Hacker News Reader

Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

It's not just public school, but in general many forms of social capital[1] have taken a huge hit and will take a while to recover. Other kinds of social interaction and organization have taken a hit. Whether its local tech meetups, your school's PTA, concerts, farmers markets, etc, society has taken a hit. We see the impact in heightened crime, panhandling, and other signs of social distress. Even these small, seemingly trivial, kinds of organized social interactions created community and a chance for people to actually care about the state of organized society.

Pre pandemic, I feel we were in a positive cycle of renewed cities, increased social capital. Now it feels like we're in a negative cycle of people avoiding each other, leading to negative feedback loops and lack of social support.

1 - https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/business/what-is-soci...

View on HN

Yeah. I'll qualify what I'm saying by specifying I'm talking about the USA.

There used to be two good, big dev conferences a year in my metro area. Now there are zero. The meetup realized it's now or never for them and recently tried to get rolling again.

Regarding cities and urban areas, the social unrest of 2020 and its aftermath must also be taken into account.

Broadly speaking, there's two things going on. One, just getting out of the habit of regularly meeting and socializing has been detrimental to the social capital. Secondly, the national political dialogue ended, and in many cases people have applied this accordingly at a personal level.

I think the increased prevalence of work from home is a huge factor for meet ups and urban activities in general. If I'm already out and about and likely nearby it's an easier sell to get me to go to a meet up. It's harder if I'm being asked to head to a central downtown just for the meet up, but there aren't enough interested people in my suburb to support a more convient meetup.

I've certainly found that myself. Even pre-pandemic, I was mostly working from home (or traveling).

When I was in an office, even if an evening event was definitely out of the way (as was typical), the fact that I had to get in my car anyway meant that it wasn't that big a deal to go into the city. I find the bar for leaving my house to take an hour drive to an evening event is a lot higher and mostly I don't do it.

Perhaps. But shouldn't there be a lot of people living in the urban area anyway? If not, that's kind of a change from the booming urban neighborhoods of 2013-2019.

While many offices are not within city limits quite a few others are and pre-COVID there was certainly a lot of net commuting into cities for the workday. There's presumably less of that today in general and it's one thing to do an after-work event in the city if you're already there vs. having to go in.

We were in a long-term decline in social capital since the 1960s, and the pandemic accelerated the process. Even in the 1990s social capital was higher. For example: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/why-mens-social-circles...

An interesting illustration of this phenomenon is the movie “City Slickers.” I just watched it again the other day. Its depiction of New York City life was completely unrecognizable to me.

Maybe. Though I think classic ways of measuring social capital don’t capture things like meetups or conferences which became more prominent in the last 10-20 years

Meetups and conferences are a white collar professional thing. What fraction of the population goes to meetups and conferences, compared to the fraction of the population that used to go to church or union meetings or local fraternal lodges?

Little things too. Have you noticed?

A lot less people are holding doors. They just pretend not to notice you.

At stop signs folks used to wave each other to go. Now it’s a race to stop and go first.

I feel like I've been hearing this my whole life and if true at some point we should have already run out of people holding doors decades ago!

There are constantly people getting older. That’s the thing we have an infinite supply of.

They complain because 1) As someone who did it when they were younger, they expect all young people to do it for them now. 2) In general society is just not as polite to old people, and society notices you’re getting older much quicker than you do.

I have not noticed, but that sounds great. Getting waved through a stop sign is a peeve of mine. If we all just went in the order we got here, we'd all be done sooner than doing this pointless dance. I guess that makes me the problem.

It's dangerous. Just obey the standard right of way rules. I've had people try to wave me into their blindspot and certain death from a car coming 60mph in the lane next to them.

What if you get there at almost the same time?

There’s literally rules about this That we were all (hopefully) taught in drivers ed. in the case of 2 drivers reaching a 4 way stop at the same time the driver on the right goes first. If the two are across from each other then in most cases there is no conflict. In the case of them turning towards the same lane, then right turns have precedence over left turns.

These situations usually play out awkwardly and are always challenging. The really inexcusable ones, though, are where people just randomly sort of decide to violate the rules out of a spirit of generosity or something like that, like they're doing you a favor.

They only play out awkwardly because one or both of the participants don't remember the rules.

