I think the US’s insanely high crime rate also explains our much-maligned incarceration rates. They are high because other violent countries can’t afford the incarceration rates they need and other rich countries have so much less crime to punish.
And yeah, I will continue to treat people who behave erratically in public as a threat because they are high risk.
Incarceration levels are-or at least were--hugely fueled by nonviolent drug crimes, that account(ed) for *nearly half* of our entire national (state + fed) prison population. Thank you Rockefeller drug laws, and our War On Drugs.
*Nonviolent* crime rates are not much higher in the US compared to the EU. And our much, much higher homicide rates are linked to our 2nd Amendment fetish, as firearms are used in roughly 80% of US murders.
These are both GOP-created problems. Or at least GOP-perpetuated problems.
As a Czech (a country with highly developed public transport), I quite often get into public transport-related discussions on Reddit, Hacker News etc.
I can confirm that the only people who ever tried to morally lecture me about the presence of screaming, threatening or stinking people on public transport are the American leftists. For them, this is a racist (because the homeless can't be white?), bigoted prejudice against the "less fortunate" and "less privileged", who are entitled to do anything they want and your only moral reaction ought to be "shut up".
This is just a bizarre ideology based on worship of anti-social behavior. Because if the system is bad, people disrupting it must be good, right?
The fact that tolerance of such behavior destroys a fairly expensive commons that is disproportionally used by lower-income people just does not register to them.
In the rest of the world, even lower-income countries manage to keep their public transport nice and safe. You could eat from the floor in the metro stations in Kyiv (GDP per capita about one tenth that of the worst US state), even today, after four years of active war.
Yeah, just bizarre, but it seems to be downstream from that dysfunction-worshipping worldview.
As I commented elsewhere on this post, I wonder if the insane level of police brutality in the US (to the point that even white Americans are at considerably higher risk from it than non-white immigrants in Europe) plays a role in US progressive tolerance of crime and disorder.
Thank you for saying what almost nobody else will: the American status quo for crime and disorder in urban spaces is, and has long been, disgraceful. All our urbanist dreams are for naught as long as our crime and disorder problem persists. Until we fix it, we will remain a car oriented suburban/exurban county.
I lived in downtown Chicago and for much longer Manhattan and my main comment is we have a big untreated mental health problem in the US. I'm not sure why policies are called compassionate when they lead to drug deaths and scared citizens. Releasing career criminals over and over to repeat their crimes doesn't seem to show much care for citizens either. Quality of life matters. And to the tweeter, I haven't been traumatized by all the interactions and interventions I've been involved in on the subway. I'm not a small person and I am well trained. My wife on the other hand stopped using it because she is vulnerable. That's not right.
Noah Smith is being such a hack on healthcare in this post.
"But this is tempered by the fact that Americans spend a lower percent of their health care costs out-of-pocket compared to people in most other rich countries:"
This is true Americans spend about 11% of the cost of their healthcare out out of pocket while Canada spends 15%.
But Noah Smith leaves out the top line number because it is absolutely devastating to his case.
According to the OECD, per capita healthcare expenditure in the US in 2024 was 14,885$.
In Canada in 2024, the same number was 7,301$.
Now, Noah Smith, ECONOMIST, didn't want to do this math, because it shows that US healthcare is actually bad.
So 11% of 14,885 = 1,637$ out of pocket in the US.
In Canada, 15% of 7,301$ = 1,095 $ out of pocket.
American out of pocket proportion looks low only because the top line number is so high.
Americans are spending 60% more out of pocket than a lot of the rest of the world.
(I purposely chose Canada because it was at the top of the provided chart, but it is even worse looking at the others. France is 7,354$ per capita but only 9% of that is out of pocket so 662$)
Your logic is wrong sorry. Math is hard. Americans spend more on healthcare because it is a luxury good and the richer people get the more they want to spend on it.
In London the underground has its own special police and crime is taken much more seriously if it takes place there. I believe this is possibly because every part of the social hierarchy takes the tube. Janitors, homeless, billionaires, politicians. There is real motivation from high office and wealth to make this a safe somewhat comfortable place. I do find the low standards for public order from American socialists to be a bit odd. It seems like a bigotry of low expectations.
