r/neoliberal • u/corlystheseasnake • 2d ago
What's The Optimal Red Number Here? User discussion
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u/RecentlyUnhinged NATO 2d ago
You don't want 0% murders, or that will negatively impact the birthrate markets. Most economists suggest around 2-3% murders as ideal to encourage investment and growth
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u/EveryPassage 2d ago
0.00001% gray, 100% red. So you know where all of murder is going to take place and it only impacts other murderers.
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u/tbos8 2d ago
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u/corlystheseasnake 2d ago
This comes from a really interesting Brookings report demonstrating that the rise in murders in 2020 preceded the George Floyd protests. I recommend reading the whole report.
For the sake of this discussion, I'm curious what people believe is the optimal red number. The optimal gray is of course as low as possible (you want as few poor people as possible), but if you had the choice, would you want homicides to be distributed evenly across the city, concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods, or somewhere in between?
As an example, would you rather have Charlotte's numbers or Louisville's.
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u/Melodic_Ad596 Anti-Pope Antipope 2d ago
In an ideal world? Probably Louisville's? Makes the crime easier to target if it is geographically focused.
In the real world? Probably Charlotte, as it gives a wider part of the voting base an incentive to support crime reducing measures and to take crime seriously as opposed to writing off a few "bad neighborhoods"
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u/Aidan_Welch Zhao Ziyang 2d ago
People in Louisville still definitely take crime seriously even if they're not in the west end
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u/The_Shracc 2d ago
The value you place on an additional year of life grows with income, therefore you would want homicides to only happen to the lowest income individuals.
Part of the red dot being higher than the gray one is the lower value of life, leading to more risk-taking and lower prevention messieurs. Low income people in jobs where being shot at is an occupational hazard tend to not invest too much into body armor.
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u/1XRobot 2d ago
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u/JeromesNiece Jerome Powell 2d ago
Are you saying that the association between poverty and homicide is a spurious correlation
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u/1XRobot 1d ago
I wouldn't be, because that's not what the graph purports to show.
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u/JeromesNiece Jerome Powell 1d ago
So you think increasing global temperatures causes a decrease in the number of pirates? What is the point of the graph if not to point to an example of a spurious correlation?
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u/1XRobot 1d ago
No, I mean OP's graph doesn't purport to show there's an association between poverty and homicide (which there obviously is). It purports to show an association between the location of homicides and the fraction of residents living in locations vaguely associated with poverty. Moreover, it does it in a particularly obtuse way instead of using a scatterplot, which would illuminate the actual correlation, if any.
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u/Carlpm01 Eugene Fama 1d ago
It should at least be higher than the grey number since safety is almost certainly not an inferior good.
Whether the correct answer is 100% or something lower would then depend on whether e.g. doubling the murder rate is more than twice as bad or not. If it were proportional I think 100% would be optimal.
Note: Only talking about ("magically") changing the distribution of homicides, not the total number.
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u/Approximation_Doctor George Soros 2d ago
Red would ideally be at zero, because wealthier families are more likely to have life insurance and savings to deal with the consequences of losing a member.
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u/modularpeak2552 NATO 2d ago
the optimal would be zero for both colors lmao