What does the decline in homicide rates look like?
Steve points us to a brief review by Steven Pinker on the decline in war and violence. Focusing just on homicide rates, what exactly does that mean — a decline in violence during modern times? It is impossible to have a solid feel for the observation Pinker wants to explain without seeing time series data on homicide rates (one of which he includes in his TED talk on the same subject). The pictures come from Manuel Eisner’s review article in the British Journal of Criminology.
This is required reading (only 20 pages) for anyone who wants to understand crime, and especially changes in crime — changes in the overall rate, differences across regions in the decline, differences in the decline across social classes, etc. If you don’t have access to it, it’s one of those rare articles that is worth the one-time price of $28 — or just request it from one of your friends or colleagues who does have university access.
Below the fold, I’ve included the pictures for all countries that Eisner found data for, along with a brief remark on the trend for each country. The vertical axis is homicides per 100,000 population and is on a logarithmic scale (so that the visible changes are by orders of magnitude). Also note that the recent decline in crime since the early-mid 1990s may not be easily visible in these pictures, given that Eisner’s article came out in 2001 — not very long for the reversal to jump out of the graphs.
First, England:
Increases during the High Middle Ages, decreases sometime starting in the Late Middle Ages or Early Modern period.
Netherlands and Belgium:
Decreases starting in Early Modern period.
Scandinavia:
Decreases starts as late as the 17th C — Scandinavia being one of the last parts of Western Europe to become civilized.
Germany:
Apparent increase during High Middle Ages, decreases starting in Late Middle Ages or Early Modern period.
Italy:
Barely visible change during 18th C, while steady decline only starts in 19th C — Italy having lacked a strong central state until then. Article says that Northern Italy shows a much earlier decline than Southern Italy (no surprise).
Also notice the presence of cycles about the overall trend. Just because there were recurring crime waves and abatements of crime waves during the 19th and 20th centuries — see here for the US, or see the Scandinavian graph above — should not distract us from the clear downward trend going only a few centuries farther back. Any account of rises or declines must deal with all of these patterns, making it impossible to generalize the narrow hypotheses for the 1990s decline in crime — there were no cell phones before then, the trend since 1500 has been toward less corporal punishment and harsh sentencing rather than more, and so on.
What we would do is write down a system of differential equations that claimed how two or more groups of people interacted with each other — say, “criminals,” “law-abiders,” and “police” — and fool around with them until they produced a solution that would show cycles or oscillations around an overall downward trend. The interactions between these groups of people are what real historical causes are made of — not the sudden introduction of some technology or law (or sudden disappearance of some technology or repealing of a law).
I’m up for a math modeling jam session if anyone else is. I remember seeing ODE models from ecology where one species replaces another, although the values oscillate around the upward trend of the winner, as well as around the downward trend of the loser.
If you’ll permit a bit of conjecture…. Might I suggest that perhaps a kind of human version of the Tame Silver Fox has been going on.
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If there was Anthropometric data available perhaps this could be tested.[1]
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[1] This would assume that “tamed” humans would be physically more juvenilized.
I love how the 14th century crisis stands out as a massive, surprisingly narrow peak on the German data.
The interactions between these groups of people [criminals, law-abiders, police] are what real historical causes are made of
1- You’re implying that socio-economical factors have no influence at all on crime rates. The above observation would seem to contradict that. Famines, epidemics, and other causes of massive social breakdown might well make people just a tad more restless.
2- There wasn’t any such thing as “police” for most of the period sampled in these graphs.
There seems to be a common pattern of a bit of an upsurge in the second half of the C20th.
This is very dependent on institutions/other factors though. Violence rates were probably low during early human expansion as there was little competition, seems to be very high for most extant hunter-gatherer societies, and starts declining with agriculture. The European decline here probably comes after a rise in the Dark Ages, and goes down as institutions and modern judicial systems replace honor killings (Greg Clark would suggest supply-side genetic/cultural changes too). Maybe you could model institutional improvement, but I imagine that data from New Guinea would show little change over this period.
You’re implying that socio-economical factors have no influence at all on crime rates.
As usual, you’re wrong. Whatever you consider socio-economical factors can influence things — but only via making changes in the interactions. Say we took a naive Lotka-Volterra model of predators and prey. There’s a parameter there for the conversion rate of dead prey into fuel for predator growth. That could obviously go up or down, depending on institutions, laws, etc.
The point is that how predators and prey interact is the fundamental thing to capture, not what laws there are. Moreover, just including a parameter in the list of equations doesn’t mean it will show up in the equation for the steady states, or will influence whether they’re stable or not.
There wasn’t any such thing as “police” for most of the period sampled in these graphs.
I know you’re obsessed with me, but try thinking harder before you reflexively bark at what I say. Obviously there were no police forces, numbnuts. When I toss people into “criminals,” “law-abiders,” and “police,” clearly the last is just a label for the group of people who aren’t in the first two — a group whose interactions are qualitatively different. Call them whatever.
Greg Clark would suggest supply-side genetic/cultural changes too
Yes, this is what an ecologist without any interest in history would say — one group replaced another in a niche they were competing over. Particularly among those with power, who used to be pretty violent and criminal: 14th C. Venice was like the world of the TV show Law & Order, where it really was the rich committing disproportionate crime, and working class people being much more law-abiding.
Eisner’s article shows very steep declines in crime among the upper social strata, but much shallower ones among the lower strata.
Luther and Calvin would be pretty pleased at the shape of those graphs.
What we would do is write down a system of differential equations that claimed how two or more groups of people interacted with each other — say, “criminals,” “law-abiders,” and “police” — and fool around with them until they produced a solution that would show cycles or oscillations around an overall downward trend.
Hari Seldon rides again!
What I would do is to write down a sentence in English. This sentence would say: Europe became generally more orderly from 1500 to 1900, and generally less orderly from 1900 to 2000, especially after 1950.
If you wanted to know why, I would say: because order is a product of coherent state authority, and coherent state authority generally strengthened from 1500 to 1900 and generally weakened after 1900, especially after 1950.
And if you wanted to know why this happened, I would say: read some history. It’s a story, not a spreadsheet.
Much of the confusion arises because “modern” to the ordinary intelligent reader means post-1900 (as in “modernism”), whereas as a technical term it is often used to mean post-1500. Thus, in the “modern” era to the ordinary reader crime has been rising vertiginously – eg, 4700% in Britain. The opposite result seems striking and counterintuitive. But the result is not really opposite – it is an observation of the obvious.
