Race & Police Shootings in America (w/Robert VerBruggen)
Published on Aug 25, 2023, 5:28:12 PM
Total time: 00:41:58
Published on Aug 25, 2023, 5:28:12 PM
Total time: 00:41:58
On this Utterly Moderate Podcast episode we tackle a sensitive issue that is hard to find a clear, definitive answer to: does race play a significant role in fatal shootings of civilians by law enforcement in America?
Our guest, Robert VerBruggen, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has done important work on this topic, including his March 2022 report: “Fatal Police Shootings and Race: A Review of the Evidence and Suggestions for Future Research.”
Based on the best available evidence, he finds the following:
“The data certainly rebut the most extreme versions of the Ferguson narrative, which originated in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in that city in 2014. In surveys, many people say that they think American cops kill 1,000 unarmed Black men every year, but the real number averages out to more like 20, and it’s even lower than that if you just look at suspects who weren’t attacking someone when they were shot.
About a quarter of people shot by the cops are Black, which is about double the Black share of the overall population—but it’s in line with many other benchmarks you might compare it to, such as the Black share of arrestees, or cop-killers, or homicides. In other words, the overall racial breakdown of people shot by police isn’t surprising, given the demographics of crime.
But these are just simple numbers, and there are more complicated methods you can use to try to find bias. That’s where the story gets more nuanced. For example, it’s worrisome that the Black share of unarmed people shot and killed by police is a bit higher than the overall Black share of police killings. And one study I found especially troubling showed that, in one city, White cops are several times as likely as Black cops to fire their guns when they’re sent to 911 calls in Black neighborhoods.
As a whole, these data don’t support the extreme narrative—and that’s important—but we still have much to learn.”
In summary:
VerBruggen goes into much more detail about his work in this area and others in this episode.
To see Robert VerBruggen’s full portfolio of research with the Manhattan Institute, follow this link.
The Connors Forum is an independent entity from the institutions that we partner with. The views expressed in our newsletters and podcasts are those of the individual contributors alone and not of our partner institutions.
Episode Audio:
“Moonlight Reprise” by Kai Engel (Free Music Archive)
Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
Utterly Moderate is the official podcast of the Connors Forum. Visit us at Conners Form Talk and be sure to subscribe to our free email newsletter while you were there. Please listen carefully. Careful, careful now. Hey. Hey everyone. Welcome back to the program. I am your host, Lawrence Safford, and this is the utterly moderate podcast, the place where you can get aggressively nonpartisan and reasonable examinations of important issues.
Thanks for joining me today. I hope you are well as we prepare to say goodbye to Summer and hello to the fall season. Depending upon who you are, that may be good news or bad news. You may be happy to say goodbye to summer or sad. But regardless, I'm glad you're here with us today. And on today's episode we are going to tackle a topic that is very sensitive and has been really perplexing to me for a long time, and that is the role of race in police shootings in America.
Now, as you are well aware, there have been several highly publicized police killings of black American civilians in the past decade. And from those killings, there has emerged a narrative that the police in this country are more likely to kill black Americans compared with whites. And if you remember, and I'm sure you do, the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, that's perhaps the event that really amplified this narrative.
Now, for me personally, it's really easy to see why people would jump to this conclusion. For me, it's extremely hard to watch the video of George Floyd's death without having had just incredible visceral reaction to how unnecessary his death was. When you see that video, especially in the context of America's history of race relations, it's really tempting to jump to that conclusion that police in America are targeting black Americans.
But when I went looking for the actual data on this, the actual empirical evidence, it really honestly led me to confusion. There are so many different people making wildly different claims about whether there is or is not racial bias in police killings. Now, as far as I can tell, there seems to be more consensus about racial bias in other categories of misconduct.
So when it comes to, say, whether police use excessive force, there does seem to be racial bias. There. But when it comes to the specific question of police killings, the picture is much less clear. And so I reached out to somebody who's done important work in this area. Robert VerBruggen. He's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and I encourage all of you to read his work, including the March 2022 report, quote, Fatal police shootings and race, a review of the evidence and suggestions for future research and quote and I'll hyperlink that in the show description.
