Why Simple Regression Models Work So Well Describing ‘Risk Behaviors’ in the USA

The generalized anger created by individual experience of marginalization in the USA makes violent behavior frequent enough to become a ‘typical’ symbol, in the information-theoretic sense, for use in communicating along the damaged social networks of oppressed communities. Simple regression models relating violence and other risk behaviors to indices of relative deprivation emerge, after some mathematical development, as a natural consequence of this underlying dynamic, described elegantly by Franz Fanon in the early 1960s.

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