[yummyfajitas]

The US have never invested in social security levels anywhere near the Scandinavian countries.

How much spending do you believe is necessary to control crime via social security/etc? Is there some consumption level at which crime is expected to vanish?

Note that the US currently spends 60% of it's budget on redistribution and 4% on police protection. What would the optimal spending levels be?

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2012_US_total

Except that when you control for factors that correlate strongly with social status, the race effect disappears almost entirely.

What factors? Most of the obvious ones that I can think of (poverty, government dependence, unemployment) fail for this purpose since blacks do not make up anything close to 50% of people suffering from them.

Could you please state concretely what these factors are and why you believe the effect vanishes?

[vidarh]

> How much spending do you believe is necessary to control crime via social security/etc?

Enough to mostly eradicate poverty. I don't know what the cost of that would be in the US, but as long as you have widespread poverty I don't see a reason to assume you have tested the effect this would have on poverty. At least nothing like Scandinavian levels.

The US presently have a poverty rate about 3 times that of Norway (about 15% vs about 4.5%), despite Norway putting the poverty "bar" much higher - in Norway you are officially considered poor if your income is below 50% of the median. In Oslo that currently means about $24k/year. The US official poverty line for a single person in the continental states is $11,670 (which isn't that far from 50% of the median in the US either, but the cost of living in Norway is not twice that of the US), rising to $23,850 for a family of 4. With directly comparable numbers, the difference would be much greater.

Then you have to expect to wait at least a generation for reduced poverty to filter through to increased education levels, even assuming you fund the education system well enough that anyone who puts in the work can complete university for free.

Then you can start to get an idea whether or not Scandinavian level social security and education would make a difference in the US.

> Note that the US currently spends 60% of it's budget on redistribution

The problem is that you've created a system that causes so large differences in the first place. 60% to redress that is little more than window dressing.

Further, that 60% number is nonsense. A large proportion of that 60% - whichever slices you've added up to get at it - provides benefits for at least parts of those that pay into it in the first place, so the actual amount that is net redistribution is far smaller.

> What factors? Most of the obvious ones that I can think of (poverty, government dependence, unemployment) fail for this purpose since blacks do not make up anything close to 50% of people suffering from them.

Poverty rate certainly does account for a substantial part of it, with African-Americans being substantially more likely to be poor than non-hispanic whites, at ca. 27.2% and <12% respectively.

http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq3.htm

Tack on education levels, unemployment, family cohesion and you get most of the way there.

[yummyfajitas]

Until you come up with a consistent definition of poverty, your theory is not even wrong. Recall that a theory is "not even wrong" if it's proponents can't explain a concrete set of steps to falsify it.

Now if you take an absolute definition, you need to explain why a lot of countries much poorer than the US (much of Europe) have less crime. Or why Brazil, Mexico and South Africa have far more crime than India. That's a tricky sell.

If you want to use a relative definition of poverty (e.g. what Norway does), then you need to postulate that the existence of someone earning more than you do within a national boundary is what causes you to murder people. I.e., the existence of someone with a platinum toilet drives people with gold toilets into a homicidal rage.

Poverty rate certainly does account for a substantial part of it, with African-Americans being substantially more likely to be poor than non-hispanic whites, at ca. 27.2% and <12% respectively.

Whites make up about 72% of the population, blacks 12%. Assume poverty is the sole cause of homicide, then multiplication suggests 3.25% of America is poor && black while 8.6% is poor && white. In that case, the black murderer:white murderer ratio should be 1:3. It's 1:1.

I don't know what you mean by "tack on". Do you have a coherent theory, or are you just hoping?

[vidarh]

> Now if you take an absolute definition, you need to explain why a lot of countries much poorer than the US (much of Europe) have less crime.

No, I don't, because I'm not postulating that poverty is the only reason for crime, merely that it is a substantial factor.

Another obvious factor is difference in legal systems that makes general crime rates extremely hard to compare (consider that the US has the highest percentage of its population in prison in the world)

Further, you're being imprecise. Many countries that are considered rich have high poverty rates. Such as the US.

> Or why Brazil, Mexico and South Africa have far more crime than India.

