of their cause. Different causes will necessitate different approaches. Otherwise, I feel it's pretty tasteless subject matter for speculative "if I was Emperor" style wankery.
I think identifying a problem and developing a solution are good and necessary things for the Mistake Theorists to be doing. I agree with you though, that the Mistake Theorists have to concede that they aren't in charge, and never will be, because our system puts Conflict Theorists in charge.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
That's a nice distinction, succinct and productive.
But, if Conflict Theorists are in charge of policy, and if policy actually produces outcomes... well, there you have it. Blame can (and must!) be assigned, and change must be fought for, strategically and tactically, not just planned out. An enemy must be identified and understood.
The old Black men I've known all have some pretty pointed theories about what happened to their communities, but I won't presume to speak for them. The CIA / crack thing is pretty well documented, at least. Gary Webb gave us those receipts.
Can't beat a conflict theorist with mistake theory. :)
The disappointing thing about that post is that Scott never brings up Hanlon's Razor. What a missed opportunity!
The funny thing about that page is that I recognize myself in both descriptions. So I must be some sort of Mistake Conflict. Or possibly just a conflicted mistake.
Like any good archetype taxonomy.
Aid to Families with Dependent Children was a big factor back in the day. Government agents would go into homes to check to see if Dad was home. If so, no more government money.
And based on my rumor mill, there are quite a few single moms that aren't truly single. Dad is just using the grandparent's address so they can be unmarried for welfare purposes. Change the economic incentives and the number of Dads at home will bump up rather quickly.
So step one to stop the problem is to make Glenn Beck cry: have an unconditional citizen dividend to make the jump from welfare to work much easier. This dividend would replace the child tax credit, the earned income credit, and the standard deduction for wage earners. Welfare programs should be cut by the value of the dividend. The actual cost to the government would be thus quite small. The reduction in the enormous marriage penalty among the very poor would be huge.
Step 2 would be to replace the tax free nature of employer provided health insurance with vouchers for everyone which have the value roughly equal to the tax savings of professional class workers. This would decouple employment from health insurance, making life much easier for part time workers, day laborers, and seasonal workers.
Step three would be to enforce the national picket line to bring up the "market" minimum wage. Tax imports by the same amount we tax domestically made products. Don't provide the citizen dividend to guest workers.
I agree with most of this. Unconditional citizen dividend means even an unemployed man can bring something to the table, and the government gets out of family business. Also, easier to commit because it's easier to get out due to having some guaranteed income.
It, really depends on the size of the dividend whether you can cut all those things you mentioned; the risk is that people end up getting less than they had before. Obviously, not having a work penalty is very helpful WRT maintaining the labor force, and decoupling health insurance from employment is a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned.
It's possible that the citizen dividend would, itself, push wages up, freeing us from the market distortions caused by strikes, although if it didn't, I have nothing against strikes if necessary.
Wondering what your thinking is with respect to the guest workers. I'm pretty agnostic regarding that.
We are over 30 trillion dollars in debt. Extending the U.S. welfare system to the entire planet is not feasible.
You should have to be a *net* taxpayer to come here. You should have to pay catchup Social Security tax in order to get citizenship. And it is the job of immigrants to integrate into U.S. society, not the other way. around. (And the converse is true for U.S. expats...)
I can be this selfish about keeping the U.S. for the cultures that founded the U.S. and still be an
international saint compared to the current administration. Stop dropping so many bombs to "spread democracy." Stop the drugs at the border; don't fund wars in the jungle to get rid of coca bushes. Don't buy oil on the international market; poor countries need that oil. Drill here until we truly have a replacement for oil. (If you're worried about carbon emissions, the first place to start is to replace coal plants with nuclear power plants.)
I agree in general with your ideas, though not on some of the specifics. I don't think continuing to prosecute the drug war is a good idea, and I don't think a UBI is a good idea. To solve the "welfare cliff" problem, I'd more suggest not killing welfare benefits as early or as sharply. Make it a 2:1 or 3:1 (or some other ratio I'm not in the mood to do the math on right now) so that your welfare dollars drop off by 1 for every 2 or 3 you earn, for example. My primary objective to the drug war continuation (aside from the fact that it's entirely unconstitutional) is that it exacerbates the missing fathers problem. I am in full accord with your thoughts on immigration.
I'm with Timothy Leary on the recreational drug issue. Make the lighter drugs over the counter, and require a license for the harder drugs. Though I have to admit as I get older, I tend to think the license requirements for fentanyl and meth would be effective illegality for most people. On the other hand, dilute forms of natural opium and coca leaf should be available for those who can handle their high.
But there is a difference between what I want and what is politically feasible. So my fallback is IF you are going to make a drug illegal, do the enforcement at the border, not in other countries or in residential neighborhoods.