(And except in the US, where it was the result of a conservative reaction whose effect can be seen in rising prison populations, I don’t trust the post-1990 “plummet” at all. I find it most parsimoniously attributed to official fudging in the face of popular alarm. In Britain, for example, if you want to know where these pretty little numbers come from, read a blog like this. Indeed, the new police commissioner of South Africa has proposed eliminating crime statistics altogether. Which probably won’t happen – but which should give some idea of the reliability of these types of authorities.)
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Homicide is also a lousy way to measure the general nastiness of a society, because it conflates many kinds of conflict which are qualitatively distinct: psychopathic homicide, predatory homicide, crimes of passion, informal warfare, etc. For instance, my guess is that most of your medieval homicides are a consequence of conflict in feudal power structures (the modern American “drive-by” could be seen the same way). Yet there is no clear distinction between informal warfare and formal warfare, and Eisner’s statistics certainly do not include the latter.
The question of nastiness is the question of how likely homicide is to happen to you if you choose not to live tha thug life. If you want to live like Benvenuto Cellini or even the Admirable Crichton, of course someone is liable to stick a shank in you. But if you prefer to live peaceably and mind your own business, how likely are you to get away with it? Homicide rates tell us nothing at all about this question.
A better measure is robbery, because robbery is an exclusively predatory crime and reveals the level of uncontrolled predation in a society. For instance, the difference between robbery rates in chaotic countries like the US, and safe countries like Japan or Iceland, is extremely striking – two orders of magnitude. My guess is that robbery rates would show a shallower decline from 1500 to 1950 and a sharper increase from 1950 on. Ie: less noise, more signal.
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I also recommend this description of the character of late-medieval English civilization. I wouldn’t trade it for all the numbers between 1 and 2^64. Note in particular the many forms of social control that have disappeared – vagrancy laws, guilds, wonderfully brutal punishments, etc. These existed in a world much more conscious than ours of the ease with which human societies can slip into Hobbesian anarchy, and will if you give them the chance.
And finally, of course, the Congo. Hochschild, being a good little liberal, skips over it in a sentence, but the Belgian Congo after Leopold and before American-ordered decolonialization was generally seen as a model of European civilization in Africa. Perhaps Eisner could spend some time in Goma and bring back more tasty numbers which prove that everything is getting better all the time, bringing a pack of nevirapine in case he gets raped.
I find it most parsimoniously attributed to official fudging in the face of popular alarm.
Yeah, I step over dead bodies all the time.
Your inane view is easy to disprove. If popular alarm causes officials to fudge otherwise unsavory data, then officially released crime rates would be constant — given that people are always concerned about crime — and constantly low.
If officials fudged data in response to popular alarm, they would’ve done so starting in the mid-1960s. Yet somehow the official data show rising violent crime rates (not just homicide) until about 1991. So, your model only requires a 25-year lag between outcry and official fudging. Sounds realistic.
Oh no wait, it sounds retarded.
agnostic,
Presumably you’ve never read any Theodore Dalrymple.
Actually, though, I think a better read would be a bound book of newspapers, English or American, from any year before 1960 or so. Have a look at how they report crime. I believe I’ve suggested this experiment to you before – I hope you’ll try it sometime. Any good library will have one.
For example, I was in a used bookstore once looking at copies of the Napa Valley Journal from 1940. On the top of the front page – German armies were pouring through France. On the bottom of the front page – police had arrested a man who was wanted for passing a bad check in Fresno.
To make it as retarded as possible, what I’m saying is that if you applied pre-1960 standards of journalism to post-1960 crime, every newspaper in America, every day, would look like an issue of the Gotham Globe: MURDER SPREE PARALYZES CITY. And, of course, the public would react accordingly. That’s public opinion for ya.
Heck, during this period, America’s fourth-largest city lost pretty much its entire decent, law-abiding population, who fled due to crime. Said city is now a ruin. This is GNXP we’re posting on here, right? I don’t think a lot of the readers have a problem with ugly truths.
This isn’t hysteria we’re looking at here. It’s precisely the opposite. It’s anesthesia. How do you anesthetize a population? When it reacts normally, convince it that it’s being hysterical. I know no one’s paying you to be part of this propaganda program, but you’re doing a pretty good job anyway.
[cont - Haloscan seems to have turned into Twitter when I wasn't looking]
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Your model of politics and bureaucracies also strikes me as a little um, simplistic. Some differential equations there too, perhaps? Do you have any idea how much the government and society of Britain changed between 1960 and 1990?
If not, Peter Hitchens will set you straight. Makes a great one-two with the aforementioned Dalyrmple. Get a day pass to the London Times archive and you’re all set.
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Or, alternatively, you could just stick to Chinese statistics poetry. Love the Homeland, Love Statistics! Do click – I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
BTW, since you do love statistics (I am not telling you not to love statistics – I am just saying that you might consider reading some history, too, at least if you’re going to entertain such strong opinions about the past), you might enjoy Charles Murray on the difference between crime rates and criminality rates. I’m not sure Dr. Murray loves statistics as much as you, or history as much as me – but he splits the difference well.
Charles,
If you’ll permit a bit of conjecture…. Might I suggest that perhaps a kind of human version of the Tame Silver Fox has been going on.
Indeed. And if you’ll permit a bit more conjecture, I wonder if this might have a little something to do with male homosexuality rates. Was there anything else queer about those tame silver foxes, besides their blotchy coats and floppy ears?
Male feminization is a pretty quick-n-dirty way for evolution to select against aggression – but get the wrong mix of alleles, and you’re playing for the other team. Maybe niceness, as well as IQ, has gotten a bit of “overclocking.” Just a thought…
Not sure if the following was already addressed or not, but it seems interesting and relevant to this discussion:
Medical advances mask epidemic of violence by cutting murder rate
Roger Dobson
BMJ 2002;325:615 (21 September)
bmj.com
…Without this technology, we estimate there would be no less than 50,000 and as many as 115,000 homicides annually instead of an actual 15,000 to 20,000…
The aggravated assault rate was, by 1997, almost 750% higher than the baseline figure. The team also described the dramatic overall decrease in trauma mortality in the second half of the 20th century…
The period of greatest change came between 1972 and 1977, on the heels of the US involvement in the Vietnam war, which triggered big advances in trauma care.
I know it’s anecdotal and not empirical data, but this post led me to ask my dad about his experience growing up in Washington DC in the 50s and 60s with respect to crime, violence, safety, etc.
