~Half the murder rate now vs. 1990. Worrisome COVID murder increase is returning to average for the past 20 years.
erkt 2 hours ago [-]
Failure to prosecute crime leads to crime stat drops.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
You’re arguing people aren’t reporting homicides because they don’t think they will be prosecuted?
jdlshore 2 hours ago [-]
Are you claiming that’s what happening, or just engaging in ominous speculation?
hn_throwaway_99 2 hours ago [-]
I think we know the answer to that one...
Besides, GP is flat out wrong - not prosecuting crime does not result in reduced crime stats. The crime decline is led be a relatively huge 15% reduction in homicides. Even if those homicides remain unsolved or are not prosecuted, they still end up in crime stats. And unlike other crimes where you may argue they go unreported, when someone ends up dead (by usually violent means in a homicide) it rarely goes unnoticed.
iamnothere 44 minutes ago [-]
Cheap energy will do that, statistically. It won’t be cheap for much longer, so enjoy the reprieve.
I think the effect is polycausal, but I think there's an important primary one that is often ignored: alienation crossing a threshold.
In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards, because the tribe and the individual are coextensive. One can't hurt the tribe without also hurting yourself, so while individual interests may not coalign, the overall goals do: the health of the people and therefore the self.
As population increases, that coalignment becomes more nebulous, and the individual can more easily gain while hurting the other. This is partly why crime increased as the species civilized, created cities, and exploded the population. This, as an isolated factor, might've increased forever, and most dystopian fiction from the 20th century assumed it would.
However, alienation then largely became complete, thanks to technology. This had the contrary effect, because the public surface became a smooth wall, removing much of the opportunity for anti-social behavior. The alienated man now lives in his bubble, without connectivity to the outside world of other individuals. Human emotion, as a pre-req for the anti-social behavior we classify most crime as, required an other, someone to direct it against. It's harder (though not impossible) to get angry at abstract social megastructures like corporations and governments, and even when you do, what are you going to do about it? You can't stab Google, you can at best post something unkind about them (on your Android phone) and the algorithm (your actual interface to the entity you may despise) ignores it. Most of us realize this and don't even bother getting angry. Thankfully, these same non-human entities provide the products we need for emotional regulation. Feeling lonely, bored, understimulated, sexually frustrated? There's a product that will safely mediate those desires and get you back into a metastable, yet ever more alienated, state.
So great, we have less crime, sure, but it required the social neutering of the species.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards, because the tribe and the individual are coextensive
Source? Pinker’s Better Angels had lots of issues. But its core observation that one’s homicide hazard rate has almost monotonically fallen across human history would imply that small, ancient group were way more violent than our modern societies are.
bm3719 24 minutes ago [-]
In this context, simply killing other humans, or any violence, is not equivalent to crime. Crime is dependent upon a collective interpretation of any act, not necessarily whether it's objectively destructive. A tribe may decide to wage war upon neighbors, sacrifice virgins, or what have you, but they do so under the impression that it's perceived to be in their coaligned interest.
This is relevant because the metric we're measuring now is exactly that: crime, not violence. WWIII could break out tomorrow, billions could die, and crime could still go down.
downrightmike 2 hours ago [-]
Just like abortions in the 70's stopped the super criminals from existing in the 90's. Not having unwanted kids goes a long way to prevent crime. Now we are in the place where people want kids, but can't afford them so they aren't.
searealist 2 hours ago [-]
I thought we were pretending it was lead?
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
What’s wrong with the lead hypothesis? It explains about 4 to 15% of the effect since 1990 [1].
On the one hand, you have a meta-analysis estimating 7–28% of the U.S. homicide decline, depending on the model, after correcting for publication bias. That’s 4–15 percentage points of a 54% decline—not 4–15% of the decline.[1]
On the other hand, you have the Dunedin study, where lead exposure was uncorrelated with measured socioeconomic status, which found weak links with offending overall and no significant link to violent crime.[2] That study is included in the meta-analysis, so it’s part of the mixed evidence, not a separate refutation.[1]
In any case, people talk about this like lead was the dominant factor in the violent crime decline, when these results don’t establish that. Even the meta-analysis leaves most of the homicide decline unexplained by lead.
Crime will surely go back in red states in a couple of decades due to the current return of the abortion bans in those states.
manwe150 2 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure if either of you are being honestly factual or snarky, but I seem to recall this hypothesis is actually quite highly contested in social circles, and not at all as strongly supported as the parent seems to state it as fact
beaned 2 hours ago [-]
Children have never been more affordable than they are now. People's wants and expectations have changed.
chanakya 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly. If you want to bring up kids the way they were brought up in the 50s and 60s, it will cost less as a proportion of people's incomes today. No one wants to bring up kids that way, though.
vannevar 1 hours ago [-]
>it will cost less as a proportion of people's incomes today.
