Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
This figure is flowing around Twitter recently: The usual commentary is simply to notice the Y axis. Chicago men having a homicide rate of 900, and those in England and Wales of 30. That’s 30x. Asking around, no one could provide me with the direct source, neither for The Economist, nor the scientific source —…
Continue ReadingA lot of instant experts have appeared on the black-white crime question. Many of these are somewhat unfamiliar with the quite large literature on the topic. The people who mostly study crime are criminologists and sociologists. However, as we know, these are some of the most left-skewed academics out there: Prior post: Do Republic professors…
Continue ReadingNature has a review of Robert Plomin’s new book by some random lefty historian data-free reasoning type called Nathaniel Comfort (he follows the usual pattern of having a background in biology, as the usual suspects). Among the usual claims without any supporting references we find this one: Crude hereditarianism often re-emerges after major advances in…
Continue ReadingI was skimming a Wikipedia article related to immigrant crime and came across an obscure Swedish language report from the 1990s: Ahlberg, J. (1996). Invandrares och invandrares barns brottslighet: En statistisk analys [Immigrants’ and immigrants’ children’s crime: a statistical analysis]. Brottsförebyggande rådet (BRÅ). (file available on OSF) This report is a goldmine. Briefly: Data from…
Continue ReadingThere is a lot of research on the link between crime and cognitive ability. (For criminal outcomes, see the problems in my previous post.) E.g. Is the Association between General Cognitive Ability and Violent Crime Caused by Family-Level Confounders? We linked longitudinal Swedish total population registers to study the association of general cognitive ability (intelligence)…
Continue ReadingI am watching Brian Boutwell’s (Twitter, RG) talk at a recent conference and this got me thinking. What are we measuring? As far as I know, there are typically two outcome variables used in criminological studies: Official records convictions. Self-reported criminal or anti-social behavior. But exactly what trait are we trying to measure? It seems…
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