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Comment by pilarphosol | Hacker News Reader

The US is a low trust society, because of all the poverty. You really notice the difference if you travel to Europe. It turns out that having half of the population be economically unsafe makes everyone and everything unsafe.

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I made the same observation when I moved to the US, it was so weird to me that SF the city is pretty much devoid of children. They're all effectively locked up and prohibited from roaming. No-one trusts children, no-one trusts adults around children, no-one trusts strangers.

But I went skiing in Lake Tahoe one weekend, and suddenly all of that disappeared. Suddenly, you have children freely interacting with strangers, there's much less adult supervision, and a whole lot of trust in others again.

It's such a contrast, and you can experience it by simply driving for a couple of hours.

SF is actually a city that is devoid of children. They're not hidden, they just don't exist because housing is too expensive. People with kids mostly leave.

It's low but not zero. SF is 13% under 18, compared to 29% nationally.

24% for New York City and 16% for Manhattan if people want an urban comparison, or a "insanely expensive" urban comparison.

It's been a common pattern for a very long time in the US for new graduates to often live in a city especially if that's where their job is and then move out when they start a family. That was the pattern with essentially everyone I knew who went into finance in Manhattan.

The kinds of strangers you are likely to meet in SF are not to be trusted. It's not irrational on an individual level, it's just a societal madness in the USA.

I lived in LA, and would not let my wife walk around after dark let alone my daughters. There were a few individuals who lived under bridges that would regularly assault women. And we lived in a "good" area. We moved to an even better area and within a couple months there was a shooting, high speed chase, and a drunk driver rolled his car into our neighbor's yard.

Needless to say, we moved away.

Once upon a time, Trolls lived under bridges. Now they call you a troll if you complain about those living under bridges.

SF is full of mentally ill homeless people and drug addicts. Some literally camping in the doorways of homes. It's also covered in vomit and human feces. No way I would let my kids run around unsupervised there

Historically, people teach their kids how to navigate their local environment safely.

In rural environments, that can include wildlife dangers and natural hazards and in urban environments, it can include human dangers and industrial/sanitary hazards.

Environmental danger is not new. The culture of isolating kids rather than educating them is. Whether the new strategy is better for the kids is an open question, but seems crazy to some of us.

>Historically, people teach their kids how to navigate their local environment safely.

And historically, society would drive insane and homeless people out of nice areas. Middle and upper middle class people weren't letting their kids hang out with drifters in the past.

I let my 11 year old ride his bike to the park, 7-11 etc on his own or with friends. I don't live in SF though. I think it's a little different when the danger is another human and they are mentally ill or addicted to drugs. You can tell the kids to stay away from them but the kids are kids they can't necessarily outsmart an adult looking to cause them harm.

Adults are killed by homeless people in SF. They are an irrational danger that is difficult to prepare for. There are also a lot of them. It's one thing to say if you see a homeless person stay away but it's another when there are dozens of them camped on the sidewalk. Telling my kids to instead walk in the road is not a great option either.

You are not wrong and 99% of the time doing as you suggest is valid. Hordes of crazy people are a danger of a different breed.

Historically a city would be run with order in mind but SF no longer is. It’s a lawless place without defined borders of what’s safe and what’s not. If SF could clean up its act then maybe it would be different. But it’s the same reason as the 1970s when parents in cities began having to shelter their kids more. We’ve just allowed to streets to be taken over by the mentally ill, drug addicted, and creeps and everything that comes with that.

As someone who plans to teach their kid to bike to school, walk to friends' houses, watch for cars, play safely in the yard, climb trees etc... Who has also lived in SF... There's no way I'd expose a kid to the dangers of walking around that city!

We left because my wife was terrified to be alone outside of our apartment. She would be followed, harassed, threatened. Because we saw crimes occur in broad daylight and experienced the indifference of police when we called.

Comparing the environmental danger of avoiding snakes and not diving into water where you can't see the bottom to navigating the streets of San Francisco as a small, alone human is ludicrous.

It can even vary from one suburban neighborhood to another, without much difference in actual safety between the neighborhoods. Our last neighborhood had roving bands of kids wandering about and picking up and losing members here and there all day long in the Summer, just like it was 1975, everyone was totally chill about it. It was great. Our new one like two miles away is a "kid plays in the yard" neighborhood and we've had people come by more than once to make sure we're aware our kids are on their bikes on the other side of the neighborhood (yeah, we know).

I lived in the Bay Area for two years. It’s a shit hole. It’s dirty, dangerous, and expensive.

I’ve lived in NYC (the Bronx), Seattle, and Saint Louis. Never felt anywhere close to the terror I felt living in San Jose and commuting to Los Gatos and San Francisco.

We fled from San Jose to Phoenix a year after having our daughter. Kids walk to school in our neighborhood. A bunch meet up at the corner near our house and all scooter together to the local school.

SF is not the U.S.

