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Updated 31 minutes ago
You've heard about the “American carnage.” But how bad is it out there, really?
Pretty horrible, actually.
I am referring to what was probably the most memorable phrase in President Donald Trump's inaugural address. Here it is in context:
“Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public.
“But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.
“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
Trump's talking about a bunch of different things there, but “carnage” means the killing of lots of people, so let's focus on that.
The murder rate
The numbers through 2015 are from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's annual “Crime in the U.S.” reports, which are based on data reported by local police departments. The 2016 report won't be out until September; an FBI report released last month said homicides were up 5.2 percent in the first half of 2016 compared with the same period a year before. Crime analyst Jeff Asher, writing in FiveThirtyEight, estimated on the basis of full- and partial-year data from 82 cities that the full-year increase will probably come out closer to 8 percent.
The two things that seem clearest from the chart are that (1) the murder rate is a lot lower than it was in the 1970s and 1980s and (2) it has risen significantly over the past two years. There is something alarming going on with violent crime, although it's too early to tell how alarmed we should be. It appears to be concentrated in a few big cities. Chicago, with its shocking 59 percent increase in homicides in 2016, grabbed most of the headlines. But as Asher writes, it's not alone: Among the notable rises outside of Chicago were increases of 56 percent in Memphis, 61 percent in San Antonio, 44 percent in Louisville, 36 percent in Phoenix and 31 percent in Las Vegas.
Taken together, those six cities accounted for 76 percent of the overall big city murder rise in 2016.
That's one big source of carnage, responsible for 15,696 deaths in 2015. Another that Trump referenced in his speech is drugs. There, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the trend lines have all been headed in the wrong direction for a while now: In 1999, the drug overdose death rate and the homicide rate were similar — 6.1 per 100,000 population to 5.7, respectively. In 2015, the drug-overdose rate was more than triple the homicide rate — 16.3 to 4.9.
This isn't all about OxyContin, the prescription opioid that has been deservedly blamed for many problems. The non-opioid overdose death rate has almost doubled since 1999, and while the prescription-opioid death rate rose from 1.2 per 100,000 in 1999 to 4.9 in 2011, it has declined slightly since, while the overdose death rate from heroin (which is pretty hard to get a prescription for, except in Canada) has gone from 1 per 100,000 in 2010 to 4.1 in 2015.
In absolute numbers, 52,404 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2015.
Other carnage
There are other kinds of carnage, too: An estimated 35,092 people died from motor vehicle accidents in the U.S. in 2015, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That was up 7.2 percent from the year before — the biggest such increase in almost 50 years — although the overall trend since the early 1970s is down.
It is the homicides, drug overdoses and suicides, though, that seem to best fit what Trump was talking about in his speech. It's hard to tell yet whether the recent rise in the homicide rate is a blip or the sign of a new trend. But the rise in drug deaths and suicides has been going on for a decade-plus — and I've got to figure that the weak post-2000 U.S. economy is at least partly at fault.
The effect has been most pronounced among what you might call Trump's core demographic: In a paper that got a lot of deserved attention in 2015, Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton found that the death rate for 45-to-64-year-old, non-Hispanic white Americans had been rising since the late 1990s — contrary to the trend in every other developed country they looked at, as well as among other ethnic groups in the U.S. The three main causes they identified were “suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning (accidental and intent undetermined), and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis.”
That is horrifying. And you really can't fault anybody for calling it “American carnage.”
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg View columnist and the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”
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