We published a very important piece at the Washington Monthly this morning by Mike Males, the senior researcher at San Francisco’s Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Mike and I worked on this piece for over a month, hashing out how to present this data in a compelling narrative form that speaks to (and helps explain) the current political environment. In the end, I think he came up with a brilliant article that is must-read stuff for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the competing narratives of the Trump campaign (we’re all doing lousy and we’re doomed) and the Clinton campaign (the future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades).
It all turns on where you’re standing. Perspective is everything.
Los Angeles is a sprawling megalopolis of 10 million people whose violent youth culture has been legendary in pop culture, myth and media. In the past, this reputation was for good cause. In 1990 alone, nearly 500 L.A. teenagers died from gunfire and 730 were arrested for murder.
Today, L.A. is again at the forefront of a youth revolution – this time a positive one.
In 2015 – in stark contrast to 1990 – teen gun-related deaths totaled 57, while teen murder arrests numbered 65. Overall in California, the crime rate among teenagers has dropped by 80 percent since 1980 – at the same time immigration has fueled a growing, more racially diverse young population, now 72 percent of color. The school dropout rate has also nosedived, as have births by teen and young-adult mothers. College enrollment and graduation rates have soared. These trends, moreover, are not unique to California. They’re happening nationally.
The flip side of young Americans’ astonishing behavioral turnaround is an equivalently dramatic decline among older Whites. In California, for example, the number of arrests among people over 40 in 2015 was nearly double the number of arrests among Black and Hispanic teens. Nationally, in a shocking reversal of past patterns, a middle-aged White is at greater risk today of violent death (by suicide, accident, or murder, and especially from guns or illicit drugs) than an African American teenager or young adult.
These stunning reversals of fortune among the generations could help explain one of the central mysteries of this year’s election cycle: why two such starkly divergent views of America – Republican Donald Trump’s grim vision of an apocalyptically degenerated America and Democrat Hillary Clinton’s sunny affirmation of a diversifying country’s bright future – are finding equal resonance. The short answer is that both portraits reflect equally valid truths about Americans’ experience today – depending on who and how old you are. While Democrats’ younger, more diverse constituencies are experiencing dramatic improvements in their personal security and behavioral well-being, Trump’s older White demographic is suffering rising drug abuse, crime, incarceration, suicide, gun fatality, and disarray.
These divergent realities, however, have also led to an extraordinary level of mutual incomprehension, as even sophisticated insiders in both parties and in the media seem largely ignorant of the underlying statistical facts. Hence, progressives dismiss the rage of Trump’s supporters as artifacts of mere racial prejudice and bigotry, without seeing that the anger is rooted in the very real personal insecurity middle-aged Whites are living with. And conservatives mistakenly impute to darker-skinned young people the growing chaos they may be feeling without understanding that a huge, multi-ethnic generation of young voters has perfectly sound reasons for feeling confident and optimistic.
Thanks for posting Booman, excellent article.
A couple of takeaways for me:
1) “Hence, progressives dismiss the rage of Trump’s supporters as artifacts of mere racial prejudice and bigotry, without seeing that the anger is rooted in the very real personal insecurity middle-aged Whites are living with. “
I don’t think is completely true. What some of us see is that this outcome was inevitable given the policies being put in place; the erosion of the safety net, the prioritization of profits over people, trickle down economics to name 3. We also feel that these middle-aged whites are the ones who supported these policies, they have yet to admit their complicity in their own fate and now they are doubling-down on more of the same.
2) “Poverty, disadvantage and inequality – the disturbing reality that the world’s richest middle-agers flourish alongside a child and teenage population one in three of whom live in poor or low-income households – remain major impediments to young people’s well-being and a key challenge for progressives to confront.”
Looks like Bernie and his youngsters are on to something.