So for a little background, in 2014, when Michael Brown was killed, we knew very little about the true number of people who were killed by police in America. Since that time, however, there have been significant efforts to count these killings and to do it comprehensively and to collect basic details about each incident. These data, along with information provided by police departments, have led to a massive amount of research into the question we're asking today, which is, is there racial bias in the killings of civilians by American police?
Now, when he's reviewed all of these new data for Burge and comes to the following conclusions, quote, The data certainly rebut the most extreme versions of the Ferguson narrative, which originated in the aftermath of Michael Brown's death in that city in 2014. In surveys, many people say that they think American cops kill a thousand unarmed black men every year.
But the real number averages out to be more like 20, and it's even lower than that. If you just look at suspects who were not attacking someone when they were shot, about a quarter of people shot by the cops are black, which is about double the black share of the overall population. But it's in line with many other benchmarks you might compare it to, such as the black share of arrestees or cop killers or homicides.
In other words, the overall racial breakdown of people shot by police isn't surprising, given the demographics of crime. But these are just simple numbers, and there are more complicated methods you can use to try to find bias. That's where the story gets more nuanced. For example, it's worrisome that the black share of unarmed people shot and killed by police is a bit higher than the overall black share of police killings.
In one study I found especially troubling, showed that in one city, white cops were several times as likely as black cops to fire their guns when they were sent to 911 calls in black neighborhoods as a whole. These data don't support the extreme narrative, and that's important. But we still have much to learn. End quote. So to sum up what VerBruggen has found in the evidence, he says, When you take into account how often the police respond to crime calls involving different racial groups, it is not likely that at least nationally, black Americans are being targeted by the police in fatal shootings.
But he says it's important to remember that, A, the evidence is not conclusive and we need better data on this. B, there may be more or less bias depending upon where you are in the country. And see, it's important to remember that there are many examples of unjustified police killings of black Americans, regardless of national trends. And those, of course, deserve scrutiny.
Now, this is such an important topic. It's a sensitive topic, and we've got to get it right in our public discourse. So I'm really pleased to have Robert VerBruggen on the show today. Robert, welcome to the program. Great to be here. So before we dive in, I brought you on today because I personally have really wanted to get down to the truth about the police and fatal shootings as it relates to race.
And so some publications say there's this huge epidemic that black people are being hunted. Some say the opposite, that, no, you know, there is no racial discrepancy. And so that's not my area of expertise. And I wanted to get down to what is the actual truth here. And I think you've done a good job of writing about that.
Before we get there, though, tell us about the work that you do and where you work, the Manhattan Institute. Sure. Well, the Manhattan Institute is a it's a think tank, sort of a center right think tank that focuses on urban issues, especially in domestic policy issues in general. My own background is in journalism. I went to journalism school.
I worked as an editor at a few different different publications and have done a lot of writing on a lot of different, different policy topics. And like most people, I think I really came to the issue of police shootings and the intersection with race in the aftermath of Ferguson when everybody was making all these all these kind of wild claims and we actually didn't have very good data at that time.
So in the years since, I've been paying attention to all the data that's been released and all the studies that have been done, and I kind of synthesize that report I did to the Manhattan Institute last year, called the fatal police shootings of race. Yeah. So and we're going to get into this, and I want to actually back up a second and ask you about what a think tank does and how that's different from a university or some other research body.
But I got to ask you, and we're sort of jumping ahead here, but I got to ask you, why is the conversation so messy? You said that like there was this narrative and there are plenty of people out there making claims with statistics. Why is it so hard? Why are there so many people making competing claims? It seems like on some topics there's this huge confusion and lots of people are saying lots of different things and some topics there's, you know, some consensus y on this topic.
So much so many opposing points of view and arguments. I mean, I think one one is that the emotion here runs extremely high. I mean, police shootings and the intersection with race have obviously been at the roots of riots, of protests. And of course, it's if people are being killed by the police unjustifiably, that's that's an enormous issue.
That's a that's an enormous violation of rights. I think the emotional emotions really run high with this topic. But the other is that, you know, first of all, we as I mentioned, we don't have a lot of great data at the beginning. So you could kind of drawn whatever numbers you wanted because nobody was actually paying attention to how many people the police were killing in America, which is really striking in and of itself.