People never locked their house doors nor their cars. And people would leave their car keys in the ignition after parking their cars. Not just at home, but when they would park their cars at stores and elsewhere outside the home. And if someone’s headlights were accidentally left on, passersby would just reach in and turn them off out of courtesy. I believe a commenter at Steve Sailer’s mentioned this as well. During high school, he would often hitchhike to school. And he actually hitchhiked across the country and back several times, both with friends and without, to visit friends/relatives, just to travel, just for kicks, etc.
Segregation was still in effect in DC for at least a portion of my dad’s upbringing, and this is a major variable of course, to say the least.
The past is a different country, that’s for sure.
I know this kind of anecdotal stuff probably isn’t too relevant for this discussion, but I just thought it was interesting.
MM, you didn’t actually give any explanation regarding why the statistics people didn’t start bullshitting (and about homicide, which is kind of hard to do) until the 90s. If Peter Hitchens actually gives an explanation, spill it. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that agnostic and most others here have read some of Dalrymple’s work, but throwing out the name isn’t enough to make your case. We both think that white people leaving cities is evidence of crime (though merely correlated with it). Do you think that during the 90s when crime was dropping whites continued to leave cities, or did gentrification occur and property values rise?
I’m a fan of Murray, but his measure of criminality (which I agree is distinct from crime and an important concept) is very flawed. The sixties (broadly defined) had a notoriously low conviction rate, resulting in it having lower imprisonment rates despite higher crime rates than the preceding era. I don’t actually know which way burglary rates will tend, but I consider them much less reliable than homicide rates. Victimization surveys show large discrepancies with official police numbers in part because rates of reporting have such a large effect on the latter with more minor kinds of crime. Dead bodies can’t be so easily concealed.
Nobody has provided any evidence for changing rates of male homosexuality. You read the inductivist, so you should already know that blacks report higher rates of male homosexuality. Real tame them.
Considering that you hold newspapers responsible for all the ills of the world now and regularly mock those who consider them reliable, its odd that you’re relying on them for evidence. Agnostic has already shown that the coverage a subject gets has little do with reality and generally just indicates fads.
Razib has also provided evidence that history and other “literary” fields are the most chock full of leftists, while many academics think economics (which you think has been so corrupted since Marshall or something that it doesn’t deserve the name) is reactionary, with some thinking that of statistics generally. Perhaps literary fields really do give insight and leftists are actually right. To me a more plausible explanation that explains both the greater concentration of leftists in such fields and your preference for the literary is that subjects with a core of reality contain constraints on bullshitting. You’re a talented bullshitter, like many academics, and you don’t like any of this evidence or rigor stuff cramping your style.
Historian David Hackett Fisher, in his book The Great Wave has traced 700 years of economic history to show that the crime rates tracks the inflation rate. It holds true the 30′s when crime and inflation both were low. The 80′s were marked by high inflation and high crime. Now we have low inflation ( almost deflation ) and hark! crime is low too.
Fisher’s book shows a correlation, not a causation, and to my knowledge neither he nor anyone else has a good explanation why this should be. Nonetheless, it seems to be.
My father grew up in rural Mississippi in the ’50′s. He says that the de facto situation for African-Americans wasn’t very different from slavery. They lived in under constant supervision and fairly low population density.
From observation it seems clear that personality trait distribution varies between populations. To me, it seems African-Americans tend to have personalities that lead to poor outcomes in conditions with anonymous, impersonal relationships and institutions. African-Americans seem to respond much better charismatic than institutional authority.
Then black people moved/were moved into materially better, but much denser housing, with less paternalistic control. Higher density means more encounters per day. Ceteris parabis, that should mean more crime. In low density and small communities, one can establish one’s ‘rep’ as a bad, as opposed to a signifying motherf*cker. The pecking order becomes established and stable fairly fast. In more anonymous communities, the stable, low violence equilibrium never happens.
As Moldbug’s links show, European urban populations were culled for long periods form docility. Even now, rural white populations (at least in the US) are more violent than urban populations.
A huge chunk of American crime comes from putting a crime-prone population in environments where crime is easy. Probably most US crime variation tracks changes in that population.
If you are doing a mathematical correlation study, I think that the IQ distribution over time for a country, e.g. England, I think it would be a good correlation with crime. Maybe, this is the strongest correlant, with economic hardship being second strongest, and access to education being the third strongest.
Why IQ distribution of the nation over time? It is well known that low IQ individuals (males particularly) commit far more crimes, esp violent ones, than higher IQ individuals.
To model IQ distribution, one would need to account for population sizes within the:
*high IQ segment (largely the trade and upper classes)
*low IQ segment (serfs, famers, immigrants?)
And account for environmental factors influencing IQ:
*nutrition (protein and key nutrients)
*lead and metals poisoning
and finally:
* Flynn effect
If you are doing a mathematical correlation study, I think that the IQ distribution over time for a country, e.g. England, I think it would be a good correlation with crime. Maybe, this is the strongest correlant, with economic hardship being second strongest, and access to education being the third strongest.
Why IQ distribution of the nation over time? It is well known that low IQ individuals (males particularly) commit far more crimes, esp violent ones, than higher IQ individuals.
To model IQ distribution, one would need to account for population sizes within the:
*high IQ segment (largely the trade and upper classes)
*low IQ segment (serfs, famers, immigrants?)
And account for environmental factors influencing IQ:
*nutrition (protein and key nutrients)
*lead and metals poisoning
and finally:
* Flynn effect
TGGP,
The answer is quite simple: Britain had a long tradition of responsible public service, which could not be corrupted overnight by American political correctness, mendacity and bureaucracy. You’re looking at the difference between the old British civil service and something much more like a Communist state. Britain has never really seen anything quite like NuLabor.
For comparison, look at Peel’s Principles – the British literally invented modern policing. As you’d expect. Note the 8th principle – “absence of crime and disorder.” As in, you know, absence.
For instance, when you read British writing about America in the 1850-1950 era, the Brits are simply amazed that such a thing as organized crime can be allowed to exist. Dr. Moriarty, the spider at the center of the web of crime, was a fantasy. Whereas now, at least according to the Times, there are 2800 gangs in Great Britain. No word on how this statistic was compiled, but I suppose it is probably accurate to within an order of magnitude or two.
Do you think that during the 90s when crime was dropping whites continued to leave cities, or did gentrification occur and property values rise?
The whites who moved into cities in the ’90s were SWPL Eloi, very different from the “hyphenated-American” ethnic whites who left. A different ethnicity, essentially. Your Eloi is thoroughly conditioned to think of crime as random and accidental, not worrisome in the slightest. In other words, the anesthesia is working.
