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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| Are you giving table from the same Eisner paper that David provided the link to relevant along with the graphs to the alleged increase in homicide rates starting in the 60s to me? |
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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And a figure I tried unsuccessfully to attach to the previous post... [log in to view]
Of course, because the US rate is so large, the other five countries' lines are a bit squashed down the bottom.
From an OECD report. "Source: Clio-Infra, www.clio-infra.eu."
[Note: I'm a little more convinced that the Canada curve agrees with the one shown previously (in the range where they overlap) than that the Oz curve agrees with the one on the previous page.] |
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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From Statistics Canada, homicides and attempted murders from 1962 on. [Log in to view.]
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2015001-eng.htm .
This graph also seems to add support to the claim that advances in trauma care have reduced lethality, at least between the 60s and 80s. Completed homicides start much higher but are overtaken by attempted murders by the mid 70s. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ good data, K.
So Canadian homicide rates, after a significant retreat, are now about 3x the rate they were in the early-mid 1960s, despite transformative advances in trauma surgery across the past 50 years. Right across the Western world, it seems. Liberals, always somewhere else when the trigger is being pulled, never imagine it might have anything to do with their “progressive” reforms.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Mugwump, you often point the finger at the ‘60s as the downfall of society, but what exactly would you have changed from that era, policy-wise? The emergence of the birth control pill? No-fault divorce? The removal of corporal punishment from schools? The removal of artistic censorship? (I presume that you are generally in favour of women’s lib, gay rights and removal of racial discrimination, also key achievements of that era.) Or were these all necessary steps that society failed to properly adjust to?
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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Is thread even remotely on track?
Asking for a friend
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| stui magpie wrote: | Is thread even remotely on track?
Asking for a friend |
well you can tell your friend its pretty depressing!
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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| What friend? A Nickster? What track is this friend looking for? |
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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| David wrote: | | Mugwump, you often point the finger at the ‘60s as the downfall of society, but what exactly would you have changed from that era, policy-wise? ... |
With regards to this "60s downfall of society", I'd be interested to see the homicide rates graphs for some Asian countries. The Japan one on the previous page does not show this trend. What about others?
Please someone do a search and share the results... |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| David wrote: | | Mugwump, you often point the finger at the ‘60s as the downfall of society, but what exactly would you have changed from that era, policy-wise? The emergence of the birth control pill? No-fault divorce? The removal of corporal punishment from schools? The removal of artistic censorship? (I presume that you are generally in favour of women’s lib, gay rights and removal of racial discrimination, also key achievements of that era.) Or were these all necessary steps that society failed to properly adjust to? |
There were many good things achieved in that period. I won’t go through the various reforms that you noted above, but removing the oppression of homosexuals - a truly liberal reform - was the greatest of these. The various discrimination acts are more complicated. I loathe racial and sex discrimination, and I have actively practised against it in many very concrete ways in my working career. At the risk of committing heresy, however, I am not convinced that encoding moral principles and human decency in legislation is always necessary or very beneficial. I am a bit conflicted about that.
My beef with the 1960s is that I think they inaugurated a culture of everyday selfishness and insincerity and hedonism which has caused great human misery, which the statistics in this thread show. There was a minor pop hit at the time with the chorus “Do what you wanna do, be what you wanna be yeah”. It’s trivia, in one way, but it’s almost impossible to imagine that song lyric at any other time in history. The verse should have been “what could possibly go wrong” ? What are the externalities of freedom and individualism?
So, to answer your question, the sixties saw a cultural revolution. Much of this was advanced via music, film and comedy, used as propaganda, rather than through legislation. In public policy terms alone, however, I think the particular negatives were :
1. The increasing police and judicial tolerance of drug use: a case where people pressed against the law, found mush, and kept pushing further into the rotting chaos below.
2. The introduction of no-fault divorce and the chaos it brought to family life and the raising of children. I know it is a case of choose your poison, here.
3. The commencement of mass migration.
4. The removal of virtually all censorship, instead of simple liberalisation. I think it likely that there a link between the kind of pornography on the internet and (some) men’s violence toward women.
5. The watering down of sentencing for crime, including capital punishment for aggravated murder.
6. The removal of pragmatic Christianity from the public square ; its expulsion from state schools and parliament, and its increasing harassment via discrimination laws.
Many years ago I’d have thought all of the above good things. After all, I had the resources to enjoy the freedoms that came with them, while insulating myself from the negative effects. As a result, I’d have been hostile to my present views because they sought to reduce my precious freedom.
With experience and age, however, the negative effects for society overall seem harder to ignore. And the complacent self-congratulation of the architects of the 1960s revolution, who seem to regard (eg) murder statistics as mere weather, seems more galling.
Edit: and to fully answer your question, I do not support corporal punishment in schools. I don’t like it anywhere, and I certainly dislike the idea of petty officials having that kind of power.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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From a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. [Log in to view]
Again, a torturous eye-test: do these curves agree with the corresponding curves in previous plots where they overlap?
To me, the UK one does not look like it does, but perhaps that's down to the differences between UK, GBR, England, etc., if the labels are precise. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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Always hard to know what’s included here, of course. There are around 250 murders a year in Australia, so a Port Arthur event has a significant impact.
The same basic story applies, looking at these charts. A sharp rise post the 1960s, followed by a fall through the 1990s, with a current level 50-100% higher than the 1950s baseline, despite transformative change in trauma surgery in the period. The reasons for the fall in the 1990s have been much guessed-at.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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The more Western countries that show some sort of trend like that, the more interesting it'd be to see what happened in non-Western countries.
I don't know where to find such information. But here is a graph for a quasi-non-Western city:
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| K wrote: | The more Western countries that show some sort of trend like that, the more interesting it'd be to see what happened in non-Western countries.
I don't know where to find such information. But here is a graph for a quasi-non-Western city:
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There is a Wikipedia page “list of countries by intentional homicide rate by decade”. Not sure how accurate it is, but it seems respectable as to its sourcing and definitions via the UNODC. Japan has the longest reliable data series, back to the 1930s.
What it shows is that Japan’s rate has fallen, decade on decade, from a relatively high average of ~2.5 in the 1960s to around 0.5 in the current decade. This is consistent with the type of fall one would associate with medical advance, according to the BMJ. Japan has suffered significant economic disruption in the period, but of course has not experienced mass family breakdown, or dilution of social solidarity through mass migration. With strong public support it also maintains, and efficiently applies, a death penalty for aggravated murder.
South Korea starts at ~1.6 in the 1970s (first decade recorded) and it declines slowly to around 1.0 in the current decade.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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It would be nice to see a list of the supposed gains and losses side-by-side, fairly considered, and fairly acknowledged.
Again, the data is highly vulnerable the recording and reporting problem which causes giant black holes in the equation. E.g., the amount of suffering reduced by advances in the tackling of child abuse, domestic abuse, discrimination (disability, gender, ethnicity, etc.), and bullying, and from further universalised services (from dentistry to mental health), among many other betterments, might dwarf other proxies by factors of ten if we actually had a the information and an agreed 'unit of suffering'.
And this is not even to mention the mass gains from the broadening of tertiary education and careers access, itself a liberalisation which has powered economic growth. How do you measure the impact of greatly universalised education, and the productivity derived therefrom, in terms of 'units of suffering' prevented? How many kids once shut out by a lack of access are now immeasurably more productive than they would've been in a 1960s conception? How many women or disabled folks now contribute to mass productivity for the same reason?
If the intention is to compare historical periods, someone needs to run these things alongside classical proxies such as the murder rate for better or worse.
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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