Links to Consider

Inquisitive Bird on America as a homicide outlier; Shelby and Eli Steele on the need to feel innocent; my review of Andrew McAfee; Russ Roberts and Daniel Gordis on Israel

Inquisitive Bird writes,

the American prisoner/homicide ratio is about average for the First World, whereas the number of police per homicide is very low. In this sense, when compared to the rate of serious violent crime, the American prisoner rate is unexceptional, but its number of police is exceptionally low.

A common misconception is that American high incarceration rate is driven by mass incarceration of drug criminals or other minor offenses. In fact, only a small fraction of prisoners are there for mere drug offenses (see section Prisoners by offense type). The reality is that the high incarceration rate is largely a consequence of the high rate of violent crime in America. Excluding prisoners imprisoned for non-violent crimes, the prisoner rate remains higher than any of the 24 other countries in the above list — if the United States only imprisoned violent criminals, it would still have a higher prisoner rate than the rest of the highly developed world.

The post offers other calculations to chew on.

Also worth chewing on is this interview in City Journal with Shelby and Eli Steele.

Eli Steele: It’s a great question. If you’re talking about innocence in 1990, that book [The Content of Our Character], it made me think about how what’s going on today is an almost perverted battle for innocence. How powerful it is to certain people to believe in the ideology that gets them that innocence. They’re doing irrational things like lowering standards for black students that they would never do for their own family. Why are they doing that? Because it’s a way to be innocent of the past.

Shelby Steele: Innocence is power. In a society like America, with our history, we have this combination of unparalleled greatness and almost unbelievable evil. The pressures of being an American involve grappling with innocence. We have wealth; now we want innocence—that’s where power lies at the moment. So much of our politics and culture really come out of this struggle with innocence. Wokeness is nothing more or less than this struggle for innocence—a way to be innocent, and therefore to have power.

Reviewing Andrew McAfee’s The Geek Way, I write,

In the middle of the last century, the American economy was dominated by heavy industry, making automobiles, steel, and other manufactured goods for the mass market. The business culture that evolved in those industries stressed planning and top-down control, as John Kenneth Galbraith argued in The New Industrial State. The leaders of such firms were allocating massive amounts of capital in irreversible ways, as in the decision to build a new plant. Needing to get these decisions right, corporate leaders relied on a cumbersome evaluation process in which each proposal was examined by a cadre of division managers and their staff analysts.

Today, much of the capital in American business consists of software systems, not physical plant and equipment. Managed correctly, this software capital can be acquired—and changed—much more quickly than physical capital. This environment rewards an entirely different management culture, what McAfee calls the Geek Way, that today’s successful business leaders have arrived at.

Russ Roberts and Daniel Gordis have a heartfelt conversation on Israel. It captures the mood of many Jews around the world that the threats to our lives and our freedom are dire. And we see the enemies of the Jews as enemies of Western values everywhere.

substacks referenced above:

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Crime in the USA