There was certainly no trend of Guidos and Micks moving back into Brooklyn. The artificial categories in your spreadsheets betray you once again.
TGGP,
I would encourage you to try the same experiment I recommended for agnostic – read some old newspapers. You’ll quickly realize that the reporter of 1950 is a very different animal from his successor of 2000. There is simply no substitute for primary sources.
There is also no substitute for thought. Moreover, the more the task of thinking has been officially monopolized by those manifestly unfit for it – the greater the opportunity to replace them.
Whereas there is certainly no shortage of Hari Seldon wannabes. (Presumably no one at the Times has ever heard of Robert McNamara. Ah, kids these days.)
Zimmern,
On the contrary – your anecdote is worth all the Chinese statisticians in the world. At least, when combined with the 50 zillion other old people who say the same thing. Walking primary sources, as it were.
This is why the Americans of that era were so terrified of the crime wave of the ’60s and ’70s – they were defenseless against it. They had lived in an era where social predation was more or less unheard of. Over time, they learned – fleeing dangerous areas, taking defensive precautions, putting up their guard. Today’s American has no idea what it feels like to live in an atmosphere of genuine public safety and order.
Here are two more anecdotes, both from the present day, both involving bicycles. Megan McArdle:
Well, my fourth bike was stolen this morning, out of our backyard, which has a seven foot stockade fence around it. I have never managed to hold onto a bike more than six months in an urban environment–the previous two times, they left the bike lock, as if to taunt me with its inadequacy. I think I’m done with bike commuting. I’d rather just hand out $100 bills to random people on the street; at least I wouldn’t be rewarding theft.
It wasn’t an expensive bike, either; it was the cheapest hybrid available in my size. But the fact is, if you own a bike in this city, it will be stolen. I’m willing to brave weather and entitled motorists. But I’m sick of funding donations to the bike theft brigade.Takuan Seiyo:
One day, in a busy section of Tokyo, carrying my supermarket grocery bag back to my bicycle propped on its stand on the sidewalk, I perceived a gaijin (foreigner) standing there and looking at me with tearing eyes. He said, “I was looking at your bike. It’s a good bike. There are no locks on it. You just left it here, unlocked, went to do your shopping, came back and expected it would be here when you returned. And it was. It’s extraordinary.” A British tourist, he then told me of the hazards of cycling in Clockwork Orange Londonistan — from the risk of being knifed by one of the denizens of post-British Britain, to the necessity of carrying 5 kg. of iron implements to chain and lock his bike everywhere.
Also, TGGP, note the difference between robbery and burglary. I said robbery, not burglary.
It is not uncommon, in any society, for burglaries to go unreported. What’s gone is gone. Whereas a society in which robberies are unreported must already be pretty far into Mad Max territory…
And for those who don’t click on all these links, I just have to reproduce Love the Homeland, Love Statistics:
Some mock me for doing statistics
Some loathe me and statistics
Some donÂ’t understand what statistics are
Why is it that statistics
Put a calm smile on my face?
Because of statistics
I can solve the deepest mysteries
Because of statistics
I will not be lonely again, playing in the data
Because of statistics
I can rearrange the stars in the skies above
Because of statistics
My life is different, more meaningful
I love my life, my statistics…To be fair, I myself feel pretty much the same way about history.
From observation it seems clear that personality trait distribution varies between populations. To me, it seems African-Americans tend to have personalities that lead to poor outcomes in conditions with anonymous, impersonal relationships and institutions. African-Americans seem to respond much better to charismatic than institutional authority.
Oddly enough, Carlyle said just the same thing 150 years ago. Of course, maybe that’s just because he was a racist, like you. “Adieu, Quashee; I will wish you better guidance than you have had of late.” Alas, better guidance has not been forthcoming.
I grew up in rural Scotland. I never had a lock for my bike. You just stuck it wherever you wanted, wandered off to do whatever you fancied and it would still be there when you returned.
I would like to see data on non-Western societies as well. East Asia, South Asia, Middle east, and Latin America. I would like to see if this is global rather than just a western phenomenon
I grew up in Dubai, and people don’t lock their houses there either. Bikes you may want to keep an eye on now, that was not the case 30 years ago
rob, which specific link were you referring to?
sily, I believe that as you go into the lower tails of IQ crime drops off, if only because like many things in life crime has some cognitive demands. It does peak below average though, if I recall correctly.
MM, you claim that Yes, Minister is the most accurate portrayal of the civil service but it certainly precedes New Labour, and it doesn’t get much more mendacious. Violent crime was actually falling from 1995 to 1997, the year New Labour came to power, and it increased afterward. Do you think the U.S civil service stopped being responsible in the mid-nineties when crime stats went down?
Organized crime existed before the 50s in England. The Hoxton gang and their rivals, for example. If anything, the current trend (with happy-slapping and such) might be more disorganized crime. Going back to the 1800s, the Dead Rabbits made famous in “Gangs of New York” had previously existed under the same name in Liverpool. The Manchester City Football Club arose in order to compete with gangs for youth participation.
The British actually got the idea for professional police from France. That was one reason many people were suspicious at the time of their introduction.
The main waves of white immigration to American cities ended in the 20s. Over time they dropped their hyphens, but it wasn’t rural Scots-Irish (the most likely to give their ethnicity as simply “American”) that gentrified. The whites who do live in New York have very low victimization rates. High-crime Detroit, in contrast, has not gentrified. The inner city minorities opposed to gentrification actually complain about neighborhoods becoming safer, because this leads to more whites moving in. The stupid anaesthetized “Eloi” generally live in the least black (i.e safest) neighborhoods and if they have kids send them kids to private school. The pattern of gentrification is usually for gay men (as they have neither children nor girlfriends) to be the initial colonizers, followed by people without dependents, and finally those with children. About what we’d expect if people were rationally acting based on vulnerability. All this suggests that gentrification actually results from (and causes) lower crime rates rather than some false-consciousness explanation. This is similar to when you claimed Europe is to the left of the United States because the U.S occupied and replaced its old governments (even though, as Ed Glaeser has pointed out, Europe had long had higher welfare spending), when the most “progressive” country is neutral unoccuppied Sweden, so then you came up with an ad-hoc explanation regarding the Lutheran church.
Yes, robbery is underreported, as are a great many crimes in which a criminal directly attacks a victim. The victimization surveys of the sort relied on for The Color of Crime routinely show rates above those for officially reported crimes. Drug dealers, for instance, are a common target for robbery who are especially unlikely to contact the police. Non-criminals who simply don’t view the police as helpful (which would describe much of the populace in high crime neighborhoods) are also less likely to report being victimized.