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I prefer a citizen dividend to assorted tax deductions in part because it simplifies life for employers. Flat tax with prebate for 95+ percent of the country. Additional brackets for the elite.
This was the original intent behind the income tax. It was supposed to be a surcharge on the wealthy. But having lots of people paying zero tax breaks the self-checking of the system. So make the bottom bracket wide and flat, and use a prebate (aka citizen dividend) to avoid overtaxing the bottom classes.
Employers should not have to determine their employee's tax brackets. Just withhold 10% for everyone. Let the IRS send a bill to those in higher brackets. If my electric company can send a monthly bill, so can the IRS.
(Last I checked, employers have to calculate EIGHT different taxes for every employee. This is ridiculous.)
I wouldn't make it a "tax deduction", my thought was more along the lines of self-reporting to the welfare agency. I have the (fortunate?) experience of having been all over the bloody map when it comes to economics. I've held six figure jobs, and I've been on SNAP. Sometimes in the same year. When I had my severe midlife crisis and left computer jocking to drive tractor trailers, I had to report to the SNAP and Medicare folks how much I was making when my income changed. This was done through a web interface. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable burden to me.
When you bring in a flat tax... I haven't done the numbers, it may well be a simplification to do a UBI. Though that presumes that everyone *has* an employer, or I have possibly misunderstood your logistics chain.
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As far as harder drugs, having been an EMT in a state with a significant opiate issue, I don;t think most people want fentanyl at all. Fentanyl is an artefact of the drug war and it simply being easier to smuggle in something that's 100 (fentanyl) or 1000 (carfentanil) times stronger than basic heroin, and then the cutting process being done by retards.
If we just straight up legalized heroin, nobody would *ever* touch fentanyl. Heroin addicts are actually remarkably good at moderating their own doses when they have a well regulated (in the original 2A sense) supply. For the most part, they don;t want to die, and know how much to take to not kill themselves. The "opiate crisis" is entirely self-inflicted.
We have a zero income tax bracket now: it's whatever falls below the standard deduction. For an employer to deduct properly, an employer needs to know how much total income you are likely to make including income from other jobs, and spousal income. Employers also have to calculate employer/employee portions of FICA and Medicare. Employers also have to compute state income tax, federal unemployment insurance, and state unemployment insurance.
For a big corporation this can be sunk overhead cost. For a tiny part time startup, this is a really BIG DEAL. Back in my Libertarian days, I tried creating economies of scale for slogan oriented T shirts, bumper stickers and the like. Compliance was the biggest cost of the business by far. Employing someone else to do part of the work was more work than doing it all myself.
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As for fentanyl, you may be correct. But if the voters don't buy it, correct isn't good enough. Back in 1999 I had this fight with the leadership of the Libertarian Party over "Legalize Hemp" vs. "Legalize Drugs." I "won" the argument by footing the bill myself for print runs of Legalize Hemp bumper stickers and yard signs.
Today, Sean Hannity is pushing hemp products. I feel a Nana nana naa naa coming on every time he does so. (Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project deserves at least two orders of magnitude more credit than me, of course. This doesn't stop me from wanting to neener dance, however.)
______
Going forward, I'd push for legalizing poppies and coca leaves. If someone is hardcore enough to concentrate poppy gum into heroin or coca leaves into cocaine, let them do so as long as they can handle their high. Neglect your kids or poop on the sidewalk, however, and it's off to the brutalist architecture government run cold turkey rehab clinic.
This is a program I believe I can sell to the Right today. America survived cocaine in Coca Cola, and some of the Founding Fathers were doing opium laced liquor while writing the Constitution.
If you have time, would you mind elaborating on your opposition to UBI? I'm debating pro and wd. like to hear some con ideas.
I used to be a huge UBI person until 2020 and rereading Hoffer True Believer. Now I think UBI is a recipe for violent revolution, because it creates a caste of comfortable bored poor.
“a recipe for violent revolution, because it creates a caste of comfortable bored poor.”
Might we not also say this about Substack?
I can see that, but I'd say that depends on the size of it and how incentivizing it is to work.
I know you weren't asking me, but I'll throw in a thought: UBI implies an income you can live on. Having the government fund lazy hippies is annoying.
This is why I use Citizen Dividend. There are lots of people who get dividends who still go to work. I'm shooting for Citizen Dividend + Market Minimum Wage = Living Wage. And by living, I mean enough to frugally support a family and pay for normal medical and legal expenses. Special government aid or charity should be for special situations.
yes, consideration of the behaviours that get incentivized should always be considered when looking at ongoing social benefits.
