Is society getting worse?

[David]

[Skids]

[Mugwump]

^ At the population level, crime is more common among those with less. There will be many reasons for that, most of them obvious in themselves, but complex when mixed. One of the big 5 personality traits recognised in psychology is "conscientiousness", and those who lack this are likely to miss worldly success. That no doubt explains part of it, as will twenty or thirty or a hundred ther factors, depending on how micro or macro you wish to go.

I think remote aboriginal communities are a very ill-chosen sample to make that point, however - being both remote, and aboriginal, brings specific context that makes them unrepresentative.

What we do know for certain is that most people who are poor are clearly not criminal, and the link between macroeconomic conditions and crime across time is very hard to make.

[Mugwump]

^ well posted, Skids.

[swoop42]

The more multi-cultural we've become the more violent crime has become prevalent across the decades I would have thought.

[Mugwump]

While we talk about violent crime, it is good to remember that crimes against property are also deeply disruptive to life. Anyone who has been burgled will know the unease that can hang around for long afterward, and anyone who has had a bag snatched, or been victim of identity fraud, knows how these crimes, too, can depress and corrupt ordinary life for weeks, if not years afterwards. These crimes are hard to measure continuously because many of the victims assume the police will do nothing about them so they do not report.

[David]

[Mugwump]

^ yep, that's why I mentioned 20 or 30 or 100 other factors. The reason I isolated the possibility that some people are poor because of their character is because you seemed to regard it as inconceivable that there might be any relationship. I'd say we've all met people who are ne'er-do-wells (as so often, the very existence of that phrase suggests that humans have found this down the ages). There will be many such people, but it is obviously not the only reason (or the most likely reason) people are poor. That is why the poor are not generally criminal. Some people are criminal, but it is clearly not because they are poor.

You state that "the path to crime is set well before people are earning wages". This is really an unprovable statement. How do you know ? So if the path is set it cannot be altered ? If it was altered, was it set ? It seems circular reasoning to me.

I'd say that the only way to conduct an effective society and to create free, dignified humanity is to tell people that they are responsible individuals who own their own wills, and to treat them as such. In the absence of this, their will can readily be owned by others, notably the state. Soviet locked psychiatric wards ? Turn left at neurology.

[stui magpie]

[David]

I think that's a misunderstanding of what I wrote. Firstly, I was quite careful in my wording above; 'nearly all crime categories' refers to pretty much every serious crime except for tax avoidance, money laundering, insider trading and the like. Once you take those rarer (or, perhaps more accurate, more rarely punished) crimes out of the picture, you're still left with all the variations of murder, manslaughter, physical assault, domestic violence, shoplifting, theft, burglary, drug trafficking, drink-driving, gang activity, rape, sexual assault, child abuse and so on. Needless to say, rich people can commit any of those crimes, and the majority of poor people don't; but people from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds are consistently overrepresented in all those categories.

None of this has anything to do with the fact that some poor people can become successful; only a fool would say that the simple fact of being impoverished on its own means that your life path will be x, y, z. The point is that, of all the many factors that determine the course of one's life, poverty is a significant one.

'Set in stone' is perhaps the wrong expression for what happens to our life path. Anyone can radically change their behaviours and surroundings, though usually only through great effort and/or strong support networks. What happens is that we're saddled with heaps of stuff right from the moment of conception and then saddled with heaps of stuff again as your life progresses. It's not impossible that a 15-year-old living on the streets and doing drugs can one day be prime minister, or guaranteed that the private school educated kid who gets everything they ask for has it made. But, if you take a good look at how their lives are at that point in all their facets, you can probably take a rough guess at how their lives will turn out, and probably be right around 90% of the time. I think we all intuitively know that on some level through personal experience if nothing else, even with the existence of rule-proving exceptions. But it does astound me how people can look honestly at our own life stories and those of the people around us and seriously think we're the authors of our own destiny.

[pietillidie]

It's hard not to conclude we only agree on some prescription for society or the economy because we're motivated to, not because we "know" and we're "right". At scale, the socioeconomy is simply too vast and complex to grasp with conviction.

