In which I once again link all of our city's problems to a lack of STEM education:
Dear Baltimore Sun,
The city health officials who plan to strip non-conforming
liquor stores of their licenses because of the Johns Hopkins University study
linking them to violent crime (“City Targets Liquor Stores”, June 17 [warning: pay wall]) are
confusing correlation with causation. It
could be that the liquor stores themselves are not causing the crime, but
rather that some other underlying cause is causing both the non-conforming
liquor stores and the violent crime. The
distinction is important, because if the liquor stores are not causing the
crime, then closing them would not actually be predicted to decrease violent
crime, and could even exacerbate it.
As it turns out, property vacancy also correlates with
violent crime (for example, Goodstein, Ryan and Lee, Yan Y., Do
Foreclosures Increase Crime? (May 2010). Available at SSRN:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1670842 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1670842). If a non-conforming liquor store loses its
license, it seems at least as likely that the store will end up as a vacant
property than that the owners will decide to open a healthy food store in its
place, as the city officials hope.
Before taking away licenses and, as a
consequence, closing small businesses (that would furthermore
disproportionately impact a particular ethnic group), the city needs to
carefully consider the evidence to determine whether the benefits of doing so
really are predicted to outweigh the costs.
This story once again emphasizes the importance of having a basic
mathematics education (for no student in the first week of an introductory
statistics course would confuse correlation with causation), both for our city
officials as well as for our journalists.
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