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It's the old story: Crime and violence are on a multi-scale decline since the dawn of civilization, but nobody believes it.
by bayesianhorse 13y ago
It's the old story: Crime and violence are on a multi-scale decline since the dawn of civilization, but nobody believes it.
- joe_the_user 13y agoInteresting. Made me go out and find a reference: http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-crime-declines-in-america/ http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-... At the same time, the decline in picketing in particular seems a bit different. It's a much extreme decline in a behavior that's criminal but not necessarily violent.
- contingencies 13y agothe decline in picketing The government doesn't exactly encourage picketing, but I do belive it has traditionally been considered a valid, non-violent form of protest and not a criminal act. Let us join together and mourn the loss of the multi-century tradition of picketing... from the old country.
- jcrites 13y agoI think it's because communicating is improving even more drastically than crime is decreasing, so the average person hears even more credible stores of crime and violence than they used to (think of the local evening news). It may fuel a perception that things are getting worse, when in reality our standards are rising, and the bad things are increasingly coming to our attention.
- tomkarlo 13y agoIt's not that we don't believe it, it's that our brains are wired to focus on perceived threats and can't differentiate between hearing about a threat from a friend (with small, local distribution) and hearing about it from the news (with very wide distribution.) So we mentally approach crime news stores that are actually one in a million events (in a large city) like they happened to someone in the 150 or so people we know and communicate with regularly (our "tribe".)