Hacker News Reader

Comment by djohnston | Hacker News Reader

It seems wrong to mix crime and economic perceptions here.

With crime, there's a clearcut explanation of objective statistics going down and media focus giving the perception that things are more dangerous than they truly are. Fair enough. Although, I'm not sure the drug zombies are counted in these statistics and they've proliferated like rabbits in most major cities. Whether crime is down, the social fabric of these places has definitely been tarnished.

With the economy, the financialization of everything has completely disconnected macro-economic statistics (GDP) from the consumer experience. Inflation skyrocketed in 2022 - that's not debatable. The rate has come down, which just means things are getting more expensive but more slowly. Homes are out of reach for most young people - which did not used to be the case. GDP is up - who the hell cares?

View on HN

It's easy to make crime statistics go down. Much harder to make actual crime go down.

Homicides are generally considered pretty reliable for statistics, and those have gone down. Though it's possible for those to go down while lower level crimes go up.

It's easy for any one agency or police department to cook the books, but I don't think that scales to the kind of huge shift across multiple categories and data sources shown in the article.

Right, there are definitely perverse incentives afoot from a reporting standpoint on the part of police departments. Additionally, my allusion to the opiate issue is meant to convey that - while a horde of drug addicts at the train station may not actually commit a crime, they certainly make the place feel less safe, which is what people actually experience.

The BJS crime stats are suspect, at best. Instead of relying on actual reports, it's based on polling with a series of interviews. I'm sure that is really reliable in the poor and wealthy neighborhoods. - https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs#1-0

> Homes are out of reach for most young people - which did not used to be the case.

That's been the case for most of my adult life, after the recovery from the Global Financial Crisis concentrated people into cities where it's against the law to build more housing.

>after the recovery from the Global Financial Crisis

Depending what exactly you mean, that's less than ten years. It wasn't until 2016 that median home sale prices exceeded 2008's.

I was thinking more 2010, for 15 years.

Prices in 2010 were certainly far more achievable than they are now. I was in college and had made a lot of career plans based on typical incomes an engineer could achieve and what a decent home cost in several cities at the time. It was feasible even on a single income for an engineer. Unless I hit senior staff+ at faang, a home is out of reach in several regions. It was never cheap but it was plausible.

Homes in Santa Clara weren’t always 2.5m.

> Inflation skyrocketed in 2022 - that's not debatable. The rate has come down, which just means things are getting more expensive but more slowly.

Sadly, this is a perfect example (perhaps unintentional) of the sort of economic ignorance/elision that is at the heart of TFA.

Things only cost more (or less) if the percentage of take-home income that they cost goes up (or down). So if wages go up by more than nominal inflation, things cost less even though their nominal price has increased. Conversely, if wages go up by less than inflation, things cost more, and by more than just amount suggested by inflation.

But it gets worse ... measuring whether wages have gone up and by how much in a very diverse economy is very hard. Reducing the data to a single number ("Wages rose by X percent") inevitably misses a large amount of variance. Consequently, even if you were to write what you said here in a more accurate way, such as:

>Inflation skyrocketed in 2022, but in the period 2019-2024 wages grew by more than the total amount of inflation, and so most products and services cost the same now as they did then

... it would still be missing out the actual experiences of many people for whom wages did not rise by that amount.

I think it's hard to get all the data captured in a broad economy as you state. So I simply go by what people are saying vs. what they are doing. Revealed preference, if may be slightly misusing the term.

The 2008 crash? Absolutely was a horrible local economy where I lived. Shops closed up left and right due to lack of customers, restaurants were basically empty, crazy deals to be had on tools on craigslist, people moving in with family, etc. The actions of the people absolutely matched the broader economic readings and it was trivial to see simply driving around for a day in the commercial/retail areas of town.

Now? I hear more complaints than I did in 2008 at the local bar, but it's jam packed and you are lucky to get a table on a Tuesday night at a mediocre middle class restaurant. Everyone seems to be talking about how expensive new(ish) cars are and how high inflation is over their $8 beer and $20 appetizers.

I understand my local perception is not 100% accurate, but it's really hard to square the "local chatter" with "local actions" at the moment. If you didn't talk to folks and only looked around at economic activity you'd think things were going pretty okay, if not great. But then you talk to folks and you get an entirely different story.

I think we're seeing a bifurcation of society, but not just at the "top 1%" like it was before. The top 20-30% seem to be doing just fine, but complaining on behalf of the bottom 50%. Everyone "feels" like they are doing poorly while engaging in economic activity I could only dream of growing up. It's really jarring to me, and I'm still trying to fully understand it. There is also the increasing asset prices (housing the primary but not only example) that may be hitting tipping point levels for people to finally notice.

Edit: A good one to talk to someone about is grocery prices. They will swear they are paying double or more than they were pre-pandemic. Absolute belief in this to the point of actively angering someone if you challenge them on it.

