I have a subsblog. And my [first post][mm] is against those who say there's "no such thing as progress"
https://www.amphobian.info/p/marys-motte-and-the-case-against.
I'm basing this off Mary Harrington's recent podcast with Bret Weinstein. But more likely I'm picking a fight with some y'all here, so I hope you enjoy it.
It is one thing when someone is merely wrong. But when someone denies what is starkly before everyone's eyes, then bullshit is in the air. And that is what I smell whenever I hear the dogma that "there is no such thing as progress".
I these dogmatists of of a motte-and-bailey trick
... progress-skeptics retreat back to the safety of Mary's Motte and acknowledge the growth of knowledge, productivity social complexity and human health but deny that this is called progress.
Their motte is a Reasonable But Wrong claim that these sorts of growth aren't morally valuable. Their bailey extends to denying history and also accusing optimists of teleological magical thinking. But really progress has a simple cause: useful knowledge increases.
Civilised humans took millennia to discover writing, bronze and electricity. But we have not since undiscovered them. Useful knowledge is easier to retain than win and easier to win than destroy. On the scale of history, it is quickly disseminated, replicated and used. It gets encoded redundantly in books, technologies, social practices and the genes of domesticated species. Every generation inherits a vast and waxing store of ancestral knowledge both explicit and tacit.
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Notes -
No objections to most of your examples, but:
(Counter) citation needed? The US reported violent crime rate fell in half over a quarter century, before leveling out. The very recent trend is worrying, but even "let's just ease up on this whole 'police' thing" doesn't seem to have been nearly as disastrous as whatever combination of "let's empty out the asylums" / "let's set a trillion gallons of leaded gas on fire near our kids" / "let's try All The Drugs" / something-else doubled homicide rates in the 60s through 90s.
This is a problem, but is it a major increase? The biggest powers contending for the last century were:
FDR's USA: where we shredded the Tenth Amendment to the point where we no longer even realize "United States" is plural, we imprisoned an entire ethnicity, we tried to micromanage the economy with theories as mad as "let's destroy food during the Great Depression", and even our best anti-Depression scheme was the one where we robbed people of gold like cartoon villains. Oh, and we also were lax about nuclear secrets and discharged 85% of our military in the couple years between WWII and the Berlin Blockade, because we trusted "Uncle Joe".
Stalin's USSR: the aftermath of radical left gaining power, not just proposing insane policies but killing millions of their own people with them via a sick combination of incompetence and its ensuing scapegoating malice, then doubling down on incompetence by trusting their entire nation to the sanctity of a secret agreement with Adolf freaking Hitler after mutually wiping out the buffer state between them.
Hitler's Germany: the very idea of "will-to-power" appropriated from Nietzsche and taken to the extreme, rampaging across subcontinents in an insane attempt to dominate the entire world, but distracted by the obsession with slandering and murdering millions of their own people, and finally defeated in part because ideas like "don't trust that Einstein guy's physics, he's a Jew!" and "let's open up the war on two fronts at once!" are the sort of things you come up with when ruled by your own madness.
I'm not sure how to find political insanity on a graph, and I'll admit it feels like there's been an uptick over the last decade, but we're still nowhere near the heights we scaled during the last century.
Yes, homicides fell. However, the gradual but undeniable advances in trauma medicine since the Vietnam war have made it far less likely that violence ends in homicide.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108876790200600203?journalCode=hsxa
So in all likelihood, you have a more violent society with fewer people dying.
As American society does not value interpersonal violence, it's hard to claim the increase in violence as a good thing.
This isn't the data I linked to. The violent crime rate is about 75x the homicide rate, and both fell in half.
This talks about a lethality decrease from the 1960s to 90s. I'm talking about reductions in 98% non-lethal crime from the 90s through 2010s.
It's especially hard if violence decreased 50%.
Non lethal crime is much more easily decreased by changes in reporting, incentives to report and so on.
For example, if you believed San Francisco police statistics, theft in shops is down.
We don't know whether violence decreased.
Consider for example the disparity between black and white lethal and non-lethal victimization rate.
There are 400k cases of black on black violence associated with about cca 4000 homicides.
There are 2.2 million cases of white on white violence associated with ~ maybe 3000 homicides.
What's your explanation for the disparity ? Reporting rates differ. We don't really know how much non-lethal violence is out there.
This is true. So what happens when we track violence independently of reporting, via victimization surveys? "From 1993 to 2021, the rate of violent victimization declined from 79.8 to 16.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older." The decline is even more astonishing.
I find this all rather astonishing because while the homicide rate hasn't changed much, was at about 80% of the early 1990s peak due to the post-floyd boom, supposedly there's only 1/5 th of the incidents yet almost the same amount of dead people.
Mhmm.
Homicide isn't tracked by victimization surveys. Unless there's vampire homicides and a particularly brave interviewer, I suppose.
