New York Times columnist Paul Krugman opines:
On the other hand, small-town and rural Americans often trash-talk big cities, portraying them as crime-ridden hellholes, when the reality is that except in New England, homicide rates in 2020 were generally higher in more rural states:
I’m seeing more of these types of CDC homicide data scatter plot graphs in the mainstream media since I’ve been doing them, which is a good thing. But I’ve noticed that Democrats like Krugman tend to take the data automatically provided by the CDC when you ask for it by state and then manually delete Washington D.C.’s listing.
You could make the pedantic argument that D.C. isn’t a state, even though it has Electoral Votes.
But, obviously, D.C. isn’t on this scatter chart because it is 100% urban and has, by far, the highest homicide rate, well above Louisiana and Mississippi. D.C. wouldn’t even fit on this graph. D.C. would be up around those three dots in the upper right corner. And that would be off-Narrative.
Krugman goes on:
I don’t know how to make a systematic comparison here, but it’s not at all clear that urban elites sneering at rural Americans is any worse than the calumny hurled in the opposite direction.
Perhaps. On the other hand, there is the question of who has bigger Megaphone: urban elites (such as, say, Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate and New York Time columnist) or rural nobodies.
