Consequences of racial composition changes in USA 1970-2023

A fairly comprehensive analysis

Some years ago, I gave a good idea of a study to a friend, and he did it. But then he just never published his study anywhere, it’s just sitting there in a Google Docs file that no one can read. So I decided with the power of Claude to redo and expand on the study. The annoying part of doing most research is collecting the data files and dealing with formatting, finding the right variables etc. But Claude will do that quickly, then it’s just a matter of figuring out the right models, good plots. In other words, AI does the boring part and human gets to do only the fun parts.

So everybody knows that race predicts crime, that is, members of some races are more likely to be criminals than others. These rank-orders are mostly not but entirely consistent across time and place, which I reviewed previously. In the USA, Blacks (~80% African ancestry, ~20% European) have by far the highest crime rates with a homicide rate about 6-10x the White one, depending on time:

Given this strong association at the individual level, the geography of crime in the USA is to some extent a map of where Blacks live:

The other red spots are Amerindian places, mainly reservations, and these are very sparsely populated. This isn’t so obviously to people who haven’t been there, but it looks like this: