andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-333 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Cameron McKenzie writes: I ran into the attached paper [by Dave Marcotte and Sara Markowitz] on the social benefits of prescription of psychotropic drugs, relating a drop in crime rate to an increase in psychiatric drug prescriptions. It’s not my area (which is psychophysics) but I do find this kind of thing interesting. Either people know much more than I think they do, or they are pretending to, and either is interesting. My feeling is that it doesn’t pass the sniff test, but I wondered if you might (i) find the paper interesting and/or (ii) perhaps be interested in commenting on it on the blog. It seems to me that if we cumulated all econometric studies of crime rate we would be able to explain well over 100% of the variation therein, but perhaps my skepticism is unwarranted. My reply: I know what you mean. The story seems plausible but the statistical analysis seems like a stretch. I appreciate that the authors included scatterplots of their data, but the patterns they
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Cameron McKenzie writes: I ran into the attached paper [by Dave Marcotte and Sara Markowitz] on the social benefits of prescription of psychotropic drugs, relating a drop in crime rate to an increase in psychiatric drug prescriptions. [sent-1, score-0.944]
2 It’s not my area (which is psychophysics) but I do find this kind of thing interesting. [sent-2, score-0.092]
3 Either people know much more than I think they do, or they are pretending to, and either is interesting. [sent-3, score-0.198]
4 My feeling is that it doesn’t pass the sniff test, but I wondered if you might (i) find the paper interesting and/or (ii) perhaps be interested in commenting on it on the blog. [sent-4, score-0.27]
5 It seems to me that if we cumulated all econometric studies of crime rate we would be able to explain well over 100% of the variation therein, but perhaps my skepticism is unwarranted. [sent-5, score-0.679]
6 The story seems plausible but the statistical analysis seems like a stretch. [sent-7, score-0.208]
7 I appreciate that the authors included scatterplots of their data, but the patterns they find are weak enough that it’s hard to feel much confidence in their claim that “about 12 percent of the recent crime drop was due to expanded mental health treatment. [sent-8, score-1.109]
8 ” The article reports that the percentage of people with mental illness getting treatment increased by 13 percentage points (from 20% to 33%) during the period under study. [sent-9, score-0.768]
9 For this to have caused a 12 percent reduction in crime, you’d have to assume that nearly all the medicated people stopped committing crimes. [sent-10, score-0.49]
10 (Or you’d have to assume that the potential criminals were more likely to be getting treated. [sent-11, score-0.387]
11 The 1960s/1970s are over, and nowadays there is little controversy about the idea of using drugs and mental illness treatments as a method of social control. [sent-13, score-0.866]
12 And putting criminals on Thorazine or whatever seems a lot more civilized than throwing them in prison. [sent-14, score-0.526]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 333 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-10-Psychiatric drugs and the reduction in crime
Introduction: Cameron McKenzie writes: I ran into the attached paper [by Dave Marcotte and Sara Markowitz] on the social benefits of prescription of psychotropic drugs, relating a drop in crime rate to an increase in psychiatric drug prescriptions. It’s not my area (which is psychophysics) but I do find this kind of thing interesting. Either people know much more than I think they do, or they are pretending to, and either is interesting. My feeling is that it doesn’t pass the sniff test, but I wondered if you might (i) find the paper interesting and/or (ii) perhaps be interested in commenting on it on the blog. It seems to me that if we cumulated all econometric studies of crime rate we would be able to explain well over 100% of the variation therein, but perhaps my skepticism is unwarranted. My reply: I know what you mean. The story seems plausible but the statistical analysis seems like a stretch. I appreciate that the authors included scatterplots of their data, but the patterns they
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Introduction: Following up on our discussion of crime rates–surprisingly (to me), Detroit’s violent crime rate was only 75% more than Minneapolis’s–Chris Uggen pointed me to this warning from Richard Rosenfeld and Janet Lauritsen about comparative crime stats.
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Introduction: Christopher Uggen reports . I’m surprised the difference is so small. I would’ve thought the crime rate was something like 5 times higher in Detroit than in Minneapolis. I guess Minneapolis must have some rough neighborhoods. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t have a good framework for thinking about crime statistics.