The US is a wealthy country with some characteristics of a Latin American state, namely higher rates of violence, especially gun violence, which confuses those who think we're a European outpost in North America, which we're definitely NOT. But urban disorder in America is definitely a symptom of progressive governance, a hallmark of which is first world levels of taxation with third world levels of services, especially here in California.
Ummm… progressives are also the ones who want gun control and urban transit and abundance. You gotta stop cherry picking extremists on the left and using them to label progressives and liberals collectively.
Progressives say they want urban transit but they fight against fare gates that make it usable (not to mention prosecution of people who commit crimes on trains).
Progressives say they want gun control, but hate the stop-and-frisk type policies that are necessary to actually enforce it.
Progressives are not the cause of America's high crime rate, but they ignore its importance when they imagine how they'd like to change the country. The truth is that progressive policies are deeply contradictory and confused.
Fare gates seems like a weird thing to land on and I would never have guessed it from my twice daily experience on multiple public transport networks around the world. The places with the most inert and safe experience actually had no gates at all. Moreover a hyperfocus on this one central policy seems like the kind of top down wonkery that will always end in failure. Just give the system running an incentive to make it safe, and then fund them. The "market", as much as it does anything, will work it out. If that's fare gates so be it, but it's more likely to be a holistic ensemble of policies that may or may not include fare gates.
The common perception that “the U.S. has much more crime than other rich countries” is only clearly true for homicide. Perhaps this is because of guns rather than progressives.
I agree overall, but I’d quibble with your footnote that encampment sweeps primarily benefit the homeless, at least in New York City. We should be comfortable making the public-order argument directly: shared spaces have to be safe and usable. That’s a legitimate function of government.
There has been so much derangement about Mamdani that it gets lost what was happening before in nyc. Under Eric Adams, audits showed that roughly 80% of people displaced in sweeps were not connected to shelter or permanent housing (see: https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2023/06/homeless-sweeps-failure-nyc-comptroller-says-audit/388040/). The homeless advocates mocked in the NR piece weren’t wrong that the prior sweeps had been a failure from the perspective of the homeless. I would just make the case that clean, orderly public spaces are a worthy goal in themselves.
I mean I agree, I’m just saying there’s a tendency to shy away from making that simple point that the function of the sweeps is to have orderly spaces. The way Noah framed it in the footnote and the way the NR article talks about it is that the homeless were dying in the cold because the sweeps weren’t happening and that’s just not true. The sweeps under Adams didn’t solve the problem for the people who were swept up, but did solve for orderly public spaces, which should be good enough.
Sometimes I wonder how this looks from abroad. Given how much crime and disorder shows up in our media, it’s surprising we’re still perceived as the world’s leading power. I’m sure it’s just seen as wild. That gap between capacity and visible dysfunction feels uniquely American too.
Calling alcoholism / substance addiction and obesity "diseases of wealth and irresponsibility" is both way too reductionistic and also plain wrong, unless you twist the meaning of "irresponsibility" to a breaking point when used as an explanation on population data level. Look into European countries, for instance, and you see that neither of these things even correlates with wealth, and again I am not sure it makes sense to label entire populations as "more irresponsible".
Irresponsibility applies to both, wealth applies to obesity. Obesity comes down to taking in more calories than you use each day, and nobody responsible looks at their life and says "I should do meth about this."
That is exactly the type of reductive moralising that is unhelpful in addressing the underlying issues and also ethically questionable allocation of "moral opprobrium". We did not collectively achieve a significant victory over e.g., the cigarette industry by viewing smoking as a deficiency of character. Rather, legislation was imposed to limit the channels (social and physical) for the addiction to set in, and over time those limitations also caused a corresponding change in social norms related to smoking.
As a European living in a city, its unfortunately getting worse here too. And we have similar taboos: in my own experience there is a relation with illegal / asylum migration from outside Europe but there is a taboo on saying this out loud for the obvious reasons.
I guess the sad part is, and maybe that is the reason why in the US it is apparantly worse, that to a certain extend you get used to it and start to accept it as a fact of life.
You talk about fear of crime, but you only provide data about murder. CertainlCertainly America has huge murder rates, but America also has crazy gun laws. So perhaps it is only murder and not other crimes that are out of sync with crimes in rich countries? Similarly, the fear that you talk about that keeps people off public transit also seems like a fear of death so maybe it's all about murder rather than crime generally?