Two others are well ahead of others:
Right now I find them the most interesting people to read. Dionne has long been in a league by himself.
they’re presented to support:
It only takes a bit of unpacking to see that (at least as presented with the limited information here) the bolded statistic provides essentially no support for the point being made. “People over 40” is an age group spanning nearly 80 years. “Teens” span 7 years. Only a subset of them are “Black and Hispanic”. Even if — as I suspect, but don’t know for sure — black and hispanic teens are currently a demographic bulge in CA, it would still be extremely surprising to me that they could be more than half the 12+ population; which they would have to be for the “nearly double” number of 40+ arrests to even be proportionally higher at all. Nor are any comparable data for other time periods provided, which could document temporal trend(s) in this statistic (e.g., proportional increase in 40+ arrests and/or proportional decline in b&h teen arrests over time).
Based on other information in the piece, and other sources I’m aware of, I think the points being made here are quite valid. This particular statistic just doesn’t add any support, though it’s presented as though it does.
A teen is still more likely to be arrested than a middle-ager, but the relative risk has changed enormously. The article does mention that. When it comes to violence, it has actually reversed – those are per capita rates.
I knew things were changing, but I didn’t realize how much they had changed.
You write:
Yes. Precisely. Thank you.
This is just more self-serving DemRat hype.
So it goes,
Believe none of it. From either side.
AG
SO what can one believe, AG?
Arthur’s gut, and what it produces, of course.
Don’t believe “me,” janicket. As I said to JDW…get out of your envelope. Find out what’s outside of your experience.
You be bettah off, too.
AG
You have no frikkin idea what my envelope, experience, etc. are, so spare me the condescension.
You’re right, of course. Everything I know about anybody on this list is just a guess based on their posts.
I’m guessing from your posts that you are an Obama sympathizer…a closet centrist clothed in “practical politics but a progressive at heart” outer clothes. A neoliberal, in a word. You live in the country, but not the so-called “ignorant white people” country. The well-developed country…horses and such. Probably New England. The somewhat gentrified country. “Well educated” in the leftiness sense (Like with a postgrad degree from some school with a fairly good re.p)…proabably a professional of some sort.
Law? Medicine? Something…past 30 at the very least.
Close enough?
AG
P.S. If you say it’s not I probably won’t believe you unless you lay out who you really are. That’s certainly who you sound like you are. I’ve been very open about who am here, and Booman knows that to be true. All except my name.
You?
Kinda surprised to see you putting people into neat little boxes, Arthur. An ugly form of collectivism, no?
Just trying to find out to whom I am talking, ishmael2.
Context is all.
AG
“If you say it’s not I probably won’t believe you”
Then any further discussion with you is just as pointless as I expected. Ain’t dancing to your tune.
Lay it out.
Who are you, janicket? In the broadest terms. Tell the truth and I …we…will probably believe you. The truth resonates very nicely if you have the ears to hear.
If not?
Not.
Bet on it.
Try it.
You be bettah off in the long run.
Bet on that as well.
Try it.
How many Puerto Rican…or latino and/or black…real friends you got!!!???
Like dat.
AG
WOULDN’T believe her!
Who do you think you are, Trump?
What is your envelope, then? It’s a simple question, whether we believe you or not. Your reluctance to say, and knee-jerk defensiveness suggests Gilroy’s guess is fairly accurate. Your “envelope” is sealed and confidential. It’s stamped: ‘none of your goddamned business.’ Says it all.
So what? Why does it even matter? And does anyone even question why AG is so fucking curious to know someone’s personal history in the first place? On public forums where we are predominantly pseudonymous for any of a number of reasons, we may want to keep personal information – or at least some subset thereof – to ourselves. The extent to which we do so is our own business and really no one else’s. It’s called boundaries, and it is wise to respect personal boundaries out of respect if nothing else. Failure to do so is troubling, to say the least.
Trolling, in this case, for personal info.
Way out of bounds.
If you are curious jan, just go here
.
Janicket is partially right below, JDW. Believe what you see in front of you, and go looking for information.
Everywhere, not just in the leftiness versions of the media.
Get out more.
Way out.
Out of your little envelope of safety and security, whatever and wherever that may be.
