The New York Times has an article about Baltimore’s murder rate in 2015: 55 per 100,000. Looking at Worldbank data for 2013, if Baltimore were its own country, it would be the world’s second most dangerous.
[Separately, for math and statistics nerds, the article is interesting because it is missing the seemingly simplest explanation for why the murder rate in Baltimore has climbed: as the population falls, the people who have moved out are disproportionately the ones in careers that don’t require occasional murders while people who have moved in are disproportionately those engaged in illegal activities where business disputes cannot be resolved through the courts. The seed of this idea is in the article: “Unfortunately, many of our victims are involved in the illegal drug trade or involved in illegal activity.”]
Related:
- interview with Jill Carter, a state legislator representing Baltimore, in the Maryland chapter of Real World Divorce
It’s also worth thinking about what the rest of the country’s murder rate would be if you pull out the top 10 murder-happy hotspots.
Bill Whittle:
Clearly if Baltimore was a country, it would be a very unusual one. Consider the fact that the Johns Hopkins Hospital is probably one of the top 10 hospitals in the world. So a standalone republic of Baltimore would lead the world in the number of elite hospitals per capita. On the other hand, if Baltimore were a country, it would probably have to import 99% of its food from other countries.
Like I’ve said for years: legalize marijuana, and about 75% of this goes away. I understand this will push other statistics around, but I get the impression that it’s that particular drug that makes up most of the trade, and, therefore, most of the territorial and monetary disputes.
The number wouldn’t be nearly so high if Baltimore were a standalone country. The drug trade thrives on the same people fleeing the city, driving back into the city to buy drugs.
If cambridge were a standalone country, it would be the richest per capita in the world. For a day, until all the people who worked in Boston couldn’t get through customs in time to get to work.
I’m afraid Phil, your methodology doesn’t work here. It would work ok for a state, but it really doesn’t work as a city. There are city-states out there, but none of them are the urban remnant that couldn’t afford to flee bad leadership. City states with consistently poor leadership simply don’t survive.
ICH: Thanks for the interesting perspective. However, Cambridge would definitely not be the richest country in the world, I don’t think. http://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/massachusetts/cambridge says that the per-capita income is $48,509/year. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html shows that quite a few countries have more than this in per-capita GDP (which should track income pretty closely). See Norway at $67,200/year, Singapore at $83,100, or Qatar at $137,200(!).