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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:58
The Truth About Crime
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
So this is the truth about crime, and particularly focused on the United States, not just as a teaser.
Imagine this.
Let me take you on a journey.
Imagine that there was a way to reduce violent crime by almost 90%.
Does that sound interesting to you?
It's free.
It's legal.
It's available for you to bring into being right now.
Would you be interested?
Well, that's the teaser.
We're going to talk mostly about crime in the United States, where the shocking statistics are that a person is murdered every 36.9 minutes.
That would be seconds if we include foreign policy.
We're just talking about domestic.
Every 1.6 minutes there is a robbery.
One motor vehicle theft occurs every 45.7 seconds.
One aggravated assault occurs every 42.5 seconds.
A violent crime occurs every 26.3 seconds.
One burglary every 18.2 seconds.
One larceny or theft every 5.4 seconds.
A property crime occurs every 3.8 seconds.
The question is why?
What is causing this?
Well, we have some answers.
You might not like them, but you need to know them because this is the truth about crime.
Let's look at crime trends as a whole.
This is from 1960 to 2014.
So on the left hand side, that's violent crime and property crime is on the right hand side.
As you can see here from the 1960s, through to the late 80s early 90s.
We saw a massive homicidal Mac Mac smoking wasteland spike in crime that then began to fall off in the 90s and is starting to bump back up a little bit now with the Ferguson effect but there are some answers that are tentative.
Nobody knows for sure.
One of the theories of course is that when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the early 1970s 15 to 20 years later you see a reduction in crime as all of the unwanted children, particularly the young men, aren't there and therefore the crimes aren't enacted.
Take that first domino off the sequence and the last domino doesn't go down.
80s and 90s you saw the introduction of stiffer sentencing laws.
In the 60s, because of a leftist approach that criminals were mere victims of class consciousness and a kind of Marxist determinism, economically speaking, you know, low socioeconomic status, of course they become criminals!
And so there was a focus on rehabilitation, on, you know, hugs and teddy bears to make criminals better.
This did not work very well.
And so what happened in the 90s as well was with stiffer sentencing laws, the habitual criminals, the career criminals, were taken off the streets.
Thus, of course, crime went down.
And of course, as it was no longer a revolving door to go into prison, fewer people engaged in a life of crime.
Now, as far as this violent crime, property crime, well, it's related, of course, to violent crime.
But, of course, better alarm systems, video cameras, and cameras on phones, and better quality of entertainment inside the home.
I mean, I remember when I was a kid growing up in England, to count them, two channels that had anything of substance on them, and pretty much nobody watched them until once or twice a year when a Bond movie was shown, the entire country shut down.
So you kind of were left to go outside and create your own entertainment.
Now, of course, if you're inside, Binge-watching Netflix, you're not out committing crimes.
And of course to some degree with violent crime there are some potential associations between the prevalence of pornography and a reduction in rape statistics.
So these are all possibilities.
Of course also taking lead out of gasoline and taking lead out of paint has had some fairly statistically significant impacts on the prevalence of violent crime.
And, of course, general anti-theft devices, particularly in cars and so on.
Oh, well, that's helped.
So, no particular answer, but a sort of constellation of things that are most likely affecting what is going on.
Yes, it's a young man's game in general.
This is violent crime and property crime.
And with property crime here, of course, we're not including political candidates, Federal Reserve Chairman and so on, where the spike would be closer to the right-hand side.
Just talking private citizens, as you can see here, it spikes in the late teens to early to mid-twenties.
35.7% of all arrested persons are between the ages of 20 and 29 in property crime.
That's for violent crime.
In property crime, it's 33.9% of all arrested persons between the ages of 20 to 29.
Now, one of the reasons why property crime and violent crime may be going down is that there are fewer kids being born.
America's, I think, the only Western country that's even close to replacement rates of 2.1 children per couple.
It goes down at 1.1 In some of the places in Japan and of course Italy, Portugal, Greece, Spain, all very low levels of reproduction, so that's having somewhat of an effect as well.
Oh, you men!
You men, you men, you men.
Now, if we look here, this is male and female.
Yes, we've got all kinds of traditional colors on this.
80% of arrests for violent crime in America in 2014 were men.
Four out of five, 20% women.
And the victims were 51% male and 49% female.
Now, men, of course, have roughly 18 or so times the levels of testosterone than women do.
Testosterone, of course, somewhat linked to aggression and sexy baldness.
So this data difference is really, really important, right?
You see this 80% of the arrests for violent crime are men.
So where the data diverge, we really want to report it.
You can't just report violent crime data as one big blob.
That leads people to think that maybe it's 50-50 men and women.
So wherever the data strongly diverges, we have a responsibility to report it.
Which brings us to the next slide.
U.S.
violent crime rates by race.
Yes, not exactly the same.
So blacks, This is, of course, all of these rates going forward are incidents per 100,000 people.
Blacks, 1,057 per 100,000.
Hispanics, 518.
Whites, 219.
And Asians, 90.
It's like the entire Kung Fu binge-watching that I did when I was younger is all a complete lie.
So blacks, again, almost double Hispanics.
Hispanics, more than double whites.
And whites, More than double Asians.
So the violent crime rates by race are related to these kinds of divergences, which are important to understand.
We'll get to some causality in a bit, but we're going to break this down a little bit further.
The ratios actually change depending on the type of crime.
So if we look at robbery rates by race, we can see blacks 429.7, Hispanics 120.
