Because Canada is the closest country on earth to the US culturally and Australia and New Zealand are not far behind. Also, poverty tends to increase crime and CA/AU/NZ are closer to US economically as well, while Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa are far behind. If you want to pick one country to compare it to the US, it only makes sense to pick Canada. Argentina is very far down the list.
The main difference between Canada and US (and to a great extent Australia and New Zealand) are not cultural or economical. The main differences are in access to firearms. I fully expect Canada's murder rate to rise to US levels if US gun laws were adopted here.
There are a few very significant cultural/economic differences between the USA and Canada/Austrial/NZ.
The biggest one is that only the USA has a legacy of slavery. The USA has much higher population density as well. The USA is also somewhat more economically unequal than the other 3. The USA is more diverse than any of the other 3, especially Canada and Australia.
The US is the least diverse of those countries. Australia has 30%(2019) of foreign born resident's to NZ's 27.4%(2018),Canada's 20%(2016) and the US's 13.7%(2018)
"Foreign born" is really not the best judge of diversity in this context imo. I would instead look at the fraction of population that has European ancestry.
I have not seen many statistics linking foreign-born residents to higher crime, but locally-born oppressed minority populations (e.g. Black, Aboriginal, Native, Maori) are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system due to ongoing legacies of systemic violence.
I thought the whole point of the ongoing systemic racism debates in the US was that even after correcting for poverty, African Americans still had worse outcomes on essentially every metric from college graduation to murder rate?
While there are almost certainly small variations, the high order bit is economics. By a wide margin.
This is almost invariably left out of the equation when these things are reported.
Just like the so-called "gender wage gap", which is at best a "gender earnings gap", because pay is equivalent, dissipates almost entirely when you account for things like occupation and hours worked.
Even if you accept that differences are solely economic (this a very tough sell for raical inequality imo, it's far from fully explained by economics), that leaves you with the question of why are black people disproportionately impoverished. This is a tougher question than why women tend to work fewer hours.
And I am fully aware that these facts are a "tough sell" these days, because they don't fit the prevailing narrative.
Another one: yes, the criminal justice system is biased against blacks. However, it is vastly more biased against males. By a 6:1 margin.
And yes, I agree that the question why black people who are not recent immigrants are disproportionately impoverished is important to answer. It is important to ask the right questions if you want to get a usable answer. And I doubt there is a unifactorial answer.
Why the "who are not recent immigrants"? Black people who are recent immigrants from Africa actually do better economically than whites.
"Solely" is a thought experiment, just to highlight the importance of that question.
It's a tough sell because statistics don't back it up; there are other significant factors at play.
There are certainly some biases against men but i think you are overestimating this one. Are you accounting for the differences between men and women?
The success of African immigrants suggests that the effect really has nothing to do with skin color, but other societal and cultural factors. Luckily society and culture are both mutable.
A young black man in the 2nd perctile of income has the same chance of being incarcerated as a young white man in the 65th. The difference between the 1st percentile and 99th percentile young white men is smaller than between 80th percentile black men and white men. [1] I'm not sure which stats you are looking at, but the ones I see suggest that economics are not the biggest factor.
The gender disparity is interesting and I wasn't aware of it's severity. Thanks.
So your blog post is contradicted by the research I cited.
How to explain the difference? Well, the blog post doesn't control for other variables. Such as, crucially, how much crime do people commit and how severe are those crimes?
The UofM study did control for such factors.
And yeah, how much crime people commit varies and, yeah, has a pretty severe impact on how much incarceration happens. If you didn't control for these variables, the male/female disparity would be incredibly more severe, as the vast majority of inmates are male.
And if you look, you will see that the research the blog post references comes from an advocacy group.
Access to guns is the main source of gun crime. 'Oppressed local minority populations' or non-european diversity or whatever other racial euphemism you wish to use has nothing to do with it.
So 13% native black population, a higher percentage native born Hispanic population, multiple generations of multiple different Asian cultures, these dont count? Why?
All your metric does is demonstrate who began allowing immigration first.
US is 76.3% white compared to Canada's 77.7% white. Still pretty similar. Actually, US's numbers are from 2019 but Canada's are from 2016. Canada's percentage should be lower than US's now, given the difference in their annual immigration numbers.
I think 76.3% white is misleading because, while the U.S. Census Bureau counts hispanic people as "white", basically no North American's intuitive model of race or ethnicity would count hispanics as white. Which is why the Census is always careful to break out non-Hispanic white.
The real comparison is non-Hispanic white to non-Hispanic white, where it becomes ~55% to ~75% or so. Hispanic people in the U.S. are easily visually differentiable, most often have one or more languages aside from, or instead of, English and come from cultures that are markedly different than mainstream U.S. culture.
It's getting into the weeds a little, but there are also likely differences between local vanquished populations, immigrants and their descendants who arrive voluntarily by air/sea, those who arrive voluntarily by land and those who arrive involuntarily.
Canada and the USA are close overall, but Canada's immigrants are much more likely to be educated professionals than those coming to the USA. And since Canada never implemented widespread slavery, there really isn't an analog to the experience of black Americans. I think that is a very big factor.
The main difference between Canada and US (and to a great extent Australia and New Zealand) are not cultural or economical. The main differences are in access to firearms. I fully expect Canada's murder rate to rise to US levels if US gun laws were adopted here.