You be bettah off in the long run.
Bet on it.
AG
80? 40 + 80 = 120. Did you mean that? Or, say, 40 to 80 years old, which would be a 40-year span?
live to approach 120 years (certainly some make it past 110). Obviously, that tail of the distribution approaches zero as a limit as age increases. But such individuals do exist.
That’s why we don’t have wheelchair access to our place. The 120 year-olds can’t break in and hide the tv controllers on us.
Still, suggesting that anyone in the 80-to-whatever cohort is likely to be driving the violence statistics upwards seem, shall we say, rather a tenuous hypothesis.
offer it as a hypothesis.
I applied the described deme by its outer reasonable limits.
If you’re going to talk about the incidence of violence within a specific age group, including the entire age group isn’t just reasonable, it’s the appropriate way to do it. (I’m not the one who defined the group in question as “over 40”, with no defined upper limit. I just applied the pre-existing classification.)
Any cutoff you might suggest that could reasonably be expected to exclude some members of the identified group (which, reminder, was “over 40”) is inappropriately arbitrary.
The relevant question as defined is “what is the proportional incidence of violence in that age group?” (as defined). You don’t get to a valid answer to that by arbitrarily excluding any (even a very few) individuals. My formulation was consciously and deliberately maximally inclusive.
Agreed. It would make more sense if the statistic were arrest rate per thousand or something along those lines – and even then would be preferable to use equivalent age intervals. That’s just the stats wonk in me that gets a bit unnerved when I read through news articles and opinion pieces. The problem then becomes one of either misinterpretation or the cynical dismissal of what may well be a real phenomenon by those who dislike or distrust statistics (or who have a vested interest in making sure an audience is dismissive of statistics).
was a primary motivation in pointing out that this statistic doesn’t support the point being made.
Statistics used appropriately are (or should be, and still are within the Reality-Based Community I inhabit) powerful.
Used inappropriately, as is too often the case (with many of those instances done with deliberate intent to mislead/deceive) they do the opposite of what they’re useful for when used legitimately; i.e., they misinform.
And you’re completely correct, the frequency of such misuse creates mistrust and suspicion in the majority (I think) of the population not sufficiently educated in how statistics validly work to distinguish appropriate use from misuse.
Then of course there’s the appallingly large group who latch onto any statistic that supports what they already believe and reject any that doesn’t, completely independently of validity/invalidity of either the statistical methods used or the underlying data.
There are games being played with the numbers.
Whites have always been the most likely to commit suicide. In 2000 whites were about 2X as likely as african americans to commit suicide. The white rate is up about 25% since 2000.
White suicide has increased, but they be a result of an aging cohort (As people get older they become more likely to commit suicide).
https:/afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics
“Even if — as I suspect, but don’t know for sure — black and hispanic teens are currently a demographic bulge in CA, it would still be extremely surprising to me that they could be more than half the 12+ population; which they would have to be for the “nearly double” number of 40+ arrests to even be proportionally higher at all.”
Have to comment here on current CA demographics, which are widely misunderstood. There isn’t any demographic bulge of black teens. Hispanic yes, but not black. There are 2.5 times as many Hispanics as blacks. Blacks are no longer that significant percentage of CA’s population. Only 6% now.
There are more Asians. When people refer to CA’s ‘minorities’ (and there really aren’t any now since even whites are a ‘minority’), they think of black and Hispanic, but there are now twice as many Asians as blacks. Yet no one ever mentions Asian teenagers.
All of these three groups are their own cultures, with innumerable subcultures, and quite different.
Current CA demos:
39 million total people (more than all of Canada)
15 million whites
15 million Hispanics
5 million Asians
2.5 million blacks
1.5 assorted from every country on earth
There are now more Asians in CA than there are Irish in Ireland or Jews in Israel, but they are invisible. A very diverse group, Indians, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Thai, etc, they are extremely different in their values and politics. But the Filipinos are the largest. They really aren’t being polled at all, at least not near proportionally. No one has any idea how they will vote. They could swing the election tho.
