Still Free

Yeah, Mr. Smiley. Made it through the entire Trump presidency without being enslaved. Imagine that.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Are Non-Whites Leading Indicator of Social Decline?

So at the end of Coming Apart by Charles Murray, I was struck by some charts on the last chapter. I noticed a pattern that Murray never mentioned directly but reminded me of a common social comment. The neighborhood I grew up in, like many neighborhoods in NY, used to be white. As black people moved in, white people moved out. We had a neighbor who refused to leave. Stayed until he died. Today there are no white people in the neighborhood. Luckily the 6 blocks that make up my immediate neighborhood has an extremely low crime rate (but going up unfortunately). However the "greater" neighborhood is not so situated. If you research assault stats on NYPD's website you can actually make a map of the major neighborhood roads. I'm pretty certain it wasn't like that in the 1950s.

This post isn't to prove that blacks caused decline or whether like the old commentary, it's about America's cold means Black Americas pneumonia. I'm just going to show the charts. Below are 5 charts from Murrays "Fishtown" and "Belmont". These fictitious towns were made to represent data about neighborhoods of certain socioeconomic makeups that can be found all over the US. Of importance is what these places represent:

Belmont: "Members have at least a bachelor's degree and are managers, physicians, attorneys, engineers, architects, scientists, college faculty members, or in content-production jobs in the media...I assign married persons to Belmont if either they or their spouse has at least a college degree and is in one of those occupations." Median family income $124,200

Fishtown: Members are "blue collar, service, or low-level white collar occupation, and no academic degree more advanced that a high school diploma." median income $41,900.

There was a complex rule for how married people were assigned to Fishtown. If you're interested, read the book. So no, it's not actually "Fishtown", but it may well be my neighborhood.

This shows the decline of marriage. The dashed line is whites only. the solid line is the entire population. Clearly then the difference between the two is what the non-white population is doing. You'll note, particularly in "Fishtown" that the non-white population leads the decline.

Once again non-whites are leading indicators.

Once again, non-whites are the leading indicator of unemployed men.

Non-whites lead the decline in members working 40 hours a week.

Inmates in prison. I won't say it.

Non-whites lead the arrests. Note that when arrests declined for the general population the white arrest rate declined a bit later.

So in "poorer" neighborhoods it appears that the presence of non-whites and their behaviours will strongly indicate what the white population will be doing in the near future. In richer neighborhoods the leading indicators are there but nowhere near as strong. So clearly income has a moderating effect on the behavior. It is known that in even wealthy neighborhoods, non-whites, specifically blacks, have higher incidents of criminal behavior compared to their white neighbors.