0.5 whites, 37.2.
Asians, 13.5.
So here again, we see a radical difference.
Whites almost triple Asians and Hispanics.
Triple whites and blacks, well, significantly higher, let's say, more than triple Hispanics.
So again, that's robbery rates by race.
What about assault rates?
Okay.
Tragically still wide but not so tragically narrowing a little bit.
So this is 2014, and again, blacks 573.6, but 100,000, Hispanics 331.4, whites 141.9, and Asians 60.
And again, ratios beginning to close down a little bit, but still widely divergent by race.
Homicide rates, blacks 17.21, Hispanics 5.55, whites 1.84, and Asians 1.
One of the things that's true, which we mentioned in our recent presentation, the truth about gun control is that when you think of just homicide, when you think of murder in the United States, oh America is such a violent country, it's not as a whole.
Right?
There are specific pockets of high violence in America, but when you exclude those pockets, things get kind of normalized.
Like, the murder rate for whites in America, like the rate at which whites murder, pretty much the same as Belgium and Norway and Canada.
It's very close.
Whites murder around the Western world pretty much at the same rates.
But of course, blacks, in the very high murder rates and high homicide rates and so on, tend to skew the data.
And then everybody paints with too broad a brush and looks at American society as a whole and thinks that it has a violence problem.
And that's not the way it is.
Now, we have some issues with this FBI data, but I did want to mention this particular slide.
We've got the truth about rape on this very channel is something that you really need to figure out, particularly as we're going through this supposed crisis of rape culture and so on.
Look at that.
So rape rates by race.
According to the FBI data, 81.25 for blacks, 57.19 for Hispanics, 24.16 for whites and 8.7 for Asians.
Property crime rates by race.
Well, 5,515 per 100,000 for blacks, 25.07.
For Hispanics, 2,200 for whites, 542 for Asians.
Burkery rates by race.
Blacks 1,224, Hispanics 627, Whites 422, Asians 102.
Larceny and theft rates.
This is stealing personal possessions.
whites, 422, Asians, 102.
Larceny and theft rates.
This is stealing personal possessions.
So blacks, 3,851, 500,000 Hispanics, 1,000.
Now, what's coming up next?
637 whites coming in just behind Hispanics at 1,603 and Asians at 386.
Now, what's coming up next?
Most people, when they see this data, they say, "Well, if you look at income, Asians are at the top and then followed by whites, followed by Hispanics and blacks are at the And therefore the amount of crime, particularly violent crime, is driven by socio-economic status.
The lower the socio-economic status, the more poverty, the more ghettoization, then the more crime.
And therefore the way that it's perceived to solve this problem is to give more money to poor people and that way they won't commit crimes.
The idea that this is not a shakedown by poor people, kind of tough to escape.
You know, if some mafia guy comes to your restaurant and says, pay me money and I won't commit a crime against you, that's illegal, that's a shakedown.
But it's more complicated than that.
It is not a function of poverty alone and pouring more money.
into the poor neighborhoods will not solve the problem of crime.
And this, of course, should be the lesson of the last, say, 50 or 60 years of the welfare state, not to mention since 2001, the hundreds of billions of dollars poured into Head Start programs designed to raise academic performance among underachieving children and so on, which has had no effect other than to leave the United States hundreds of billions of dollars poorer.
So this idea that, well, you see it's poverty and we backfill money, you know, take a big money truck and dump it into the poor neighborhood and suddenly it becomes exactly like a rich neighborhood is not the case.
Unemployment rate and property crime.
Well, if poverty or lack of money is a driver for crime, then these should be very closely correlated.
But they are not!
The correlation is 0.07.
So 1.0 is a perfect correlation.
0 is no correlation at all.
And this is one bee's wing to the left of no correlation at all.
So you can see here in red, property crimes, U.S.
unemployment rate.
These should track if unemployment or lack of money coming in is a cause of crime.
I don't have any bread, I'm gonna go steal some bread, and so on.
And there's no correlation.
There's not even a shifted Al Gore-style correlation, there's no correlation fundamentally at all.
This is from 1972 to 2013.
So this is not massive disproof, this doesn't irradiate the entire theory, but it should give you pause if you believe that it is merely poverty which drives crime.
So, let's look at unemployment rate.
This is 1972 to 2013.
Whites on the bottom, and then Hispanics, and then Blacks.
And does this seem to track anything to do with the violent crime?
No.
I'm sorry, we don't have Asian data before 2000.
So, this goes up and down, and it does not track very well at all with the violent crime.
Let's look at property crime and unemployment rate by city.
This is some of the original research that we're able to put together for you because people help support this conversation and the illumination of philosophy and data into the challenging realms of public policy and public perception of social problems.
These yellow dots are the cities.
The property crime rate is along the bottom left right x-axis.
On the right axis is the unemployment rate.
So, if unemployment or poverty was a driver of property crime, then this line should be going bottom left to top right.
In other words, the lower the unemployment, the lower the property crime rate.
It is not the case at all.
Here we have a correlation of 0.17, and that is extremely low in general.
So, we can't find a correlation here either.
It is not unemployment that appears to be driving property crime.
Now, property crime and black unemployment rates, since of course blacks are having the highest rates of crimes, and, you know, just please understand the vast majority of blacks, of course, very peaceful, law-abiding, nice people, but nonetheless, proportionately, there are higher populations of criminals within the black community.
Property crime rate.
The correlation is a little bit lower, 0.16.