And yes, I agree with the inexcusable example you gave -- it's like the person who stops dead to let some car left turn through traffic. "Oh they've been waiting a while and I'm not in a hurry today I'll be a nice person" Yeah that's great for you but you just caused a damn traffic jam behind you and maybe someone behind you WAS in a rush. You just inconvenienced upwards of a dozen+ people to help one person. You were a net loss on society's progress in that moment.

I mean, sure if you could rely on everyone clearly remembering and following the rules every time or you could understand that humans are fallible and sometimes a bit of communication smooths that over.

I agree. I believe that people should drive "selfishly" (i.e. going ahead of me when they have the right of way rather than offering to wait), because it makes traffic more predictable and therefore safer. I'd much rather wait a couple of seconds than have to guess at your intentions.

This is how i characterized NYC traffic when I lived there 2 decades ago: 100% predictably aggressive, which made it safer.

Agreed, I like the term “niceholes” for these people - got it off Reddit.

Just follow the rules, be predictable on the road.

I have very much not noticed this. People are holding doors as much as or more than ever where I live in a suburb of Dallas, Texas.

Driving seemed to be worse initially post-pandemic, but I think it has gone back to the normal pre-pandemic levels of bad now.

I haven’t noticed this either in the Bay, but could be very specific to where they live. I also think you see what you expect to see.

In America churches were historically the community center. Other counties have secularized in a way that replaced churches with something else: clubs, union halls, fraternal societies, etc.

In America we have replaced them with the Internet.

What are some examples of the above in other countries?

eg in Europe I don't think much of that has happened along with their secularization – if anything I think its more cafes (of which the American versions suck cause they're never open past 9pm) and nightclubs...

I was thinking of the UK and its pubs, but that precedes secularization.

It’s possible the other institutions I’m thinking of (labor halls, etc) preceded secularization.

I wonder too if modern working couples makes a difference. Only a few decades ago the wife looked after the kids and fathers went to the bars, societies etc to hang out. During the day women met up in other venues.

In America there used to be union halls, fraternal societies, and clubs. The decline in these things in the U.S. occurred with desegregation. I don’t know enough of social history to say desegregation was the cause but it certainly was a contributing factor. For instance, municipal pools used to be a thing and they were shutdown as a result of desegregation in many cities. Whatever the causes we see an increase in social isolation, a decrease in desire for municipal investment in community activities, a decline in men in universities, and other ill effects.

I joined a fraternal organization about 12 years ago (AF&AM) and the social and physical deterioration was blatantly obvious from the inside as well as the outside.

Shifting gender roles probably played a part as well.

I'm sure there are sitcom examples from the 50s/60s as well but look at even a show like The Flintstones. The guys are down at the lodge while the women look after the kids. Yes, it's just a cartoon, but that sort of working class lifestyle wasn't fabricated out of whole cloth.

My very limited exposure to such places in recent times--for a time I played in a work softball league at a Knights of Columbus location--was that they were very past their prime.

Yup. All of humanity spent a year-plus with our media screaming at us to avoid every other human as a potential threat. Who could have known that could have lasting effects?

I was surprised to learn that the number of people who can only think in terms of single variables is staggering, and that the main variable they consider was what the last asshat on TV said it should be.

I don't know if anyone has experienced the same, but I haven't been to a wake or funeral since COVID started. People die, and then there's no visitation or funeral of any kind - I think the families do a cremation, and that's that.

It's a really cold feeling. It demonstrates to me why these rituals were important in the first place. It is like the person just disappears.

My first time getting covid was (highly suspected to be) from a funeral I went to last spring.

The violent crime rate has not gone up. Murder in particular has gone up, but not broader measures of violent crime:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/10/31/violent-cri...

Murder rates are an important indicator because virtually no murders go unreported, while reporting of other violent crimes can vary. For example, as your source notes, NYC doesn’t even report violent crimes to the FBI:

> In the latest FBI study, around four-in-ten police departments – including large ones such as the New York Police Department – did not submit data, so the FBI estimated data for those areas

The homicide rate rose 30% during 2020, taking us back to roughly mid-late 1990s levels: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/27/what-we-kno....

