The United States is in the Middle East or Sub-Saharan Africa: Income Inequality and Homicide

A joint analysis of income inequality and homicide indicates that the United States is really a poor Middle East country or a slightly above average Sub-Saharan country!
Charted Territory has previously demonstrated a strong positive global relationship between income inequality and violence/homicide¹ and that the United States is in poor country in terms of sister countries; Iraq, Burundi, and Turkey are three of the four most similar counties to the United States². And now, using a new “minimized convex hull” confidence region concept, we can identify clear regions of coupled inequality-and-homicide. This new approach groups the United States in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa regions, and is not good enough to be in Europe, ex-USSR countries, Asia, or even North Africa.
Methodology: Previous Charted Territory posts cover the background to the inequality³ and homicide⁴ ananlysis^1,2. Here, we have developed custom VBA code in Microsoft PowerPoint⁵—the pptCharter—to plot the chart. The pptCharter is a flexible charting tool capable of producing high-quality charts that can be straightforwardly manipulated in PowerPoint. This enables users to produce a mix of advanced visualizations not possible in other charting tools. The pptCharter also includes a novel approach to calculate confidence regions⁶, based on the concept of minimal convex hulls⁷. In this case, each “80% confidence hull” in the chart contains 80% of the data points that make up each region (pptCharter allows users to adjust the confidence interval).

1. https://chartedterritory.us/2018/02/24/inequality-and-violence-homicide-part-1-world-outlook/
2. https://chartedterritory.us/2018/03/01/inequality-and-violence-homicide-part-2-the-united-states/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
4. http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=2&series=SI.POV.GINI#
5. https://products.office.com/en-us/powerpoint
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_region
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_hull