External Processing

Standing at the corner of Avenue D and East 40th Street in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, there is nothing particularly remarkable to see. The houses are narrow, deep duplexes with two-story porches. There are no businesses on this block, but just down the tree-lined street there is ground-floor retail with residences above, a Benjamin Moore paint store, a beauty supply, and the Kennedy Fried Chicken and Grill.

Greetings readers. I wrote the essay below at another outlet’s invitation, but they ultimately declined to publish it. Such is life in front of a blinking cursor. Now it is yours to enjoy. But it does not have to be yours alone! Please feel free to share. Local Government Capacity and the Historic Homicide Spike and Decline Any causal explanation for the historic decline in homicide in the 2020s should have four key attributes.

One of my favorite truisms is that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are the kind of people in the world who tell you they are in sales. Then there are the kind of people who do not tell you they are in sales, who are also in sales. We are in the Age of the Salesmen. You probably have to go back to the time of PT Barnum to find another epoch in American history where we were so collectively enamored of being sold.

The point of this essay is to say that despite AI’s competitive advantages over humans in possibly all the things, humans have comparative advantages over AI that are likely sustainable in the very long term. At the end of this essay, I will give you three obvious areas where this comparative advantage exists, but there are many more. Don’t throw in the towel, human! I asked AI to make a funny picture of an AI teaching college students, and this was the best of the bunch.

I recently had the good fortune to go on the Jeff-alytics podcast and had a great discussion with Jeff Asher about the state of crime. We explored the COVID spike in gun violence, the ongoing crime decline, made some predictions about the future and even talked asymptotes, which you just don’t get enough of in podcasting. One of the best reasons to go on podcasts is that they generate a transcript, which I have reproduced here.

This is sort of a bonus edition, so I will keep it pretty brief. Later today, I will be a part of a panel hosted by the Council on Criminal Justice’s Women’s Justice Commission, The Rising Cost of Women’s Incarceration and What it Means for Public Safety. The panel will discuss two papers I worked on with Stephanie Kennedy (CCJ) and Avi Bhati (Maxarth, LLC), The Rising Cost of Women’s Justice System Involvement, and, What Happens when Women Serve Less Time in Prison?

Summer is spinning by, and it has actually been pretty glorious, at least by mid-Atlantic standards. Well, until last week’s inferno, but I was away somewhere cooler. The weather folks promise brief spells of torturous heat next week and beyond, but until then, I can sit comfortably on my covered porch and ruminate. Ruminating being a good thing for a writer to do. I listened to a Tyler Sheridan podcast recently, who cited long morning walks as the inspiration for his incredible productivity.

It is striking how enamored the Abundance crowd is of strict policing. This is a surprise to me. I have written about it here and here and the satire and sarcasm therein are prompted by disappointment, not contempt. I certainly understand the pull of order maintenance as a prescription for safer cities. But, it is so outside the original formulation of what it means to be a healthy city that it is worth spilling a few words on the evolution of New New-and-Improved! Urbanism.

Recently, I came across this quote from Matt Yglesias, who explains the crime spike and decline this way: I think it is broadly clear that the spike was a reaction to the George Floyd protests and that the subsequent decline reflects a return to more vigorous levels of police activity. This is a provocative take, for a couple of reasons. For one, I think it is representative of a broad class of people who are interested in urban policy projects and see crime as an impediment to those projects.

One estimate is 35%. The other is 71%. They are both correct. Few statistics are more important in crime and justice than the recidivism rate. It is obviously important for policymaking, but the impact goes much deeper. If most people who commit crimes and are incarcerated go on to commit new crimes, then there are all sorts of knock-on effects. It will be very hard to convince a potential employer to hire you. It will be hard to convince a landlord to rent to you.