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Comment by Arizhel | Hacker News Reader

Japan is pretty famous for having almost no crime. I doubt they're debating crime-fighting. Their main problems as a society seem to be workaholism and a lack of children, not crime or school quality.

Here in the US, crime has been falling steadily for decades now, and no one's really sure why. One big theory is that the elimination of leaded gasoline had a big effect: our population was suffering from low-level lead poisoning from all the lead in the air and environment. But crime here is of course still much, much worse than Japan. Crime in England is probably significantly worse, with the main difference being that you don't have to worry much about getting shot over there, but you have to worry a lot more about being mugged or knifed.

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Japan is pretty famous for having almost no crime. I doubt they're debating crime-fightin

The reason for this is not generally applicable outside extremely homogeneous populations.

Singapore is one of the most diverse countries in Asia and has similar crime rates to Japan.

Singapore is over 75% ethnically Chinese. That's still remarkably homogeneous by US standards.

It depends what you mean by "diverse". You could say Switzerland is diverse, they speak 3 languages there, but there is an essential Swissness that everyone generally agrees on. I believe the same is true of Japan. Maybe the word I actually wanted was somewhere between homogeneous and harmonious.

Over 15% of Singapore's population are non-citizens ("foreign talent"), so whatever they're doing it's not the same as Switzerland

Singapore has similarly low crime figures and is not remotely as homogeneous as Japan.

What's the reason, then? Looking at Appalachia and southern Italy, I don't see any reason to believe that ethnic/racial/cultural homogeneity is a magic bullet.

Pretty much all the crime in rural areas is a side effect of drugs. There isn't enough anonymity in those areas to actually be a career criminal (other than dealing drugs).

These societies' problems are certainly not recent, and they're not just due to drugs. For Appalachia, read _Albion's Seed_ or at least Slate Star Codex's review ("the sensibility is positively Orcish"); for Sicily, read Peter Turchin's _War and Peace and War_ (watch for the section on "asabiyya black holes"), and probably _The Moral Basis of a Backwards Society_. Both of these societies have been absolutely awful for centuries.

It's definitely not, proven by the examples you cited.

Where you get ultra-low crime is when you combine that homogeneity with good public education. Take a look at the education systems and levels in places like Japan or Norway, and then compare to Appalachia or Sicily or various middle eastern nations. Also look at the levels of religiosity.

But if good public education and low religiosity were the magic bullets, the Soviet Union would never have fallen; if homogeneity was necessary, Singapore wouldn't work and the Ottoman Empire would always have been dysfunctional; if high religiosity was bad in itself, Bavaria would be a hellhole. Some religions get in the way, others don't -- and some actively help to enrich their societies. (Zoroastrianism should come to mind. Rice was the staple crop of Persia before it was the staple of China, thanks to pious Zoroastrian agricultural research; and building an aqueduct or draining a swamp was a fast path to paradise. Down to the present, the Zoroastrians do pretty well for themselves -- the Parsis of India are the main population of Zoroastrians today -- and some of their habits of mind seem to still be present in Iran today.)

I've come to believe that the potential to rise in social position is what matters most, except possibly in Zoroastrian societies. Appalachia, Sicily (including lower-class parts of Boston), and the Middle East all agree that where you were born is where you'll stay, and that ambition is ridiculous or contemptible; while the healthiest societies are the ones where talent can bubble to the top even if you're not the judge's son.

My favorite example of the vitality that social mobility brings is the Ibo of Nigeria -- "the Jews of Africa", the most successful and energetic of West African peoples. Also look at the dynamic nature of the early Islamic world, compared compared to the stagnant nature of the modern one. And what's true of the Islamic world is equally true of the Iberian one; Brazil and West Virginia have the same basic problem. And back in the Middle Ages, too, it was the most fluid societies -- Lombardy, England, the Low Countries, and the Iberian states -- that were the most successful ones.

You make some great points, but for your Soviet Union point I'd like to counter that indoctrination does not equal "good public education". Good public education teaches you to question authority and to think critically. That kind of education is notably absent in authoritarian regimes.

Also, I never said that religiosity by itself would result in downfall of a society. Lots of religious societies have done well in history, but they also had relatively good education. The early Islamic world you mention I think qualifies here. It's when you combine religiosity with terrible education that you're really doomed. The education serves as a check against the religiosity getting out of control and turning into theocracy, or whatever you call the wackiness we're seeing in the right-wing here in America today.

The Soviets really did do a good job in some important areas. No one had taken the basic skills, the "three Rs", seriously in Russia before them; science and engineering were also pretty good (apart from Lysenko in biology), and while 20th-century culture was closed off, 19th-century was certainly accessible. (Hugo and Dumas were a big part of Soviet popular culture, not in the sense of "what the state sponsored" but in the sense of "what people actually read.") Insofar as critical thinking is a subset of logic, science and math taught at least a little of it, too. Understand that I'm not defending the Soviets as a whole -- I think they were mostly cancer, and that the historical record backs me up on that -- but deserve credit where credit's due.

I think that the American right is a unique sort of society, and that patterns drawn from their behavior can't be relied on in most other contexts. Their religions look like Christianity but act like non-syncretistic paganism ("worshiping oneself in the guise of worshiping God"), and their hostility to an awful lot of scholarship seems to originate in not wanting to be taken for a ride -- and in the confidence of many peoples, especially relatively backwards ones, that they already know everything that's necessary in order to live well. (The Persians told Chardin as much in the 1500s, as mentioned in The Structures of Everyday Life.)

Have you read Albion's Seed? If not (and it's about 600 pages of historical scholarship, so I won't blame you), look up Slate Star Codex's review, which makes the book's essential points in reduced (and maybe slightly caricatured) form.

You could say Japan committed quite a lot of crime 75 years ago, but the population hasn't really changed since then.

Probably, these days, everyone has something better to do.

People often claim this, but I have never seen evidence for causation--just theories, whereas the actual evidence is only correlation.

Crime is England is a lot worse than Japan or the US?

Um, no. It's FAR safer than the US, but not nearly as safe as Japan (but then, what is)? Comparing crime statistics is notoriously difficult due to differences in methodologies and reporting rates, but "homicide" is one statistic that has sufficiently uniform categorisation and reporting rate as to enable a comparison. Doing that, you can see that the US is about 4 times worse than the UK, and 13 times worse than Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

Edit: perhaps the grandparent comment meant that crime in England was "a lot worse" than in Japan? If so, then yes that's true.

As you said, it's hard to compare because of methodology and such. Yes, the US looks bad when you average everything together, but that ignores that some places are very different from others. Basically, if you stay out of blighted urban districts ("ghettos"), you're far less likely to suffer from violent crime. Many of the homicides here are because of gang violence, something that really only affects gang members and people living around them.

If you take out areas with high crime in any country then of course the statistics look better. Similarly of course it's possible to find areas in one country that are safer than areas in another country if you want to.

You're ignoring the fact that there's a huge racial division in the US. If you're a white person, gang warfare in the black or hispanic ghettos simply does not present a danger to you the way it does to those minorities. (Note I'm not saying these problems shouldn't be dealt with or that these minorities should be ignored or that the deserve it, just that this is the reality on the ground.)

From what I can tell, in European countries the divide isn't so stark and middle-class-and-up people are more likely to be victims of petty and street crime like muggings. Here, if you're a white suburban dweller, you just don't have to worry about being victimized in a mugging or carjacking very much, while in the ghettos you definitely do.

Where is your source for crime in England being "significantly" worse than the US?

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