Then I check my actual history from those days and now? I see them more or less match the official USDA statistics of about 25%. Mine are actually around 18%. I can't square this either. It's like folks want to have inflation be far more exaggerated than it really is, and they truly believe this - regardless of political party in my case.

About inflation: We had basically zero inflation for a decade. That's long enough for people to get used to it. When inflation hit, it felt like "that's really high", because we were comparing it to zero, and it was really high by comparison. But that meant that the emotional impact was higher than the real impact. (I'm not minimizing the real impact! But the emotional impact was out of proportion, and higher.)

Yes. Something I read recently was a long the lines "if people think this is a bad economy, what would a good economy even look like?"

> it would still be missing out the actual experiences of many people for whom wages did not rise by that amount

And the experiences of many with cash savings, pensions that haven't kept up with inflation, etc.

It always jars me when people conflate public drug use, which is fundamentally an aesthetic issue and not a matter of public safety, with crime - as though people getting dysfunctionally high on opioids pose a danger to anyone but themselves. It suggests a very foreign moral system, which is hard for me to understand.

Well, legally, many of those things are crime, and so people call it crime.

But public safety is more than worries about being violently attacked. If you have someone passed out on a narrow sidewalk, you then have to walk into the street to get past them: that's unsafe, and even worse for people with mobility issues. If someone relieves themself in a public space or throws away needles on the street, that's a matter of hygiene and disease.

And although opioid users aren't going to be violent, there are other drugs. Am I allowed to be concerned for my own safety when someone is smoking meth on the bus?

> Well, legally, many of those things are crime

I suppose that not everyone has abandoned the old drug-warrior mindset yet, absurd and useless as that philosophy has proved to be.

> Am I allowed to be concerned for my own safety when someone is smoking meth on the bus?

That certainly is a different situation, and I would feel concerned about that too: but meth has been a problem for decades, while the phrase "drug zombies" has only come into use during the fentanyl era, when you now see people tipping over and passing out and otherwise shambling around unable to fully control their bodies. Those people are out of it, unable to do much of anything but breathe (usually). The fear is really unwarranted.

> The fear is really unwarranted.

Here's the deal: you have no right to tell people how to feel.

When someone's fear comes from ignorance, what kindness is it to leave them in the dark?

CS Lewis once observed: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive"

I suppose it's a good thing, then, that I have no power over you - beyond that which you may have created de novo, by choosing to care about my opinion - and therefore have no means of exercising tyranny.

Where would you want a young female (for their own safety) to walk through at 9pm at night, given the choice:

A block of drug zombies, or a block doesn't have any of that?

Calling suffering people "zombies" is kind of offensive; it seems pretty obvious that people who are too high to stand up or keep their eyes open pose less of a threat than people who are fully alert and in control of their faculties would.

I was walking down the street in San Francisco, and a guy defecated on my shoe.

I saw the look in his eyes, and any anger I had just vanished. There was nobody home.

But I make sure when my daughter visits, we never walk down that street, or any other streets that have similar inhabitants.

I can tell unpleasant stories of how the homeless have treated women, especially those who wear headscarves.

Buses now have recorded messages telling people to report “gender-based” aggression.

Since I’m male, I guess I don’t need to report someone defecating on my shoe.

I agree - the desire to not step in feces and other bodily fluids while walking in SF does seem like a foreign moral system when I'm there.

You think public drug use is just an “aesthetic” problem? That’s the problem with this kind of “nerd reasoning” that is in HN a lot; it lacks any common sense. Public open drug use is much more than aesthetics and is a safety and draws more crime and it’s drives poverty.

Pay too much attention to common sense and you will find yourself believing that the sun revolves around the earth; it's good at spotting correlations, but when you want to understand actual causes, you need research.

I can see as well as you can that crime, poverty, and public drug use are related - but research shows that your intuitive explanation of causality is backward. It is housing policy which causes homelessness, which causes desperation, and desperation causes addiction - but does addiction cause crime? Not so much as you'd think: drug addicts are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime - which is mostly a function of poverty, a consequence of economic policy.

When someone focuses on public drug use as an issue, they mistake an ugly, visible downstream symptom for the actual disease. It is a matter of unpleasant appearances, not the meaningful problem. Trying to eliminate public drug use by focusing enforcement on the people who are using drugs in public is a cruel and pointless game of whack-a-mole, so long as the policy engine which creates those desperate addicts remains in operation.

Yeah, the thing about inflation in the 1970s was that a significant number of workers had cost of living adjustments so they could survive with inflation at a higher level than now. Moreover, many people had a cushion for survival.

When you have no wage increases and no cushion, as common now, all it takes is little inflation to screw you considerably. That situation isn't considered in statistic about how the economy is doing.

And the thing with crime is that when people's own situation isn't good and they're told X-that-they-can't-directly-measure is bad, they tend to believe it. And indeed, the visibility of the homeless can look like crime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com