Why the heck is crime so low?

Crime goes up in a recession, right? More people are unemployed, and some of them get desperate. It's only common sense.

Well, think again. Crime rates in the U.S. have been dropping for 20 years, and in the two years since the recession hit, they've dropped even faster. Take a look at this chart, courtesy of this BBC News article:

So why is this happening? The frustrating thing is, no one knows for sure. But there are lots of theories, and I think a combination of the following ones makes the most sense:

1. Smarter policing
2. More people imprisoned
3. Reduction of lead poisoning
4. Baby boomers aging (fewer young people)
5. Video games

The video games theory is particularly interesting … recent studies have shown that playing violent video games does increase violent tendencies slightly, but this is more than offset by the simple incapacitation of sitting at home playing video games rather than going out to commit crimes. In other words, if video games are increasing aggressiveness at all, players are then taking out that aggressiveness on more video games.

At any rate, no matter what the true cause of the reduction, it's good news. Now if we can just keep that crime rate low without imprisoning quite so large a percentage of our population - strike a slightly smarter balance there, and make sure our prisoners are treated as humanely as possible - it would be the best of both worlds. (For more information about that issue, I recommend When Brute Force Fails by Mark Kleiman.)

And for more details about the crime drop - specifically, homicide, which has just dropped off the list of the top 15 causes of death for the first time since 1965, check out this Washington Post article and this other one, too.

The mysteries of photography reveal progress

I just read Errol Morris's excellent book, Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography). Every bit of the book is thought-provoking, as he takes old photographs and analyzes them to find out the stories behind them, which brings up all sorts of questions about what truth is and how accurately we can portray and remember it. One small portion of the book reminded me of the Secret Peace so I thought I'd share it.

Have you ever seen either of these famous photographs?



The first one is by Arthur Rothstein, from 1936. The second is also from the same year, by Dorothea Lange. Both of these photos perfectly evoke the desperation of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, and have become iconic pieces of American history.

But when we come back years later, this is what we find:




We see the little boy on the right of the Dust Bowl photo, now grown and in his own home, as well as a story in Look Magazine about "The Dust Bowl Turns to Gold." Then we also see the "Migrant Mother" herself, surrounded by her three now-grown daughters, posing in one of their suburban backyards. Put simply, here is photographic evidence of people who are much better off than they were in the 1930s.

In The Secret Peace book, I don't mention many cases like this, because they are only anecdotal evidence. In and of themselves, they don't build a case for progress because they are only two examples. And you can always find counter-examples. (Although it would probably be difficult to find many families worse off than they were during the '30s, and even harder the farther back in time you go ... this would be an interesting experiment.) So the book focuses on broader statistics. Nevertheless, these pictures are riveting in a way that statistics can not be; in fact, this was the point of the original photographs themselves.

Morris's book goes into a lot more nuanced detail about these photographs as well as many others, of the Crimean War and Abu Ghraib, for example. It's a fascinating read that I highly recommend. You'll never look at photographs the same way again.

2011 was a bad year to be a dictator

The Daily Beast has a well-done short photo slideshow of 2011's most notorious fallen dictators. Remind yourself how far the world has come this year alone by reading about the nutcases who will no longer be tormenting their citizens, from Gaddafi to Mubarak and more - not to mention Kim Jong-Il. North Korea's future remains up in the air, but in most of the rest of the cases, the dictators' downfalls spell increased freedoms for their peoples. Honestly, compared to most of human history, there are hardly even any dictators left in the world. Here's hoping we get rid of the rest of them soon.

Check out the slideshow here.

(Osama bin Laden isn't included in the list, since he didn't rule any country (thankfully), but let's not forget to loop him into the broader category of won't-be-missed when reminiscing.)

We live in a much safer world

In honor of my wife and I leaving today for St. Martin, for our first vacation in years, here are some reassuring statistics about flying, as well as other safety measures.

To start with, want to guess how many fatalities there were on U.S. airlines in 2010? Your guess is either going to be correct or too high, because there wasn't a single one. This is the third year in the past four without a single death, despite more than 10 million flights with more than 700 million passengers a year. (The Week, Feb 4, 2011)

In fact, as Stephen Moore and Julian Simon mention in It's Getting Better All the Time, "Peter Spencer of Consumers' Research magazine estimates that if an individual were to take a random flight every day, on average 20,000 years would pass before the person perished in a fatal crash." These charts are from their book, too.



Here's a look at death rates in the U.S. from natural disasters. Of course, this chart ends at 2000 and so doesn't include Hurricane Katrina (for example), but the overall trend is clear.