Is the decoupling of homicide from other violent crime during a mass panic something to be really surprised about, though? With 98% of violent crime non-lethal, it only takes a tiny change in conversion rate. If a burglar is suddenly looking at a bunch of Covid-locked-down houses that no longer ever seem to empty, it doesn't seem a priori implausible that a few percent of them are going to say "no, too risky for me" (so the violent crime rate component of robberies still drops) while a few percent are going to say "I need the money, and if it's not empty, I can fix that" (so the homicide rate skyrockets). For that matter, what happens to the other side of the equation during the post-Floyd period? A homeowner who might have said "I'll run and call the police" is now more likely to conclude "the police might just shoot me by accident" or "the police might not even show up tonight" and take things into their own hands. Still a robbery, still 1 violent crime, but maybe now it's 4% likely to turn into a homicide instead of 2%.
All this said .. could you answer my original question? "(Counter) citation needed?" I'm getting the impression that you're so confident of "an increase in violence" over these decades that no new evidence will change your mind, and I'd really like to know whether the explanation is that there's some far-more-compelling old evidence that you've neglected to mention, or whether this is just confidence not based on evidence. I can come up with a dozen reasons the latter sort of confidence might exist (witness the long tails of these responses - surely the news wouldn't hammer on a category of story 24/7 if it was about as common as deaths by lightning!) but I'm hoping to stick with the former for myself.
I'm confident crime and violence in the United States and other 'developed' countries has increased considerably since 1930s.
Which is darkly funny considering the go-to political claim by the respectable institutions is that crime is caused by poverty.
We have a homicide rate that's increased or kept the same while medicine has improved.
Why, on the basis of this data would we conclude there's less violence ?
Put scare quotes around "respectable" next time. And yeah, poverty only even correlates with a fraction of the problem.
And you say "since 1930s"? No. The 2020 jump leaves us worse than 1937-1939, but it's still below the start of the 30s and nearly 20% below the peak. The first big jump in homicide was over the 1900s through 1920s (following a long secular decline), and then the mid 30s through mid 50s was a decline again.
But though since the 1930s the US homicide rate fell a little again on net, the "huge jump from 1960 to 1980 then decline again from 1980 to 2000 then sudden more moderate jump in 2020" pattern is more complicated than that. This roller coaster is an interesting phenomenon but you have to pay attention to the details, not oversimplify. "We screwed up something horribly between 1930 and today" would have us looking in the wrong places, if the problem is really that we screwed up something super horribly between 1910 and 1930 and then again between 1960 and 1980 (or between 1890 and 1910 and then again between 1940 and 1960, if the "childhood lead exposure" theories are right) and we've fixed something between 1990 and 2010 but only part way.
If anything, we still could use way more details. E.g. I'd love to see that "murder correlates astonishingly well with single parenthood rates" graph extended in time instead of just space; looking at just national data they did increase together but then when the homicide rate fell the single parenthood rate didn't.
As another comment here just paraphrased today: "if someone is biased towards something, then when presented with evidence that reinforces the bias, they think "CAN I believe this," but when presented with evidence that counters the bias, they think "MUST I believe this?"" This is not a straight path to truth.
The other data I've brought directly concerns the violent crime rate rather than trying to extrapolate from a biased subcategory of it. Ceteris paribus, far fewer people admitting to having been victimized is evidence of fewer victims! You've come up with the possibility that the ratio of crime to reported crime (and the ratio of crime to surveyed crime!? the ratios of surveyed to reported crime haven't changed too much) both increased a lot, not because you've brought evidence of that but because that would let you answer "CAN I believe this is wrong" in the affirmative. You're simultaneously neglecting the possibility that the ratio of (attempted) homicide to other violent crime increased slightly, because that is necessary to let you answer "MUST I believe this is right" in the negative. If now
4% of violence ends in death instead of2%, like the data seems to show, that would have interesting implications ... but if your priors are "violence is simply proportional to homicide" then "true" is no longer a conclusion you can reach, it's in a blind spot that gets filled in from assumptions instead of evidence.More options
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The difference between now and those is they resulted from massive social upheaval, massive amounts of physical force, or both. The modern woke advance was done with no Great Depression, no world war, no dictatorship.
I think the (possibly weak) counter to this is "the Great Recession, the War on Terror, and Web 2.0 all provided enough force and upheaval to nurture the woke surge."
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It should be constantly falling as forensics, cameras, and so on improve, as the country gets richer. Likewise, life expectancy should always be rising. Real wages should always be rising. Technology improves after all.
If the US is like the UK, charge rates will have dropped significantly too: https://twitter.com/duncanrobinson/status/1629785524599762946
I can't understand how the UK Home Office thinks 'literally all crime that happens is reported but our charge rates are under 5%.' I can't easily find charge rates for the US and I suppose there might be useful context in the paywalled Times article... But I believe that most crime figures are gross underestimates.
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