Lone Gunman

Cities with large immi­grant pop­u­la­tions are some of the safest places to live, sug­gest the data and stud­ies, espe­cially those where the police “know how to work with [immi­grants], not against them”.

The stud­ies in question–including one exten­sive study by the FBI–go on to sug­gest rea­sons why immi­grants reduce a city’s crime:

This is not just a mat­ter of ran­dom cor­re­la­tion being mis­taken for cau­sa­tion. A new study by soci­ol­o­gist Tim Wadsworth […] care­fully eval­u­ates the var­i­ous fac­tors behind the sta­tis­tics that show a mas­sive drop in crime dur­ing the 1990s at a time when immi­gra­tion rose dra­mat­i­cally. In a peer-reviewed paper appear­ing in the June 2010 issue of Social Sci­ence Quar­terly, Wadsworth argues not only that “cities with the largest increases in immi­gra­tion between 1990 and 2000 expe­ri­enced the largest decreases in homi­cide and rob­bery,” which we knew, but that after con­sid­er­ing all the other expla­na­tions, ris­ing immi­gra­tion “was par­tially responsible.” […]

So, yes, there are pretty com­pelling data to sup­port the argu­ment that immi­grants as such—even pre­sum­ably “ille­gal” immigrants—do not make cities more dan­ger­ous to live in. But what mech­a­nism about such immi­gra­tion makes cities safer? Robert J. Samp­son, head of the soci­ol­ogy depart­ment at Har­vard, has sug­gested that, among other things, immi­grants move into neigh­bor­hoods aban­doned by locals and help pre­vent them from turn­ing into urban waste­lands. They often have tighter fam­ily struc­tures and mutual sup­port net­works, all of which actu­ally serve to sta­bi­lize urban envi­ron­ments. As Samp­son told me back in 2007, “If you want to be safe, move to an immi­grant city.”

In a hugely cap­ti­vat­ing and com­pre­hen­sive look at the food sup­ply chain in Britain, Jeremy Hard­ing pro­vides a look at “the future of food and its supply”–including food ethics, food secu­rity and the dire need for a sus­tain­able future.

Harding’s case is the most cogent I’ve read and it offers much more than a con­dem­na­tion of our cur­rent, unsus­tain­able habits: the arti­cle focuses on what Hard­ing dubs the “seven big stories”–the seven fun­da­men­tal “loom­ing threats” we must keep in mind when plan­ning for a sus­tain­able, effi­cient and secure ‘food future’.

1. Pop­u­la­tion growth: The expected large-scale urban­i­sa­tion of the future “poses big ques­tions about land use (hous­ing v. farm­ing) and the pro­duc­tion of food by a minor­ity for a major­ity as the gap between the two gets wider”.
2. ‘The nutri­tion tran­si­tion’: As we move fur­ther away from a diet based on grains, pulses and legumes and toward one of meat and dairy (the tran­si­tion from maize feed­ing us to maize feed­ing the ani­mals) means that “global pro­duc­tion of food – all food – will have to increase by 50 per cent over the next 20 years to cater for two bil­lion extra peo­ple and cope with the ris­ing demand for meat”.
3. Energy: “The indus­trial pro­duc­tion of food is sure to become more expen­sive as fuel costs rise. It takes 160 litres of oil to pro­duce a tonne of maize in the US; nat­ural gas accounts for at least three-quarters of the cost of mak­ing nitro­gen fer­tiliser; freight, too, depends on fuel”.
4. Land: “The amount of the world’s land given over to agri­cul­ture con­tin­ues to grow, but in per capita terms it’s shrink­ing. As with oil, it’s pos­si­ble to envis­age ‘peak food’ (the point of max­i­mum pro­duc­tion, fol­lowed by decline), ‘peak phos­pho­rus’ [and] ‘peak land’: the point at which the total area of the world’s most pro­duc­tive land begins to dimin­ish (soil exhaus­tion, cli­mate change) and mar­ginal land comes up for reassessment”.
5. Water: “World­wide, one in three peo­ple face water short­ages and by 2030 the ratio will have nar­rowed. […] Much of our fruit and veg comes from water-scarce coun­tries and […] lack of water closes down food pro­duc­tion and livelihoods”.
6. Cli­mate change: “Extreme weather events will […] jeop­ar­dise agri­cul­ture and the move­ment of food from one place to another”.
7. Agri­cul­tural work­ers: More than half of the world’s 1.1 bil­lion agri­cul­tural work­ers” own nei­ther land nor machin­ery and live in a state of semi-slavery. The con­di­tions of this new global under­class are at last a mat­ter of con­cern: world­wide food pro­duc­tion is set on a down­turn as their wretched­ness weak­ens their capac­ity to pro­duce and earn, dri­ving more peo­ple inex­orably towards the cities.

I sup­pose you could call these the food equiv­a­lent of Jared Diamond’s twelve prob­lems of soci­etal sus­tain­abil­ity.

