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Sometimes I think the way HN should work is not that you can't both downvote and comment, but that you can't downvote and not comment.

by moldbug 15y ago

Retric 15y ago
Violent crime in the US and around the industrialized world has been on a long downward trend for literally thousands of years. Trying to analyze any current system without at least looking at how much things have improved over the last 20, 200, AND 2000 years completely misses why things are the way they are. PS: There are far more laws to break now than in the past which again shifts the picture greatly. Also, Island nations have less drug crime because it's harder to bring the stuff in.
- moldbug 15y ago
  Has the industrialized world existed for "literally thousands of years"? I'm not sure any statistical trends are consistent in this timeframe. How do you separate crime and war, for instance? Actually, law enforcement in the Edwardian period was much more strict. At that point in history the "broken windows" theory of crime is not a theory - it is a piece of everyday common sense which it has never occurred to anyone to question. Juridical punishment in the Anglo-American era decreases more or less monotonically since (at least) the Elizabethan age. America is in all eras notorious for endemic crime. In general, by the end of the 19th century there is no significant criminal underclass in Protestant Europe. Of course, in Naples you can get knifed in an alley at any time since the 5th century BC, so everything is relative. This book (1921) is a pretty good look at American and European police systems in the prewar era: http://books.google.com/books?id=Q90qAAAAMAAJ http://books.google.com/books?id=Q90qAAAAMAAJ. Fosdick was later head of the Rockefeller Foundation so you know he's legit. (Edit: book link was wrong.)
  - moldbug 15y ago
    From Fosdick's book (p. 14): "The chief constable for Edinburgh in his annual report for 1915 wrote as follows: 'I regret to state that while crimes against the person have considerably decreased, a number of serious crimes under the heading of homicide were reported during the year, namely one murder, one attempted murder, and five cases of culpable homicide. The one murder was an abortion case; two of the culpable homicides were cases in which infants had died from neglect; a third was a vehicular accident case; and two others, after full investigation by the Crown Authorities, were not proceeded with.' Edinburgh is a city in excess of 300,000 population. Surely a chief of police in an American city of equal size would have reasons for pride rather than regret if he could point to such a record." In 2012, said American chief of police wouldn't have reasons for pride - he'd probably be committed to an insane asylum. But even a century ago, American crime is an order of magnitude above British crime. Yes. New York 30 years ago was insane. Giuliani cleaned it up. This is a case of mistaking the exception for the trend. Moreover, all chic New Yorker-reading New Yorkers are now free to think like Gopnik, as they stroll around Central Park at midnight or whatever - a blatant invitation for the trend to resume. Remember, it took the Dinkins era to get these people to elect a Republican in the first place. But if you asked their great-grandfathers of Fosdick's era, they'd have been quite astonished to learn that Central Park could ever become a predator's den, day or night - and would associate such an outcome with the complete collapse of American civilization. Which obviously hasn't happened, so nobody's perfect.
    - Retric 15y ago
      Some states in the US have homicide rates below 1.3 / 100,000 or ~3-4 for a city of that size. And that includes both vehicular manslaughter cases and child neglect cases so your example would be a rather bad year compared to many city's in the US.
  - bokonist 15y ago
    "America is in all eras notorious for endemic crime." In 1894 Philadelphia, a city of a million people at the time (2/3rds the current population) recorded 22 murders. By 1990 the murder count peaked at 535 before falling a bit back to around ~300 the past few years. Overall that's a 1000%+ increase between 1894 and now. So even by historical American standards, crime now is much worse. Part of the change in Philadelphia is due to the great migration and the changing composition of the population rather than change in law enforcement. But even adjusting for demographics the crime rate is 2-4X that of the 1890's http://books.google.com/books?id=8CVNAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA13&dq=philadelphia+robbery&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RxoCT727BqXn0QHIno2nBg&ved=0CFIQ6AEwBTgU#v=onepage&q=homicide&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=8CVNAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA13&#3... I'm still trying to figure out what precisely changed about law enforcement between the 1890's and the 1980's. Many books mention in passing that the Warren court and more liberal policing policy in the 1960's played a role (the books "Slaughter of the Cities" and "Unheavenly City" mention this a bit, among others). But I still haven't found a good treatment that details how these policies made their way from the courts and the mayors to the beat cops on the ground, and how the day to day job of policing and sentencing actually changed. BTW, mencius, do you ever worry that policing in Europe or Japan is too stringent? That it will lead over time to a domestication of the population, a winnowing out of the masculine and risk taking character in the population? -devin f
    - onemoreact 15y ago
      Pieter Spierenburg, a professor of historical criminology at Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, sifts through the evidence in “A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present” (Polity; $24.95). In Europe, homicide rates, conventionally represented as the number of murder victims per hundred thousand people in the population per year, have been falling for centuries. Spierenburg attributes this long decline to what the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” (shorthand for a whole class of behaviors requiring physical restraint and self-control, right down to using a fork instead of eating with your hands or stabbing at your food with a knife), and to the growing power of the centralizing state to disarm civilians, control violence, enforce law and order, and, broadly, to hold a monopoly on the use of force. (Anthropologists sometimes talk about a related process, the replacement of a culture of honor with a culture of dignity.) In feuding medieval Europe, the murder rate hovered around thirty-five. Duels replaced feuds. Duels are more mannered; they also have a lower body count. By 1500, the murder rate in Western Europe had fallen to about twenty. Courts had replaced duels. By 1700, the murder rate had dropped to five. Today, that rate is generally well below two, where it has held steady, with minor fluctuations, for the past century. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/11/09/091109crat_atlarge_lepore#ixzz1ouqRHX00 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/11/09/091... Philadelphia is one of many city's in the US, but looking at the overall trend and including things like duels shows a different picture. Consider, some gang violence would not have counted as murder 100 years ago.

