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Murder, Crime and Military Spending are 99.6% proportional internationally among the leading industrial nations. In fact, the 22 states of the Southern United States is twice the murder and military spending rates of the 28 Northern United States. This is especially true for the Nineteenth Century countries of Japan, Italy, Germany, and the United States. For the 400 year old societies of England, France, Massachusetts, and Virginia, the murder rates are still proportional to the military spending rates, but at 40% of the level of the 150 year old countries. So long civilization leads to less crime. R=.93

Spirit Level Addenda

Thanks to data published in the 2009UK-2010US book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, we see an interesting pattern. That book presents graphs to support their case that income inequality is tied to many health and social problems. They create a nine factor health and social problems index that correlates about 88% with either military spending or income inequality. However, when you compare military spending correlations with income inequality correlations for these nine factors side by side, there is about a 3% difference in favor of military spending as the strongest overall. When you drop the three weakest correlations, where neither factor has any robust correlations and look at only the top six where military spending has six 75% or better correlations and income inequality has only three that strong, military spending has a 13% lead with an average correlation of 82% to the income inequality average of 69%. Clearly, among the most relevant correlations, military spending has the stronger explaining power for: prisoners (85 to 66); teen births (82 to 74); homicides (80 to 57); mental illness (79 to 74); and for obesity (75 to 52). Overall, for military spending, the strongest factors are the economic ones, followed by the health and social problems, followed by the environmental factors. The economic relationships with military spending are very strong indicating that all these relationships most probably begin with the economic relationship. Incidently, the correlation between the military spending and income inequality is a robust .765 (Note, I'm using R not R2 for my percents)

 

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