{"id":44490,"date":"2021-12-20T05:23:20","date_gmt":"2021-12-20T13:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/?p=44490"},"modified":"2021-12-20T05:23:20","modified_gmt":"2021-12-20T13:23:20","slug":"violence-fantasy-and-reality-where-does-it-go-from-here-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/20\/violence-fantasy-and-reality-where-does-it-go-from-here-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Violence, fantasy and reality: Where does it go from here? Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you heard of the misery index? (Stick with me; this does<\/em> have to do with the very real violence we face.)<\/p>\n

Very simple: The misery index is the rate of inflation added to the rate of unemployment. It was invented by one of LBJ’s economists back in the 1960s and designed as an imprecise indicator of how Average Joe and Average Josie are feeling at any given time. The lower, the better.<\/p>\n

Index is 2.97? Happy people, happy country. That, BTW, is the lowest it’s ever estimated to have been, (presumably retroactively calculated) for 1953.<\/p>\n

Index is 21.98? Unhappy people, unhappy country. That is the official<\/em> highest the misery index has ever been, back in 1980 when Joe Biden, Sr. <\/del> Jimmy Carter was ending his short and now eclipsed tenure as the nation’s weakest and most pathetic president.<\/p>\n

Did I saw “simple”? HA.<\/p>\n

Because of course not long after the index hit its most embarrassing high the “official” ways of calculating both inflation and unemployment began to be seriously fiddled. People who give up looking for work are — voila!<\/em> — not UNemployed and not counted. If one item in the “basket of goods” consumer price index calculation gets too expensive, a cheaper item is substituted — from steak to hamburger to chicken to cat food. Voila!<\/em> no inflation.<\/p>\n

According to official statistics, the current (as of October) misery index is 10.82. Not “Leave it to Beaver” days happy, but not Jimmy Carter malaise, either.<\/p>\n

And if you believe that, I’ve got a Built Back Better bill to sell you.<\/p>\n

So (with the aid of friend and occasional co-blogger Silver) we turn to ShadowStats, where John Williams has been calculating various economic indices as they were calculated once upon a time. And we get these figures for the last two years:<\/p>\n

2020<\/strong><\/strong>
\nUnemployment: 35%
\nInflation: 10%
\nMisery index: 45%<\/p>\n

2021<\/strong><\/strong>
\nUnemployment: 25%
\nInflation: 15%
\nMisery index: 40%<\/p>\n

Now, you can quibble with ShadowStats, and people do. (This article<\/a> explains the main issue clearly and with great graphics.) But which figures do you believe are closer to reality?<\/p>\n

If anything, judging by the national and global climate, Williams’ figures appear to understate our degree of misery.<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

But Claire<\/em>, I hear you protesting, when are you going to get to the part where you relate all these dry, intellectual \ud83d\ude41<\/a> statistics to present day and future violence?<\/em><\/p>\n

Now. Right now, I promise.<\/p>\n

The relationship is, according to a well-aged research paper out of Auburn University<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A. Violence (with the murder rate used as a proxy for all violence) unsurprisingly goes up with the misery index; and<\/p>\n

B. The effect lags by about a year.<\/p>\n

Although the 2006 paper viewed the annual murder rate, a few years after its publication, we saw two more upticks. The misery index soared toward a new all-time high (per ShadowStats figures). And — guess what? — we then experienced a plague of the very sort of smash-and-grabs and flash-mob crimes<\/a> we’re witnessing today.<\/p>\n

Except back then the non-official misery index was “merely” 33-34%. Now …?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Graph created by Silver<\/em><\/p>\n

Worse, even though life sucked back in 2011 — as we slogged through the endless non-recovery from the crack-up of 2008 — we didn’t have a large, vocal power faction actively encouraging racial and economic resentment, dismissing the impact of crime (“mostly peaceful protests,” “the SUV drove into the crowd”), and enacting policies guaranteed to tell criminals that crime pays. Nor did we have an administration blatantly promoting hyperinflation and mass unemployment to destroy small business and the middle\/working classes — both of which we have now.<\/p>\n

To state the obvious, miserable, hopeless people are already prone to commit freelance crime. And the sadly less obvious to most people: It’s easy for power factions to whip misery, hopelessness, and chronic resentment into bigger — and from their perspective — better and more useful violence.<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

Of course, none of this proves anything and I’m not saying it does. I welcome criticism, corrections, corroborations, or counter-calculations. Fire away.<\/p>\n

It’s simply that the misery index is busily confirming what our own experience tells us — and confirms that the signs aren’t good.<\/p>\n

In 2020 we had all those “mostly peaceful” arsons, lootings, and expropriations of formerly pleasant neighborhoods. In 2021, the murder rate soars and smash-and-grab becomes not only a crime of opportunity for lone creeps and local gangs, but becomes big, organized business.<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

There’s a pattern in the lead-up to internal warfare. I don’t know if it’s the<\/em> pattern, but it’s certainly a typical one:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. An “us against them” attitude becomes intractable;\n
  2. Urban crime not only soars, but becomes (in some eyes) justified;\n
  3. Crime moves into the suburbs (again, justified; that’s where the no-good richfolk live and they have insurance to protect them, anyhow);\n
  4. Then crime moves onto the highways, where no one is safe from hijackings, roadblocks, and random killings.\n
  5. Troops are called out to “keep peace,” but either it’s too late for peace or the troops themselves commit and provoke worse violence.\n<\/ol>\n

    And round and round it goes until everything implodes.<\/p>\n

    All the while, right from the beginning, some political faction is either actively encouraging the violence or taking advantage of it to gain power. <\/p>\n

    No, usually several<\/em> factions are doing the encouraging and taking advantage. One faction hopes to destabilize society to impose a new order on top of it. One hopes to entrench and grow its power through harsh imposition of “law and order” (“temporary measures for the duration of the emergency,” of course) and needs maximum crime to justify maximum response. Another faction uses ordinary crime as a cover for planning and executing it’s own even more nefarious crimes. Another faction, originally merely criminal, uses the chaos to influence and entrench itself into whatever it perceives to be the winning power bloc. On and on. <\/p>\n

    The beneficiaries of crime and misery are legion. And they don’t include us.<\/p>\n

    —–<\/p>\n

    A statement by a member of the Living Freedom Forums sums up what we all know: “We are on the threshold of a year that IMHO will be a very hard one to survive in one piece.”<\/p>\n

    That year is probably barely the beginning. Attacks — from the mass looting of luxury-goods stores to attacks like the mass-murderous “SUV accident” in Waukesha — are looking like a typical prelude to civil war.<\/p>\n

    Some of you, I realize, don’t expect or even want us to survive in one piece. We can argue about that.<\/p>\n

    One thing is inarguable: Violent war is being brought to us by violent pawns and their well-insulated chessmasters. Does anybody disagree? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Have you heard of the misery index? (Stick with me; this does have to do with the very real violence we face.) Very simple: The misery index is the rate of inflation added to the rate of unemployment. It was invented by one of LBJ’s economists back in the 1960s and designed as an imprecise indicator of how Average Joe and Average Josie are feeling at any given time. The lower, the better. Index is 2.97? Happy people, happy country. That, BTW, is the lowest it’s ever estimated to have been, (presumably retroactively calculated) for 1953. Index is 21.98? Unhappy…<\/p>\n

    Continue readingViolence, fantasy and reality: Where does it go from here? Part II<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44490"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44510,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44490\/revisions\/44510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}