Crime
Russian
- Russia has lower murder rates than America, and Moscow and London are about the same (2021). See US and Russia murders over time plot.
For all intents and purposes, Moscow is now a considerably safer city than London, to say nothing of most American conurbations. Robbery rates in Russia are 5x lower than in the UK, and have almost converged to the level of the V4. Now in fairness, robbery is much harder to compare across countries;...
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Let’s take safety. This is one of Mencius Moldbug’s pet issues, and he likes to quote the following from an 1876 century text on criminology:
Meanwhile, it may with little fear of contradiction be asserted that there never was, in any nation of which we have a history, a time in which life and property were so secure as they are at present in England. The sense of security is almost everywhere diffused, in town and country alike, and it is in marked contrast to the sense of insecurity which prevailed even at the beginning of the present century. There are, of course, in most great cities, some quarters of evil repute in which assault and robbery are now and again committed. There is perhaps to be found a lingering and flickering tradition of the old sanctuaries and similar resorts. But any man of average stature and strength may wander about on foot and alone, at any hour of the day or the night, through the greatest of all cities and its suburbs, along the high roads, and through unfrequented country lanes, and never have so much as the thought of danger thrust upon him, unless he goes out of his way to court it.
Moldbug then usually contrasts this with whatever recent news article has struck his fancy about entire inner-city neighborhoods where the police are terrified to go, teenagers being mowed down in crossfire among gangs, random daylight murders, and the all the other joys of life in a 21st century British ghetto.
Of course, the plural of anecdote is not data, but the British crime statistics seem to bear him out:
https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/reaction_crime.jpg
(recorded offenses per 100,000 people, from source)
If this is true, it is true despite technology. If crime rates have in fact multiplied by a factor of…well, it looks like at least 100x…this is true even though the country as a whole has gotten vastly richer, even though there are now CCTVs, DNA testing, police databases, heck, even fingerprinting hadn’t been figured out yet in 1876.
This suggests that there was something inherent about Victorian society, politics, or government that made their Britain a safer place to live than modern progressive Britain. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/
"Sociopaths, who comprise only 3-4% of the male population and less than 1% of the female population...are thought to account for over 50% of all crimes in the U.S." "The sociobiology of sociopathy: An integrated evolutionary model," Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010 Linda Mealey
Implication: if we lock up 2% of the population, we can cut crime in half.