It's also a relief to see more people accepting this, rather than watching one group dress up some fraction of truth as this week's saviour, and everyone else being forced to waste time countering it.

The optimistic take is that this might enable a more reasonable societal negotiation to take place, sans the layers of tribal BS which exaggerate the differences between people. For all we know, this could lead to a new social settlement updated for the times, as people tire the futility and staleness of the old back-and-forth.

[Mugwump]

I think that's a misunderstanding of what I wrote. Firstly, I was quite careful in my wording above; 'nearly all crime categories' refers to pretty much every serious crime except for tax avoidance, money laundering, insider trading and the like. Once you take those rarer (or, perhaps more accurate, more rarely punished) crimes out of the picture, you're still left with all the variations of murder, manslaughter, physical assault, domestic violence, shoplifting, theft, burglary, drug trafficking, drink-driving, gang activity, rape, sexual assault, child abuse and so on. Needless to say, rich people can commit any of those crimes, and the majority of poor people don't; but people from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds are consistently overrepresented in all those categories.

None of this has anything to do with the fact that some poor people can become successful; only a fool would say that the simple fact of being impoverished on its own means that your life path will be x, y, z. The point is that, of all the many factors that determine the course of one's life, poverty is a significant one.

'Set in stone' is perhaps the wrong expression for what happens to our life path. Anyone can radically change their behaviours and surroundings, though usually only through great effort and/or strong support networks. What happens is that we're saddled with heaps of stuff right from the moment of conception and then saddled with heaps of stuff again as your life progresses. It's not impossible that a 15-year-old living on the streets and doing drugs can one day be prime minister, or guaranteed that the private school educated kid who gets everything they ask for has it made. But, if you take a good look at how their lives are at that point in all their facets, you can probably take a rough guess at how their lives will turn out, and probably be right around 90% of the time. I think we all intuitively know that on some level through personal experience if nothing else, even with the existence of rule-proving exceptions. But it does astound me how people can look honestly at our own life stories and those of the people around us and seriously think we're the authors of our own destiny.

Of course we all start life with different opportunities and propensities.

Some of us probably start life in a place which makes us more likely to commit acts of aggression, but I think you accept that these people still have a choice. The number of these proto-criminals who rob or assault is then heavily influenced by the type of culture they see around them, and the consequences for offending.

Today's poor are housed, fed, doctored and educated many times better than a century ago, but crime is way higher (at least in the U.K., and I am very confident that it's true in Oz as well). Why ?

I cannot see a plausible cause other than the culture of libertinism we have (relatively recently) created in the West, where selfish individualism is licensed, and the consequences for offending are not very severe. The cost of that culture is being meted out on the bodies and security of innocent and peaceable citizens.

It might be reasonable to want to fix (or at least improve) wealth inequalities. It's not reasonable to extenuate civil brutality against the innocent.

[Pies4shaw]

If they were still down the mines from 12, none of this would be happening. If we marched them all to war against cannons as infantrymen with bayonets, none of this would be happening. If we made sure they were weakened by diseas and malnutrition, none of this would be happening. If ....

[watt price tully]

If they were still down the mines from 12, none of this would be happening. If we marched them all to war against cannons as infantrymen with bayonets, none of this would be happening. If we made sure they were weakened by diseas and malnutrition, none of this would be happening. If ....

Yes, the poor are so much better off than the middle ages and the neanderthal days . What the hell is wrong with them? They have no excuse, if only they could learn to behave like the rest of us.

I was raised in a hole in the ground and we were lucky, no crime then. We thanked our overlords, twice daily.

[watt price tully]

^ well posted, Skids.

Hardly.

The federal government over years put specific monies towards aboriginal communities but the NT & WA governments especially did not spend or target the monies to the communities they were meant to spend it on in full or in some instances at all or in the way it was intended to be spent.

Further over the years the monies when the monies was being spent was a top down view ignoring the cultural & familial context where indigenous communities were located. The ignorance of policy makers regarding say issues like aboriginal kinship was profound to say the least.

Commonwealth expenditure then was mediated by state & local politics before it got to where it was meant to go.

In part then Skid's raw data (text) is meaningless without context.