But the other thing is, is that when you have a topic that involves race and crime, there's there's one question is whether there's a disproportion with regard to the general population. But the second question is whether there is a skew relative to crime rates. Unfortunately, in this country, we do have, you know, different crime rates on the basis of race for historical reasons that stretch back to you.
Of course, slavery and Jim Crow and years and years of really rough racial history in the U.S. But when you have different different crime rates on the basis of race, you're also going to have different policing outcomes on the basis of race. The left rate debate tends to boil down to folks in the left will tend to use population benchmarks.
They will say that you know, black people are shot disproportionately to their numbers in the general population, which is true. And but then the response from the right is that, no, this this reflects differences in crime rates and there's not really a problem here. And what I've tried to do is to dig underneath all of that and try to sort out what's really going on.
And so you would argue that at least early on it was a matter of low quality data and methodological disputes. Yeah, Yeah, definitely. At the beginning, there were basically two two major collections of data that you could look at. Police use three. One was from the CDC, the other was from the FBI. Neither one of them was even even collecting data on half of the police shootings.
The problem with the FBI data was that it was voluntarily reported by police departments. Some police departments don't even participate in the program. Some of them don't report the police shootings, even if they report other crime data. And the CDC, a lot of the the police homicides were just being classified as regular homicides. They were being classified as what's called a legal intervention, which is what they're supposed to be called.
So we actually didn't have data. And then you'd have, you know, journalistic outlets and in some academic studies trying to make use of what data we had. And that was just sort of sort of a messaging. And you'd led to all these kind of wild claims about about the percentages involved. Okay. So African-Americans, 13% of the population. All right.
And which so many people would say, okay, if it's much higher, if they're proportion of unarmed police shootings is much higher than that is racism. That's an example. That's a it's a clear demonstration of racism and bias and that kind of stuff. But you say a better benchmark is to look at crime rates. So why is that the case?
Why would that be a better benchmark than that, just like mechanically speaking, like for like how it actually plays out, why that would lead to more shootings? Why would crime rate be an important thing that we should actually get said to different to different levels of the issue? One and one is the crime benchmark, and the other is whether we're looking at all shootings or unarmed shootings.
One of the issues with using any sort of benchmark approach is that it's never exactly clear which benchmark is the right one. So so when police go into a neighborhood, they're they're often deployed on the basis of crime rates. There might be a stronger police presence in it in areas with more crime rates. And of course, they're often specifically looking for and responding to calls about crime.
So that's the whole job of the police, is to prevent crime. Crime, stop crime. They go where the crime is and where the crime is. And the individuals who are involved in crime are not represented, but of the general population, the people who police are interacting with and using force on are not going to be representative of the general population either.
So that's where you get this idea of using a benchmark. The second issue here is, you know, the unarmed versus armed question. Obviously, when somebody is not armed and they're killed by the police, that is sort of a red flag that indicates something might have gone wrong there. But being armed or unarmed is not proof of of a wrongful shooting.
If somebody is armed but was peacefully carrying a gun, that they had a permit to carry, The fact that they were armed is not a justification for shooting in the same things if somebody was unarmed, but they were saying that they had a gun and digging around in their waistband or if they were unarmed and, you know, very physically powerful and attacking the officer in these cases on the shooting of somebody who's unarmed can be justified.
So that that really digs into, first of all, why benchmarks are important, why it's important to understand that crime rates are different for different populations. And we need to consider why that's the case. But I think it also reveals some of the limits of just comparing the percentage of people who are shot by the police, whether that's in total or specifically those who are unarmed.
And just comparing that raw number to some other number that represent the crime rate. So I think I think crime is important. It's an important part of the dynamic here that we absolutely have to understand. But I also think that benchmark approaches we're just comparing two different percentages are very limited. So I use this metaphor in class and right on the air here for all of America to hear or, you know, the little slice of America that listens to me, you can tell us if this is a really stupid metaphor and if I could just stop using it or if this makes sense.