> Never felt anywhere close to the terror I felt living in San Jose and commuting to Los Gatos

Terror in Los Gatos?

Los Gatos is pretty damn close to Mayberry (of The Andy Griffith Show fame), imho.

Certainly parts of San Jose are horrible, but you don’t have to live there.

Is there a reason you didn’t chose to live in Los Gatos? It’s expensive, but much higher QoL if cities are scary.

We have a whole media industry unrestrained by responsible regulation peddling fear.

Look at the court disclosures about Fox News personalities retaliating against Fox reporters actually reporting the truth. They knew the election fraud story was bullshit, but these folks have no higher purpose and want grandma to be scared.

SFO is a whole other universe.

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

Really strange to hear what life for US urban kids and pedestrians has become like. Can't have been always like that. As a proof, there's an episode of The streets of San Francisco where three boys break into a supposedly abandoned mansion in their neighborhood (looking like those SF hills but what do I know).

San Francisco is actually last in US cities for proportion of population under 18 years: https://www.aaastateofplay.com/the-u-s-cities-with-the-most-...

I remember watching 'The Phantom Tollbooth', which is set in San Francisco and has the main boy walking home from school through the city, and feeling how odd that seems now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Tollbooth_(film)

SF is devoid of kids because it is a super expensive place to raise kids in SF, and the schools are so messed up you need to go private or move. Also, a lot of same sex couples don't adopt.

https://www.aaastateofplay.com/the-u-s-cities-with-the-most-...

Nitpick: approx. half of same sex couples don't need to adopt. Sorry for digression

I doubt it’s anywhere near half, at least in my experience. It is definitely non-zero, but gay men are more common in the city than lesbians.

I grew up in India, a much poorer nation than the US, and I played outside all the time, walking to relatives' houses and going to hang out with friends. I highly doubt it's the poverty causing this kind of thing in the US. Seems more to me the high amount of media "stranger danger" affecting people's viewpoints.

I think this is a key perspective. In the US you will have rich neighborhoods where kids play freely outside and poor neighborhoods where kids play freely outside. It is in the mixed neighborhoods there is an overwhelming fear of children playing

I don't know how it is where you grew up in India, but where my wife's family lives in the Philippines, poverty is very different than here. They are much poorer than us, but at the same time, much more secure. Losing a job is not good, but they would not lose their home or starve as a result due a combination of not being in debt-slavery and familial/social networks close by.

If we lost one of our two jobs, we'd be utterly fucked. We have no family nearby, and the housing market is so fucked we'd be in dire straits within a month.

the highest murder rate in US is 15.8 Louisiana while the highest in India is 6.5 (Patna). Most places in India have half or lesser murder rates compared to the average in US. India in general is just a much safer country, not in the same league as China, Japan but far safer than US. Growing up in Bangalore, I walked the streets regularly at 2AM when I was a teen, something that I’m scared to do as a full grown adult in SF

If you include traffic deaths (more likely to cause kids to get killed than murders), India and China look much worse.

The US is a low trust society because we're told not to trust people through highly negative news stories. The result is the US being primed to think there are child murderers and rapists under every bush, etc, etc. Ancedent to this unintentional effect was the incentivised "if it bleeds it reads" motivation for promotion of the highly negative.

Both of these things can be true at the same time. The news can overemphasize the worst, AND we can have an epidemic of drug problems, mental illness, and the crimes that those bring.

Yet oddly, when I was a kid, and the crime rate was roughly double what it is now, we didn't have this problem.

There were drugs, oh you betchya, cocaine and crack and all these other cool things the D.A.R.E. officers were telling us about. There was crime, about twice as much of it as today. But us kids were out there riding our bikes around and playing till the streetlights came on.

This is something different entirely.

US is a low trust society because of a culture that reveres individualism and independence to the detriment of everything else, especially community and freedom from being abused in favor of freedom to abuse. Every man for themselves means kids need to constantly be supervised.

That culture is created by a media environment manufactured by companies whose employee base are well represented on this site. This line is pushed on us, ad nauseam. Unsurprisingly, most of us are sick from it.

An alternative view is that our individualistic culture is simply an evolution of the American idea of "rugged individualism" -- an idea which somewhat predates the tech industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugged_individualism#Influence...

> That culture is created by a media environment manufactured by companies whose employee base are well represented on this site.

Are you saying then that "that culture" is a decade old?

Yellow journalism dates to the 1800's. I'm sure much longer, but that is something everyone should remember from history class.

That's right, which makes it unlikely that the FAANG companies are responsible for it.

We were a more philosophically individualistic society in previous generations, during which children played freely in cities and suburbs.

Hungary is extremely low trust and extremely poor, yet no one fears public transit nor letting their kids wander about.

that's not a contradiction. if society in hungary is low trust (which i doubt btw, unless something changed since i was there last more than a decade ago) then this low trust does not extend to the safety of their children.

letting kids wander about shows high trust in their kids not getting into danger. in the US people don't even trust that.

