I talked to Princeton sociologist @patrick_sharkey about America's crime surge.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

It's not just the mass shootings. 2020 had the most gun deaths of any year in US history and was, on a per capita basis, the most violent year of this century. Why?
If you have a deep need for single-cause answers to complicated questions, definitely don't read this story, or any other story, about why crime rises and falls. There are things we know for sure about this surge of violence—and then there's a tug-of-war over interpretation
So, what we know. Violent crime surged by its highest rate in many decades to its highest level in many decades. Fatal shootings rose more than 40% in several cities, including

Madison: 60%
Sacramento: 51%
Milwaukee: 47%
Atlanta: 46%
New York: 44%
Minneapolis: 43%
Boston: 41%
Violent crime is very unevenly distributed both within cities and between cities.

Fatal shootings rose in Chicago by 2x more than any other city. But others—including Miami; Las Vegas; San Jose, CA; and Honolulu —actually saw declines in fatal shootings.
Of course, we talked about the police protests and the Defund movement.

What's not debatable is that the largest surge in crime last year occurred after the protests. Disentangling blame & responsibility is where things get gnarly.
I think Sharkey makes a compelling point that the rise in violence might be causally downstream of the police protests; but the police protests are also downstream of other things—social injustice, gun prevalence, violent policing—that make unrest and social distrust inevitable.
We didn't talk so much about guns.

But to be exquisitely clear, I think handguns and assault rifles are a civic poison that makes civilians less safe from each other, cops less safe from civilians, and civilians less safe from cops

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

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More from @DKThomp

23 Mar
Everybody is wrong about Florida

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
1. Liberals and a lot of public health experts were wrong:

They predicted COVID would specially ravage FL, given its YOLO policies and elderly population. But the state is still officially reporting fewer deaths-per-million than the national average and nearby states.
2. Conservatives are wrong:

There is a lot of chest-beating about how the Florida economy is kicking ass. But as far as I can tell, its economic performance is—kind of like its pandemic performance—much more *average* than the national narrative would make you think.
Read 6 tweets
17 Mar
Shutting down half the economy and losing half a million lives anyway is totally unacceptable.

If we're gonna have 1 pandemic per decade—as we have this century—the U.S. must develop "institutional memory" to ensure this horror show never happens again.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
I asked experts what they considered the "original sin" of our COVID response.

To my surprise, there was strong unison: Our testing fiasco was the early failure that made every other failure worse and every hard decision harder.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
With more and faster tests, the U.S. would have benefited, at least a little, in almost every thinkable capacity: We would have had greater and faster epidemiological knowledge, less stringent lockdowns, a more open economy, and fewer overall deaths.
Read 4 tweets
15 Mar
Seeing lots of people RT this and similarly gloomy analysis about how the US won't spend money in the pandemic. It's just wrong.

Many ways to evaluate a nation's response to COVID. But by fiscal impact—spending and tax cuts—U.S. relief is among the biggest in the world.
Here's the IMF global analysis.

imf.org/en/Topics/imf-…

Different countries use a variety of spending, tax,and loan program. But the U.S. fiscal response was the 2nd highest in the world in January—larger than any European country—before counting then entire Biden relief bill.
There is an unhelpfully doom-pilled approach to Twitter, where the game isn't to figure out true stuff, but rather to sign on with one's most pessimistic and disappointed opinion about the world, irrespective of accuracy, then collect some commiseration tokens and peace.
Read 4 tweets
7 Mar
i think it would help the discourse to have a more sophisticated theory of—and maybe a word for—instances when perceived cancellations create publicity and riches for the cancelled party
We have a Streisand Effect: efforts to remove information often ironically publicize that information

It needs a Cancel Culture Corollary: the perception of unfair cancellation often leads to more subscriptions, or purchases
what I need is a PhD student in Internet sociology to write the following dissertation asap: "Cancel Culture or Can-Sell Culture? On the Merchandization and Mendacity of Cultural Stigma in 21st Century America"

Read 4 tweets
17 Feb
I really appreciate the early responses to this article

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

I think two somewhat related issues deserve amplification:

1) The surprisingly global decline of COVID cases
2) The possibility that these explainers are still staring into the fog of pandemic
The COVID retreat looks pretty global. Cases are falling in the U.S., and they're falling in Canada, and the UK. They're falling in Europe, and they're falling in Africa. They're even falling in .... South Africa.
I think that the 4 variables I analyzed—partial immunity, seasonality, behavior, and vaccination—together explain a great deal of why cases have declined in the U.S. so suddenly and why hospitalizations are likely to keep going down.

But clearly this is a global mystery.
Read 4 tweets
13 Feb
To vaccinate America by this summer, we don't face one challenge but rather 4 bottlenecks:

1. regulatory approval
2. vaccine supply
3. shot distribution/eligibility
4. demand for vaccines

This is my proposal to solve all four bottlenecks.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
1. Approve the AstraZeneca vaccine

@PeterHotez: “If we don’t accelerate the pace of vaccinations, we’re looking at an apocalypse ... The first out-of-the-box thing I’d do right now is release the AstraZeneca vaccine."
2. Test "First Doses First"

@ashishkjha: “I am really anxious about the next two months ... The best argument against FDF is that it goes off script from what the clinical trials suggest. But one way to solve the data shortage is to get more data.”
Read 5 tweets

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