But I always tell my my students when thinking about race and crime and these types of issues, I tell them to think about our campus and imagine if there was only a couple of people on campus who were smoking weed, you know, and but the police knew that. And in one dorm, nobody was smoking weed in another dorm.
Two people were smoking weed. Everybody else wasn't. Right. But they pay their they they spend their energies and their resources there because that's where the crime was occurring. And by virtue of always being there and not being elsewhere, they're going to come and do a lot of contact with the other people in the dorm who aren't committing any crimes.
Right. So is that your argument that these benchmarks for crime show us that, yes, you should expect more interaction and therefore more more deaths based upon participation in crime, but also where police resources are targeted? Exactly. That's exactly the point that we expect cops to go where the crime is. These are people we hire and tell them, hey, you know, go where the crime is, stop crime, get involved.
When you see crimes happening. And that's not that's not an assignment to interact with a random sample of the population. You know, nobody is you. We talk a lot about race and crime, but nobody seems surprised at all that police shoot a overwhelming majority of people shot by the police are male as opposed to female, for example. This is not an assignment we give the police is not to interact with the random selection of the population.
It's a very specific assignment that involves subsets of the population. And unfortunately, those those are not representative along a lot of different, different demographic characteristics. And that's something that's going to affect, you know, who's shot by the police. And we need to account for that when we're thinking about your percentages of people who are shot by the police.
Because one issue, of course, is if you look at any maps of crime in the U.S., they tend to overwhelm in terms of gun homicides. They tend to be clustered in areas of intense disadvantage. And those areas tend to be much higher proportion of black. Right. But also another uncomfortable reality is on certain types of crimes where police are going to be likely to use lethal force like murder and sexual assault and those sorts of things.
You also see an overrepresentation in terms of African-Americans, in terms of perpetrate perpetrating exactly. Exactly. And this is not something I mean, I think some people on the right, you know, sometimes you almost come off as if they're gloating about it's like, you know, oh, no, this is nothing to worry about because it's just because there's such a high crime rate in this community.
And I think it's important not to come across like that. I think this is a national emergency that we have such disparate homicide rates, for example, by race. But but the bottom line is that when you're you're sending cops out to to interact with with crime and to try to stop crime, you can't then blame the cops, root for either the demographics of the of the offender population that that they're dealing with.
That's not something that's under their control, something that that we need to address as a society. Right. Unless they're shooting people in a unjustified manner. And what you found in your research is nationally, you find that no, it does not appear that cops just as a function of their duty and the bias that comes with, you know, being a cop, they're not shooting African-Americans at a disproportionate rate.
You say there are some areas where it looks like there may be an issue, but nationally, it's not just a function of if you have cops, they're going to, you know, disappointingly shoot African-Americans. There is a there was a different study by an economist called Mark Hoekstra, I think is the Dutch position. And Cali. Well. Sloan they did not identify the city that their data came from.
It was part of the condition of their agreement to get the data. But they actually found that when a white officer is sent into a black neighborhood, that officer is much more likely to discharge Scott. And then that a black officer is when sent in to the same neighborhood, working the same beat shift. So and also, I think there's just a lot of geographic variation in terms of overall police shooting rates and racial disparities in written and police shooting rates that deserve a lot more studying that we don't know a lot about.
But but if you look at the sort of the benchmark data you just get, if if all you're doing is comparing the percentage of police shooting victims who are black, which is in most years tends to be about 25 to 30%. And you just compare that to the percentage of offenders of various crimes that go through that that might reported that ranges as high as about 50% in some years for for for homicide offending and tends to be at least in that that kind of 20 to 40% range for for other serious crimes as well.
Basically even if you had completely unbiased cops who were just sort of doing their jobs as robots, if they were only shooting people who are committing serious violent crime and do something to justify a shooting, you would probably see a pretty similar racial skew to what we actually see. Now. That doesn't that doesn't prove that there's no bias anywhere.
It doesn't doesn't prove anything like that. But it doesn't show that that somewhere in the general ballpark of where you would expect the disparity to be is where, in fact, we see it. So so I think that in aggregate, it's fair to say that cops are not just running around shooting, shooting people at random on the basis of their race, which I think is some of where some of the more extreme versions of the narratives start to take.