Introduction: Solomon Hsiang writes : I [Hsiang] have posted about high temperature inducing individuals to exhibit more violent behavior when driving, playing baseball and prowling bars. These cases are neat anecdotes that let us see the “pure aggression” response in lab-like conditions. But they don’t affect most of us too much. But violent crime in the real world affects everyone. Earlier, I posted a paper by Jacob et al. that looked at assault in the USA for about a decade – they found that higher temperatures lead to more assault and that the rise in violent crimes rose more quickly than the analogous rise in non-violent property-crime, an indicator that there is a “pure aggression” component to the rise in violent crime. A new working paper “Crime, Weather, and Climate Change” by recent Harvard grad Matthew Ranson puts together an impressive data set of all types of crime in USA counties for 50 years. The results tell the aggression story using street-level data very clearly [click to
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Introduction: Ryan King writes: This involves causal inference, hierarchical setup, small effect sizes (in absolute terms), and will doubtless be heavily reported in the media. The article is by Manudeep Bhuller, Tarjei Havnes, Edwin Leuven, and Magne Mogstad and begins as follows: Does internet use trigger sex crime? We use unique Norwegian data on crime and internet adoption to shed light on this question. A public program with limited funding rolled out broadband access points in 2000-2008, and provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use. Our instrumental variables and fixed effect estimates show that internet use is associated with a substantial increase in reported incidences of rape and other sex crimes. We present a theoretical framework that highlights three mechanisms for how internet use may affect reported sex crime, namely a reporting effect, a matching effect on potential offenders and victims, and a direct effect on crime propensity. Our results indicate that the
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Introduction: Cameron McKenzie writes: I ran into the attached paper [by Dave Marcotte and Sara Markowitz] on the social benefits of prescription of psychotropic drugs, relating a drop in crime rate to an increase in psychiatric drug prescriptions. It’s not my area (which is psychophysics) but I do find this kind of thing interesting. Either people know much more than I think they do, or they are pretending to, and either is interesting. My feeling is that it doesn’t pass the sniff test, but I wondered if you might (i) find the paper interesting and/or (ii) perhaps be interested in commenting on it on the blog. It seems to me that if we cumulated all econometric studies of crime rate we would be able to explain well over 100% of the variation therein, but perhaps my skepticism is unwarranted. My reply: I know what you mean. The story seems plausible but the statistical analysis seems like a stretch. I appreciate that the authors included scatterplots of their data, but the patterns they
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Introduction: Hank Aaron at the Brookings Institution, who knows a lot more about policy than I do, had some interesting comments on the recent New York Times article about problems with the Dartmouth health care atlas. which I discussed a few hours ago . Aaron writes that much of the criticism in that newspaper article was off-base, but that there are real difficulties in translating the Dartmouth results (finding little relation between spending and quality of care) to cost savings in the real world. Aaron writes: The Dartmouth research, showing huge variation in the use of various medical procedures and large variations in per patient spending under Medicare, has been a revelation and a useful one. There is no way to explain such variation on medical grounds and it is problematic. But readers, including my former colleague Orszag, have taken an oversimplistic view of what the numbers mean and what to do about them. There are three really big problems with the common interpreta
Introduction: Solomon Hsiang writes : I [Hsiang] have posted about high temperature inducing individuals to exhibit more violent behavior when driving, playing baseball and prowling bars. These cases are neat anecdotes that let us see the “pure aggression” response in lab-like conditions. But they don’t affect most of us too much. But violent crime in the real world affects everyone. Earlier, I posted a paper by Jacob et al. that looked at assault in the USA for about a decade – they found that higher temperatures lead to more assault and that the rise in violent crimes rose more quickly than the analogous rise in non-violent property-crime, an indicator that there is a “pure aggression” component to the rise in violent crime. A new working paper “Crime, Weather, and Climate Change” by recent Harvard grad Matthew Ranson puts together an impressive data set of all types of crime in USA counties for 50 years. The results tell the aggression story using street-level data very clearly [click to
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Introduction: Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen brings up one of my research topics: In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news. Those statistics represent the justification for New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, which amounts to racial profiling writ large. After all, if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk. I have two comments on this. First, my research with Jeff Fagan and Alex Kiss (based on data from the late 1990s, so maybe things have changed) found that the NYPD was stopping blacks and hispanics at a rate higher than their previous arrest rates: To briefly summarize our findings, blacks and Hispanics represented 51% and 33% of the stops while representing only 26% and 24% of the New York City population. Compared with the number of arrests of
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Introduction: I just wanted to add the above comment to Bob’s notes on language. Spoken (and, to some extent, handwritten) language can be much more expressive than the typed version. I’m not just talking about slang or words such as baaaaad; I’m also talking about pauses that give logical structure to a sentence. For example, sentences such as “The girl who hit the ball where the dog used to be was the one who was climbing the tree when the dog came by” are effortless to understand in speech but can be difficult for a reader to follow. Often when I write, I need to untangle my sentences to keep them readable.
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Introduction: Alberto Cairo tells a fascinating story about John Snow, H. W. Acland, and the Mythmaking Problem: Every human community—nations, ethnic and cultural groups, professional guilds—inevitably raises a few of its members to the status of heroes and weaves myths around them. . . . The visual display of information is no stranger to heroes and myth. In fact, being a set of disciplines with a relatively small amount of practitioners and researchers, it has generated a staggering number of heroes, perhaps as a morale-enhancing mechanism. Most of us have heard of the wonders of William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas, Florence Nightingale’s coxcomb charts, Charles Joseph Minard’s Napoleon’s march diagram, and Henry Beck’s 1933 redesign of the London Underground map. . . . Cairo’s goal, I think, is not to disparage these great pioneers of graphics but rather to put their work in perspective, recognizing the work of their excellent contemporaries. I would like to echo Cairo’
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