So this is property crime rate and black unemployment rate by city.
And there's almost no correlation at all.
So it is not unemployment, which is loss of income, of course, loss of opportunity.
That is not driving the criminality.
What about poverty rate and property crime rate?
This is 1960 to 2014.
The red, of course, is the property crime rate, and the U.S.
property crime rate is in the white.
Of course, you can see here, during the 1960s, the poverty rate was going down, while the property crime rate was going up.
And this just sort of squiggling around, back and forth, round and round, the correlation is minus .59.
And that means that the poorer people are, in general, the less property crime they engage in.
The poorer people are, the less property crime that they engage in.
So this is not only a rejection of the thesis, it is the proposition of a counter-thesis.
If property crimes were driven by poverty, then the correlation would be positive.
Here it is significantly negative.
A minus almost 0.6 correlation is a very significant correlation.
So, sorry, doesn't work out that way.
Just by the by, and we've got the truth about poverty on this presentation, one of the great heartbreaks
of American social policy and social policy around the world is of course that in the nineteen sixties the welfare state was introduced and uh... for throughout the post-war period poverty was declining about one percent one percentage point every year you can see this tailing off into the sixties and then when the welfare state comes in poverty stops declining and starts bumping along the bottom here so the problem was being solved until the government came in and attempted to solve it further and faster at which point uh... the problem became
Unsolvable, at least in the short term.
What about property crime and poverty rate by city?
Well, here we have a bit of a correlation.
0.4.
So, as the poverty rate percentage goes up, the property crime rate goes up to some degree.
It's not linear, but it definitely is a trend.
But let's break it down even further, because you say, ah, you see, it's poverty that drives the property crime.
Because as you can see, the more poor people there are in a city, the more the property crime goes up.
But that is not the case if we look at it in a more granular fashion.
So this is property crime and white population, Caucasian population, by city.
And here we can see that there's no correlation.
More whites, less whites, it doesn't really have any effect on The property crime in the city, property crime rate in the city.
So, sorry, it is not poverty alone that is driving this, because otherwise this graph would be the same or stronger for all of the races.
So it is not poverty as a whole.
Property crime and Hispanic population by city.
Well, here we see A negative correlation of a minus 0.19.
In other words, the more Hispanics that you get coming into a city in general, the lower the property crime becomes.
There are some theories that they're pushing out the more high criminal black population, but nobody knows for sure.
But this is a negative correlation.
So when we say, aha, poverty is more crime.
No, for whites, it's not.
For Hispanics, it's not.
Property crime and black population by city.
Okay, so now we have a positive correlation of 0.39.
And that is significant.
So here you can see that as the black population in a city goes up, the property crime rate tends to go up again.
Lots of outliers here.
It's not a 1.0 correlation, but it's a significant correlation.
So again, when people just say poverty without breaking it out by ethnicity, they are masking the issue, the real issue, which I believe can... Solvable is a strong word, but there's a lot that we can do to help this.
But of course, first you need to identify Where the issue actually is.
Black population and poverty rate by city.
So if we look at this, we can see that there's a 0.5 correlation, which is stronger even than the last one.
So what this means is that as the black population goes up in a city, the poverty rate goes up in a city.
And of course, this is the famous course of what is called white flight.
And so here we're starting to zero in on what the actual problem is with regards to criminality, and it is not only poverty.
Let's look at welfare usage by American households.
So among all households, 30% In America, 30% of all households are using welfare.
Among Asians, 22%.
Among whites, 23%.
Hispanics, 54%.
And blacks, 55%.
whites 23%, Hispanics 54%, and blacks 55%.
So you could use this to make the foundation of a case that it is not poverty that drives criminality, but welfare consumption that drives criminality.
And you could make a case for it, and it would include things like, well, you know, the Hispanics and blacks on welfare tend to be single mom, households, you know, almost three-quarters of American blacks are now born outside
of wedlock, so the young men grow up without a stable father figure, and there are some black academics and intellectuals who theorize that the black mom's anger at the black dad, the black father of her kids, who left and abandoned them, and so on, is taken out on the black young men, and so you could argue that the welfare state, by enabling single mother households, creates a more fertile feeding ground for Well, this makes the case even more strongly.
Welfare usage by American households with children.
with negative outcomes for children, particularly in the realm of criminality.
Again, not an airtight case, but you could begin moving in that direction with some credibility based on the data.
Well, this makes the case even more strongly.
Welfare usage by American households with children.
So among all American households with children, 52% of them are on the welfare state.
See, there's male privileges.
If the man leaves, well, all the other men and women are just taxed to take his place.
Among Asians, 36%.
Whites, 41%.
Hispanics, 76%.
And blacks, 82%.
And is this creating an environment where young men are growing up?
Because remember, 80-20, right?
Yeah, some young men are growing up with father absence, with a lack of feeling of Capacity to succeed within society, which can fester and foster a sort of anti-educational, oh you're acting white if you want to study and read books and so on, this Oreo argument or verbal abuse against blacks, that you're black on the outside or brown on the outside but white on the inside because you want to succeed.
Does it create an entire toxic and dysfunctional culture?
Let's not even get started on the war on drugs, another topic entirely, but here again you could make the case.
That if high criminality is associated with Hispanics and Blacks, and that ratio is not dissimilar for welfare consumption with children, maybe we're getting somewhere.
So, a landmark 10-year study that tracked – we're jumping the pond here, stay with me – that tracked 716 British youths found a very interesting relationship between crime and poverty.