You. Right. So you would say at the very least, you know, I always tell my students the when someone makes a claim, it is their responsibility to show evidence of that claim, not my responsibility to disprove it. Right. And so for people out there who are saying there's strong evidence that the police are hunting black people, you would say that's not actually true.
Now, there are some studies which suggests there's more bias than others, but you're saying the weight of the evidence suggests, no, that's not the case. Right. Right. I mean, I think if you look into the you know, for example, a lot of my my work has been based on The Washington Post data that's based on fatal police shootings, which I think is considered one of the better databases.
Yeah, that's I mean, I certainly consider it to have a lot of advantages. The big downside of it is that because it's only includes shootings, that's the vast majority of police, you know, sort of police cause fatalities. But it does leave out some of the really big cases, including George Floyd. George Floyd is not a shooting. But but yeah, if you start digging into that, you know, you you start to see that you a if you just go through the individual cases, it's the overwhelming majority of the cases.
It's either extremely clear, you know, justifiable shooting or something that would clearly be legally justifiable even if you could maybe come up with some explanation of how the officer could have avoided it. And you also see in the racial breakdowns that, you know, they're not as severe as is some some of the impression would have given you, you you get the narrative that your police are running around shooting black people.
They never shoot white people. I mean, it's just not true. Blacks are only 25 to 30% of the people shot by police. Plenty of white people are shot by police. And there are plenty of questionable shootings of white people as well. So it's a it's a much more nuanced picture. And the methodological questions of trying to answer it in a really rigorous way are way more complicated than I think a lot of people rise.
So let's just let's let's we spent a lot of time here talking about what you did say in your research. Let's spend a little bit of time because I think this is important. You can get wrapped up in a podcast and you can hear all this stuff and you can have your priors and those can clash and you can come away thinking people said things they didn't say.
So let's talk about some things you didn't say. You did not say. There aren't instances where police have clearly killed somebody in an unjustified. Oh, absolutely. I mean, there is a I would say there's a based on years of just paying attention to this. I think there are kind of a handful of cases each year, some some of them make the news in ways that others don't.
But there are at least a handful of cases each year where it is extremely blatant, bad use of force. You know, somebody just shot somebody who had no reason to be shot whatsoever. I think there's also a lot of cases that fall on a gray area where the officer could make a plausible case that he reasonably feared that he had a threat.
But, you know, a lot of other officers might not have not might not have shot in that same circumstance. And like I said, there's a whole lot of variation, you know, especially if you look out west, there's really high rates of police shootings relative to their homicide rates. And I have a chart in my report that that depicts your state by state, all of those numbers.
I mean, it's really striking how some some places have way more police shootings and others even with similar crime rates. So so I think that, you know, professionalizing law enforcement, you know, get training law enforcement better so that we have more consistent uses of force across the country, might be a really promising way of bringing down police shootings in general, regardless of the race.
QUESTION All right. Let's talk about some of the things you didn't You didn't say that there aren't areas of the criminal justice system where there is evidence of bias. So I'm fairly confident, but I'm not an expert in this area. I'm fairly confident there is some research out there which says that police are more likely to use excessive force, maybe not kill, but use excessive force when it comes to race.
Is that true? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a similar question with with all these other areas that when you start digging into it, certainly fatal police shootings is the area that I've dug into the most. But it Egypt, I've paid a lot of attention to researcher and police bias over the years. And with any of these areas you can kind of find conflicting studies that say different things.
But the rolling fire study that I mentioned earlier on looked at non-lethal force. In addition to lethal force, He found some evidence of bias in force by by by analyzing a survey that's conducted, asking people about their experiences with police. There's there's also evidence based on it's called the veil of darkness test, where basically it's easier for police to tell the race of somebody during the day than it is during the night.
So you can look to see if the composition of stops and searches and so on change when when darkness falls. And there's some evidence, too, of the of a modest but but but detectable shift when when darkness falls please stop stopped if you're black people presumably because they can't can't see the race so so yeah I mean there's there's a lot of research in a lot of different areas.
There's an entire process of criminal justice that goes all the way from, you know, police officers walking the streets all the way to, you know, criminal convictions and prison sentences. And each each part of that process has a whole area of research on it. And there's very complicated findings in each of them, as has been my experience. Yeah.