I live in a mid-level but gritty Chicago neighborhood. I’ve never been mugged or robbed, but there have been a few gunfights outside my building (~5 in three years; plus a very noisy celebration on last Election Night).
When I get home and am planning to go back out, I park my bike outside, with a chain through the wheels. Ordinary steel chain, not a U-lock, and not to any fixed object, as there’s none available.
Occasionally, if I’m in a hurry, I leave it unlocked. A few times I’ve forgotten I was going back out, and left it out overnight, unlocked.
It hasn’t been stolen. And no, it isn’t a junker. (To look at, anyway – the brakes don’t hold and the shifter is messed up, but you’d have to ride it to find out.) Nor has it been stolen from any of the public places where I’ve left it chained up, sometimes for a couple of days at a time.
I don’t know what’s going on in DC, but there’s probably some local infestation driving the acuteness of the problem there.
Hoxton Gang: fine, we’ll push it back to the 1930s. And in the 1930s, a gang in England was remarkable and anomalous – a dog playing chess.
Here is a good description of English organized crime in the early 20th century. Highlight:
“Edward Emmanuel had a group of Jewish terrors. There was Jackie Berman. He told a pack of lies against me in the vendetta case – he had me put away? Bobby Levy – he lived down Chingford way – and his brother Moey. Bobby Nark – he was a good fighting chap. In later years all the Jewish terrors worked with the Italian mob on the race course? The Narks were a famous Jewish family from out of Aldgate. Bobby was a fine big fellow though he wasn’t very brainy. His team used to hang out in a pub at Aldgate on the corner of Petticoat Lane. I’ve seen him smash a bloke’s hat over his face and knock his beer over.”The Wire, it ain’t.
Moreover, as you can see from the existence of Wik pages, these people were newsworthy in their era. That’s because they were new phenomena. This Hoxton Gang outrage, for instance, would be pretty unlikely to enter history in 2009:
During the 1930s, the gang was among many who struggled for control of racetracks and “protection” rackets and, in June 1936, around 30 gang members attacked a bookmaker and his clerk with hammers and knuckle-dusters at the Lewes racetrack before police arrived, with at least 16 gang members being convicted at Lewes Assizes and sentenced to serve over 43 years.I suspect a lot of Brits would be pretty happy if they could get their hat-smashing, beer-knocking, hammer-wielding Jewish and Italian gangsters back. They also wouldn’t mind having their Lewes Assizes. As Dalrymple noted:
Yet the public?s impression is understandable: not long ago I was leafing through a patient?s extensive criminal record when I read of the sentence he received for his 57th conviction for burglary: a £50 fine. No wonder we don?t feel safe.As for the exact timing of Tony Blair’s election and yearly crime fluctuations, you’ve trailed off into the noise. NuLabour is a symptom, not a cause. Britain has been steadily Americanizing – and Europe Anglo-Americanizing – for the past century.
On the Continent and (especially) in the Nordic countries, you’ve got to understand that England was the fashion leader between 1815 and 1914, much as America is now. And for much the same reason. Until after WWII, Sweden (like Britain itself) contained both the Protestant philanthropic ancestors of today’s Social Democrats, and a healthy nationalist aristocracy with folks like Sven Hedin, Carin Goering, etc. Ever wonder why the Swedes were neutral in the war?
If the Nazis had won, this aristocratic Sweden would be today’s Sweden. They lost, so Sweden is renowned for its socialism. History likes a winner – and so, apparently, do the Swedes.
The stupid anaesthetized “Eloi” generally live in the least black (i.e safest) neighborhoods and if they have kids send them kids to private school. The pattern of gentrification is usually for gay men (as they have neither children nor girlfriends) to be the initial colonizers, followed by people without dependents, and finally those with children. About what we’d expect if people were rationally acting based on vulnerability. All this suggests that gentrification actually results from (and causes) lower crime rates rather than some false-consciousness explanation.
No, it suggests that while anesthetized, your Eloi is not actually brain-dead. Touchy business, anesthesia.
In particular, the ability to maintain progressive consciousness in general, while avoiding blacks in specific, demonstrates a remarkable level of multiprocessing. But multiprocessing has its limits. The result is always a compromise.
Imagine, for instance, that your Eloi took the same level of care to avoid being stabbed by a NAM that she takes to avoid getting cancer from a stray pesticide molecule on a rutabaga. She’d have to live in a white-supremacist compound in Idaho. Or at least a gated community in Georgia. But does she? Noo….
Trust me – I live in San Francisco. I know these people. In ’98 my gay roommate in the bad part of the Mission had a bottle thrown at his head by some Sureño gangsters. Fortunately, it missed. His rutabagas were all organic, so he didn’t have that problem. I think he’s in Australia now – I hope he’s watching out for the Lebanese.
Drug dealers, for instance, are a common target for robbery who are especially unlikely to contact the police. Non-criminals who simply don’t view the police as helpful (which would describe much of the populace in high crime neighborhoods) are also less likely to report being victimized.
As I said: Mad Max. Frankly, all these people should be in secure temporary housing. We did it once – we can do it again.
@moldbug, you said…
Indeed. And if you’ll permit a bit more conjecture, I wonder if this might have a little something to do with male homosexuality rates. Was there anything else queer about those tame silver foxes, besides their blotchy coats and floppy ears?If you are asking about the animals’ sexual preferences, I don’t remember reading anything about it either way.
Male feminization is a pretty quick-n-dirty way for evolution to select against aggression – but get the wrong mix of alleles, and you’re playing for the other team. Maybe niceness, as well as IQ, has gotten a bit of “overclocking.” Just a thought…
How do you see IQ relating to tameness and male feminization?
@TGGP, you said…
Drug dealers, for instance, are a common target for robbery who are especially unlikely to contact the police.My impression has been that drug dealers are usually taxed. Not legal taxation, but taxation by gang members. (I.e., gang members will take so much money from the drug dealers that operate on the territory they claim as theirs.)
(Assuming you are talking about this) if you are going to include this a robbery, then shouldn’t you count legal taxation as robbery too?
@charles, no connection at all – it’s just an analogy.
One of Cochran & Harpending’s theories about IQ evolution in Ashkenazis is that many Ashkenazi genetic disorders are the result of alleles harmful in recessive combination, but individually valuable – if you have one copy of the Gaucher disease allele, you’re smarter; if you have two, you have Gaucher disease. Just like sickle-cell and malaria resistance.