The study found a distinct pattern in criminal behavior.
Children who had greater self-control, and a strong adherence to a moral code of conduct were identified as crime-averse, while crime-prone individuals were impulsive and short-sighted.
So I have now been going on ten years bringing reason, evidence, philosophy, and a rational system of ethics to the world.
Why?
Well, it's true, it's good, it's fun, and it also helps young men avoid A life of crime.
Greater self-control, a strong adherence to a moral code of conduct.
Well, with growing secularism among the youth, it's going to have to be philosophy that takes the place of religion, which to some degree was able to restrain the more savage demons of our nature in the past, but given that religiosity is falling generally around the world, it's philosophy, it's rational philosophy, it's what I call universally preferable behavior, my
Proof of secular ethics, which you can find at freedomainradio.com slash free, because we are losing religion and because we are faced with the nihilism that generally erupts and consumes the world like a giant black hole swallowing up a sun.
The nihilism that erupts in the absence of religion can only be combated by rational philosophy, which is why I'm putting so much time and effort into getting this information out to people.
About 60% of the crimes committed by the study group were the responsibility of the 16% most crime-prone youths.
The 16% most crime-averse children committed only 0.5% of the crimes.
So even when we're talking about socioeconomic status, we're not talking about a blanket statement that can encapsulate and include all of the children.
So if you're going to say, well, if you have an income below $8,000 a year, then you're crime-prone.
Well, no, because if there are other characteristics, such as what we talk about here, greater self-control, strong adherence to a moral code of conduct, You can't mix those people in with everyone else.
Otherwise, you are simply not identifying the actual instance.
And then you're going to end up misapplying your resources.
Right?
So if, let's say, people from Iceland and people from Australia.
Well, people from Iceland get skin cancer at lower rates than people from Australia for the obvious reason that is in the name.
But if you lump these two together and say, well, let's just apply equal don't You know, slip, slap, slop, you know, slip on a hat, slap on some sunscreen, slap on a shirt, slap on some sunscreen, right?
So if you're going to say, well, Icelandish people and Australian people, you know, mix them all together, you're going to end up over-applying resources to try and combat Skin cancer in Iceland and under-applying it.
You've got to granulate these things out in order to focus our precious resources on actually helping people who are at high risk.
So blurring it all together might make you feel great from a hysterical, egalitarianism, goo-goo land of hippie oneness, but it doesn't actually help you solve problems, which is what I am committed to doing through this conversation.
So, even among the poor.
Importantly, impulsive and short-sighted youths didn't automatically commit more crimes.
However, they were more likely to be influenced by a bad environment.
See, poverty does not automatically make for a bad environment.
If poverty drove crime, monks would be criminals, right?
It doesn't make any sense.
And if wealth did not Like if wealth made you crime-averse, then there'd be no such thing as white-collar corruption.
There'd be no such thing as some of the corrupt 1% pillaging the body politic, right?
So it is not poverty, but a bad environment.
Quote, many young people are crime-averse and simply don't perceive crime as a possible course of action.
It doesn't matter what the situation is, noted the study's lead researcher.
The idea that opportunity makes the thief That young people will inevitably commit crime in certain environments runs counter to our findings.
Rather, only the crime-prone become vulnerable to said opportunities when taking part in environments with a moral context that encourages – or at least does not discourage – crime.
Now, one great way to get young people To turn away from rational, economic, and productive participation in their society would be something like this.
Gather a whole group of young people together and say to them, you'll never get ahead.
Because there are all of these institutions that just hate your guts.
And there's all these dominant people and groups and ethnicities who just hate your guts.
They'll never cut you a break.
You'll never be able to get ahead.
You've got no chance.
Oh, by the way, we're gonna give you the worst possible schools and really a lot of single moms floating around and we'll throw in some rap and we'll throw in some drug culture and we'll throw in some drug war and then you have a perfect petri dish for breeding under functioning and hostile youths and It's not just the bad environment within the household, it's the bad environment that is portrayed within society.
So whenever people start talking about institutionalized racism, and you can't get ahead, and you've got no chance, and everybody's going to hate you, and they all want to put you down, and they all think you're inferior, and blah-de-blah-de-blah, well, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that turns more people to a life of crime, which then makes some people in society find it hard to resist negative characterizations of particular groups.
Single motherhood, violent crime, 1962-2014.
So this was tracking up with, again, until the mid-90s, early to mid-90s, single mother families, which is the yellow, was tracking up with violent crime.
Violent crime has diminished and single mother family percentage has begun to level off a little bit.
And this will likely continue until the government runs out of money for the welfare state, at which point Hopefully there will be some remediation of this terrible, terrible transition into a single mother based underclass.
Single motherhood and property crime again.
Single mother families going up, property crime going up at the same time, property crime has begun to diminish, single motherhood continues to do its thing.
But it's of course not equal.
U.S.
single motherhood 1980-2014 by race, we don't have.
Asian but white, I'm assuming it's lower.
White has been going from 10 to about 20% since 1980-2014.
Hispanics gone from the low to mid-20s to just over 30, and blacks have stayed up around 50, hovering between 50 and 60%.
Now, this is interesting.
A correlation of 0.96 is like two twins standing side by side.
Hey!
One freckle difference!
We'll count that as the same.
Divorce rate and property crime, 1960-2012.
0.96 correlation.
Divorce rate and property crime.