Thanks. It's a definition issue; I think a UBI can be any amount, and thought maybe the wording was changed to uncouple it from Andrew Yang. Just having something to count on and the ability to work part-time would be good. Unpaid emotional labor is real!
It's a combination of what's probably basic old school protestant work ethic and some notion that the math doesn't work out in the end. Though frankly, it might if we got rid of the Fed and the stupid fiat currency and the inflation effects. Still, I think subsidizing sloth is probably overall a poor idea.
I dunno. I have been *in the dirt* at times. It is currently still less than 30 days since I stopped being homeless. But I still think that it is best to encourage people to be in some way productive. At least until we get to a point where we hit true post-scarcity. But that's basically AI style singularity, so who can say what happens then or if the species even survives it.
So I guess the short answer is "I think the social incentives and mathematics don't work out". I am open to being convinced otherwise, but I have seen a lot of arguments both for and against and I am still on the "against" side. I know that's not a very concrete of an explanation for my position.
A lot of it is probably personal sense of not being particularly happy *myself* when I'm being supported and not supporting myself. So I recognize that this is very much an "anecdote and not data" position, in some ways. I am simply a happier person when I pay my own rent and buy my own food. I feel more accomplished and more successful at being an adult human.
Seems to me the best way to destroy the drug trade is to remove the demand for escape through drugs, rather than restrict the supply, which increases prices, incentivizing people to produce in the black market.
It's a manifestation of a machismo / dis culture, that, as you say, has limited countervailing force in the form of fathers or father figures. And the mothers and sisters seem to prefer this manifestation of "manliness" because of their own warped honor code.
In the view of Thomas Sowell, the problem is, at least in part, due to Black Rednecks. That is, American Blacks adopted the redneck culture of the South and carried it to the cities of the North, where it is ensconced as "black culture" (and therefore cannot be attacked by Whites).
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-Liberals-Thomas-Sowell/dp/1594031436
That may be the dumbest take I've ever heard from Sowell. Especially considering we don't see elevated homicide rates among white rednecks, we see elevated suicide rates.
Math:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/geographic-evidence-that-gun-deaths
In the view of a former co-worker, a Black Vietnam vet:
“The only good thing about Vietnam was that n*****s and white trash found out how much they had in common.”
I think it makes sense if you think of it not in terms of homicide among white rednecks, but fighting as a way to resolve interpersonal disputes rather than going to the police.
Ok, if we're talking generalized honor culture stuff then I'd agree.
I think it works a lot better if we remember he was referring to redneck culture from the late 19th and very early 20th century. That culture seems to have largely dissolved away as time and assimilation pulled it into the mainstream, but had holdouts in the urban ghettos where it managed to metastasize due to the drug war driven narcotics market. That's my take at least, having grown up in a rather rednecky part of the Appalachians where the culture was a bit of a hold out (not the violence fortunately, but all the rest Sowell described). The similarities are pretty striking.
It's not a direct carry over, it's just got similar roots. Much like how the "black accent" is basically a morphed southern accent.
Hmm, I'll have to review that. My experience with white redneck culture is that it does not express its honor code with homicide, but more along the lines of hyper sexuality and partner abuse. Interesting theory!
Well, some of that is now part of the so called "black culture". Not saying the statement was fully true, but it does logically follow.
Maybe they carried the violent traumas of slavery from the South, which they reenacted with their children and peers, who reenacted it with their children and peers, which became part of their culture. Although of course we started out with the caveat that this was not about blacks being more violent than whites, and obviously it's more complicated than that.
I stand by this. Black folks are not inherently more violent than white folks.
Caveat: if two black women are in a fist fight, run for cover.
Also, there's a way that it's self-perpetuating. Violent men don't make good partners, leading to boys from single-parent families who also don't make good partners. They had to stop mandatory jailing for domestic violence because black men were more likely to go back and kill the woman if they had been jailed. Pretty big disincentive to get married.
Very frequently two dudes who are fighting both welcome the fight being broken up as it creates a win-win scenario: nobody gets seriously injured, but both preserve their honor.
In the rarer occasion when women physically fight, they’re doing it because they want to harm the other person. This type of fight among males is simply outnumbered by the macho/honor fight.
Another factor has to do with the response to experiencing trauma, which often is addiction. That pretty much takes the dad out of the picture/workforce a lot of times.
Big in Latino culture too.
Machismo that is.
Somehow it gets toned down among the Latino population in the US though.
I mean... maybe? I live in New Mexico, and it's *pretty* prominent here. But hell, maybe it's even worse elsewhere. But I know I got a lot of "You dissin' me, homie?" when I was younger that took some talking to get my way out of.
This is good stuff. Lorenzo From Oz recently came to precisely the same conclusion by comparing rural vs urban black violent crime rates:
https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/race-and-other-annoyances
Rural blacks have much higher rates of intact families, and violent crime rates comparable to whites.
