The year of 2024 is now behind us, so I thought I would make a brief overview and summary of my posts in that year.
As for the upcoming year, I am currently working on new articles and have many other ideas for posts—so consider subscribing! If there are any topics in particular you’d like to see, you’re free to make suggestions in the comments. I’ll take them into consideration, but of course I can’t promise anything.
About half of my posts are open to everyone. Paid subscribers have access to otherwise restricted posts, future ones and those already written.
Finally, thanks for all the support and for tagging along.
Crime
Many of my articles in 2024 have addressed various aspects about crime.
Perhaps most noteworthy is my investigation into the Nordic rehabilitation model. In a 2-part article, I challenge the widely held idea that the Nordic countries are so much better at rehabilitating criminals.
In this first part, I look at the challenges with comparing recidivism rates across countries due to varying definitions. Equivalent defined, Nordic recidivism rates are more alike the United States than often thought. Furthermore, many factors contribute to varying recidivism rates, not just rehabilitation effectiveness.
In the second part, I find that low Norwegian recidivism ratespredate the Norwegian rehabilitation reforms, so attributing low Norwegian recidivism rates to their rehabilitation model is highly dubious. I then discuss what other factors may contribute to low recidivism rates.
Following that, I also wrote a short post discussing the effectiveness of prisons and what the purpose of prisons is.
In this post, I argue that the causal effect of poverty/SES on violent crime is rather minor, contrary to common belief. There is a strong correlation between poverty and violence, but it’s mostly explained by selection and reverse causality.
This is a short write-up, combining the points of the two previous articles. If economic disparities cannot statistically account for much of the racial disparities in homicide, and what is “accounted” isn’t causal, American racial homicide disparities must have little (causally) to do with economic disparities.
I have also written two posts comparing crime rates across countries. The first discusses all crime variation across the entire globe; the second discusses America’s high homicide rate compared to the rest of the developed world.
In this post, I look at how crime rates vary across countries and, further, the quality and reliability of the evidence. Homicide evidence can most reliably be compared. Beyond that there is survey evidence. I also discuss why rape rates are exceptionally difficult to compare across countries.
I look at whether America’s high homicide rate can be explained by racial/ethnic demographic differences between the United States and the rest of the West. I conclude that the majority of the disparity can be, but that the (non-Hispanic) white homicide rate in the United States remains substantially higher than similar developed countries.
Immigration
In a series of articles, I have looked at immigration in the Nordic context. In one article, I wrote about how taboo the subject is in Sweden.
In this post, I discuss how the Swedish government has been unwilling to publish information about immigration in the country, and how Sweden systematically makes researching immigration more difficult.
In two other articles, I have looked at immigration and crime. I started with Denmark and Sweden, but I still plan to write about Finland and Norway, too.
I use government data to analyze whether immigrants are overrepresented in crime in Denmark, and to what extent. I also briefly consider possible explanations for the disparities.
Like the article on Denmark, I analyze patterns in immigrants’ participation in crime in Sweden. I also look at the role in organized crime, which has become a substantial problem in Sweden.
Lastly, in a short article I looked at how immigrants assimilate in Denmark in terms of school performance.
Looking at school grade performance, I find that there is significant assimilation from first to second generation among immigrants, but there appears to be no measurable improvement from second to third generation.
Nature, nurture and parenting
In 2024, I wrote two posts discussing the importance of nature and nurture for social outcomes. The first is dedicated to the role of nurture, the other to the role of nature.
In this post, I argue that behavioral genetics results do not support the notion that parenting is unimpactful. Specifically, I argue that parenting nontrivially affects (socially important) outcomes like educational attainment, income and criminality.
In this post I review a large body of evidence showing that genes influence socioeconomic mobility and standing. This has important implications for the distribution of genetic variants in society. In particular, socioeconomic classes differ systematically in traits such as intelligence, personality and mental disorder frequency partly for genetic reasons.
Related to parenting from a different angle, my most recent post discusses the relationship between age and fecundity — that is, the ability to become a parent in the first place.
In this post, I discuss how age is related to fecundity and other birth outcomes, the relative effects of male and female age, and what it is about the female reproductive system that is affected by aging.
History
I have a great interest in the history of science and technology, particularly the period spanning medieval Europe up to the Industrial Revolution. I have previously written about the West’s ascent between 1000 and 1500 AD. As a follow-up, I wrote about the period that preceded, roughly 500 to 1000 AD, popularly known as “The Dark Ages.”
In this post, I analyze quantitative evidence regarding the decline of the Roman Empire. Then I look at how “Dark” the Dark Ages were, in terms of written works, scholars, technology and more.
In this post, I document various historical accounts of cannibalism in Africa. These accounts come from varying sources including medieval Islamic scholars, early European explorers, later European anthropologists, and also modern accounts.
In this post, I argue that “controlling” for confounding variables is rarely sufficient in observational social science, and explain the reasons why (omitted variables, measurement error, etc). I also discuss more broadly how to think about confounding, and some potential methods to address it.
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