And this, of course, is not taking the entirely rational assumption that divorce in the United States, particularly in terms of how the family court system treats men, is fundamentally a property crime.
But here you can see divorce rate and property crime.
If you can bring the divorce rate down, the property crime will tend to diminish.
This is correlation, of course.
Nobody can prove causation.
But when correlation is this close, you kind of edge a little closer to causation.
The causes we can only speculate about, but anybody who is interested in reducing, say, property crime in the United States, who's not looking at divorce rates, is not looking almost certainly in the right place.
Divorce rate and violent crime.
Property crime, 0.96.
Divorce rate and violent crime, 0.85.
0.85 correlation.
As the divorce rate has begun to diminish, violent crime has begun to diminish.
Divorce, of course, breeds a lot of anger and resentment, and generally removes the father from the house, and crushes and emasculates the father through the brutal, subjectivist, and incredibly aggressive U.S.
family court system.
Basically a giant ball-grinding machine with over-greased and overpaid lawyers at the helm.
And so if you're a young man and your family goes through a divorce, well, daddy's gone, mother's in charge, daddy's a broken man, is that going to make you want to get married?
Two things that civilize young men.
And this is not just a theory.
You can see this in terms of their diminished testosterone levels.
Number one, get married.
That's going to lower your testosterone levels significantly.
Number two, have children.
And the more time you spend with your children, the lower your testosterone goes.
You may have noticed I'm a little bit less shouty than I was in the past.
Well, I've been a stay-at-home dad for close to seven years, so I'm on the downwards Curve in terms of testosterone, which is fine.
It's not determinism.
You still have a choice and all of that But when divorce goes down violent crime goes down violent crime basically is saying I'm not gonna plan for a future in this society and when you have these airstrikes regularly taking out men in society and destroying them Young men say, okay, well, why would I want to bother getting married?
And if you don't want to bother getting married, why would you need to gather resources?
The general thing is you go out, right?
Your daddy's rich and your mama's good looking.
You go out and get resources in order to get yourself a higher quality woman.
If you don't want to get married.
Yeah, desire to get an education, to get resources, to obey the law diminishes.
So when you can bring divorce rates down, violent crime comes down as well, because there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow called social conformity.
Young men go sour when society has nothing left to offer them, right?
The old bargain is, okay, yeah, we know you want to run around, we know you want to Stay out all night and drink and drive.
But if you don't do those things, looky, looky, we've got some lovely carrots for you.
We've got sexual access through marriage.
We've got stability.
We've got job security.
We've got all these wonderful things that are going to coast you into a well-respected grandfatherly old age where you can hoist up your suspenders, whittle something on the porch, and yell at the kids who throw things on your lawn.
However, if society doesn't have any particular goodies to offer young men, then they can't.
Young men will not be that interested in conforming to society's rules.
If a young man looks into his future and says, okay, so I could go get a big expensive degree and end up with a huge amount of debt like my older brother did, or I can go and get married and I can spend 20 years accumulating resources until mom just decides to pull the shredder and throw me, catapult me into a giant vat of Unlubricated lawyers with giant dildos.
So why would I want that?
I don't want to do what Dad did.
I don't want to follow the rules because there's no part of goal at the end.
It's all just exploitation.
So, just a theory, but something worth considering.
So, now we're going to start to zero in on something very, very important.
And I've got lots and lots of researchers who've come on to this show to talk about IQ.
It's a real measure.
It measures something very real.
It's very predictive of social outcomes.
So, Dr. Kevin Beaver, who's been on this show before, you can check out Linda Gottfridson, who's coming up, and Eric Turkheimer, and we've talked to Charles Murray, and we've talked to James Flynn, Dr. James Flynn.
Let's go into IQ and see if we can tease something out that's of value.
In 2010, criminologists Dr. Kevin Beaver and Dr. John Paul Wright published a study examining the association between IQ and crime rates at the county level.
They examined 243 United States counties.
They found, and I quote, statistically significant and negative associations between county level IQ and the property crime rate, the burglary rate, the larceny rate, The motor vehicle theft rate, the violent crime rate, the robbery rate, and the aggravated assault rate.
You know, IQ is a bell curve, right?
Lots of people in the middle, few people at the super smart end, and a few people at the not so super smart end of the opposite.
And so as in the county, at the county level, as IQ, as average IQ goes down, a wide variety of crimes go up.
Now here we're starting to look at something more particular than just poverty.
See, low IQ tends to produce low economic value.
That's important.
If you track people's IQ and income, it goes up pretty straight, right?
Smarter you are, the more money you're going to tend to make.
There's exceptions and so on.
Everybody knows the five easy pieces.
Jack Nicholson, hold the chicken, give me the toast guy who's a genius, but Doesn't make any money.
It's much less common to find somebody who's not smart who makes a fortune.
But in general, there's a trend that the smarter you are, the more money you make.
Now, if it's low IQ that is producing both poverty and high crime, then we are starting to get somewhere in terms of figuring out what the cause is.
Because if we say, well, poverty causes high criminality, then the solution is, okay, well, let's give money to poor people and then they'll stop committing crimes.
But if it's low IQ that produces both criminality and poverty, then throwing money won't make any difference.
Drafting people into school.
Nobody knows how to budge IQ.
Nobody knows how to budge the physical substructure, what's called G. Nobody knows how to functionally budge IQ from its original position.
And the correlation between your childhood IQ and your adult IQ is incredibly high.
Very high.