So let me get this straight, trust is measured on multiple axis except for the axis of children which sets the maximum?

trust is measured on multiple axis, period. no exception.

the US have low trust when it comes to children. Hungary does not. Hungary may still be low trust on other axis.

Why do you say Hungary is low trust?

Parts of the US are like this, but huge swaths of Americans don't even bother locking their front doors.

That's largely changed. I grew up in rural areas where this was true. In fact, we didn't bother locking our doors when I was a kid.

Now, however, people lock their doors because of meth heads even in the extremely rural areas of the southeast.

Just… no. It has not changed, crime is down across the board.

My impression is the opposite - it is easy to encounter unsupervised children in a poor neighborhoods but practically impossible in upper-middle class ones.

Helicopter parenting is common in families where one of parent stays at home with one or two kids and directs all energy into supervising and 'developing' them. Having high income such families have disproportionate political power and able to enforce this model of rising kids on society at large.

I've been through a lof of the balkan areas in the 1990s, also yugoslavia/serbia during the sanctions before the 1999 nato bombing and fast after, and during all those times in all those areas there was A LOT of poverty.

Kids were playing outside all the time... from urban belgrade, parks and playgrounds surrounded by huge socialist buildings, to rural villages. Going to school? Sure, kids 7, 8, 9yo walking alone to school was (and still is) a normal thing. Usually elementary schools (6/7->14/15yo) were walking distance, but some still had to use a public/city transport. High schools meant a bus/tram for a majority of kids. During weekends seeing a bunch of kids outside even late at night was normal and still is.

I can back that claim. Unfortunately, it's no longer the case - not exclusively for the low trust reason, though - but that kids of school age, in my experience, now largely rush home after school to text to their same group of friends they just physically separated from, and play games.

I believe the altered persona they can assume when texting, and freedom of expression they can have using that medium, over doing it in person, is of very high appeal, and something I find concerning for the future of society...

I'm sure that poverty can play a factor in worsening social trust, but can the reason for anything as complex in society only have 1 cause? Also, arguing your point, there's far poorer countries that are far more trusting. And arguably at the US's "poorest" (maybe during the Great Depression to WWII period) there was a much different social attitude to strangers than exists now.

I'd say that commenters have brought up some good factors like mentioning the media's business model in hyping up negative clickbait, but personally I'd say that the increasingly heterogenous population is closer to the biggest factor. Identity politics drives a wedge between most groups that can tend to make you distrust the motives of almost anybody, even if the stranger is a member of your own group. As long as identify politics persists, countries with an increasingly heterogenous population will have even lower trust.

The people living in poverty very very rarely hurt a stranger's children. It's the cops who show up and take them, absolutely destroying their sense of security and growing independence.

This is very false.

National studies show more violent crime happens in poor areas: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf

That study says poor people are more likely victims. Doesn't even say who is performing the crimes (doubtful, but based on this study could be rich people robbing the poor or whatever), nor does it show the rate at which those in poverty victimize a stranger's child (which despite your sidestepped report here was what you replied to).

For example, despite all the worries about kidnappings, there are only a few hundred kidnappings of children by complete strangers every year.

As an aside (and separate point): The data in there was all 12+. I'm gonna be the one to come out and say it: if the hypothetical reality is the teenager is growing up in a hell-scape world of death-match-violence then unfortunately it's one of those cases of "nows the fucking time to get out there and learn how to (gradually) adapt to the hellscape while we try to make it better." (which honestly is a little what driving feels like when you turn 15)

You need to cite more specifically, I'm not reading the whole study looking for the bit you think was relevant to the other poster's point.

Okay don't do it. Instead you're just going to believe the guy who cited nothing? Live your life however you want I guess...

I'm not going to believe either of you. What you offered was not responsive to his claim because it didn't address risks to children, which are the topic.

You can’t not believe either of us. He said a thing and I said it’s false. If you don’t believe him then you agree with me.

This btw is the correct course of logic since the burden of proof is on the asserter.

"False" is your assertion. You have the burden of proof in that claim. If you just wanted proof you should have asked for that rather than make a new, different assertion. The person you replied to took the 3rd option of the tri-state, which requires no burden, which is to merely remain skeptical.

Well yes. So you asserted a thing and didn't prove it.

Therefore the correct course of logic is to dismiss your assertion.

I have yet to make up my mind - a possibility that seems not to have occurred to you.

There's a section about poor people more likely to be victims of _stranger_ violence, which backs up your point. I didn't see much about children specifically, but I guess all other things being equal... Just such a sad thing to think about that I don't _want_ to think it unless there's hard evidence.

What you've linked doesn't really contradict what the commenter said; he's arguing that folks don't generally hurt kids, poverty notwithstanding, and that tends to be my experience.

That's obviously not the case when poverty levels are decreasing over time along with social trust.

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