Thank you! Agreed that EA as a community often overlooks the value of protests and social change. Excited to look more deeply into the report
On “backfire”—do you have any view on backfire of BLM protests? I’ve been concerned with the pattern of protest → police stop enforcing in a neighborhood → murder rates go up. Seems like if this does happen, it really raises the bar as the long run positive effects protests like this need to achieve in order to offset the medium term murder increase.
But maybe I’m thinking of this wrong. Or maybe this wouldn’t be considered backfire—more of an unintended side effect?
On “backfire”—do you have any view on backfire of BLM protests? I’ve been concerned with the pattern of protest → police stop enforcing in a neighborhood → murder rates go up.
I wouldn’t consider this a “backfire”, although murder rates going up is definitely a bad thing. In the context of protests, a backfire isn’t when anything bad happens, it’s when the protests hurt the protesters’ goals. If “police stop enforcing in a neighborhood” is a goal of BLM protests (which it basically is), then this is a success, not a backfire, and the increase in murder rate is an unfortunate consequence.
A backfire effect would be something like: protest → protests make people feel unsafe → city allocates more funding to the police.
Thank you! Agreed that EA as a community often overlooks the value of protests and social change. Excited to look more deeply into the report
On “backfire”—do you have any view on backfire of BLM protests? I’ve been concerned with the pattern of protest → police stop enforcing in a neighborhood → murder rates go up. Seems like if this does happen, it really raises the bar as the long run positive effects protests like this need to achieve in order to offset the medium term murder increase.
But maybe I’m thinking of this wrong. Or maybe this wouldn’t be considered backfire—more of an unintended side effect?
Source: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/06/what-caused-the-2020-spike-in-murders.html
I’m a bit late to the party but:
I wouldn’t consider this a “backfire”, although murder rates going up is definitely a bad thing. In the context of protests, a backfire isn’t when anything bad happens, it’s when the protests hurt the protesters’ goals. If “police stop enforcing in a neighborhood” is a goal of BLM protests (which it basically is), then this is a success, not a backfire, and the increase in murder rate is an unfortunate consequence.
A backfire effect would be something like: protest → protests make people feel unsafe → city allocates more funding to the police.