Very, very hard to budge IQ.
Throwing money at it won't do it.
And so this is one of the reasons why the welfare state hasn't worked, why Head Start hasn't worked.
These are things that explain very important things in society And there's things we can do, I believe, it's just not the things we have been doing.
So lower average IQs at the county level associated with higher crime rates in those communities.
Furthermore, these results were unaffected by what's called concentrated disadvantage.
So this is a measure that's used by criminologists to encompass significant predictors of higher crime.
So, concentrated disadvantage is a scale that includes the following items.
Proportion of blacks in the community.
Proportion of female-headed households.
Poverty, welfare usage, and unemployment rate.
So it doesn't matter how many blacks are in the neighborhood.
It doesn't matter how much welfare is being consumed.
It doesn't matter how unemployed people are.
It doesn't really matter.
When you normalize for all of these things, the results still matter.
Has this destroyed our earlier feces?
Let's find out.
So what this means is that low intelligence people of any race, of any ethnicity, are more likely to commit crime.
Now, since blacks have the lowest average measured IQ in the United States, followed by Hispanics, and then whites, and then Asians, their crime rates are not a surprise.
You remember we go back and we look at why Asians are very low, whites are a little higher, Hispanics are higher, and blacks are higher.
This follows average intelligence by ethnicity.
Asians have the highest IQ.
Let's put aside Ashkenazi Jews for the moment, but Asians have the highest IQ, followed by whites.
Who have a little bit of a lower IQ than Asians on average, followed by Hispanics who have a lower IQ than Whites on average, followed by Blacks who have a lower IQ than Hispanics on average.
So these crime rates, not hugely shocking.
So, East Asian, White, Hispanic and Black.
These bell curves, we're going to take a little bit of a moment on this because this is where we can really begin to help people.
So if we look at This is a sweet spot of criminality, generally 75 to 90.
85, 97, 80 to 90.
75 to 90, 85, 97, 80 to 90, there's a sweet spot of criminality that criminologists have found.
Now, as I said before, going from lowest to highest average IQ, and this is held relatively constant for decades, and no, it's not culturally biased and anything like that.
So blacks have an average IQ, American blacks have an average IQ of 85.
Hispanics have an average IQ of 89.
Whites have an average IQ of between 100 and 103, and Asians have an average IQ of 105 to 106.
And Asians in particular score very, very well on spatial reasoning, which is one of the reasons why you know the stereotype of the Asian engineer more than a stereotype.
Whereas if you look at Jewish Americans, the Ashkenazi Jews, as distinct from the Sephardic Jews, which are mostly of course still in the Middle East, Well, Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 113+.
If you just look at language skills, they're often in the 120s, which is one of the reasons why, of course, there are so many Jewish writers and Jewish reporters and Jewish philosophers and so on.
And Jews actually score below average on visual-spatial skills, which is why there are proportionately fewer Jewish engineers relative to East Asian engineers, because the East Asians score very high.
There's lots of theories as to how this came about and the degree to which it's genetic or environmental.
We've had discussions on this show before.
I leave you to look that up to your own leisure, but rest assured that these are not scores that are culturally biased and they haven't just arisen over the last couple of years and they're not fixable by any methodology that has been tried over the past hundred years.
If you look around the world, cross-national differences in the rate of violent crime, murder, rape and serious assault, significantly correlated to a country's IQ scores.
So the higher the IQ of a country in general, the lower the rate of crime.
High IQ is a very precious resource in society.
High IQ people tend to be more mentally healthy, more sociable, they tend to have longer lasting and more stable marriages, they tend to be better parents, they tend to Just be more richer of course they generally tend to do better in society so this is a significant value in society and we had Jason Richwine on the show who was talking about the study that he did at Harvard
Where he was pointing out that Hispanics come in with significantly lower IQs than Asians, Ashkenazi Jews, or whites, and that this lower IQ persists over several generations, which would seem to indicate that there is a strong genetic component.
Genetics often considered to be between 50 to 60 to 80 percent of one's final IQ.
Here's an excerpt from The G-Factor, The Science of Mental Ability, by Dr. Arthur Jensen.
And he wrote, The rate of serious crimes against persons such as robbery, assault, rape, and homicide is very low and nearly constant across IQ levels above 100.
But below IQ 100, the rate rises sharply and then declines rapidly below IQ 70.
So, just taking whites as an average, if you are at or above the average for whites, Well, higher IQ is going to help you avoid criminality, you know, this evil genius thing, you know, the guy with the Bill Gates haircut and a bald Cheshire cat on his lap.
It's kind of a myth.
The smarter you are, the better, the more you can see over the horizon, the less impulsive you are, the more you can be afraid of the negative consequences of impulsive actions.
And of course, the smarter you are in a relatively free market economy, the more people are going to bid up the value of your brains.
So the smarter you are, the more you have to gain by following the rules of society and not ending up in jail, whereas the less intelligent you are, the more welfare is appealing, because you're not giving up that much, and the less you are going to want to obey the rules as a whole.
Now, please understand that the vast majority of people in the IQ range from 60 to 100 never become criminals.
Here's a continued quote.
The Asian population of the United States, which has an average IQ of about 105, and only about 15% of Asians fall below IQ 90, which is the region of highest crime rates, they have a crime rate lower than that of the white population.
White populations mean IQ of 100, with 25% of the white population falling below IQ 90.
Jews, another group with mean IQ well above 100, also have a relatively low crime rate.
