Humans Are So Hard to Study in the Wild, can we ever parse out cause and effect? #statistics #science #maths

[image error]Any human activity involves a lot of complicated factors. We’re still arguing over what brought crime rates in America down so precipitously in the 1990s and keeps them down now. I love studies that bring new factors into the debate.

Increased incarceration, increased police numbers, aging population, growth in income, decreased alcohol consumption, and unemployment. They also concluded that the decrease in environmental lead exposure and crack use and the increase in abortions “possibly” had some effect. theatlantic.com

Did cell phones somehow do the trick? Or was widespread phone usage too late to offer an explanation? Always keeping in mind that correlation does not equal causation.

These are arguments based in statistics, and with so many variables, promising answers sometimes fall when “data don’t hold up across time, across cities, or across countries. The problem is analogous to something like dark energy in physics—a sort of unexplained, unseen material that confounds the calculations of different branches of the social sciences.”

But is it the general trend towards less violence over centuries that needs explaining, or the strange spike in crime during the 1990s?

Sorry if I misled anyone – the article quoted above doesn’t answer the question. What it does is ask us to open our minds to the full spectrum of parameters in human life. And if you’re curious about the possible contribution of abortion rights, check out my previous post here.