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The US is more like Latin America here, where top 25% does not mean you are immune to the problems of the other 75%. Your average resident of an affluent wester
by _delirium 1y ago
The US is more like Latin America here, where top 25% does not mean you are immune to the problems of the other 75%. Your average resident of an affluent western European country does not come into daily contact with a poor resident of western Russia (except maybe through some recent drones...?). But in the US, it's hard to escape the poverty and violence unless you're closer to the top 1%. I am probably around top 20%, in an affluent part of an affluent coastal US city (but not Manhattan affluent). Still, I don't walk outside after dark because of the high crime rates. The crime rates are not as high as in the bad parts of the same city, but people are mugged on a daily basis, and even murders are uncomfortably frequent. I didn't have this problem when I lived in several different places in western Europe, which had lower incomes, but also much lower levels of violent crime. I will admit that American pay is better, but not sure about the quality of life.
- yes_really 1y agoWestern European cities have been getting more violent.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- syrgian 1y agoLondon murder rate per million in 2024: 11.6 NYC murder rate per million in 2024: 43 And from what I read, NYC is exceptionally safe for a US city, and London is exceptionally unsafe for a UK city.
- youngtaff 1y ago104 murders in London in 24/25, 535 in the whole of the UK for the same period Overall crime and especially violent crime is falling in the UK but there are some well publicised hotspots - phone theft, shoplifting
- rsynnott 1y agoNYC is very safe for an American city, but London is not particularly unsafe for a UK one; its violent crime rate is about average for England as a whole.
- syrgian 1y agoYou are right. Should not have relied on the most likely LLM-generated description attached to the data. I trusted it because I already had the wrong impression that it was less safe, but that was just because the raw number of crimes is high because it is very populated.
- rsynnott 1y agoAs a general rule of thumb, probably never trust anything an LLM says; they're bad at things. (I'm particularly unsurprised that they'd get confused about _London_, because, well, what is a London anyway? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London . Even _human_ writers sometimes get confused about stats for London.)
- rayiner 1y agoWhat do you think that difference in homicide rates proves? It’s caused entirely by racial disparities in homicide victimization rate. The NYC homicide rate for white victims is about 9 per million: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/year-end-2024-enforcement-report.pdf https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_p... (7% of 343 homicides divided by 2.7 million). The homicide rate among white people in London was also about 9 per million: https://aoav.org.uk/2024/londons-2023-murders-examined-key-figures-in-the-uk-capitals-homicides https://aoav.org.uk/2024/londons-2023-murders-examined-key-f... (43% of 103 homicides divided by 4.7 million). It seems unlikely that this pattern of homicides would be explain by differences in general government policies between the U.S. and UK, such as healthcare policies.
- syrgian 1y agoThe post I was replying to was edited and originally claimed that London had higher murder rate than New York.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 1y agoI’m sure you can a find a city or two where this is true, but the general trend in most places is slow reduction since a peak in, usually the 80s or 90s. It’s not well-understood _why_ this is. Social media tends to make people _feel_ like there’s a lot of violent crime.