Again, we're just talking about general crimes for the general population.
Now the black population with a mean IQ, this is again a quote from Dr. Jensen, the black population with a mean IQ of 85 and approximately 60% falling below IQ 90 has higher rates of delinquency and criminality than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States.
Robert Gordon has coined the term IQ commensurability for his discovery that nearly all of the mean black-white differences in delinquency and crime rates can be accounted for in terms of the mean black-white difference in IQ.
Sorry, that's a real mouthful.
But what he's saying is that if you just do a slice And you just take all of the whites with, say, IQs around 85, and you take all of the blacks with IQs around 85, and you take all of the Asians and all of the Jews with an IQ of 85, they're all going to be committing crimes at roughly similar rates.
It's the higher proportion of blacks and Hispanics who have People around IQ 85, which is the sweet spot of criminality, that accounts for it.
In other words, if you normalize by IQ, racial differences in criminality disappear.
Also, of course, there are some environmental aspects in that people who have lower IQs are generally less able to provide the kind of quality, security, stability, and income for their kids that can help the kids have better childhoods.
Now, there are genetic factors which could Contribute to problems of criminality in the black population that aren't specific to Intelligence one which has popped up actually relatively recently cancer researchers are trying to figure out why black males suffer from such significantly high rates of prostate cancer and they found that That, depending on how you measure it, depending on the population, that blacks have up to 17 or 18% more testosterone than whites.
And since, of course, as we talked about earlier, testosterone is linked to aggression, this could be one possibility.
But, let's talk about the warrior gene.
Monoamine oxidase, A, M-A-O-A, is an enzyme that is responsible for the production of dopamine and serotonin.
The enzyme is encoded in DNA by the MAOA gene, which is also known as the warrior gene, which is how I'll refer to it, because of its association with violence and antisocial behavior.
If you measure people who have this gene and then you look at how violent and antisocial they are, there's a relationship.
Now the warrior gene varies between individuals and races based on the number of repeated alleles.
These variations also contribute to differences in the activity of the warrior gene.
Multiple studies have established a strong relationship between low warrior gene activity and violent behavior in humans.
As one study noted, quote, deficient warrior gene activity may dispose the organism towards neural hyper-reactivity to threat.
Hyper-reactivity, fight or flight, is very strong among people who have deficient warrior gene activity.
The rare two-repeat version of the warrior gene is linked to the lowest observed gene activity, and individuals who have it are particularly prone to aggression.
So this is a two-repeat version of the warrior gene, and the lower the activity of the warrior gene, the more explosive your temper, the more hyperactivity you have towards threats.
A 2008 study of 2,524 men found that those with the warrior gene, 2R, this two repeat version, report, quote, a level of serious delinquency and violent delinquency in adolescents and young adulthood that were about twice as high as those for participants with the other variants.
So either the one gene or the no gene.
So this is twice as high for those who have this particular two repeat version of the warrior gene.
So 2012, Dr. Kevin Beaver et al. successfully replicated the findings of the 2008 study but focused on the arrest and incarceration rates of American blacks.
Quote, analyses of African American males revealed that carriers of the two-repeat allele were at much greater risk for being arrested during their lifetime and for being incarcerated during their lifetime.
However, simply carrying, this is what drives me so crazy when people won't talk about this stuff, is that there are solutions.
Simply carrying the 2R version of the warrior gene is not enough to result in more violent behavior.
For adult violent conviction, maltreated males with the low warrior gene activity genotype were more likely than non-maltreated males with this genotype to be convicted of a violent crime by a significant odds ratio of 9.8%.
In contrast, among males with high warrior gene activity, maltreatment did not confer significant risk for violent conviction.
Okay.
Remember we said at the beginning, if we had a way of reducing violent crime by 90% that was free and available to everyone right away and Would you be interested?
Of course you would.
Here's where we hit the jackpot.
I'm going to read this again.
For adult violent conviction, maltreated males with the low warrior gene activity genotype were more likely than non-maltreated males with this genotype to be convicted of a violent crime by a significant odds ratio of 9.8.
9.8.
That's huge.
That is huge.
So what that means is it doesn't in particular matter whether you have this warrior gene activity.
What matters is whether you're abused as a child.
For years and years and years I have been pounding this drum.
Treat your children well and we will have a free society.
Treat your children well and we will reduce violence.
Treat your children well and we will reduce aggression.
Treat your children well and we will reduce rape.
I have been talking about this for years.
The data is coming in.
Philosophically, of course, to aggress against your children is a violation of the non-aggression principle and blah blah blah.
But here we see the actual data.
This is a no-kidding moment for the world as a whole.
A couple of years ago I did A video, the truth about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, wherein I put, and this went out to over a million people on YouTube.
You can check it out on this channel.
It's well worth watching.
I put out a very passionate plea for black families to maltreat their children less, less corporate punishment, less yelling, less instability, more marriage, more stability, more security, because It is so important.
Of course all children should be treated well, no question about this, but there is this, I don't know, this like dancing around the black community kind of thing.
Sorry, I mean if this was a white group that hit their children while producing more criminals, I'd damn well say that too.
This has nothing to do with race fundamentally, it's just looking at a high-risk population and telling them what they need to do to stop this cycle of violence.
Avoiding this topic is not helping the black community.
To continue, a number of studies have found that childhood abuse is the triggering condition for violence.
In other words, carriers of 2R become more violent than the average population when they are abused as children.