1. The US went through 50 years of what would now only be called ethnic cleansing. Think about lynchings. Not a shameful thing. Something that you brought your kids to on a Sunday afternoon, posed for pictures with the body and sold postcards to friends afterwards.
Ofc you have heard about entire towns and neighborhoods destroyed, murdered and either burned to the ground or reoccupied by whites. While police either looked the other way or organized the activity.
That is some major 'normalization of violence'. For generations. All of our (US) grandparents grew up in this world, and most (if we were white) didn't ever tell us about it. Because you weren't supposed to talk about it after the Civil Rights movement.
Look at census rolls in the PNW. Black population throughout the area drops from over 10% in 1900 to almost zero. Ethnic cleansing worked.
Know that the Nazis (the actual German ones) studied Jim Crow and KKK tactics as role models for how to do ethnic cleansing. We Americans inspired them.
The 'war on woke' is about NEVER admitting to ANY of that history, or its aftereffects that, yes, linger to this day.
Did some progressives say 'defund the police' for a short period? Yeah. Did this normalize americans to violence and disorder? Learn more history.
2. Separate question: you are inspired by the order and safety you find travelling in Japan. When i read travel blogs by women, many of them have put Japan on a 'no go' list for solo travel, bc of the off scale level of creeping by men on single Western women. And how it is broadly tolerated in public spaces. And yes, pervades a lot of Japanese culture and art. So if Americans are too inured to violence, are Japanese too inured to sexual intimidation and violence towards women?
Are you simply too white and male to see these two factors or feel the need to comment on them?
I think the US’s insanely high crime rate also explains our much-maligned incarceration rates. They are high because other violent countries can’t afford the incarceration rates they need and other rich countries have so much less crime to punish.
And yeah, I will continue to treat people who behave erratically in public as a threat because they are high risk.
Incarceration levels are-or at least were--hugely fueled by nonviolent drug crimes, that account(ed) for *nearly half* of our entire national (state + fed) prison population. Thank you Rockefeller drug laws, and our War On Drugs.
*Nonviolent* crime rates are not much higher in the US compared to the EU. And our much, much higher homicide rates are linked to our 2nd Amendment fetish, as firearms are used in roughly 80% of US murders.
These are both GOP-created problems. Or at least GOP-perpetuated problems.
As a Czech (a country with highly developed public transport), I quite often get into public transport-related discussions on Reddit, Hacker News etc.
I can confirm that the only people who ever tried to morally lecture me about the presence of screaming, threatening or stinking people on public transport are the American leftists. For them, this is a racist (because the homeless can't be white?), bigoted prejudice against the "less fortunate" and "less privileged", who are entitled to do anything they want and your only moral reaction ought to be "shut up".
This is just a bizarre ideology based on worship of anti-social behavior. Because if the system is bad, people disrupting it must be good, right?
The fact that tolerance of such behavior destroys a fairly expensive commons that is disproportionally used by lower-income people just does not register to them.
In the rest of the world, even lower-income countries manage to keep their public transport nice and safe. You could eat from the floor in the metro stations in Kyiv (GDP per capita about one tenth that of the worst US state), even today, after four years of active war.
Yeah, just bizarre, but it seems to be downstream from that dysfunction-worshipping worldview.
As I commented elsewhere on this post, I wonder if the insane level of police brutality in the US (to the point that even white Americans are at considerably higher risk from it than non-white immigrants in Europe) plays a role in US progressive tolerance of crime and disorder.
Thank you for saying what almost nobody else will: the American status quo for crime and disorder in urban spaces is, and has long been, disgraceful. All our urbanist dreams are for naught as long as our crime and disorder problem persists. Until we fix it, we will remain a car oriented suburban/exurban county.
Great post. I'm glad to be a subscriber.
I lived in downtown Chicago and for much longer Manhattan and my main comment is we have a big untreated mental health problem in the US. I'm not sure why policies are called compassionate when they lead to drug deaths and scared citizens. Releasing career criminals over and over to repeat their crimes doesn't seem to show much care for citizens either. Quality of life matters. And to the tweeter, I haven't been traumatized by all the interactions and interventions I've been involved in on the subway. I'm not a small person and I am well trained. My wife on the other hand stopped using it because she is vulnerable. That's not right.
