Deaths spiral: America’s spike in murders

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The fraction of Serbia's population that's fully vaccinated against COVID-19 is the second highest in Europe. We look into why a relatively poor and corrupt country got so far ahead of the average and what it may mean in the political long run. And research has long shown that employment leads to fulfillment. Some amount of working gives people a sense of purpose. But what is that amount? The pandemic's crimped hours and furlough schemes have provided a natural experiment to find out. First up, though, with the attention of the world's media focused on the pandemic last year, it may have seemed as if there were fewer of the mass shootings for which America has become notorious. This year, lamentably, there's no mistaking the trend. On March 16th, a gunman in Atlanta apparently targeted Asian Americans.

Grisly new details tonight in the Atlanta spa shootings.

The attacks were at 3 massage parlors in the northern suburbs of the city.

8 people were murdered in roughly in only 1 hour, 6 of them Asian women. Days later, 10 more deaths at a supermarket in Colorado.

A shooting has claimed multiple lives, as the police put it, in Boulder.

We had a very tragic incident today here at the King Soopers.

There was loss of life.

Second mass shooting with multiple deaths in just 1 week in this country.

3 killed at a house party gone wrong in North Carolina. 6 members of the same family in Texas, a mother and her 2 children shot by a man who then took his own life in New York. All those murders just in the first week of this month. The pandemic has led to reductions in many types of crime, but in America, murders seem only to be on the rise, the greatest rise in perhaps half a century.

2020 was a traumatic year for America. Not only was there the COVID-19 pandemic, which at this point has killed 550,000 people, but there was a huge uproar over racial justice in the wake of the deaths of unarmed Black men in police custody that swept through the country in June.

Idris Khaloun is The Economist's Washington correspondent.

Both those things may have contributed to an extraordinary increase in murder in America, and figuring out what trauma of 2020 causes increase in violence, I think, is going to be really important going forward.

And let's just put these numbers into perspective here. How does 2020 compare to previous years in terms of murder numbers in America?

The increase in 2020 was on the order of 25 to 30%, and that's huge. Normally crime increases a bit or decreases a bit, but it usually doesn't move nearly as much. That looks like a particularly large number because violent crime had dropped over the last 25 years, really. It had been cut in half since it peaked in the early 1990s. This takes us back probably to murder rates last seen in 1998, which is an extraordinary increase, reversal in trends that have been going in the right way. And one thing that's What's particularly interesting in the American case is that it seems to be unique in this regard. If you look at countries like Mexico and South Korea, Italy, France, places that all had also severe lockdowns as a result of the pandemic, you didn't see very much of a change in murder rates, suggesting that there's something uniquely American and upsettingly American that's going on here.

And how is it broken up though? Does that national number represent a kind of average across the country?

So far, we think that there was a rise in murder across the country, and there was even an increase in small towns in rural America, at least according to the original data that the FBI has released. Now, it does seem to have been worse in especially big cities, and Chicago unfortunately had an extremely violent year. It was already a place that had a lot of homicides, but its murders increased 56% in the span of a single year. But it's not just Chicago. In New York City, murders were up by 45%. In the Bay Area, they were up around 36%. If you look city by city, you see big increases—Dallas, Washington, D.C., for example—all across the country, and especially the cities that already had high levels of violent crime.

And it seems the biggest factor in play here is the pandemic, but you might have thought if everyone was stuck indoors, there would have been a reduction in murders.

The pandemic explanation would be that young men are stuck at home, they don't have very much to do, resentments simmer. The things that might have dissuaded them from resorting to violence, things like school, work, churches, community centers, the violence cessation programs that cities had set up, those were all suspended. There was less to do. At the same time, stimulus payments dried up around the summer, so poverty was increasing. The number of guns that were being sold in America increased dramatically. People were drinking a lot more. All of these things that were indirect effects of the pandemic, joblessness being one direct effect, might have all created a grim cocktail that resulted in the increase in murders. If you think it's mostly a pandemic-related effect, then theoretically, as the vaccine increases its percolation through the economy and the economy just reopens, perhaps you'd see a decline, or at least that's the pandemic-only explanation.

But you say the movement for racial justice, the killing of George Floyd, may have also been a factor here somehow.

The evidence here looks at the timeline of murder. So murder was up across the year, but it especially spiked in the immediate aftermath of the death of George Floyd. If you look at what happened after May 25th in big cities, you see a big spike in violence that corresponds with the protests that erupted throughout the country. If there's a big rupture between police and the community, what often happens is that 911 calls will decrease and the ability to solve crimes will be diminished. Faith in the police as the guarantor of safety is diminished, and so that generates these sort of circles of reprisal, which is what leads ultimately in a place like Baltimore, a place like Chicago, to the vast majority of murders. They're often hyper-concentrated in the same communities and even on the same streets. In past American cities that have experienced these traumatic protests in the aftermath of police violence, they tend to see an increase in violence, and so one argument is that perhaps there was a permanent destabilization of the way that streets were policed in America, in a way that could potentially augur a permanent increase increase in violence in the country.