Their cite includes the national crime victimization survey which surveys a 100-200 thousand people and asks if they've been a victim of a crime. Theoretically that's independent of anything else and should accurately reflect the true crime rate. But these days I'm not sure how you can get an accurate sample.

That said, I think this somewhat misses the point. Large numbers of cities saw violent disturbances over the last couple years. Anecdotally, I've noticed an increase in street racing and those sorts of general jackassery. Technically I'm not the victim of a violent crime but there definitely seems to be more of an edge to life these days. Understandable that people feel less safe and violent crime technically not going up isn't much solace.

The national clime victimization survey excludes homicides. And even if you’re not the one killed, homicides have ripple impacts across the community. There was a teenager working as a cashier at the lunch place in my office. Really nice kid—I saw him several times a week. He was shot and killed in one of those random shootings that’s all too common in DC, and which became a lot more common since 2020.

It never hit 1990s levels (your own source shows this in its charts), and it's falling again. It shouldn't be that surprising that COVID and the ensuing disruptions caused some fluctuations.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/briefing/crime-data-us-ma...

Look at the chart at the end of Item 5. It shows the homicide rate climbing to 7.8 per 100,000, which is well above the level in 2000.

2000 is at 6, 2001 spikes to 7ish, and not many people consider either year "the 90s".

The worst of 2020's disruptions doesn't come close to historical highs, even in the 90s, and it's already fading.

2020 was at 7.8. As you note 2000 is as at 6 (2001 was 9/11 so that doesn’t really count for our purposes here). So that means 2020 was back at levels last seem before 2000, which is what I said. Specifically, it’s around the level in 1996, which was 7.4: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

The FBI’s 2021 statistics show a further increase from 2020. For 2022, New York City is down a bit from 2021, but you’re still talking about wiping out a decade of progress in lowering homicide rates: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_p...

For their 2021 (latest data), the FBI (which Pew references for the article) did not include data from California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico and Pennsylvania. Unless I misunderstand that, we have no idea how much crime actually went up or down by those omissions alone.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/10/08/the-problem-wi...

I’m not trying to be confrontational, but I do need to say something on this comment and hopes for some good discussion.

How much of that is due to actual drops in crime levels and how much of it is due to decriminalization of offenses and a the resultant drop in crimes reported?

Both the Uniform Crime Reporting Program from the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey have methodological have problems. There isn’t even a consensus between when about what constitutes criminal activity. And in some jurisdictions, only incarceration worthy crimes are considered ‘crime,’ where as in others fined infractions like speeding in a vehicle count. To say nothing of the tendency of crime data to suddenly regress towards the mean, which has been a problem for researchers.

I am wary to accept short term crime statistics, because it’s so politicized. There’s a great discussion here, though it’s a tad dated:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/when-crime...

> how much of it is due to decriminalization of offenses and a the resultant drop in crimes reported?

Which violent crimes have been decriminalized?

I mean isn’t not prosecuting properly the same effect? If that’s the case I’d say sexual assault is often viewed as efffectively decriminalized.

I don’t know what I’d like to know on these subjects, to be perfectly honest. I’m still learning and didn’t wade into HN today to spread my perfect knowledge on the subject. Hope there is still room for that.

Here’s what got me thinking about the whole subject in the first place:

https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=18...

https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-informed/the-decriminalisation...

Another angle: how much non-reporting is due to mistrust of police, and how much is due to police explicitly telling crime victims not to report or that a report will be useless, because they are trying to politically undermine a progressive DA?

But I think there need to be actual studies on reporting rates and reasons for non-reporting before too much pure speculation is applied to dismiss these statistics. People have been making arguments close to the above for years if not decades, at some point one would assume the reporting rate would stabilize.

> how much is due to police explicitly telling crime victims not to report or that a report will be useless, because they are trying to politically undermine a progressive DA?

I'll go ahead and suggest something like zero. This is a conspiracy theory.

My observation is that there were a fair number of activities that had their own momentum of a sort. When that all screeched to a halt, it's a lot harder to restart them given that organizers and others have gone off to do other things, etc.

With respect to cities, in the US, a lot of cities (including those we consider elite today) were losing population until 20-25 years ago. There's no guarantee that the young college-educated demographic will continue to move into cities in greater numbers than their parents did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com