by Tom Kando
Our last three posts have been
about Charlie Hebdo, terrorism and Islamic immigration. There has
been excellent response by readers. The present post is also related to those
topics.
The title of this piece is
usually attributed to Auguste Comte, the father of Sociology, and I want to
show how true it is.
Two of the things which the media never let us forget are:
(1) terrorism/crime/violence/war and
(2) immigration.
These two issues
are related, as in the Charlie Hebdo case, because some of
the violence is committed by Muslim
immigrants to places like France.
For example, criminologists
disagree as to why the US crime rate is
down so very sharply. Sometimes the criminal justice system feels that more punishment and more law enforcement are
the answer, so we build more prisons and we
hire more cops. At other times, sociologists advocate more
rehabilitation and more help with mental health, so we go the other way.
Theories such as James Q. Wilson’s broken windows idea come and go. Guns are
always a hot topic. And of course, to
combat and protect against international violence, we engage in multiple wars,
and we spend ourselves into bankruptcy
with Homeland Security. This
never-ending quest for explanations and for policies that will reduce criminal
violence has been going on for
centuries.
But let me suggest something
else, something based on Comte’s axiom that demography is destiny:
There is no factor that
correlates more strongly with criminal violence than AGE. No explanation and no
amount of dickering with policies sheds as much light on the issue as the recognition of one simple, fundamental
fact: namely that criminal violence is something that is done by YOUNG MEN.
Period.
To see the role of demography,
let’s look at the two afore-mentioned and related issues:
1) Crime, violence, war: There
is a sense, nowadays, that the world is
rife with conflict and violence.
We live in a near-permanent
state of low-level warfare, terrorism flares up periodically, and crime ranges from low levels
in places like Northern Europe and Japan, medium amounts in the United States, all the way to
disastrous levels in some Latin American countries and in failed states such as
Somalia.
A caveat: worldwide violence and war are down, not up. Nervosity about them are
up, due to the news media, the social media and
the Internet. But this is a
perception thing. It is aided and abetted
by the non-stop chatter about
terrorism. In fact, the historical trajectory has been a sharp
downward trend in worldwide violence of all sorts. (See for example Steven
Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature) This is true for both the long-term and for the short-term, both
for large-scale, organized warfare, and
for private individual criminal
violence.
Fluctuations in violence over
TIME and variations by PLACE are precisely what “demography is destiny” explains so well.
Take the declining American
crime rate. Our national murder rate has gone down from 10.2 per 100,000 in 1980 to 4.4 in 2013.
That is a 57% decline over 33 years. In 1990, there were 2,245 murders in New
York City. Last year there were 328. That’s a decline of 85% (!) over 24 years.
Has the number of guns declined
over this period of time? Absolutely not. The contrary. Don’t misunderstand me:
I strongly support gun control, and I still believe that the fewer fire arms there
are in circulation, the better. However,
the relationship between gun ownership and the crime rate is complicated, and one to which I cannot do
justice here.
Are New York police commissioner Bratton’s policies responsible?
Who knows. Probably not, since other cities have experienced similar reductions
in crime.
But one thing is clear: Since
1990, US life expectancy has gone up from 75.3 years to 78.9 years. Americans’ median age was 32.9 years in 1990
and it rose to 37.7 years by 2014 - an increase of nearly five years.
Nothing correlates more strongly
with crime than age. Not gun ownership, not rates of incarceration, not the
number of cops on the street, not economic conditions. Ninety-eight
percent of all the index crimes
tabulated by the FBI are committed by
people under fifty. Two percent by people
over fifty. As America ages, its crime rate goes down. Simple.
Now take a look at the world.
Table One, cleverly combining two different sources, gives you a sample of 40 selected countries
of interest, half of them with high murder rates and half of them low. I
deliberately excluded city states like
Monaco and Hong Kong (Countries by Median Age; Countries and Continents Murder Rates)
Table One: Forty Countries listed by Median Age and by Murder Rates
Country
|
Median Age, in Years
|
Murder Rate per 100,000
|
1. Japan
|
44.6
|
0.3
|
3. Switzerland
|
41.3
|
0.6
|
3. Norway
|
39.7
|
0.6
|
4. Sweden
|
40.6
|
0.7
|
5. Germany
|
43.7
|
0.8
|
6. Denmark
|
40.7
|
0.8
|
7. Spain
|
40.1
|
0.8
|
8. Italy
|
44.3
|
0.9
|
9. Austria
|
42.6
|
0.9
|
10. Netherlands
|
40.8
|
0.9
|
11. United Kingdom
|
40.5
|
1.0
|
12. Czech Republic
|
40.4
|
1.0
|
13. France
|
39.7
|
1.0
|
14. Poland
|
38.2
|
1.2
|
15. Hungary
|
41.3
|
1.3
|
16. Belgium
|
42.0
|
1.6
|
17. Finland
|
41.6
|
1.6
|
18. Canada
|
40.7
|
1.6
|
19. Bulgaria
|
41.6
|
1.9
|
20. US
|
36.9
|
4.4
|
WORLD
|
28.4
|
6.2
|
21. Iraq
|
20.6
|
8.0
|
22. Russia
|
38.5
|
9.2
|
23. Uganda
|
15.0
|
10.7
|
24. Namibia
|
21.4
|
17.2
|
25. Botswana
|
22.0
|
18.4
|
26. Equatorial Guinea
|
18.5
|
19.3
|
27. Nigeria
|
19.1
|
20
|
28. Mexico
|
26.7
|
21.5
|
29. Rwanda
|
18.6
|
23.1
|
30. Brazil
|
30.5
|
25.2
|
31. Congo
|
16.5
|
28.3
|
32. South Africa
|
24.7
|
31.0
|
33. Swaziland
|
20.1
|
33.8
|
34. Lesotho
|
22.6
|
38.0
|
35. Jamaica
|
23.9
|
39.3
|
36. Guatemala
|
19.7
|
39.9
|
37. El Salvador
|
23.9
|
41.2
|
38. Belize
|
20.7
|
44.7
|
39. Venezuela
|
25.8
|
53.7
|
40. Honduras
|
20.7
|
90.4
|
Table One shows clearly that
the younger a country’s population is, the higher its murder rate tends
to be. The strong correlation is evident from mere visual inspection. No Chi Square
needed here.
Table Two sums up the relationship between age and murder
rates in a more global way:
Table Two: Relationship between Age and Murder Rates,
by Continents/Regions
Median Age
|
High Murder Rate
|
Medium Murder Rate
|
Low Murder Rate
|
Young
|
Africa
Latin America
Caribbean
|
||
Medium
|
Asia
Middle East
|
||
Old
|
Europe
North America
Australasia
|
So you see, explanations such as gun ownership, law
enforcement, political strife and poverty are not nearly as helpful as the one
crucial variable of AGE!
Remember Michael Moore’s great film, Bowling for Columbine? Canada has as many fire arms per
capita as the US. So do
the Swiss and the Israelis. Yet those countries’ murder rates are much
lower than ours. Similarly, within the
US, states with stricter gun laws (New
York, the District of Columbia, etc.) do
not necessarily have lower murder rates.
Clearly, crime and violence are multi-causal, like most
social phenomena. By no means do I intend to reduce my explanation of violence
to a single independent variable. My intent today has been to focus on
something that is perhaps somewhat overlooked - age - and also to offer a bit
of a lesson in humility: Human
intervention through social policies may not be as consequential as natural
processes over which we have little control:
Demography is destiny. leave comment here
(To be continued)
© Tom Kando 2015