Mr. Campbell, I deeply respect your work because you ground it so solidly in the data. If we, as a society, are consciously avoiding the data because it does not line up with our view of how we want to world to work, we will never have the world that we want to live in.
I have no reason whatsoever to disbelieve any of this analysis. But what is the next step? I have seen other work that demonstrates a causal link between single mother families of all demographics due to the unintended consequences of federal and state welfare policies. Under many programs, folks lose benefits if they get married. I believe strongly that folks are not poor because they are mentally deficient. Lower income folks are no different than other demographics in that they respond quite well to economic incentives of all sorts. So if the incentives are in place to punish marriage, guess what the result will be? But assuming this is true, how do we fix it?
Increasing the marriage rate and the two parent household rate are tasks that require, in my opinion, a large scale reversion back to certain elements of traditional value sets. They cannot be implemented by government, they have to come through cultural realignment, and the trads have been losing, and are currently losing, and may continue to lose, the culture war.
My solution for this, going back to 2014 and before, is to cook up some version of Religion 2.0 to plug the growing religiosity gap. Only recently (2018) did I realize that's literally what the Woke program was, and then I became much more afraid of any sort of Religion 2.0 stopgap system that wasn't properly thought out. Right now I don't know what the best solution is, but I think a Religion 2.1 rooted on modernism instead of postmodernism might work. But it's hard to turn an animal like that loose without knowing where it's going to go. All 21st century religions are going to have feed based update mechanics and that makes them wild and uncontrollable.
I think it would be a good first step to change the welfare state such that it stops being quite so damaging to the institution of marriage. I don't think that would fix it alone, but "stop making things worse" would make later changes to culture a lot easier to implement.
I guess I should have read one comment down. Ha.
Never a bad idea to reiterate "First, stop doing harm" when talking about government interventions :D
Just try taking those cheques away! palatable might be a temporary and diminishing value style ubi that includes training or childcare for the recipient, that bumps up job income to a living wage. no problem recognizing special needs, with single motherhood not being a special need. The word incentivizng is a good one when trying to modify behaviour.
I partly disagree here. I think you can see a revision back if you removed the welfare that subsidizes those communities. That being said, the political toxicity from that would make it impossible. Subsidize, imo, 2 parent households with 2, or less, children. That works out with less poverty and better parental engagement (over fewer children). I have no data to back this up. Just a thought.
I wonder if it would be as easy as just changing the wording that requires the father to be absent (or requiring a single head of household, whatever) in the relevant laws. One could sell that as loosening the restrictions to the left and ceasing to penalize better family situations to the right.
Employment. You can't just come to a marriage empty-handed. I can't imagine what kind of religion would trump that. It's
“First, it was the last good year the FBI has data on, because they changed their data collection scheme in 2020 to make it so burdensome that half the police agencies in the country stopped giving them data.“
Of course the woke activists and journalists would leave some thing like that tidbit out.
https://principledbicycling.substack.com/p/la-times-bicycle-stop-report-may
After reading the first few lines I was going to recommend RCA's old blog post. Then you linked to it.
When I was researching/debunking the lead crime hypothesis, I found an article on crime rates by IQ, in Sweden. Large cohort size, not much racial confounding:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0041783
They found that dropping IQ by 15 points doubled the violent crime rate.
So, we do have a B/W gap of ~15 points in the US (for whatever reasons). But the crime ratios aren't 2X, they are more like 6-10X. It seems like even the people who believe in genetic differences need a better theory.
I like your theory. Though I suppose you also need to establish that the marriage gaps cause higher crime, not that both are secondary to another factor. And you might want to look back in time to see if crime ratios increased as marriage broke down. Marriage rates were much higher 60 years ago, but I think the crime ratios were similar.
You're right that in the end this entire thing is an exercise in correlation, not causation. But I don't have a better theory on causation.
If you've got a link to lead-crime debunking I'd like to read it. I've always thought lead-crime was an interesting idea.
https://medium.com/@tgof137/debunking-the-lead-crime-hypothesis-949e6fc2b0dc
I grew more doubtful as i researched it, but the thing that really clinched it for me was the 5th graph in section 3.
The increase in crime in the 60s was a period effect, not a cohort effect. Every age group became more violent at the same time, they weren't lead poisoned one after another.
Analyzing by cohory also helps to understand the peak of crime in the late 80s/early 90s. You can rule out the abortion/crime hypothesis the same way.
I should say it's hard to call either theory completely debunked -- lead or abortion could both have some subtle (10%?) effect on crime and it would be hard to prove or disprove that. But neither one is the kind of unifying theory of crime rates that it promises to be.