And in many of those areas, there's credible and, you know, compelling evidence of bias. So you're just you're just talking about fatal shootings here. Yeah. Not absolving the entire criminal justice system. Know, it was it was I found that it was more than enough to to write about to focus on. Yes. And hard enough I think to to get down to the bottom of it.
Definitely. Okay. So a decade ago, not great data when it came to this topic, you say the data is improved that perfect still problems, still some ambiguity, uncertainties, methodological issues, but the data is better. And you say you don't think it shows that cops are out there hunting black people. But that narrative took hold. Right? And so you mentioned the Ferguson narrative.
So that's Michael Brown. And of course, it all gets just ramped up to 11 with George Floyd. So talk about that, that Ferguson narrative after Ferguson was that the hands up don't shoot. Yeah, well, I mean, the Ferguson that was especially kind of gut wrenching to watch because that is a case where the shooting itself was justified in the know.
The Obama Justice Department more or less found that it was justified. They didn't find out till later. Yeah, and later. But but you had later in that case, you had a narrative about the shooting at the heart of the entire thing that was that was incorrect. That so and so you had you basically these cities on fire over a shooting, you know, in protest of a shooting that was justified and based on your false narrative that he had his hands in the air.
You know, of course, you have the George Floyd situations. You are extremely different. You you have somebody who is he had no time for it for for 8 minutes, 9 minutes, whatever. The the the official the count of that was. And your police continued to restrain him after he had he had he was down after he was had stopped moving after he was starting to lose his pulse.
That was a year obviously a murdered by by police officers. And so, yes, you do the narrative surrounding the the individual incidents, you know, vary across these things. But what we found found is that when one of these incidents goes viral, whatever actually happened, you can have you have, first of all, unrest in specific cities where you're having, you know, goings on fire, so on and so forth.
But another thing that that that a lot of different research has found at this point is that when you have one of these viral shootings, and especially when you have a lot of scrutiny on the police department, you also find that police back off of their jobs. And that's that's something that's extremely frustrating to me as somebody who is on the right but has some some libertarian tendencies, because you obviously you can't you can't stop people from talking about these incidents even when they're justified.
And some of these incidents are not justified. If the police kill somebody, as happened in the case of George Floyd, people have to be able to to correct that and talk about it and debate it and make reforms to fix it. That's really important. But but at the same time, there's this cost where police are backing out of their jobs and you're seeing crime go up in these places.
So one police murder can translate to multiple murders and property destruction and so on and so forth beyond the original incident. So I think this is something that we really need to get a grasp on as a society and fix, because every time you have one of these viral incidents, you can have a whole lot more bad things that happen after it.
Yeah, you know, I wrote a whole book on on inequality and Freedom, and one of the chapters we had was on violence. And it's really hard to conceptualize a free society when you're not secure, when there's chaos, you know, when there's attacks on your physical well-being, or at least the threat of that. So, you know, there was a push to defund the police.
There was a push to pull back. Is there a pattern in areas that were sort of de policed? Is there a pattern in terms of the positive or negative impact of that de policing? Yeah. I mean, there's been actually a fair amount of research on this on this now that I actually discuss a little bit in a different report.
There was another study by Birol and Fryer with Tonight Tonight, Debbie. And there is increasing in the authors names now but a different study that found essentially the same thing. And what they found is that when you have a viral police incident, and especially that's coupled with a lot of scrutiny on the department and your federal investigation, for example, of the department, what you see is violence goes up in that community writ large.
So it's not at that point you're no longer talking about the original violent incident. Now you have crime going up on a more general level. And what that seems to be connected to is just police backing off of their jobs. Basically, police feel that they can't enforce the law anymore. They're under a lot of scrutiny and they stop doing proactive work and there seems to be a connection between the de policing that happens after these incidents and then the subsequent rising crime.
And that's it. That's a extremely serious consequences that I think we need to be we need to look at better because it's very difficult, as I as I argued in that of the report, it's just very difficult to force a cop to do his job. If there's a911 call, you can certainly fire the coffee, refuse to go to a91 call.