So I suspect that if you get a little bit of male-feminizing, you’re less aggressive, more gentlemanly, and in general fit better in civilized society. But if you get too much, possibly combined with some environmental/prenatal stimulus, you’re… etc. Note that the negative Darwinian effects of male homosexual tendencies are less likely to appear in traditional societies in which the “lifestyle” is not an option – men who would identify as gay today might well have gotten married, shut their eyes and thought of England.
For instance, living in San Francisco I see two very distinct gay phenotypes – the effeminate “fairy” and the hypermasculine “bear” or “Tom of Finland.” These would seem to have very different biological causes. I suspect that the “fairy” is the result of some disruption of the testosterone system throughout the body, whereas with the “bear” some wire is cut just in the brain. If these are genuinely multiple genetic mechanisms for male feminization, it would indeed parallel the multiple mechanisms for Ashkenazi intelligence which evolved under shared pressure.
Historically, widespread homosexuality seems to appear in societies with a long (centuries) tradition of stable urban civilization. So for instance you see it in Athens, maybe six or seven centuries after the Greeks had descended barbarically from the North and set up their little city-states. Certainly enough time for selection to work. Whereas it is almost unheard of among savages and barbarians, as this hypothesis would predict. Just a thought, my n1ggaz…
“For instance, living in San Francisco I see two very distinct gay phenotypes – the effeminate “fairy” and the hypermasculine “bear” or “Tom of Finland.”
Do you see these from the top, or from the bottom? ;)
First time ever hearing about “Tom of Finland” and just googled it. Man, those have to be like the gayest sketches ever.
MM,
The 10-100x slower resolution of sexually antagonistic selection certainly figures into this question. I’m embarrassed to admit, I was not aware of that fact the last time this subject came up here.
You might want to consider identical twin concordance, though. Claims seem to vary wildly with a couple at 95-100% and other lower. These can’t all be right.
I guess that even if we stipulated a concordance of 50%, developmental stochasticity would still a conceivable explanation for the remaining variation, so we could still have a model with no environmental inputs. The main problem there is that I don’t think there is any evidence that developmental stochasticity contributes much at all to any trait. I’m not sure.
identical twin concordance for homosexuality (in males) is ~20-25%, using the Australian twin registry.
I prefer to see them from the side, actually. You definitely don’t want to mad-dog a bear. Let alone Tom of Finland. (I keep thinking the SFPD should have a special Gay Division, inspired by such. But alas – no imagination.)
gcochran’s number for twin concordance sounds about right. There has to be some significant environmental input – either bugs (gcochran) or some prenatal thingy, probably. Or just psychology.
The sexual antagonism theory doesn’t explain why we see male homosexuality in complex societies but not hunter-gatherers. Neither does the bug theory. Of course, it could just be a coincidence.
But just as a gut feeling, the selective pressure for male docility in governed societies seems relatively similar to the selective pressure that gave us Ashkenazi intelligence. I don’t know how anyone would even begin to quantify either, of course.
If you’re a major-league pussy, even a straight pussy, your genes are not going to get very far in Yanomamo land. If you act like the average Yanomamo male in Victorian England, ditto. Why shouldn’t people adapt to their environments?
MM:
a gang in England was remarkable and anomalous – a dog playing chess.
As I said, they weren’t the only gang in the area, and gangs also existed back in the Victorian era. There is a large distance between The Wire and chess-playing dogs.
NuLabour is a symptom, not a cause
I agree. You’ve previously said something along the lines of “There has been nothing new under the sun in politics since Aristotle was a lad”, which is quite a contrast with “Britain has never really seen anything quite like NuLabor”, which I don’t believe. I’m not claiming that Labour cleaned up the Torie’s fudging of the crime stats or even that their social policies caused an increase (though the 97 gun control law is often pointed to as such). I’m looking at a dog that didn’t bark. If there’s an opposite of barking, that’s what this dog is doing. I do think it likely the drop from 95 to 97 is due to an actual drop in crime rather than the Tories adding fudge, since the same thing was happening in America at that time and we’ve seen crime rates moving together in different countries during other time periods.
Ever wonder why the Swedes were neutral in the war?
The last time they were a belligerent, Gustavus Adolphus was in charge, right?
If the Nazis had won, this aristocratic Sweden would be today’s Sweden
Sweden was more socialist than Germany & the U.S (though less than France) even back in the 19th century and all of Europe had gotten more socialist before WW2. I’m not going to look for causality in the 1940s for a trend that existed throughout the previous decades.
They lost, so Sweden is renowned for its socialism.
Your claim was that Europe went left because it was occupied by Americans and its previous governments dismantled. So we should expect one of those countries to be more renowned than Sweden. I think Europe is more socialist for the same reasons it has always been more socialist.
Imagine, for instance, that your Eloi took the same level of care to avoid being stabbed by a NAM that she takes to avoid getting cancer from a stray pesticide molecule on a rutabaga.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that white urbanites eat inorganic food far more often than they are stabbed.
Or at least a gated community in Georgia.
Georgia is plenty black. Atlanta is like Portland for black people. And even “buppies” like gated communities. The standard line against pin-headed liberal elites is that precisely because they are able to insulate themselves (in Hyde Park, for instance) they can promote bad policies without suffering the effects.
I live in San Francisco
That reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to ask: why? You’re always going on about what horrific wastelands America’s cities are because they’ve been ruined by progressivism, yet you live in the poster-child for progressivism. I like to taunt lefties by asking them why they don’t move to Cuba; shouldn’t we be surprised that YOU aren’t in an Idaho compound? As long as you’re there, your complaints have the air of “It tastes like shit, and the portions are so small!” You don’t even have the excuse that you’ve lived there all your life and dagnabbit you ain’t leaving just cause johnny furrinner’s trying to take over the old block.
Charles Iliya Krempeaux:
(Assuming you are talking about this) if you are going to include this a robbery, then shouldn’t you count legal taxation as robbery too?
No, I was talking about violent armed robbery. Peter Moskos attributed all the murders he came across in Baltimore to the war on drugs, but he noted it wasn’t all just gangs fighting for turf. Another major source was shootings that occurred when drug dealers were being robbed (both the robber and robbee being likely to get shot). Dealers stand on corners with large amounts of cash and valuable product on hand, without any police protection.
MM:
Historically, widespread homosexuality seems to appear in societies with a long (centuries) tradition of stable urban civilization.
Cochran’s claim is that it isn’t found among hunter-gathers, who are puzzled when they hear about it from their low-level agriculturalist or pastoralist neighbors. Others have countered that it has been documented among native-americans. I don’t know where one would look to determine this sort of thing. I do think urban living is likely to lead to more sexual encounters that can be hidden from one’s community.
