The reason this happens is because of bad actors. This is why we can’t have nice things. Walk around and pay attention next time and you will notice all the little things that are shitty because of bad actors like thieves.
Generations before mine talk about their childhood as a wonderful time. Not having to lock their bikes up when going into a shop. Not having security cameras watching their every move. Not having barriers everywhere to prevent theft. My local supermarket introduced receipt scanners a few months ago that block you from exiting. They treat you as a thief by default.
I wish I could live in a high trust society. It sounds like in some parts of world (Japan for example) there are still elements of that.
More importantly though, generations past also often lived in smaller communities then we have today. When your world is smaller and you are only a degree or two of separation away from everyone, people often feel more bound to a certain standard of behavior. Stealing a bike in NYC today is one thing, stealing a bike in a town where you probably know whose bike it is and someone will recognize it if you ever actually ride it is very different.
The larger we grow societal centers and the more we expand the boundaries of our own world, the more we break societal bonds and need laws to enforce rules that are more easily broken when your victim is just another random person living there.
Steal? Life in jail.
Litter? Year long sentence.
Assault? Life in jail.
Criminals are going to commit crime and there is absolutely no evidence that rehabilitation works for those kinds of crime. We need to keep them away from society and change our culture to be entirely intolerant of crime.
I'm rather baffled how educated adult human beings keep on analyzing the world using moralistic fairytale level concepts like "bad actors" or "evildoers" as if there are some inherently tainted souls doing bad things just because they are bad.
In my, probably biased, assesment this is especially prevalent in the US public discourse.
You can justify some thievery due to social problems - stealing for food is one thing.
But if you eliminate "fairytale concepts" like "bad actors", how do you explain the people constantly attacking managed services and trying to gain access to other people's accounts? These surely aren't the guy on the street looking for their next meal.
The educated middle class can afford to hold the most out of touch abstract theories because they don’t need to suffer the consequences.
As time goes on I believe this less and less. I don't even think it's supported by the data. Spain or Sweden have way more thefts per capita than, say, Poland. Am I to believe a poor person is better of in Poland than in Spain or Sweden? They literally freeze to death sometimes.
I'm Spanish, I remember visiting Helsinki and finding toys in a wooden trunk in a small park for children. My first thought was "How is nobody stealing these?" and the second, immediate thought was how utterly sad the first one was. Am I to believe it's poverty pushing people to steal children's toys?
I think social cohesion is a factor often ignored, which is amazing in a way because it gets alluded to all the time, "They are tourists, who cares?", "Yeah but that guy is rich", "it's a supermarket", "They have insurance", "they are non-gypsies". Any of these has an implied "I don't care about that person because...". And this generates a feedback loop. It's harder to care about other people and have sympathy for them when you don't trust anyone not to steal your stuff if you leave it unattended for five minutes.
In retrospect, I do think those toys got "stolen" frequently, just because children grab stuff all the time and I'm sure it ended up lost more than once, but there must be an insistence to trust your fellow man, to trust that if a good is lost there must be a good reason. I don't think we have that trust anymore.
We aren't some master race with pure souls. Finland was a shithole until about after WW2 after which the society was deliberately built to not be a shithole.
I agree with the OP - as a society, we should look more at aligning incentives rather than instilling morals.
Another huge area this comes up is the war on drugs - if you're caught with drugs, we slap you with a felony that ensures you can't get a real job... pushing you right back to drugs.
I could say the same thing for any sort of crime. If you're an accountant, and you get put in jail for embezzling, that conviction is going to prevent you from getting another job as an accountant.
While there have been a few controversies about jobs that the law excludes felons from, in a lot of cases there's nothing preventing you from hiring a felony drug criminal. If you personally are fine with drugs and you think that committing the crime doesn't make him a danger to your business, go ahead and hire him. If you won't, it isn't the conviction that's keeping him from being hired, it's the crime; the conviction just lets you know that he committed a crime.
It has been my anecdotal observation that it is more common for small, local businesses to "look past" prior convictions when hiring and be more willing to take chances on their neighbors.
Large corporations with big HR and legal departments typically have a dimmer view of things however.
Right or wrong, it is harder to get a job with a past conviction. Without a job, it is difficult to earn a living, feed and house yourself and your family. When people are desperate and unable to survive through legal means, they resort to whatever it takes to survival. It's human nature.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're arguing that a drug user is less employable (perhaps because you believe drug users are untrustworthy or unreliable), and this is the reason they aren't hired.
But a conviction for a drug crime years ago does not mean someone is a drug user today. It is the conviction, not drug use, keeping them from being hired. A drug test would make more sense if you want to determine whether someone is a current drug user.
And besides, without the conviction you may be unaware of their drug use. If someone has a drug habit, but nobody can tell, what exactly is the problem? There are plenty of "functioning alcoholics" in the workforce.
People don't steal cars and bikes to buy food, they do it because they're selfish and want a shortcut to get the things they want. In any first world country there are ways to get food without resorting to taking other peoples' possessions that they worked hard for.
There are many people out there having a really hard time who would never even think about stealing because they were raised with a functioning moral compass.
In a free market, all transactions are voluntary. "Selfishness" just means that you only agree to a transaction if it benefits you. But the other party will only agree if it benefits them, so it's a win-win.
Thievery, OTOH, is not voluntary for the victim, and is, at best, a win-lose. Not at all the same as a free market transaction.
Theft has the highest recidivism rate too[1]. You can never trust someone who has stolen again, thieves are the scum of the earth and only hurt good people.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/proven-reoffending-...
Sure, we should punish crime but never solving the root problem and taking a "hardline" approach towards the symptoms feels good. But, it puts us in a perpetual state of law enforcement and anxiety about crime.
Agencies like the DEA should be abolished and possession/use of drugs should not equal prison time or anything on your record. Of course, things like driving impaired are still punished because you're endangering others.
College should not be expensive or put you into debt for decades. In the US, we need a general cultural shift away from hyper individualism and unregulated capitalism.
Sweden's welfare state is a left wing dream come true, however the bad news for the left is that it empirically disproves every left wing idea about crime and society.
When I generate random passwords, people complain that they're unreadable. When I ask them why the password they need to enter once every two years would need to be readable, they just shrug. When I bring up the ability to save passwords to their devices using a password manager or their browser, they say they're "not into IT" and ignore any advice beyond that. Then they change their passwords to Welcome2024!, and that's why we have to make things more complicated. I don't care about most random accounts, but the Welcom2024! people are the ones safeguarding personal data, medical information, and so much more, and if they don't care, you have to force them to use computers responsibly.
Most websites would be perfectly fine with just a username and a randomly generated password. Even eBay or banks, if we're talking about <€100 worth of transactions/day. 2FA is a workaround only very few, very important services should actually need.
However, in real life, we can't do that, because when the Welcome2024! people get their accounts taken over, their digital wallets drained, their credit cards emptied out, and their life ruined by people on another continent, it's always the websites' fault. People love to say "Google/eBay/PayPal/my bank should've prevented this" but when these services take steps to prevent that stuff, they get mad that everything gets so complicated.
Bad actors will always cause things to be worse, but the general apathy the general public has to digital safety is the reason why it's _this_ bad.