Wikipedia: As of the 2010 Census there were a total of 17,941,286 respondents who claimed to be Asian American and Asian.[21] Out of these respondents in the United States,[22] 30.9% live in California, with 5,556,592 Asian Americans being counted by the 2010 Census.[23] This is a 1.5 million growth in population from the 2000 census, making Asian Americans 14.9 percent of the state’s population.[24] Out of those almost 5.6 million Asian Americans in California there are 1,474,707 Filipinos, 1,349,111 Chinese, 647,589 Vietnamese, 590,445 Indians, 505,225 Koreans, 42,814 Japanese, 109,928 Taiwanese, 102,317 Cambodians, 91,224 Hmong, 69,303 Laotians, 67,707 Thais, 53,474 Pakistanis, 39,506 Borneons, Sumatrans, and Indonesians, 17,978 Burmese, 11,929 Sri Lankans, 10,494 Bangladeshis, 6,231 Nepalese, 5,595 Malaysians, 4,993 Mongolians, 1,513 Singaporeans, 1,377 Okinawans, and 750 Bhutanese.
“Even if — as I suspect, but don’t know for sure — black and hispanic teens are currently a demographic bulge in CA, it would still be extremely surprising to me that they could be more than half the 12+ population; which they would have to be for the “nearly double” number of 40+ arrests to even be proportionally higher at all.”
Have to comment here on current CA demographics, which are widely misunderstood. There isn’t any demographic bulge of black teens. Hispanic yes, but not black. There are 2.5 times as many Hispanics as blacks. Blacks are no longer that significant percentage of CA’s population. Only 6% now.
There are more Asians. When people refer to CA’s ‘minorities’ (and there really aren’t any now since even whites are a ‘minority’), they think of black and Hispanic, but there are now twice as many Asians as blacks. Yet no one ever mentions Asian teenagers.
All of these three groups are their own cultures, with innumerable subcultures, and quite different.
Current CA demos:
39 million total people (more than all of Canada)
15 million whites
15 million Hispanics
5 million Asians
2.5 million blacks
1.5 assorted from every country on earth
There are now more Asians in CA than there are Irish in Ireland or Jews in Israel, but they are invisible. A very diverse group, Indians, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Thai, etc, they are extremely different in their values and politics. But the Filipinos are the largest. They really aren’t being polled at all, at least not near proportionally. No one has any idea how they will vote. They could swing the election tho.
Wikipedia: As of the 2010 Census there were a total of 17,941,286 respondents who claimed to be Asian American and Asian.[21] Out of these respondents in the United States,[22] 30.9% live in California, with 5,556,592 Asian Americans being counted by the 2010 Census.[23] This is a 1.5 million growth in population from the 2000 census, making Asian Americans 14.9 percent of the state’s population.[24] Out of those almost 5.6 million Asian Americans in California there are 1,474,707 Filipinos, 1,349,111 Chinese, 647,589 Vietnamese, 590,445 Indians, 505,225 Koreans, 42,814 Japanese, 109,928 Taiwanese, 102,317 Cambodians, 91,224 Hmong, 69,303 Laotians, 67,707 Thais, 53,474 Pakistanis, 39,506 Borneons, Sumatrans, and Indonesians, 17,978 Burmese, 11,929 Sri Lankans, 10,494 Bangladeshis, 6,231 Nepalese, 5,595 Malaysians, 4,993 Mongolians, 1,513 Singaporeans, 1,377 Okinawans, and 750 Bhutanese.
Glad I included caveat “I suspect, but don’t know for sure”.
(OTOH, if black and hispanic teens are lumped together, as in the statement I responded to [i.e., wasn’t MY lumping], still looks like a demographic bulge per the stats you provided, no? Unless I’m missing something else, my suspicion was correct? And as already noted, I just used the classification that was handed to me. This info is interesting, but not that salient to the point I made, as far as I can tell.)
