Thread by @RichardHanania

Was the crackdown by @nayibbukele really responsible for the drop in crime in El Salvador? Some argue the murder rate was already falling, or the decline can be attributed to a deal between the gangs and the government. But these arguments make no sense.🧵 richardhanania.substack.com/p/the-midwit-m…

First, the idea that murder dropped since 2015 is true. But look at the historical norm of El Salvador. We have data going back to the 1990s, it's never been anywhere near this low. When Bukele came to power, things looked similar to how they always had been.

As a matter of basic logic, “things tend to revert to the mean” is a much better assumption than “trends continue until they reach numbers never seen before.” It's why if the temperature increases by 3 degrees since yesterday, you don't assume the world will soon burn.

Ok, what about the idea of a deal? This argument has been made by National Review and Matt Yglesias, so it has bipartisan credentials. Putting aside the question of why no one else worked out a similar deal, it actually broke down in 2022, which led to the current crackdown.

Moreover, here are some details of the previous "deal" with the government. People want to give the impression that Bukele and the gangs were best friends.

In reality, the "deal" before 2022 involved him getting tough on crime and then relaxing the repression a bit.

The "deal" involved stuff like letting them have fast food in jail, not putting gang rivals in cells where they'd kill each other, and not letting prison guards abuse them so much.

Human rights orgs want to pretend the government was coddling MS-13, and that reduced crime.

In other words, they ignore the fact that it was the tough-on-crime approach that made it an option to reduce the murder rate with cheeseburgers and curly fries in the first place.

This is like the Platonic ideal of the midwit meme. Bad people do bad things. Lock them up, they stop doing them. To much of the intelligentsia, this seems quite puzzling.

Why does everyone from NR to Yglesias doubt this? When people dislike a tradeoff, they pretend it doesn't exist. Civil liberties for criminals seems "nice", so they pretend tough on crime can't work. Or tough on crime must only be by US standards, not developing world standards.

Notably, no one disagreed with my back-of-the-envelope calculation showing that if we assume the Bukele crackdown did influence the crime rate as it appeared to, it would be justified. This is what makes people need to deny the repression worked. But I think it clearly did.