The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years, a development that was considered puzzling partly because it ran counter to the prevailing expectation that crime would increase during a recession.
In all regions, the country appears to be safer. The odds of being murdered or robbed are now less than half of what they were in the early 1990s, when violent crime peaked in the United States. Small towns, especially, are seeing far fewer murders: In cities with populations under 10,000, the number plunged by more than 25 percent last year.
This development reminds me of a fallacy committed by (some) intellectuals. Occasionally you will read it insinuated that if inequality continues, or continues to rise, “the public will take matters into its own hands,” or something like that. Apart from being potentially factually false, such an outcome is neither endorsed nor condemned by the intellectual. The writer is hinting that the losers from such a rebellion would deserve what is coming to them, without having to say so. Least of all is the writer willing to throw his or her efforts behind dissuading or criticizing such a public response (is it so hard to write “don’t bring out the guillotine”?). The ostensibly “positive” description of what the public will do is used as a veiled threat, to be enacted if the warnings of the supposedly smarter intellectual are not heeded, yet without the intellectual having to make the threat himself.
A similar issue comes up in some discussions of free trade. It is sometimes hinted that if more is not done to help victims of free trade, the public will turn against free trade and force through extreme populist anti-trade measures. Again, the writer is playing on mood affiliation rather than analyzing such an outcome dispassionately and then evaluating the behavior of the public and trying to prevent it by framing the issue in a different manner.
The reality is that the public does not respond to most events, or most changes in the income distribution, as the intelligentsia likes to think it should, or will.
Maybe I will call this “the public as billy club” fallacy. I have a low opinion of sentences in which this fallacy is committed.
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Could it be an increase of overall societal trust?
How about the correlation with illegal drug prices going (way) down over the past 40 yrs?
Good point. Also, introduction of more car antitheft and location detection devices also affect this type of crime as well.
Drug prices:
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/fed-data/cocaine-prices.htm
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/fed-data/heroin-prices.htm
crime continues to fall – incarceration rates continue to rise…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
“Occasionally you will read it insinuated that if inequality continues, or continues to rise…”
It’s actually not about inequality and actually about quality of life; Cowen is taking on a strawman. Yes, people confuse inequality in the aggregate with individual diminishing quality of life, but that doesn’t make it less true. Inequality can rise while people’s quality of life remains the same. In the case of job loss, the extraordinary measures being taken by the federal government and states to maintain some unemployment income might be part of the reason crime hasn’t been rising due to the recession.
I’d prefer to see a chart showing how this actually works out instead of jumping to conclusions (or smacking the wrong intellectual enemy). Crime has been going down for decades. A slow down in that trend due to the recession would knock your argument out.
Mehh. I think this is more a case of shady rhetoric than logical fallacy. We have seen an uprising as a result of sharply increasing inequality; that was the spark that ignited the uprising in Tunisia. I don’t think it’s too unreasonable to surmise a causal relationship between economic conditions and the consequential public sentiment.
The intellectually dishonest part comes from associating deteriorating public sentiment with veiled rhetorical threats. ‘If A occurs, then they will take matters into their own hands…’ correctly identifies a causal relationship between A and the decline in mood, but frames it within the call of violence. There are surely other factors which have to be taken into account before we can confidently assert that if A occurs, violence/something really bad will happen.
So it is indefensible to claim that a party will yearn for a fight after some event appears, but I don’t see it as a fallacy.
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