Whereas it is almost unheard of among savages and barbarians
I believe its normalized into a rite of passage in Samoa. That sort of pederasty has more in common with ancient greece than modern gays (which we all know don’t exist in Iran).
gcochran:
Eric Johnson said that claims vary wildly. Do we have special reason to believe those Australian numbers, or is he incorrect and there’s actually less variation?
MM:
Cochran’s theory is intended to explain why it isn’t found in hunter-gatherers. You’re familiar with Guns, Germs and Steel: agriculture breeds germs much more than hunting and gathering does.
If you count some old East German claims, he might be correct – but I don’t think that more recent twin studies ever showed real high concordance. Mike Bailey once did a study that showed 50% concordance, but that recruited thru gay publications and thus concordant pairs were more likely to have been recruited. I think something like 20,25% is probably correct.
I don’t have texts, but the cites are:
- Kallman 1952. 37 out of 37 MZ probands concordant.
- Schlegel 1962. “Schlegel (1962) reported on 113 twin pairs with 95% concordance for homosexuality in MZ twins and 5% concordance in DZ twins.”
The above quote on Schlegel is a fragment, via google, of a paywalled paper. Kallman is discussed in this apparently amateur review, which vaguely suggests that it used the Kinsey scale and assigned people in classes 3 through 6 as gay. The scale – nothing surprising – is the following:
0 Exclusively heterosexual
1 Predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual
2 Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual
3 Equally heterosexual and homosexual; bisexual.
4 Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual
5 Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual
6 Exclusively homosexual
Kallman’s result is obviously statistically significant. I lack the numbers for Schlegel. And then there are questions about the sampling methods, about whether any of these guys was an idealogue or nutcase, etc.
TGGP,
> I don’t know where one would look to determine this sort of thing.
You might email this guy for a cite:
However, when reading a 19th century book on American Indians [...] I found that one of the pieces of data he?d relied on was strongly contradicted by the behavior of certain tribes. Cochran suggested that among hunter gatherers homosexuality was rare, even unheard of. However, the Koniagas of Kodiak Island and the Aleuts both practiced homosexuality to the extent that it was a culturally-sanctioned institution. Both groups could fairly be described as hunter gatherers, as could the Californian tribes who were also notorious for homosexuality.
However, he says nothing about whether this homosexuality was ever exclusive. As I’m sure you know, homosexuality is not too mysterious; it’s lack of heterosexuality that is mysterious.
At any rate, while I don’t know the information sources on this hunters v agriculturalists issue personally, I’m not sure a few exceptions would matter that much if they exist. Even if exclusive or near-exclusive homosexuality were, say, known in 90% of agri peoples and unknown in 90% of hunter-gatherer peoples, that would certainly be telling us something.
Gut feeling – even without reading them – the later twin studies are probably more reliable. I imagine no one paid any attention to these publications in the 50s and 60s. Today, you know that people may wind up in your face if you slip up and/or cook the books in a study like this. Journalists, popular book writers… I’ll bet there’s a couple thousand learned and semi-learned gay people who read about this stuff in detail beyond that of pop periodicals.
These words about Kallman do not engender confidence:
The exact method of recruitment is unclear from the report, but it is stated that “the search for potential index cases was organized not only with the aid of psychiatric, correctional, and charitable agencies, but also through direct contacts with the clandestine homosexual world.”
It sounds kinda like “hey dude, know any gay twins?”
Moldbug,
Regarding your characterizations of two distinct gay phenotypes, the stereotypical fem sort and the more masculine-looking bear. I work in San Francisco and see both as well, but I think the opposing two “looks” might be misleading. After all, tastes can be different.
I remember when the bear image was promoted by a now-defunct magazine, and yes, it appealed to gay men who hated the idea that the world saw them as swishers who didn’t know that there were four downs in football and as flamers who idolized Cher. Nevertheless, these bears were hardly rough and tumble guys.
I work with some young guys that work out regularly and have fairly buff bodies, but it has been my observation that on the “inside” these guys are really similar to their more feminine counterparts.
Some I know regularly take in Giant’s games and such, but then they pretty much talk about which guys on the team are hot. It seems their interest in sports is really as a social activity rather than a gung-ho love of athletic activity.
So, yes, they have eschewed the flaming aspects of homosexuality, but I still see evidence that their emotional nature seems much the same as the fem phenotype.
I wonder if the Venice Beach muscle crowd of the 70s with all that steroids use just kind of created a new gay look. After all, gays had always loved the looks of a manly man (the Tom of Finland sort) and one day maybe they realized that though they didn’t want to or couldn’t engage in the rough and tumble of contact sports, they could indeed go to a gym and build some muscle. They discovered they could look like the men they envied.
If you think about it, this new look for gay men came about after the 70s visibility of the Village People. It seems their camp made it the in-thing to try to look more manly.
After all, Andrew Sullivan considers himself a bear. Now tell me. How fast does it take someone watching and listening to Andrew on a Sunday show to decide he is gay?
toni,
Well, individuals of course vary. But the classic “bear” body shows not just the effects of weightlifting, which anyone can do, but a huge barrel-shaped ribcage and an enormous quantity of body hair. (No, I don’t spend a lot of time in gay bathhouses, I just live about four blocks from 18th & Castro.) This suggests a genuine high-T phenotype, almost as if some T receptor is broken and the system is generating an insane amount of T to compensate.
I think the “bear” is very much a rarity among male homosexuals. But it exists, and my neighborhood certainly concentrates it.
The whole gay hunter-gatherer question is fascinating. If the the hypothesis that Castro-style obligate homosexuality is an evolutionary disorder of civilization is true, I suspect the various instances of tribal pederasty and savage butt-rape are somewhat like prison homosexuality – not necessarily a matter of sexual preference. On the other hand, the hypothesis depends rather heavily on the data point, so the danger of circular reasoning is quite apparent.
Note also, however, that 20th-century anthropologists were quite eager to show that homosexuality is natural and universal. This too is a source of data distortion – a la Margaret Mead. As Dexter Gordon said in Round Midnight: “lot of that goin’ around.”
TGGP, the basic problem is that progressives are America’s ruling class, and therefore know all the good things in life and have them. Let me tell you, my neighborhood has them. It is also relatively safe, just by coincidence – San Francisco is actually one of the most segregated cities in the country. By some coincidence almost all the blacks ended up on the other side of the freeway, and of course the Bay. Berkeley, where I used to live, has all these good things as well, but no natural barriers between it and Oaktown.