I’m in the ‘incredulity’ stage, so I have a hard time believing some of those assertions:
As for the question, ‘why haven’t progressives embraced this story of youth success?’ clearly at least one small part of the answer is in the previous comment, which basically says ‘They asked for it.’
Another is … well, there is political power in forcing the Powers That Be to address the problems facing one’s community. If I see someone tweeting, ‘Middle-aged whites are at greater risk from guns and drugs than black teens and young adults!’ that reads right-wing to me. Which leads to all sorts of conundra. (I don’t care, it should be a word.)
Also, there’s a kneejerk human reaction, I think, to reject the suggestion that a group to which one doesn’t belong is suffering unfairly.
That’s an extremely threatening suggestion.
Middle-aged whites are at risk because they own the guns, and in modern America it’s guns in your household that kill you. Half of all gun deaths are suicides. Nearly half the rest are from domestic disputes. Probably the young and nonwhite are still at greater risk from stranger homicide, but that’s a much smaller risk and it’s swamped by the risk of being a gun nut.
That sidesteps the question. If it’s true that middle-aged white gun ownership is disproportionately higher now than 20 years ago, why? We might as well say that young people are at higher risk on account of youth.
No statistics, but I don’t think gun ownership is higher. Gun nuttership certainly is. Those who own guns own a lot more. I have some hair-raising stories among my own family and friends I won’t share only because this is not a pseudonymous account.
There are also issues from economic distress reaching the formerly insulated white “middle class” and from drug addiction.
More guns being owned by fewer people?
https:/www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/05/america-has-more-guns-in-fewer-hands-than-eve
r-before%E2%80%8B
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2016/2/19/analysis-more-guns-but-fewer-gun-owners.html
The data are by no means conclusive, but are strongly suggestive that at least some subset of gun owners are hoarding.
How the fuck can you possibly imagine that you know who owns guns and who doesn’t!!??? You think that the majority of people who own guns reliably report to the federal system their weaponry predilections??? Wake the fuck up, fool!!! Most of the peoople who hoarding weaponry are doing so because they do not trust the feds!!!.
Bst on it.
AG
Perhaps this is just a quirk of how (i.e., the order in which) the site displays comments (I think I’ve noticed the first couple swapping places on occasion), but as the author of what’s currently displayed as “the previous comment”, I can only ask:
WTF?
(Nor, in fact, have I noticed any other comment in this thread to date that “basically says” that.)
Was not referring to your comment. Apologies for the confusion.
I’m wondering if the numbers given in the article about, say, arrest rates are absolute numbers or per capita by category. Example: if you look at the bar chart giving arrest rates by age group, do they indicate raw, absolute numbers or arrests? Or do they indicate something like number of arrests per 1000 people in the relevant category?
I hope y’all are right. I really do. That is a sunny prospect you paint.
However, it has been my observation that any projection whatsoever built on official numbers can be supported by other “official numbers” that paint a different picture. I tend to simply disregard all official pronouncements of how bad or how good things may be and simply observe through personal experience, anecdotal evidence from people I trust and a general survey of the equally official major media news…news which has the same range of “fact” as do the official numbers…to deduce my own picture of where we are as a country.
Trump’s “we’re all doing lousy and we’re doomed” and Clinton’s “the future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades” are both merely self-serving political tropes. The reality of what is happening lies somewhere in the middle.
Trump leavens his doomsaying with a good portion of “I know how to change this,” just as does HRC leaven her more Pollyanna-ish view with “We live in a dangerous, dangerous world!” The policies that she supports…especially foreign policies, which include international trade…are the same ones that produced the rust belt cities, the broken urban ghettoes, the amazingly dangerous national and personal debt problem, the truly serious threat of international terrorism (up to and including WMDs…bet on it) and the overall decline of the middle class.
Trump’s policies? No one…not even Trump…really knows what they are beyond a general “I will fix what’s wrong by being strong and being a master negotiator.” He…so far…pretty much is his policies.