Apart from what I wrote above, all of these countries have massive poverty rates. I haven't checked all three, but South Africa's poverty level is at least under some measures at similar levels to India. Mexico also have a massive US-fueled drug war that accounts for a substantial proportion of all crime to the extent that it mostly swamps out most other factors.

But of course, this alone is not very relevant unless you - unlike me - assume poverty is the only factor.

> If you want to use a relative definition of poverty (e.g. what Norway does), then you need to postulate that the existence of someone earning more than you do within a national boundary is what causes you to murder people.

No, I don't. You're making up strawmen again.

The reason for pointing out the relative definition was to make it clear that the US definition (which is also relative - the specific numbers are adjusted regularly) and Norwegian definitions are not directly comparable, and that Norway's 4.5% number is vastly higher than it would have been under a US definition.

As such, we can not with confidence say that if the US brought poverty down to 4.5% after the US definition, even all else being equal, it would provide sufficiently stable living conditions to make it possible to reap whatever level of benefit the Norwegian system does from reduced poverty.

This was to address your issue of how much social security would be enough, after the ludicrous claim that the US tried to provide social security in the 60's and 70's, and that it didn't have any positive effect on crime rates, and my counter-claim that the US have never seriously tried to provide proper social security.

Also, despite your aggressive and rude way of asking for me to support my claims, you've provided nothing but that in defence of your claims. I take your aggression and rudeness and lack of support for your own claims as a good indicator that you have nothing.

> Assume poverty is the sole cause of homicide

Nice strawman. Pretty much your entire line of reasoning appears to be founded on setting up strawmen. Has anyone suggested poverty is the sole cause of homicide? No. I suggested that differences in poverty levels was one major factor confounding the claimed link between homicide and race. The rest is your own invention.

> I don't know what you mean by "tack on". Do you have a coherent theory, or are you just hoping?

By "tack on" I meant that, unlike what you seem to believe, I have never claimed poverty to the be the only factor. In fact, I originally pointed to social status specifically of those other factors.

I don't see the point in continuing this discussion and trying to explain anything to you, as you seem intent on misinterpreting every word, or you would have seen that "my" two theories are quite simple:

1) Poverty level (your own, and that of your immediate community, though they are usually largely the same) has a substantial effect on crime rate. You can falsify this theory by correcting for poverty levels in crime rate data, and see what difference it makes to the crime rate in the population reviewed.

2) If you adjust for factors that influence social status, the vast majority in the gap between crime rates for African Americans and white Americans will disappear. These factors include poverty, but also other factors such as education level and family cohesion.

The main point is not the specific set of factors, but that there are confounding factor that needs to be corrected for, that has dramatic effect on levelling the inter-racial differences in crime rates.

To falsify this, I don't need for there to be evidence of the specific effects of poverty on crime, as controlling for poverty and other such factors when looking at crime rates broken down by ethnic groups will either yield a result or not.

[wyager]

>Enough to mostly eradicate poverty.

What does that mean? A homeless person today can afford food, often (temporary) shelter, frequently a cell phone...

I'd say poverty has effectively been "mostly eradicated" already by production technology.

[IkmoIkmo]

What's your definition of poverty? It's important to be specific in your wording. For example there's absolute poverty (which seems to be what you describe, whether someone has the bare minimum to survive in terms of food, shelter) and relative poverty (which I think everyone can say, there's lots of that.)

But even on the first point, I don't think we've really eradicated poverty at all. There are millions of food-challenged people in the US, millions of people without insurance, millions of homeless. To say these people do not live in poverty because not all of them literally die of starvation is extremely myopic in my opinion. And that's in one of the richest and the most powerful country on the planet.

[Retric]

Federal budget is a long way from total government spending.

Further the vast majority of that goes to the elderly not the poor. Subsidizing the medical costs for a retired person living on 200k/year is hardly the type of social insurance suggested.

[yummyfajitas]

The link covers all govt spending.

[Retric]

And your link does not support the 60% number for redistribution. For example, you might think pension means SS, but states spend 200B/year on pension bennifits which are simply deferred compensation. When you read medical expenditure you might think Medicare and Medicare but local, state, and federal worker bennifits are limped there as is R&D.

Edit: I assumed you got the 60% from the federal numbers aka 24 SS, 22 Medicare Medicare etc, Safety Net 12% = ~58%. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1258