Sometimes I think the way HN should work is not that you can't both downvote and comment, but that you can't downvote and not comment.

by moldbug 15y ago

Sometimes I think the way HN should work is not that you can't both downvote and comment, but that you can't downvote and not comment.

Retric 15y ago

Violent crime in the US and around the industrialized world has been on a long downward trend for literally thousands of years. Trying to analyze any current system without at least looking at how much things have improved over the last 20, 200, AND 2000 years completely misses why things are the way they are. PS: There are far more laws to break now than in the past which again shifts the picture greatly. Also, Island nations have less drug crime because it's harder to bring the stuff in.

moldbug 15y ago
Has the industrialized world existed for "literally thousands of years"? I'm not sure any statistical trends are consistent in this timeframe. How do you separate crime and war, for instance? Actually, law enforcement in the Edwardian period was much more strict. At that point in history the "broken windows" theory of crime is not a theory - it is a piece of everyday common sense which it has never occurred to anyone to question. Juridical punishment in the Anglo-American era decreases more or less monotonically since (at least) the Elizabethan age. America is in all eras notorious for endemic crime. In general, by the end of the 19th century there is no significant criminal underclass in Protestant Europe. Of course, in Naples you can get knifed in an alley at any time since the 5th century BC, so everything is relative. This book (1921) is a pretty good look at American and European police systems in the prewar era: http://books.google.com/books?id=Q90qAAAAMAAJ http://books.google.com/books?id=Q90qAAAAMAAJ. Fosdick was later head of the Rockefeller Foundation so you know he's legit. (Edit: book link was wrong.)
- moldbug 15y ago
  From Fosdick's book (p. 14): "The chief constable for Edinburgh in his annual report for 1915 wrote as follows: 'I regret to state that while crimes against the person have considerably decreased, a number of serious crimes under the heading of homicide were reported during the year, namely one murder, one attempted murder, and five cases of culpable homicide. The one murder was an abortion case; two of the culpable homicides were cases in which infants had died from neglect; a third was a vehicular accident case; and two others, after full investigation by the Crown Authorities, were not proceeded with.' Edinburgh is a city in excess of 300,000 population. Surely a chief of police in an American city of equal size would have reasons for pride rather than regret if he could point to such a record." In 2012, said American chief of police wouldn't have reasons for pride - he'd probably be committed to an insane asylum. But even a century ago, American crime is an order of magnitude above British crime. Yes. New York 30 years ago was insane. Giuliani cleaned it up. This is a case of mistaking the exception for the trend. Moreover, all chic New Yorker-reading New Yorkers are now free to think like Gopnik, as they stroll around Central Park at midnight or whatever - a blatant invitation for the trend to resume. Remember, it took the Dinkins era to get these people to elect a Republican in the first place. But if you asked their great-grandfathers of Fosdick's era, they'd have been quite astonished to learn that Central Park could ever become a predator's den, day or night - and would associate such an outcome with the complete collapse of American civilization. Which obviously hasn't happened, so nobody's perfect.
  - Retric 15y ago