And coming to another almost uniquely American problem, that of mass shootings, there seemed to be fewer of them than usual last year. How do they figure into the overall numbers here?

There were definitely fewer of them, but unfortunately those seem to have returned in 2021. In Atlanta, there was a spree shooting in a couple of massage parlors that killed 8 people. About 6 days later, there was another mass shooting at a grocery store in Colorado that killed 10. These events are tragic and drive huge amounts of media attention, but they explain comparatively little of America's total extremely high homicide rate, especially for a country as rich and developed as America is. Sadly, the people who die of gun violence are typically one-off killings, typically of young Black men disproportionately, that don't generate very much media attention. And while mass shootings might steer the conversation towards gun control and what can be done to change gun policy, but as far as the total amount of gun homicides that are in America, they don't account for very, very many of them.

And yet these overall numbers are really troubling. I mean, are they getting the political attention that they deserve?

You know, it's hard to say. Crime is seen typically as a local issue. It's something that mayors are certainly having to answer for, but it's not something that has really surfaced to the national level yet. The White House is not talking about it. They're consumed with crises like containing the COVID-19 epidemic. But Republicans also are not speaking terribly much about the rise in murder. But at some point, there might need to be more serious discussion and more serious conversation about what policies could be needed and could actually address this pretty remarkable increase in murder.

But what are those policies?

Violence in America is typically the province of young men living in poverty, often in the most disadvantaged communities in the country. And reducing poverty ultimately requires addressing those communities and a strong anti-poverty agenda, changing the education system as a whole so that it better transitions people into lives of meaningful work. On the specifics of violence itself, there have been violence cessation programs that have shown actually pretty promising results. In reducing violence. There are also changes in policing that seem to help that are short of mass incarceration, things like proactive policing and community policing that would probably make a difference. So there are a whole bevy of policy solutions that people know and have some evidence behind, but the first step to getting those into place, of course, is acknowledging that there is actually a serious problem at hand.

Idris, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Vaccine distribution in Europe hasn't been going well. The World Health Organization's regional director has called the rollout "unacceptably slow." But one Balkan country has surged ahead. Serbia has become a world leader in vaccination, but you wouldn't know it from the case numbers.

In terms of people vaccinated with one dose, by the 5th of April, 21.76% of Serbia's population had been vaccinated.

Tim Judah writes about the Balkans for The Economist.

And in terms of people who've had both doses, it's 16.35%.

And how does that compare with other countries, particularly European ones?

Well, extremely well. If you just take people who've had one dose, Serbia comes 6th in Europe, but some of those countries are really extremely small. The number 1 country for 1-dose vaccinations is the UK, then it's Malta, Monaco, and San Marino, then Hungary, and then Serbia. In terms of people who've had both vaccines, Serbia comes number 2, but after Monaco. It's done even better if you compare it to its own neighborhood, to the Western Balkans, where Other countries have been doing disastrously bad to date. And actually, Serbia seems to have had so many vaccines and so many spare vaccines that recently it's been inviting people from the neighborhood— Bosnians, Macedonians, and Montenegrins— to come across the border and to get vaccinated. And how has Serbia leapt ahead so quickly? Well, basically what Serbia has done is it's getting vaccines from Europe, from Russia and especially from China. Part of the international politics of all of this is that Russia and China, who really have an interest in discrediting the EU in the region, are very happy to supply Serbia with vaccines. At the beginning of the pandemic, a year ago, Aleksandar Vučić, who is Serbia's leader, famously almost cried on television by saying Europe had let the Balkans down, and that the only country, the only real friend of Serbia, was China. And as a result, China has played the vaccine diplomacy game, and 75% of the vaccines that have been given in Serbia to date are Chinese. Then there are a certain amount of Russian ones, and then the various Western ones like AstraZeneca and Pfizer.

And what about the epidemiology here? How has the rollout matched up in terms of case numbers?

Well, that's a very interesting question. In other countries that have done extremely well with their rollout, for example, the United Kingdom and Israel, the more people that have been vaccinated, the numbers of deaths have been coming down and the infection rate has been coming down. But actually, that hasn't been the case in Serbia, and that's really quite worrying. In fact, if you look at the graphs of death rates and infection rates, you'll see that in the last couple of months since the vaccination began to roll out, infection rates and death rates have gone up.

And why is that?