Noah Smith is being such a hack on healthcare in this post.
"But this is tempered by the fact that Americans spend a lower percent of their health care costs out-of-pocket compared to people in most other rich countries:"
This is true Americans spend about 11% of the cost of their healthcare out out of pocket while Canada spends 15%.
But Noah Smith leaves out the top line number because it is absolutely devastating to his case.
According to the OECD, per capita healthcare expenditure in the US in 2024 was 14,885$.
In Canada in 2024, the same number was 7,301$.
Now, Noah Smith, ECONOMIST, didn't want to do this math, because it shows that US healthcare is actually bad.
So 11% of 14,885 = 1,637$ out of pocket in the US.
In Canada, 15% of 7,301$ = 1,095 $ out of pocket.
American out of pocket proportion looks low only because the top line number is so high.
Americans are spending 60% more out of pocket than a lot of the rest of the world.
(I purposely chose Canada because it was at the top of the provided chart, but it is even worse looking at the others. France is 7,354$ per capita but only 9% of that is out of pocket so 662$)
Your logic is wrong sorry. Math is hard. Americans spend more on healthcare because it is a luxury good and the richer people get the more they want to spend on it.
What is wrong about the logic here? Americans spend a lower percentage (out of pocket) of a higher number.
Are you arguing that the American health spending per capita is NOT radically higher than our peer countries?
In London the underground has its own special police and crime is taken much more seriously if it takes place there. I believe this is possibly because every part of the social hierarchy takes the tube. Janitors, homeless, billionaires, politicians. There is real motivation from high office and wealth to make this a safe somewhat comfortable place. I do find the low standards for public order from American socialists to be a bit odd. It seems like a bigotry of low expectations.
Actually the British Transport Police polices trains all over the UK, not just the London Underground.
The US is a wealthy country with some characteristics of a Latin American state, namely higher rates of violence, especially gun violence, which confuses those who think we're a European outpost in North America, which we're definitely NOT. But urban disorder in America is definitely a symptom of progressive governance, a hallmark of which is first world levels of taxation with third world levels of services, especially here in California.
Would Canada be more of a "European outpost in North America"?
Ummm… progressives are also the ones who want gun control and urban transit and abundance. You gotta stop cherry picking extremists on the left and using them to label progressives and liberals collectively.
Progressives say they want urban transit but they fight against fare gates that make it usable (not to mention prosecution of people who commit crimes on trains).
Progressives say they want gun control, but hate the stop-and-frisk type policies that are necessary to actually enforce it.
Progressives are not the cause of America's high crime rate, but they ignore its importance when they imagine how they'd like to change the country. The truth is that progressive policies are deeply contradictory and confused.
Fare gates seems like a weird thing to land on and I would never have guessed it from my twice daily experience on multiple public transport networks around the world. The places with the most inert and safe experience actually had no gates at all. Moreover a hyperfocus on this one central policy seems like the kind of top down wonkery that will always end in failure. Just give the system running an incentive to make it safe, and then fund them. The "market", as much as it does anything, will work it out. If that's fare gates so be it, but it's more likely to be a holistic ensemble of policies that may or may not include fare gates.
The common perception that “the U.S. has much more crime than other rich countries” is only clearly true for homicide. Perhaps this is because of guns rather than progressives.
I agree overall, but I’d quibble with your footnote that encampment sweeps primarily benefit the homeless, at least in New York City. We should be comfortable making the public-order argument directly: shared spaces have to be safe and usable. That’s a legitimate function of government.
There has been so much derangement about Mamdani that it gets lost what was happening before in nyc. Under Eric Adams, audits showed that roughly 80% of people displaced in sweeps were not connected to shelter or permanent housing (see: https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2023/06/homeless-sweeps-failure-nyc-comptroller-says-audit/388040/). The homeless advocates mocked in the NR piece weren’t wrong that the prior sweeps had been a failure from the perspective of the homeless. I would just make the case that clean, orderly public spaces are a worthy goal in themselves.
"A failure from the perspective of the homeless"?
WtF? The objective of encampment sweeps is to get rid of the encampments.
I've been homeless and destitute in the past. There's ALWAYS somewhere else to go -- another way to approach life.
