Re: violent crime up
On Jun 16, 2006, at 7:42 AM, Ted Winslow wrote:
Doug Henwood wrote:
How’s that? You have some examples that show both similiarities
and differences. Similarity: lots of guns. Differences: on the
dependent side, murders; on the independent side, imperial
history, frontier culture, inequality, racial heterogeneity… You
control for the similarities and try to see if the dissimilarities
are significant. That sounds like standard stats to me.This implicitly assumes that individuals are everywhere and always
the same so that differences in behaviour are explainable solely by
differences in circumstances.
I don’t see how differences among individuals are explicable by
anything but circumstances (allowing for “temperament,” aka Freud’s
“constitutional factors,” and random variation). History, inequality,
family patterns, racial hetero/homogeneity - these are precisely the
differences among societies you’d want to investigate to explain
differences in crime rates.
Doug