    Some states in the US have homicide rates below 1.3 / 100,000 or ~3-4 for a city of that size. And that includes both vehicular manslaughter cases and child neglect cases so your example would be a rather bad year compared to many city's in the US.
- bokonist 15y ago
  "America is in all eras notorious for endemic crime." In 1894 Philadelphia, a city of a million people at the time (2/3rds the current population) recorded 22 murders. By 1990 the murder count peaked at 535 before falling a bit back to around ~300 the past few years. Overall that's a 1000%+ increase between 1894 and now. So even by historical American standards, crime now is much worse. Part of the change in Philadelphia is due to the great migration and the changing composition of the population rather than change in law enforcement. But even adjusting for demographics the crime rate is 2-4X that of the 1890's http://books.google.com/books?id=8CVNAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA13&dq=philadelphia+robbery&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RxoCT727BqXn0QHIno2nBg&ved=0CFIQ6AEwBTgU#v=onepage&q=homicide&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=8CVNAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA13&#3... I'm still trying to figure out what precisely changed about law enforcement between the 1890's and the 1980's. Many books mention in passing that the Warren court and more liberal policing policy in the 1960's played a role (the books "Slaughter of the Cities" and "Unheavenly City" mention this a bit, among others). But I still haven't found a good treatment that details how these policies made their way from the courts and the mayors to the beat cops on the ground, and how the day to day job of policing and sentencing actually changed. BTW, mencius, do you ever worry that policing in Europe or Japan is too stringent? That it will lead over time to a domestication of the population, a winnowing out of the masculine and risk taking character in the population? -devin f
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    Pieter Spierenburg, a professor of historical criminology at Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, sifts through the evidence in “A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present” (Polity; $24.95). In Europe, homicide rates, conventionally represented as the number of murder victims per hundred thousand people in the population per year, have been falling for centuries. Spierenburg attributes this long decline to what the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” (shorthand for a whole class of behaviors requiring physical restraint and self-control, right down to using a fork instead of eating with your hands or stabbing at your food with a knife), and to the growing power of the centralizing state to disarm civilians, control violence, enforce law and order, and, broadly, to hold a monopoly on the use of force. (Anthropologists sometimes talk about a related process, the replacement of a culture of honor with a culture of dignity.) In feuding medieval Europe, the murder rate hovered around thirty-five. Duels replaced feuds. Duels are more mannered; they also have a lower body count. By 1500, the murder rate in Western Europe had fallen to about twenty. Courts had replaced duels. By 1700, the murder rate had dropped to five. Today, that rate is generally well below two, where it has held steady, with minor fluctuations, for the past century. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/11/09/091109crat_atlarge_lepore#ixzz1ouqRHX00 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/11/09/091... Philadelphia is one of many city's in the US, but looking at the overall trend and including things like duels shows a different picture. Consider, some gang violence would not have counted as murder 100 years ago.