Do you have any evidence for this assertion, or are you relying on intuition here? A cursory search yields a number of references similar to this one---https://reno.nyloffices.com/resources/articles/starting-a-fa..., which indicate that the cost of raising a child has gone up significantly, at least in the last 40 years. And many of these references do not include the cost of college, which has skyrocketed. I'm not sure what you mean by "bringing up kids the way they were brought up in the 50s and 60s." They certainly had housing in the 50s and 60s, and that single expense alone is probably enough to make today's kids more expensive.
kasey_junk 38 minutes ago [-]
Even a cursory reading of that article is full of stat crimes. They denominate a single value for the past then a gigantic range for current times. But basic math shows no major increase for the bottom of their range in their own numbers.
I don’t have any intuition or stats either way but that’s a bad and biased citation.
Which is not surprising giving it’s selling something.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
Actually curious for someone to run the numbers on this.
hn_throwaway_99 1 hours ago [-]
But that environment also largely doesn't exist anymore that made that upbringing possible. Heck, parents are getting arrested and having CPS show up at their door for having their kids walk alone less than half a mile to the store.
bdangubic 2 hours ago [-]
might be craziest thing written here this month, I really hope you were being sarcastic
monideas 2 hours ago [-]
In 2026 in the West, most correct ideas and understandings of things come across as crazy because the elite strata within Western societies promotes ideas and even entire epistemological frameworks which are abjectly and just simply wrong and often also insane
vannevar 57 minutes ago [-]
I'm pretty sure that one of the ideas that Western societies still promote is the notion that a claim should be consistent with the evidence, and that if it is not, it is probably wrong. And if it's very obviously inconsistent with the evidence, it may in fact be crazy. And there's a ton of evidence that raising a child in 2026 is substantially more expensive today than it was 75 years ago.
onemoresoop 2 hours ago [-]
In the vein of ‘LLMs can now raise your children’
rayiner 2 hours ago [-]
You should look at some actual statistics instead of vibes.
bdangubic 2 hours ago [-]
that is asking too much for this crowd ;)
Der_Einzige 2 hours ago [-]
They're downvoting you because you're right and they know it and they don't like that.
~Half the murder rate now vs. 1990. Worrisome COVID murder increase is returning to average for the past 20 years.
Besides, GP is flat out wrong - not prosecuting crime does not result in reduced crime stats. The crime decline is led be a relatively huge 15% reduction in homicides. Even if those homicides remain unsolved or are not prosecuted, they still end up in crime stats. And unlike other crimes where you may argue they go unreported, when someone ends up dead (by usually violent means in a homicide) it rarely goes unnoticed.
In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards, because the tribe and the individual are coextensive. One can't hurt the tribe without also hurting yourself, so while individual interests may not coalign, the overall goals do: the health of the people and therefore the self.
As population increases, that coalignment becomes more nebulous, and the individual can more easily gain while hurting the other. This is partly why crime increased as the species civilized, created cities, and exploded the population. This, as an isolated factor, might've increased forever, and most dystopian fiction from the 20th century assumed it would.
However, alienation then largely became complete, thanks to technology. This had the contrary effect, because the public surface became a smooth wall, removing much of the opportunity for anti-social behavior. The alienated man now lives in his bubble, without connectivity to the outside world of other individuals. Human emotion, as a pre-req for the anti-social behavior we classify most crime as, required an other, someone to direct it against. It's harder (though not impossible) to get angry at abstract social megastructures like corporations and governments, and even when you do, what are you going to do about it? You can't stab Google, you can at best post something unkind about them (on your Android phone) and the algorithm (your actual interface to the entity you may despise) ignores it. Most of us realize this and don't even bother getting angry. Thankfully, these same non-human entities provide the products we need for emotional regulation. Feeling lonely, bored, understimulated, sexually frustrated? There's a product that will safely mediate those desires and get you back into a metastable, yet ever more alienated, state.
So great, we have less crime, sure, but it required the social neutering of the species.
Source? Pinker’s Better Angels had lots of issues. But its core observation that one’s homicide hazard rate has almost monotonically fallen across human history would imply that small, ancient group were way more violent than our modern societies are.
This is relevant because the metric we're measuring now is exactly that: crime, not violence. WWIII could break out tomorrow, billions could die, and crime could still go down.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10393136/
On the other hand, you have the Dunedin study, where lead exposure was uncorrelated with measured socioeconomic status, which found weak links with offending overall and no significant link to violent crime.[2] That study is included in the meta-analysis, so it’s part of the mixed evidence, not a separate refutation.[1]
In any case, people talk about this like lead was the dominant factor in the violent crime decline, when these results don’t establish that. Even the meta-analysis leaves most of the homicide decline unexplained by lead.
[1] https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/332830/1/332830.pdf
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
Do you have any evidence for this assertion, or are you relying on intuition here? A cursory search yields a number of references similar to this one---https://reno.nyloffices.com/resources/articles/starting-a-fa..., which indicate that the cost of raising a child has gone up significantly, at least in the last 40 years. And many of these references do not include the cost of college, which has skyrocketed. I'm not sure what you mean by "bringing up kids the way they were brought up in the 50s and 60s." They certainly had housing in the 50s and 60s, and that single expense alone is probably enough to make today's kids more expensive.
I don’t have any intuition or stats either way but that’s a bad and biased citation.
Which is not surprising giving it’s selling something.