But if he's just out policing, people do not like quotas. They don't like in this union pressure against it and also public pressure against having police do more proactive work, especially when they're under scrutiny like this. So so in somewhat at some level, you know, police are just doing what the public ask them to do. If there's a public outcry against the police and they kind of back off what they're back off it proactive work, responding to pressure in in a very straightforward way and that a serious consequences.
Yeah you know it's it is rare and like you say, the research does not support the claim that cops are hunting black people. In fact, it's about proportionate to what you would expect given the communities they're in and the number of offenders they would be likely encountering from each race. But it seems in the social media era, I find myself doing this all the time with any particular issue, any problem, write earthquakes or tornadoes or whatever it is that everything is local.
I'm seeing everything, right? I mean, I wouldn't have seen any of this stuff in the past. You know, maybe a few incidents, you know, would make national news. But I'm not seeing every bad thing that happens. I'm seeing it all. It all feels very, very close to me and local. Right. Because I'm seeing so much of it. I'm doomscrolling.
Right. It just seems like the world is as an awful place. And like in Ferguson, it seems like when this stuff happens and that's the kind of environment you're swimming in that all sudden we race ahead, right? Our feelings and our priors. And, you know, like you said, the Obama administration eventually says no. The narrative does not fit the facts on what happened.
But in the social media age, it seems like we're always going to race out in front of that stuff. I mean, is there any hope to not just be like beholden to our emotions on this stuff? Yeah, I feel like it's a central tension are we have a lot of freedom in this country, The First Amendment, we're allowed to say whatever we want.
And you know, that encompasses newer technologies like social media. But, you know, while these technologies do not work well with our sacred psychology, sometimes it's just like stuff can fly around to get where our of the narrative everybody kind of lines up on their sides. And then, you know, the next day it turns out that the the camera angle was misleading or what have you.
It's just it's a it's a very difficult dynamic to navigate in any way in a country that respects freedom. Yeah, that was my last episode. I talked about Covington Catholic, you know, and even myself. I'm not I'm not a crazy lefty, but, you know, I'm left of center and I'm an academic. And so I see this grinning kid in the MAGA hat, and there's an indigenous American in his face.
And I'm thinking, What an A-hole that kid is, right? I mean, he's just trying to provoke. And then you get a different camera angle and you're like, Oh, my God, the complete opposite. I thought it was all right. ROBERTS So we're going to wrap up here in a moment, But I was just going through the various things you've written for the Manhattan Institute, and there's a lot of great stuff in there about the gender wage gap and mass shootings and the falling incarceration gap between black and white Americans.
I mean, there's all sorts of great stuff, and they're all linked to some of that stuff in the show. Notes encourage everybody to go check out your work. It's great. I feel like you write with a really you mentioned your journalistic background. There's a really sort of dispassionate, objective way in which you treat this subject, which I really appreciate.
But I got to say, because I found one thing that you seem to be a fan of that I'm also a fan of because I'm a scholar of economic and racial inequality. You appear to be a Raj Chetty standard, You know, so so let's talk really briefly about that really cool study you wrote about the Facebook data. And it was millions of people and billions of friendships that they analyzed and they found that social capital ends up being really, really important for mobility.
So tell us what they do, what they find and what are the implications of all that? Yeah, I mean, essentially what they're what they're doing there is they have, you know, as you said, this data from Facebook, which some of your listeners and it may not be aware, Raj Shetty's superpower is getting data that nobody else has access to.
He's he's got massive millions. I mean, we would have I mean, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. But mean he's done work with the IRS data and college admissions data. Actually, the most recent study of his I wrote about was about college admissions. But. But, but for that study, what he did was he he took Facebook data. He basically was able to tell from the Facebook data how people are forming friendships in different kinds of communities and how sort of segregated by class and so on there.
And even what he basically finds that when you have stronger social connections between classes in a given place, that tends to be good for mobility, that if you have a more cross class friendships, the kids who start at the bottom of the income spectrum are then more able to work their way up. You know, presumably in part thanks to the connections they had with with people who are in the social capital and the manners and so on that you learn from interacting with people who are higher class.