You don't want dehumanization? Respect and consideration are a two-way street.
I mean I agree, I’m just saying there’s a tendency to shy away from making that simple point that the function of the sweeps is to have orderly spaces. The way Noah framed it in the footnote and the way the NR article talks about it is that the homeless were dying in the cold because the sweeps weren’t happening and that’s just not true. The sweeps under Adams didn’t solve the problem for the people who were swept up, but did solve for orderly public spaces, which should be good enough.
Sometimes I wonder how this looks from abroad. Given how much crime and disorder shows up in our media, it’s surprising we’re still perceived as the world’s leading power. I’m sure it’s just seen as wild. That gap between capacity and visible dysfunction feels uniquely American too.
Calling alcoholism / substance addiction and obesity "diseases of wealth and irresponsibility" is both way too reductionistic and also plain wrong, unless you twist the meaning of "irresponsibility" to a breaking point when used as an explanation on population data level. Look into European countries, for instance, and you see that neither of these things even correlates with wealth, and again I am not sure it makes sense to label entire populations as "more irresponsible".
Irresponsibility applies to both, wealth applies to obesity. Obesity comes down to taking in more calories than you use each day, and nobody responsible looks at their life and says "I should do meth about this."
That is exactly the type of reductive moralising that is unhelpful in addressing the underlying issues and also ethically questionable allocation of "moral opprobrium". We did not collectively achieve a significant victory over e.g., the cigarette industry by viewing smoking as a deficiency of character. Rather, legislation was imposed to limit the channels (social and physical) for the addiction to set in, and over time those limitations also caused a corresponding change in social norms related to smoking.
I interact directly with addicts daily. I assure you, irresponsible is the nicest term I could use to describe them.
As a European living in a city, its unfortunately getting worse here too. And we have similar taboos: in my own experience there is a relation with illegal / asylum migration from outside Europe but there is a taboo on saying this out loud for the obvious reasons.
I guess the sad part is, and maybe that is the reason why in the US it is apparantly worse, that to a certain extend you get used to it and start to accept it as a fact of life.
The "Wikipedia via Gemini" graph is mostly incorrect: while the United States does have a high murder rate, Luxembourg very much does not.
You talk about fear of crime, but you only provide data about murder. CertainlCertainly America has huge murder rates, but America also has crazy gun laws. So perhaps it is only murder and not other crimes that are out of sync with crimes in rich countries? Similarly, the fear that you talk about that keeps people off public transit also seems like a fear of death so maybe it's all about murder rather than crime generally?
Maybe. But the snarling, spitting, homeless man threatening to kill people is unlikely to have a gun, yet still causes a very rational fear of danger.
Two things.
1. The US went through 50 years of what would now only be called ethnic cleansing. Think about lynchings. Not a shameful thing. Something that you brought your kids to on a Sunday afternoon, posed for pictures with the body and sold postcards to friends afterwards.
Ofc you have heard about entire towns and neighborhoods destroyed, murdered and either burned to the ground or reoccupied by whites. While police either looked the other way or organized the activity.
That is some major 'normalization of violence'. For generations. All of our (US) grandparents grew up in this world, and most (if we were white) didn't ever tell us about it. Because you weren't supposed to talk about it after the Civil Rights movement.
Look at census rolls in the PNW. Black population throughout the area drops from over 10% in 1900 to almost zero. Ethnic cleansing worked.
Know that the Nazis (the actual German ones) studied Jim Crow and KKK tactics as role models for how to do ethnic cleansing. We Americans inspired them.
The 'war on woke' is about NEVER admitting to ANY of that history, or its aftereffects that, yes, linger to this day.
Did some progressives say 'defund the police' for a short period? Yeah. Did this normalize americans to violence and disorder? Learn more history.
2. Separate question: you are inspired by the order and safety you find travelling in Japan. When i read travel blogs by women, many of them have put Japan on a 'no go' list for solo travel, bc of the off scale level of creeping by men on single Western women. And how it is broadly tolerated in public spaces. And yes, pervades a lot of Japanese culture and art. So if Americans are too inured to violence, are Japanese too inured to sexual intimidation and violence towards women?
Are you simply too white and male to see these two factors or feel the need to comment on them?