Take away all the murders and crime by black people and our country is quite healthy. Oops! We aren’t supposed to point that fact out.
Hell, if blacks could just lower their murder rate to that of Hispanics, who live in equal poverty, we’d be a utopia.
Actually, it’s a thought that lots of people have just about every day.
In the world of credit you have the accepts and the rejects. Accepts you offer credit to, rejects you turn away.
A major question is, how do the rejects perform? Are they bad, really bad, abysmally bad, or what if they were just slightly worse than the worst of the accepted population? To analyze the effect on profits, underwriters assume that the rejects were accepted, hypothesize a bad rate for these “swap sets” and see what it does to profits (like “what happens when we accept the best 10% of the rejects?” - which was the thinking behind sub-prime credit ventures.)
With respect to the population at large, you can measure all sorts of behaviors (labor force participation, college graduation rate, home ownership rate, family formation rate, arrest rate, incarceration rate, homicide rate, drug addiction rate, high school dropout rate, etc., etc., etc.)
So, naturally you can then say, analogous to the credit swap set question - what if the black population in the United States was swapped out with a 15% chunk of the population that behaved exactly like Asians in all these regards. You could then evaluate the impact on the economy at large of the effects of higher graduation rates, lower homicide rates, lower incarceration rates, etc. The impact on GDP would seem to be enormous.
And there, in a nutshell is why you should be very skeptical of transnational comparisons, say, US vs Japan or US vs Switzerland, nations that have no parallel to the black minority population in the U.S.
That reminds me of an anecdote told by the the late great William Buckley: he was invited to a dinner party at which the guest of honor, a well known sociologist, made a comment to the effect that if one factored out the crimes committed by blacks and Hispanics, the crime rate in the US would be like that of Luxembourg.
Some researcher was fired for pointing out that if we excluded violent crime from blacks in the US, we would have the violent crime rate lower than Iceland.