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An econ friend of mine told me that if you drop the bottom few percent of American counties (accounting for a trivial amount of the population) all of the notorious disparities between the US and Europe disappear.
Basically, we have a very small number of very shitty parts, but otherwise it's at least as good as Europe on whatever metric you care about.
69 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 5h
That's interesting. Many statistics don't stand up to scrutiny.
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heard something similar re: gun violence. Take out DC/Baltimore and Chicago (and two more that I forgot...) and there wouldn't be a murder/shootings epidemic in the U.S.
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And, really, you don't need to take out the entire cities. If you can get granular enough data, just taking out the worst few dozen neighborhoods would be sufficient.
Also, the point isn't about cherry picking data. The point is that Europe has absolutely no analogue for those kinds of communities (although that's changing of late and the crime gap is closing accordingly).
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I wanna know which counties to drop, haha
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They're such outliers, they should be pretty easy to find. I want to say the number he told me was 20 counties (which I know is less than one percent but most datasets don't cover every county).
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