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It's hardly clear that the root is socioeconomic. I don't have data on crime, but in education race remains predictive even after you include socioeconomic status in the estimator.

https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/on-c...

Do you know of a similar analysis of crime?




I haven't looked into this deeply, more of a productive assumption[1], but here are some related studies:

"the majority of the black-white gap (over 60%) [in violence] and the entire Latino-white gap are explained by a small set of factors, especially marital status of parents, immigrant generation, and neighborhood characteristics associated with racial segregation." https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/www/external/labor/sem...

"Despite a large difference in mean levels of family disruption between black and white communities, the percentage of white families headed by a female also had a significant effect on white juvenile and white adult violence."

"The combination of urban poverty and family disruption concentrated by race is particularly severe. Whereas the majority of poor blacks live in communities characterized by high rates of family disruption, most poor whites, even those from "broken homes," live in areas of relative family stability" https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3226952/Sampson_...

"Multivariate regression results for ninety-one cities showed that while total inequality and intraracial inequality had no significant association with offending rates, interracial inequality was a strong predictor of the overall violent crime rate and the Black-on-Black crime rate." http://egov.ufsc.br/portal/sites/default/files/anexos/33027-...

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_correlations_of_cr...

[1] I have a hard time imagining a productive line of thought that leads from saying that high black murder rates result from something inherent to blackness


When reading studies like this, it's very helpful to look at the tables of regression coefficients rather than just reading text. Unfortunately, it can often be a career limiting move for study text to accurately reflect the contents of the data tables/regression coefficients.

The first source you cited (the rand study) shows that being African American is a strong predictor of engaging in violence, even after accounting for other factors. See table 2.

The second study doesn't address the question.

The third study (see table 2) shows that, among other factors, percentage of a city that is black is a strong predictor of violent crime even after accounting for other factors.

One productive line of thought which leads from "something inherent to blackness causes crime" is "since this problem is intractible with current levels of biotechnology/social engineering/etc, we should stop wasting resources trying to solve it and focus on other things."


I don't disagree with your analysis of the studies, but the fact that a difference remains after accounting for known socioeconomic factors does not indicate that other factors do not exist.

Personally, I wouldn't call this[1] a productive thought, rather a fatalistic one.

[1] "since this problem is intractable with current levels of biotechnology/social engineering/etc, we should stop wasting resources trying to solve it and focus on other things"


Agreed. I've looked into the data in the past and this is not at all clear. You don't see anywhere near the same incidence for murder or violent crime among impoverished whites or Hispanics in America. These sorts of things are much more correlated with IQ than to poverty or nearly anything else.




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