The rate of accidents for infants has fallen 88 percent since 1900, and the rate of accidents for seniors has fallen 72 percent. "Americans are now employed in occupations that are far safer than in the past. The accidental death rate at work has plummeted from about 38 per 100,000 workers in 1930 to about 28 in 1950 to about 4 per 100,000 today."

Vaccines save lives

Sure, you knew that the world eradicated smallpox in 1979, but did you know polio has also been eliminated 99% worldwide?


Bill Gates narrates a short talk about vaccines and why they're so important - and also so easy, so cheap, and so obvious as a means to save lives. The talk was animated in a fun way, check it out (it's only 3 minutes long):



The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also has a neat interactive infographic on its site, illustrating the fight against malaria, as well. You can see all the progress the world has made, and how much more we still need to do to ensure a healthy life for everyone.

Why the Titanic is a bad metaphor

Someone used the phrase "could crash and burn like the Titanic" when talking about the potential dangers of a project recently, and rather than be perturbed over the use of "burn" rather than, say, "sink", I got annoyed at another invocation of the huge ship. The Titanic is used so often as a metaphor for man's hubris that the satirical newspaper The Onion fake-back-dated an article to 1912 that says, "World's Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg: Representation of Man's Hubris Sinks in North Atlantic."


On the surface, it makes sense: vain, overzealous shipbuilders and titans of industry boasted that the Titanic couldn't be sunk, even going so far as to not include very many lifeboats, and then it sank anyway. Clearly, mankind should be more humble. We should learn a lesson from the disaster, and not overreach. Specifically, we should reign in science and technology so they never get too out of hand.

Sure, on the surface it makes sense. But lurking below the surface is the much-larger realization that this is an incorrect lesson to draw from the events of 1912. After all, what did we do after the Titanic sunk? Did we learn our lesson and stop making all boats? Did we declare the Titanic's 882-feet length the upper limit in boat construction and vow never to try to approach that size again?

No. Today, the world's largest ship is almost twice the length of the Titanic. Lots of ships are larger than the Titanic - oil tankers, container ships, aircraft carriers. There are even a few that are passenger ships like the Titanic was. They're all doing fine; no icebergs to report. So, we didn't really reign in our hubris at all. Take that, lesson!

But that's not really true - we did learn our lesson. But the lesson was: take what practical information can be learned from our mistakes and apply it to keep pushing forward anyway. I'm sure that boats built after 1912 contained more lifeboats, for example, and maybe routes changed to better avoid icebergs. Perhaps construction was changed in ways to make large boats sturdier.

So this is why this metaphor annoys me. It's a subtle difference in some ways, but the context I've often seen the Titanic metaphor in implies that science should be reigned in, while the real-world lesson learned vindicates science. After all, the whole point of scientific development is to allow mistakes and the constant refinement of knowledge. Science and technological development are less hubristic than other fields of human endeavor, like art, religion or politics. And while the Titanic was a disaster in terms of lives lost, it was also an essential step on the long path of progress that led us to where we are today.

I bet you haven't thought about water today. Exactly.

We are lucky to live in an era of history when water is not a concern for many of us: we can go about our daily lives without even thinking about it, and just get as much water as we like at any moment. This would have astonished our ancestors.

Charles Fishman, in The Big Thirst, warns that this might change soon, as new shortages force us to value water more (again.) But here are at least two pieces of good news excerpted from that book, one historical and one current:

"One hundred years ago, with the dawn of bacteriology, two things happened. Cities started aggressively separating their freshwater supplies from their sewage disposal, something they had been surprisingly slow to do. (Philadelphia is just one of many cities whose sewage system, 100 years ago, emptied into a river upstream of the city water-supply intakes from the same river.) And water utilities discovered that basic sand filters and chlorination could clean and disinfect water supplies, all but assuring their safety. … Between 1900 and 1940, mortality rates in the united States fell 40 percent. … Clean water [also] cut child mortality in half."

"It is a mistake to imagine that small changes don't matter, or that even big water issues are not manageable. One of the most startling and least well-known examples involves the United States. The U.S. uses less water today than it did in 1980. Not in per capita terms, in absolute terms. U.S. water use peaked in 1980, at 440 billion gallons a day for all purposes. Today, the country uses less than 410 billion gallons a day. That performance is amazing in many ways. Since 1980, the U.S. population has grown by 70 million people. The U.S. GDP has more than doubled in constant dollars: We use less water to create a $13 trillion economy than we needed to create a $6 trillion economy. It has been nothing less than a revolution in water use in the biggest economy in the world, a completely silent revolution. Most of the change has come in water use by power plants and farms. Farmers today use 15 percent less water than they did in 1980, and produce a 70 percent larger harvest."