Chris Blattman: evaluation

Transcript context

…It still seems odd, there’s this commonality across so many countries. Most of the cities where you see some of the highest murder rates — Latin American cities have very few police per capita when you compare them to American cities, and certainly if you compare them to Asian cities. I don’t like to be that crude because I’m actually a little bit of a skeptic of this knee-jerk to policing: “We need more police, and we need more investment in security resources. ” But as a first-order approximation, I think that’s a big part of it. You also then have subcultures. Once you have cities and groups within cities that begin to do this — I’ve seen this in Uganda. It used to be that Nairobi was always a very violent place, but people would copy. It became a thing you could do. They now had a model. This was a career or a vocation that existed in Nairobi, but it didn’t exist in Kampala, or it didn’t exist in Dar es Salaam. People just didn’t do it. Then, once you had people prove that it could be done and it could be profitable, then you had this relatively small group who professionalize it and do it. And now it becomes a thing, and it’s entrenched. It’s sort of a multiple equilibria story. I’ve read that murder rates in New York City have fallen by a factor of about 20 from their peak, which was within my lifetime. Do you think the research you’ve done gives us any insight into that, or is that a fully separate phenomenon?…

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