A newly pro­posed inter­na­tional def­i­n­i­tion of the mid­dle class for devel­op­ing coun­tries, pro­duced by the Cen­ter for Global Devel­op­ment for the World Bank, has some sur­pris­ing con­clu­sions for India.

The report, pro­duced by the pres­i­dent of the Cen­ter for Global Devel­op­ment, Nancy Bird­sall, sug­gests that “mid­dle class” is defined as every­one with an income above $10 a day, exclud­ing those in the top 5% of earn­ers in the coun­try… mean­ing India has no mid­dle class.

This is a com­bi­na­tion both of the depth of India’s poverty and its inequal­ity. China had no mid­dle class in 1990, but by 2005, had a small urban mid­dle class (3% of the pop­u­la­tion). South Africa (7%), Rus­sia (30%) and Brazil (19%) all had siz­able mid­dle classes in 2005. […]

In socio-political terms, the mid­dle class is tra­di­tion­ally that seg­ment of soci­ety with a degree of eco­nomic secu­rity that allows it to uphold the rule of law, invest and desire sta­bil­ity. They do not, unlike those defined as rich, depend on inher­i­tances or other non-productive sources of income. […]

OECD coun­tries define their poverty lines as 50% of median income which works out […] to about $30 day. In the US the poverty line for a sin­gle indi­vid­ual in 2008 was $29 per day and for each indi­vid­ual in a four-person house­hold was about $14 per day.

How­ever, peo­ple in devel­op­ing coun­tries liv­ing on even $10 a day still have extremely low social indi­ca­tors. Econ­o­mist Lant Pritch­ett has shown that infant mor­tal­ity of house­holds in the rich­est quin­tile in Bolivia was 32 and Ghana 58 per 1,000. Fewer than 25% of peo­ple in the rich­est quin­tile in India com­plete 9 grades of school, Pritch­ett showed. “An upper limit of the 95th per­centile, while on the high side, is just about suf­fi­cient to exclude the coun­trys rich­est,” Bird­sall adds.

via The Browser

Admit­ting that there are “so many, many pos­i­tive aspects and ben­e­fits to reli­gios­ity”, the authors of a meta-analysis on the sub­ject have shown a pos­i­tive cor­re­la­tion between reli­gious affil­i­a­tion and racism.

Orga­nized reli­gion […], by its very nature, encour­ages peo­ple to accept one fun­da­men­tal belief sys­tem as supe­rior to all oth­ers. The required value judg­ment cre­ates a kind of us-versus-them con­flict, in which mem­bers of a reli­gious group develop eth­no­cen­tric atti­tudes toward any­one per­ceived as different. […]

Stud­ies have shown that reli­gious adher­ents are more likely than agnos­tics and athe­ists to rate con­ser­v­a­tive “life val­ues” as the most impor­tant prin­ci­ples under­ly­ing their belief systems.

Those spe­cific val­ues — social con­for­mity and respect for tra­di­tion — also most closely cor­re­late with racism. In short, peo­ple are attracted to orga­nized reli­gion for the same rea­son some peo­ple are inclined toward racist think­ing: a belief in the sanc­tity of estab­lished divi­sions in society.

Of course there are numer­ous caveats. The most impor­tant of which is that the cor­re­la­tion is strongest with reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists and is “unclear” with those who are attracted to reli­gion as a spir­i­tual pur­suit (as opposed to those who attend church as an obligation).

The researchers also note that the link is par­tic­u­larly strong with highly edu­cated sem­i­nary stu­dents, that the cor­re­la­tion seems to have been decreas­ing in recent decades, and that there is no link between “intrin­sic reli­gios­ity” and racist atti­tudes (although there is also no link between this “intrin­sic reli­gios­ity” and racial tolerance).

via Intel­li­gent Life

Does an increased police pres­ence decrease crime? That’s the seem­ingly sim­ple and obvi­ous ques­tion that Mark Eas­ton poses on his BBC blog before explain­ing the dif­fi­culty in attempt­ing to dis­cern if a greater num­ber of police helps to reduce crime.

To set the scene, Eas­ton quotes from a Steven Levitt study (pdf) that attempted to answer this ques­tion by analysing crime fluc­tu­a­tions around elec­toral cycles (because, equally inter­est­ingly, the num­ber of police increases around elections).

One of the most sur­pris­ing empir­i­cal results in this lit­er­a­ture is the repeated fail­ure to uncover evi­dence that an increase in the num­ber of police reduces the crime rate. Of the 22 stud­ies sur­veyed by Samuel Cameron (1988) that attempt to esti­mate a direct rela­tion­ship between police and crime using vari­a­tion across cities, 18 find either no rela­tion­ship or a pos­i­tive (ie incor­rectly signed) rela­tion­ship between the two.

Eas­ton does con­clude, how­ever, by say­ing that it “would be almost per­verse to argue that more police has no effect on crime. But we don’t know how much impact they have or how long that impact lasts”.

via @vaughanbell