Elon Musk should buy a introductory data course
I am not revealing any trade secrets by telling you that Elon Musk’s public persona is unserious. He obviously has some business acumen; he remains in control of a number of corporations that are not at risk of imminent collapse. But politics? Woof. The lack of sophistication that was obvious during his brief stint in Donald Trump’s administration remains readily apparent — as does his willingness to amplify any fringe-right claim that pops up in his social media feed.
Yesterday, that meant sharing an idiotic graph from one of his ideological allies, appending only his trademark “Wow”. (He has also presumably trademarked 😂, but that’s beside the immediate point.)
The chart from podcaster (and former recipient of income from the Russian government) Tim Pool purports to show “what violence rates look like depending on political party.” It is offered, he explains, as a counterpoint to various analyses showing that violence is far more common on the political right than the left. Aha!, exclaims Pool: but the “combined violence rates” for “Democrat” are 21,765 compared to 858 for “Republican”!
Perhaps you find yourself slightly befuddled, unclear on what exactly Pool is talking about. Allow me to reassure you: This is not because you are stupid. It’s because the chart is stupid.
What Pool appears to be doing (but, honestly, who the hell knows) is taking violent crime rates from different cities and adding them together depending on whether the city is run by a Democrat or a Republican.
Even so, the numbers don’t make sense. What cities is he picking? How many? What is his source for the crime rates? When I took the list of the 100 largest cities, extracted the party of their mayors (now, mind you, and not in 2023) and overlapped that with Wikipedia’s violent-crime-rate data, I got very different numbers. (I would not normally use Wikipedia’s aggregated data, but I am very confident that Pool’s analysis, such as it is, did not rely on more sophisticated assessments of crime patterns.) Excluding two GOP-run cities for which data wasn’t immediately available, my totals are about 276,000 versus 54,000 (with another 32,000 for cities run by non-partisan mayors).
The specific figures don’t matter, though, because this is a very, very stupid metric.
Allow me to use a baseball analogy. What Pool is doing, in essence, is not looking at which team has more hits but, instead, comparing the cumulative batting averages of players on the New York Mets with players on the Chicago White Sox. That’s … not how batting averages work!
Even worse, though, is that he’s comparing different numbers of players. It’s as though he’s adding together the batting averages on each team, but only including players who live in or around New York City. There’s a lot more of them on one team!
In the case of the 100 most populous cities, there are about three Democratic mayors for every Republican. Even if those cities had violent crime rates that were half the value of Republican-led cities, the cumulative total would still be higher.
Again, though, that’s granting Pool the grace of assuming that his chart is based on anything at all. That grace is not deserved. The Republican-led city with the lowest violent crime rate in the Wikipedia data is Gilbert, Ariz., where there were more than 1,100 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in 2023. In other words, even if Pool only included one Republican-led city and that city was Gilbert, the “cumulative violent crime rate” would still be higher than his “858.”
Setting aside the ridiculousness of the data, it’s worth pointing out that, even if the figures were real and useful, there’s no actual connection to the debate at hand. Democrat-run cities among the 100 most-populous do have higher average violent-crime rates, but there are plenty of smaller cities run by Republicans where violent crime rates are higher still. But a city being run by a Democrat does not mean that the crime in that city is being done by Democrats, any more than having a Republican president means that crimes committed today are necessarily committed by Republicans. In fact, there’s research to show that mayoral partisanship isn’t correlated to crime rates.
Pool’s chart is just winking, leveraging the right’s core belief in the violent, criminal nature of ✨ People From Urban Areas ✨ to backstop the false claim that the left is more likely to engage in acts of political violence. It’s sort of useful, honestly, because it reinforces the extent to which all of the “it’s the left that’s violent” rhetoric is often simply about perceptions of who constitutes “the left.”
Allow me to now summarize my assessment of Pool’s chart and Musk’s response: 😂.
Thanks to Kevin Korb for elevating the research about mayors and crime.
Photo: People doing data stuff in 1990. (National Archives)