Levels of “social spending” are a ridiculous statistical indicator that tells you jack about culture. Bismarck’s regime had high social spending and Hitler’s even higher, but neither was a liberal. Read some Ibsen sometime – you’ll see the traditional Scandinavian culture. The basic conflict in Ibsen is between that culture and liberal Anglomania, a disease that infected all of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. For whatever reason, Scandinavia ended up all parasite and no host.
and gangs also existed back in the Victorian era.
Now I’ll have to ask you to name a source. No country has ever been entirely free of ruffians and lowlifes, but organized crime is something else.
When I search for “organized crime” “Victorian England” I end up with the likes of Adam Worth, “the Napoleon of Crime” and the inspiration for Moriarty. Who – again – ain’t exactly reminding me of D’Angelo from The Wire. And is also (a) a foreigner, and (b) notorious for being an exception, like a dog playing chess.
Perhaps you’re referring to juvenile gangs such as these. Again, not organized crime – just tough kids (with jobs) who like to fight (each other). Quite unusual in their time, too, and eradicated by 1900.
I got tired of fighting numbers with history, so I thought I’d go find some numbers of my own. This took me approximately 5 minutes. “Not to get knowledge, but to save yourself from having ignorance foisted upon you!”
Dear lovers of statistics and Whig history, do you feel that puckering sensation which precedes any serious anal penetration? If you have some lube handy, now’s the time.
[cont]
Ladies and ladies, I give you: Crime in England and Wales in the Nineteenth Century (1876). Let’s go directly to the latest numbers. From 1860 to 1874, there are an average of about 4165 class 1 and class 2 crimes per year, in a (young, rapidly-growing) population of about 20 million. Ie, 21 per 100,000. These classes include:
1st – OFFENCES AGAINST THE PERSON – Comprising murder, attempts to murder, stabbing or wounding with intent to maim, manslaughter, rape, assaults with intent to ravish, carnally abusing girls between ten and twelve, assaults, &c.
2nd – OFFENCES AGAINST PROPERTY WITH VIOLENCE – Comprising burglary, house-breaking, breaking into shops, robbery, assaults with intent to rob, misdemeanours with intent to commit the above offences, &c.[cont]
[cont]
I’m not sure if everyone can understand intuitively how low these numbers are. So let’s compare them to some figures from the modern, advanced, low-crime United States, in which everything is getting better all the time and always has been.
Hoyle’s category 1 seems roughly comparable to the FBI’s category of violent crime: 1,400,000, or about 470 per 100,000. Hoyle: 2300, or about 12 per 100,000.
The FBI’s property crime index blurs the Victorian categories 2 and 3: the FBI has 10 million, or about 3500 per 100,000. Hoyle’s category 2: 1846, or about 9 per 100,000. Hoyle’s category 3: 12,500, or about 62 per 100,000. Category 3:
3rd – OFFENCES AGAINST PROPERTY WITHOUT VIOLENCE- Comprising cattle, horse, and sheep stealing, the various kinds of larcenies, or in other words thefts not of an aggravated kind, embezzlements, receiving stolen goods, &c.[cont]
[cont]
So what we see is that crime in the US today is somewhere in the general vicinity of 50 times more common than in Victorian England. Ie, basically the same result produced by Britain’s own rearrangers of stars.
In other words: Carlyle, yet again, has made the 20th century his bitch. Didn’t get to that lube in time? Ouch, I’m sorry. But it’s never too late to read history – even if you have to read it standing up.
Cochran’s theory is intended to explain why it isn’t found in hunter-gatherers. You’re familiar with Guns, Germs and Steel: agriculture breeds germs much more than hunting and gathering does.
Yeah, but I’m not sure I find this especially convincing. Germs spread to hunter-gatherers. Does homosexuality? So you’re looking at not just an ordinary, smallpox-type germ, but one with a rather peculiar epidemiological profile. Again, maybe… but Darwinian pussification seems a little more parsimonious to me.
moldbug,
Having read your last physical description of the bears in your neighborhood, the hairy high T guys, I have reconsidered what I said. They are not the bears I was thinking of.
I am wondering if these guys you describe aren’t an incarnation of some of the 1950s style bikers, guys who’d screw anything–hard fighting, hard drinking and drugging, and yes, large and hairy. Prison sorts too. Could these bears be those kinds of guys? Their affinity for male on male sex might be related to power and the violence that is often associated with anti-social types.
Just wondering, for now I freely admit to not knowing about these guys.
You know, although blowhards can be a pain, too much censorship can also be bad for a blog.
Better just to whack them.
I too once lived, albeit for a short time, in the modern Sodom which is San Francisco.
One thing that every Irish man gets in American – although San Fran is relatively well educated, and so I got it less than other contemprariues. elsewhere in the US – is questions about the “war”. Sometimes I did get the question though.
No point getting in to history. I just tend to say I kept my head down ( for the record I came from the republic where there was little or no spillover)
one day I am watching the news, and they mention a killing in Oakland. It was October. It was the third item. The reason it was mentioned at all – it was the 100th killing that year ( as far as I can see, though, all killings in the UK make the news, and probably National news too).
Anyway, I did some simple maths in my head. 100 deaths per 300K population per year, is equivalent to 600 deaths per year in a population of 1.8 million ( the population of Northern Ireland), which would be 18,000 over thirty years, 6 times more than the death toll in Northern Ireland. ( Where I didnt grow up, and which was miles from me). I take an average of 100 for Oakland, becasue they seemed a bit shocked by it happening in October. Christmas seemed the time to reach the century ( otherwise the oakland total is 120, and the per capita killings are 7 times higher).
I could ask people in SunnyVale – one of American’s safest cities in Silicon Valley – what is is like living in a warZone, I suppose. but you learn to hold your tongue.
toni,
Au contraire – my (admittedly quite limited) experience is that the bears often seem quite neurologically feminized. Soft voices, good manners, wouldn’t hurt a fly, etc. They look like bikers, but I don’t get the impression that they act like bikers. Again, though – I am hardly the expert.
eoin, presumably in Ireland you learn not to talk about the troubles, too! It’s really much the same thing. I once worked for a company that had acquired a Belfast subsidiary. This apparently was the etiquette. But one of the fellows taught me how to tell a Catholic name from a Protestant name, not that it’s that hard…
“They look like bikers, but I don’t get the impression that they act like bikers.”
Oh they not only look like bikers, they act like bikers too. They love to ride -hard and fast.