There seems to be a terrorism-related attack almost every day in Europe now. Should that become the norm here in the U.S., Pollyanna gonna have a bad stretch and Mr. ME!!! gonna have a good stretch.
Then comes the election.
Las Vegas and other oddsmakers seem to make it about a 76% chance that HRC will win (up 1.4% over the past 24 hrs) and a 21.5% chance that Trump will win (down 2% over the past 24 hours. I think that’s about right…as of today. There are 2 1/2 months of campaign left. Anything and everything can happen. I personally think that they will both make lousy presidents and I plan to survive them as I have the long line of lousy presidents that have preceded them. Obama was a lousy president and he was better…certainly more talented and smarter…than any president in living memory, back to FDR.
So it goes.
You know the secret to survival?
Surviving.
Later…
AG
Obama wasn’t a lousy president to Wall Street. It just depends which side of the dividends you’re on.
Short term?
Absolutely right.
But of course…as we have been doing for 50+ years,. we will be paying for their dividends for a long time even if we cut them off today.
As will the rest of the world.
I played a club date…like background music for a party…recently at an old money country club on Long island. The crowd was entirely white, mostly early 30s/through early 20s. The help was almost exclusively black and latino. These country clubbers are the 3rd and even 4th generation of that old money. They are gobbling up those trust funds. An emptier group of idiots would be hard to find. G. W. Bush squared. Cubed, even.
AG
It would seem that the violent cohort from 1990 is now in their 40s, perhaps it’s just a continuation of their behavior that was set when they were teenagers?
That was my thought as well. The violent risk-taking middle-agers of today are the same people who were violent risk-taking young people 20 years ago. I know there has been speculation that the high rate of violence 20-30 years ago was touched off by high levels of environmental lead, which has now abated. Could we just be seeing the lead-affected cohort working its way through the generations?
Interesting , but belied by some of the data I think. The increase in violent death rates (see the figure in the article) is only among older whites, not older nonwhites. Both would see increasing rates if they were due to the aging of a cohort previously exposed to lead, and if anything the nonwhite rate would increase more since they tend to live in higher pollution areas.
Except that a very concerted effort was made to remove minorities and put them in prison, where if they are still violent, they aren’t part of the statistics because they are mainly violent to other prisoners.
Looked at the cdc figures the data was culled from. They don’t say prisoners are excluded from the stats, as far as I can tell.
Even so the data doesn’t fit the hypothesis. The young white population was not violent in the past, and that cohort has aged and become more violent.
The violence of the middle-aged white cohort is in large part due to a sharp spike in suicides.
I have written specifically about the amazing drop in crime in LA here before on multiple occasions. I have also written about the decline in youth incarceration, which is a country wide phenomenon.
I have been citing these stats for years – in general neither liberals nor conservatives want to hear them.
But the attempt to draw political conclusions fails rather miserably here.
So let’s remember, among the young Sanders regularly carried 80%, and indeed in some later states beat Clinton among African Americans.
Trump is an anathma to the young: he simply fails the baseline test for tolerance and diversity that is required to even to begin to relate to the young.
But Clinton failed miserably as well. It was not the “sunny” appeal that drew them, it was the candidate who speak to the very real economic divide that the young are very in touch with.
To the young that divide transcends race.
As it should.
In point of fact the young SHARE a common understanding of the political an economic moment their elders do not.
So the article basically has this upside down. Because it starts with the wrong divide.
The defining divide is generational for the young, not racial.
There is more to say – see the impact of lead poisining as an explanation for behavior changes over 45 – bubt I have written this stuff here multiple times.
I am really kind of confused, because I don’t really see voters buying what either candidate is selling.
Trump’s populism is seen as erratic and ungrounded and HC is seen as simply dishonest. Just look at poll after poll after poll.
And young people dislike both of them the worst.
Are only female seniors and POC seeing that “future so bright, you gotta wear shades”? Unlikely, imo. More like willing to endure more of same, afraid of change.
Of course, there is a contingent doing well and eager for HC. How large, I have no idea.