You flick that domino and it can so often result in violent criminality.
And of course, it's not like you have this test done.
You don't know when you have kids whether violence against them is going to turn them out this way or not.
So this genetic variation explains why some people don't become more violent despite significant abuse.
They don't have the 2R gene.
And we talk more about this in a presentation called The Truth About Spanking.
So.
Warrior gene prevalence by race.
Boom.
So this is the gene that if you are Exposed to violence as a child.
If you are maltreated as a child, you are 10 times more likely to become a criminal.
And here we see 5.5% of the black population are carrying this gene.
0.1% of the white or Caucasian population is carrying this gene set.
0.0007% of the Asian population carrying this gene.
We can get this information from Hispanics.
It's not poverty.
It's a combination of genetic susceptibility and an abusive childhood that produces both the poverty and the criminality.
The degree to which, the degree to which this produces the IQ challenges, I don't know.
You know, my particular approach is, we've had significant studies presented.
Dr. Elizabeth Giroshoff has been on the show and other people.
Breastfeeding adds IQ points.
Not spanking your children adds IQ points.
Not having a steady diet of junk food for the first couple of years of your life also will increase your IQ points.
To what degree could this be altered?
I don't know.
But dammit, isn't that something we should be really focusing?
In on and trying everything that we can that is not about some giant taxpayer submerging government program that produces virtually nothing but resentment and dysfunction.
Why don't we actually talk about the reality and say to the black families, look, when you abuse your children, you are setting events in motion that if they have this genetic susceptibility, and if you look at these ratios, it's huge.
You are setting events in motion that are going to result in increased criminality in your population.
You already have higher testosterone, according to many measures.
If you have this genetic susceptibility to being triggered by violence, sorry, into becoming violent, being triggered by violence into becoming a violent person, you know, maltreat an Asian child, I don't know, what do you get, a great pianist?
I don't know.
Maltreat a Caucasian kid, I don't know, you get some goth.
but maltreat a black kid and the prevalence of this warrior gene sequence, particularly this two repeat, you're going to get a very different kind of person.
Self-reported spanking prevalence by race?
Asians, 73% of Asian families say they spank their kids.
Whites, 79%.
Hispanics, 80%.
79%, Hispanics 80%, Blacks 89%.
And knowing about this genetic susceptibility, that the high testosterone, the genetic susceptibility to becoming violent after being exposed to violence in the Black community, God, don't we need to talk about this?
Can't we make things better in society this way?
I mean, if you had a family history of heart disease, but there were specific actions you could take to reduce that risk, would it help you if nobody talked to you about your family history of heart disease?
Wouldn't you want to know that?
And there is a genetic susceptibility to becoming violent when exposed to violence in the black community that is far higher, many, many times higher than any other community that's been measured.
We need to talk about this.
We need to talk to the black community about genetic susceptibilities and the need to parent peacefully, much more so than any other ethnic group.
Black parents need to parent peacefully.
They need to breastfeed longer.
They need to make sure children get the proper diet.
Otherwise, there is going to be this continued escalation in criminality.
When you have a population which has a significantly higher proportion of criminal predators that then cries victim all the time, it gets a little bit disconcerting to everyone else, right?
So this is what we actually can do when we have the data and we have the facts.
And listen, for anyone who thinks that this is driven by a negative view of the black This information has been systematically suppressed and hidden.
This is all sourced below.
You can find all the data below.
I don't think that you can find many people out there who care more about the black community than people who are willing to talk about actual facts that help the black community escape the cycle of poverty and violence.
So the idea that this is somehow racist or negative towards the black community, the people who are truly racist and horrible towards the black community are the people who keep this information away that could actually help the black community become far better than it is now.
Those are the people who are doing the significant harm to the black community, not people who are reaching out with facts and data and compassion, saying, here's what the data shows that you can do to fix this problem.
Pretending the problem doesn't exist.
Screaming racism at numbers.
This is all boring and it's so fundamentally destructive to the black community that obfuscation of facts is the new plantation.
Now, it's not just, of course, genetics and IQ and so on.
The welfare state has, as Tom Sowell pointed out, the welfare state has done what even slavery could not do, which is to have destroyed the black family.
Black rates of marital stability were very high in the past and went caved in after the introduction of the welfare state.
This also is contributing to higher criminality in the black population.
I know this has been a challenging presentation.
I know this has been a difficult presentation.
I respect you for making it this far.
This means you really do care about the underprivileged in society.
You really do care about improving Disadvantaged.
And the fundamental disadvantage the blacks have is a lack of knowledge about what's actually going on and how they can actually work to improve it.
That is the real disadvantage.
All the other disadvantages flow from people not having the respect for the black community and the Hispanic community to simply say the truth.
This is how you care for people.
You know, if you're a doctor and you deny differences among the races, you'll get sued for malpractice.
You have to understand That there are significant differences between the races.
Otherwise, you can't solve any problems whatsoever.
All you can do is run around like a chicken with your head cut off, screaming racism, screaming white privilege, screaming institutionalize this, that, or the other, which does a goddamn nothingness to actually solve the problems in these communities.
The data is clear.
The solutions are clear.
So I challenge you.
Like, subscribe, share, donate.
We can't do this without your help.
We can't bring these kinds of solutions to the world without your support and your help.
So please, freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out and please get this information out there because as a society the factions and fractions within our society that are rising up against each other if we can't solve it with facts and reason and compassion and evidence it will very quickly
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