So these a really, really fascinating and really interesting study. Yeah. And when you said people would hear you say that and your chair is famous for having found social capital and family structure, both being really, really important in the various you mentioned the IRA study and some people will hear that, especially when you hear the single Parenthood one and they'll say, Well, that's just a function of poverty, right?
So if you if you control for for poverty, single parenthood would disappear. And in fact, it's actually the opposite, right? So you control for all these different things and you find that family structure and social capital end up still being really, really powerful. In that study you mentioned there's two papers, two nature papers that came out of that.
They argue that there's two reasons, and they're both sort of equally responsible, sort of half and half, two reasons why people have different economic connectedness. One, you can't really change all that much and one you can one is friend friending bias. People just sort of naturally tend to make friends with people like themselves. But the other is exposure, right?
So that is one area where we could socially engineer more connections, right? Yeah, that's sort of an interesting concept how they how to go about that if it's not happening naturally because is they feel like a lot of a lot of times different communities just ended up being different for for totally random idiosyncratic reasons. And when you try to step in in social engineering in an existing unity that's already been built up, that's that's a it's a difficult question how to how to do that.
But it does seem to be a very promising area where if you could do it, you would get a lot more social mobility and a lot more social harmony, frankly. Yeah, And you mentioned that, you know, in that study, there's there's stuff for everybody. There's stuff for the right stuff for the left. But you mentioned one thing that that's going to sound good to my my right leaning listeners, which is religion, you know, being a part of a religious community, being a part of a church can actually enhance those types of connections.
Right? Yeah. I mean, I think there are there are a lot of good things about religious and I'm actually an agnostic myself, so I say that in a sort of dispassionate way. But but yeah, I think yeah, yeah. I mean, religious ties, religion serves the important social function of just bringing people together and saying everybody is welcome here, everybody can come in.
And I think we were losing a lot as people become less religious in that that isn't happening anymore. I think it was Ross Douthat who once said that if you didn't like the religious right, you wait till you see the past religious, religious right. So well, that's a topic for a whole nother show. So. ROBERTS So at a university, you know, I've I've got a Ph.D. in economic and racial inequality.
And so a university hires me to teach those kinds of classes. I'm expected then, as part of my agreement to get tenure, I should be then publishing in that area in journals that are known for that topic and those sorts of things. So a think tank is different from a university. So tell us, you know, what does a think tank do?
What does a person like you do there? Why are you hired there? You know, what's the difference between a think tank and other types of organizations that do research? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think there are a couple of things that distinguish a think tank for something like a university. One thing the phrase is that think tank is like a university without students.
I obviously don't have any teaching responsibilities beyond writing things and appearing on media once in a while to tell people about what? If you want some, I can give you some grading. No, thank, no thank you. But but yet another thing is that when we do do do research, yeah, we have some people who are academics as well and who do publish in those academic journals.
But when I write a paper or a research something, it's normally put out through the Manhattan Institute itself as opposed to being shopped around to academic publications and other things that think tanks tend to engage directly with policy and just to some limited extent, politics in a way that that universities generally we are who are nonprofit, we're not endorsing candidates, we're not getting involved with campaigns, but we are proposing policy ideas that that could be implemented through the political process.
And we do meet with politicians from time to time who are curious about our ideas to tell them about them. And too, there's a policy mission for a think tank or there's a lot of think tanks that I don't think a university or a university professor would have. Robert VerBruggen. He is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. I'll put a bunch of stuff in the show description.
You guys can go check out his work. I think it's really, really good. He does a really good job of, I think, trying to come to these topics, seeking truth, not trying to, you know, affirm his priors. So go check it out. Robert VerBruggen, thank you so much for joining the show today. Thanks for having me.
Happy trails to you until you need me again. Happy trails to you. Please smile. And until that, who cares about the clouds when we're together, just sing the song and bring the sunny When you betray too You tell me Oh, yeah. Call me Happy trails to you I know we need and happy trails Do you see? Smile down to the land Who cares about the clouds when we're together?
Just sing the song and bring the song When the happy trails to you tell me Oh, yeah. Goodbye. Good luck. And may the good Lord take a liking to you.
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