One reason is that people have been certainly not as cautious as they should have been. There have been no extensive lockdowns like in Britain or in Israel. And also there's a high prevalence of conspiracy theories in Serbia and in the Balkans as a whole. One of the doctors that I spoke to said that he'd been alarmed to even see doctors on TV or social media propounding conspiracy theories. And what's worrying is that it appears that a lot of people in Serbia who want to be vaccinated have been vaccinated, and now the vaccination rate is beginning to go down. There was research done at the end of last year where it was found that just over 70% of people in Serbia believe in one or more conspiracy theory when it comes to COVID, and that's extremely alarming. And if you want to be cynical, some people say that this is why Serbia has so many vaccines to give to the neighbours, because the take-up rate within Serbia has gone down.

But for the moment anyway, the vaccination effort is leading the league tables by various means. How is that playing politically?

Well, clearly, this has been a big success for Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia's president. Yesterday, Mr. Vučić had had one of the Chinese vaccines. There had been actually quite a lot of speculation about why he hadn't had it before, but he said when he had the vaccination that he wanted to wait for a million people to have been revaccinated or to have had the second vaccine in Serbia to avoid being accused by the opposition and the media of jumping the queue. Mr. Vučić has been to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, to distribute vaccines from Serbia, and he's been giving them to the other neighbors as well. And it's also sort of helped to bolster his position within the whole region. Serbia here has clearly emerged as a regional leader when it comes to vaccines. And what Mr. Vučić would like to do is to establish the country as the regional leader, not just for vaccines, but for everything else.

Tim, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. In 1980, Dolly Parton memorably sang that working 9 to 5 was all taken and no given. Now, after a year of working in the midst of the pandemic, a routine 8-hour day seems almost quaint, with some workers clocking in for longer and others on furlough. In the song, Ms. Parton hypothesized that there's a better life, one to be dreamed of. But in that life, what hours should you work?

The philosophical debate is how much work makes you happy.

Philip Coggan writes Bartleby, our column on management and the world of work.

We do know that unemployment leads to depression, and we also know that working too hard can cause stress.

So what's the right balance, and how do you even go about finding what that balance is?

There was a recent study by the Centre for Business Research at Cambridge University which took the opportunity of the pandemic and furlough schemes and short-term working schemes to analyse how much work kept people happy, and they found surprisingly that only the equivalent of 1 day a week was needed to keep you happy. Of course, you need more than that to earn a living, but there are lots of other things that come from work apart from the money. There's the social status. There's the feeling of being necessary, of having a skill. There's the camaraderie that comes from your charming colleagues, Jason. All those sort of things that come through. And as long as you have a bit of that, then that seems to fend off depression. That impact is no greater if you work 30 hours, 40 hours, 50 hours than it is with just that one day a week. But what if you, you keep going?

As you say, working too many hours brings you to the, the stress threshold.

Yes, so the other news story that relates to this is this Goldman Sachs study that one enterprising young analyst did by surveying his or her colleagues. There are only 13 of them, but that's still quite a few in a single year, and found that on average, they had been working 98 hours a week since the start of the year. They were getting only 5 hours sleep a night, and quite a lot of them did not foresee themselves staying on at Goldman Sachs in 12 months' time. And there seems to be this tradition in some of these professional jobs of taking young people and sort of almost trying to break them by working as many hours as you can. Sort out the ones who are prepared to sacrifice all the rest of life in order for work. That's not healthy either.

And what's been the response then to that report?

Well, Goldman Sachs put out a statement which is actually quite sympathetic and said, we realize that people have been working too hard. And we're trying to address the issues put forward in this report. There was a bit of a reaction in the press and online about what do they expect? Joining Goldman Sachs, former bankers say, oh, well, you know, it was like that in my day, it never did me any harm, that sort of stuff. But you shouldn't have to only get 5 hours sleep a night as a young person trying to get on with life. And it's very difficult to believe that you're an effective worker if you're working that hard and you're that tired. And the obvious answer is to employ more people so they don't have to work those hours.

Okay, so in the final accounting, where does that balance lie?

I think the sense is that we should get closer to this effective balance between work and home life, and we don't just live to work. And over the long period, there was, until maybe the last 30 or 40 years, a general downward trend in hours worked. It used to be 12-hour days, used to be that people worked on Saturdays as well as Monday to Friday, and the 8-hour day is a relatively recent phenomenon. And so maybe only in the last over the last 30 or 40 years that professionals in particular, their hours have drifted up a bit. And I think this trend has to stop. The idea that you need to test employees' stamina to see how long they can work because that sorts out the men from the boys, as it were. If you're thinking that way, you don't need better employees, you need better managers.

Philip, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, Jason. And don't work too hard.

Don't worry.

For more about the world of work and what the future of it is likely to look like, check out this week's episode of our sister show Money Talks. Find it, well, wherever you found this. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review And we'll see you back here tomorrow.