Russia is not actually a very nice place to live

It may have impressed Tucker Carlson, but it's still a dysfunctional middle-income country.

Photo by Mstyslav Chernov, CC BY-SA 4.0

Tucker Carlson came back from his recent trip to Russia amazed by what he saw. He compared Moscow favorably to American cities:

What was radicalizing, very shocking and very disturbing for me was the city of Moscow, where I'd never been, the biggest city in Europe…is so much nicer than any city in my country. I had no idea…If you can't use your subway, for example, as many people are afraid to in New York City because it's too dangerous, you have to sort of wonder like, isn't that the ultimate measure of leadership?…It's radicalizing for an American to go to Moscow. I didn't know that. I've learned it this week, to Singapore, to Tokyo, to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, because these cities, no matter how we're told they're run and on what principles they're run, are wonderful places to live that don't have rampant inflation.

Now, he’s certainly right about Tokyo and Singapore (I’ve never been to Dubai or Abu Dhabi so I can’t comment). And he would be right about many other foreign cities. Compared to most of the developed world, American cities are run-down, dirty, and dangerous, with worse public transit systems and higher crime rates. Singapore has a murder rate of 0.1 per 100,000 people; New York City, America’s safest big city, has a murder rate of 4.8, over fifty times as high as Singapore. Rampant NIMBYism and high construction costs make NYC far dowdier than cities in the developed parts of Europe or Asia, while old industrial cities in the Midwest have been hollowed out due to disinvestment and high crime rates. America’s cities are not in good shape, and our society should make a major push to improve them.

That being said, Moscow is not a great choice for a comparison here. Despite the money that has flowed in over the past two decades as a result of booming oil revenues, the city still has a grim post-Soviet feel. Aerial footage shows a small central business district with a few newish skyscrapers, surrounded by endless neighborhoods of grim Soviet-era tenements crisscrossed by giant roads and highways, peppered with vacant lots and the occasional tacky monument:

The only really great thing about Moscow is its subway, which is generally regarded as one of the world’s best, and which is known for its beautiful stations.

What about crime rates? Officially, Moscow’s murder rate in 2017 — the last year for which I could find widely reported data — was 2.5, which would make it about half as dangerous as NYC. But there are reasons to doubt this number, because there is evidence that Russia has been misreporting its murder rate under Putin.

Official statistics show a dramatic decline in Russia’s murder rate since Putin took power in 1999. In the 90s, Russia’s murder rate had soared — in 2001, it was 30.7 per 100,00 people. That’s about 1.5 times as high as the murder rate in Philadelphia, which is one of America’s more dangerous cities. And that was the number for the entire country, not for a big city or a particularly violent region. Back in 2001, Russia’s murder rate was more than 5 times as high as that of the United States as a whole.

Under Putin, there has been an absolutely massive decline in the official murder rate; as of 2022, it stood at 3.7, which is lower than the U.S. But Lysova and Shchitov (2015) argue that part of this decline is simply due to the police reporting fewer of the murders that do happen. They note that at the same time murder numbers were falling in the 2000s, the number of “unidentified bodies” recorded in health statistics was soaring:

Source: Lysova & Shchitov (2015)

The authors list a number of reasons why Russian police have an incentive to underreport murders, but the most important simply seems to be political pressure from Vladimir Putin himself. Putin made law and order a key theme of his administration and his rhetoric in the 2000s; this presumably resulted in some improvement in public safety, but it probably also gave police departments throughout the country an incentive to show fictitious progress.

The UN and the World Bank agree. Their statistics show a huge drop in Russian homicide rates, but only to about 7 per 100,000 in 2021:

Source: UN via World Bank

That would make Russia just about as dangerous as the United States in 2021 — though murder rates have since fallen significantly in America and risen a bit in Russia. Anyway, applying the ratio of 7 to 2.7 (UN numbers vs. Russia’s official numbers) to Moscow’s official murder rate in 2017 would give Moscow a murder rate of about 6.5 per 100,000 — a bit more dangerous than New York City.