Trust your neighbors; if you were being murdered they would probably help you

Have any of you, like me, had to sit through a Sociology class in which they discussed the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder? Or, maybe you've seen one of the estimated 1,000 books, articles, or documentaries about the case? (Alan Moore used it as part of his vicious vigilante Rorschach's motivation in Watchmen.) If you're old enough to remember it, perhaps you read the infamous front-page New York Times article that kicked off the nationwide media frenzy. It started:

"For more than half an hour, thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens."

It's no exaggeration to say that this story had far-reaching effects on the American psyche for decades to follow. The crime didn't matter, but the fact that 38 people watched it, with either the classic apathy of "I didn't want to get involved" (the famous quote from one of the witnesses), or worse, a sick voyeuristic glee, well, that shocked the world. Nothing better encapsulated the feeling of traditional American values coming apart at the seams. Nothing better expressed the fears of rising crime, the obvious dehumanizing consequences of urban living, and the just-plain-nastiness of New Yorkers, to boot. As Jim Rasenburger describes in American Heritage,

"The Times article detonated on breakfast tables, then mushroomed into an expanding cloud of gloom. Newspapers disseminated the story across the country. The 38 witnesses were roundly and personally vilified, but to those in the business of worrying about such things, their actions—or rather, inactions—reflected a broad crisis in American society. As clergymen decried the incident from their Sunday pulpits, politicians spoke gravely of the country’s moral lethargy. Mike Wallace broadcast a CBS radio special called “The Apathetic American.” Loudon Wainwright concluded in Life magazine that Americans were “becoming a callous, chickenhearted and immoral people.”"



So, naturally, it's not true. In recent years, several people have stepped up to point out the inconsistencies in this tale. The mistakes include:

1. There weren't 38 "eyewitnesses", as the article claimed. There were perhaps 7 or so. There were several more "earwitnesses" who heard various bits and pieces, but even they don't add up to 38 people.


2. One reason that there weren't more witnesses was that the attack happened at 3:20 in the morning. Most of Kitty's neighbors were asleep.


3. The article was based on an error-filled police report. For example, there were actually two attacks, not three.


4. The first attack took place in view of some windows, but from far away (and in the dark), it appeared to witnesses to be a domestic dispute. The woman walked away on her own, and her staggering appeared to be drunkenness.


5. Only one witness ever saw the knife.


6. The second attack took place shortly thereafter, when the murderer caught up to Kitty in a foyer-type space in the back of a building, out of the line of sight of anyone.


7. There was no 9-1-1 emergency line in 1964, so calling the police meant waiting for the operator to connect you. In fact, perhaps the only good thing to come out of the aftermath of the inflated media coverage of the Genovese murder was more support for establishing 9-1-1, in 1968.


8. Nevertheless, at least one person did call the police, and possibly several. The police arrived later than they should, but they arrived.


9. The article claimed that the police didn't arrive until after Kitty's death. In reality, she died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.


10. Kitty's murderer was caught several days later when a Corona (another Queens neighborhood) man saw someone acting suspiciously and called the police. Yeah.

So instead of 38 people watching Kitty die, we get a handful of people, some of whom called the police and some of whom probably should have, but didn't. Their inaction probably wasn't due to apathy but confusion. For example, our upstairs neighbors here fight all the time, and we can hear them yell. I've called the police on more than one occasion, but not every time. You have to make a judgment call and only report something if you think the seriousness or violence warrants it. Perhaps over the years of living in apartments in the city, there have been sounds in the night that I half-sleepingly heard that were actually crimes but I never reported. How responsible should I feel for that?

Reading about the fallacies in the Genovese story got me madder than usual, really struck home. It's because this story is one of those rare events that becomes a public myth, much larger than itself. It warps people's perspectives for years, even decades, and no amount of mitigating caveats and dry counter-statistics can change the mind of someone won over by the visceral impact, the resonance, of the myth.

(Perhaps it's hitting home because I used to work for Meetup, a site that brings people together in community groups and is thus dependent on social capital and neighborly trust. So, trying to grow the site including trying to get people to abandon irrational fears of their neighbors. People often left comments after Meetups expressing surprise at how "friendly" and "normal" the attendees were, revealing their low expectations.)

How different would Americans have felt - still feel - about the neighborhood of Kew Gardens, about Queens, about New Yorkers, about city living, about their own neighbors, about humanity, had that article not been published? It's impossible to know how many subtle demographic and social trends would have turned out differently. And when trust disappears and social capital erodes, it turns these negative myths into self-fulfilling prophecies that then take decades of hard work of community-building to overcome.

Are we in a cultural golden age right now?!?

Are we living in a cultural golden age? Since this is a blog about positive trends, you've probably guessed I'm going to say the answer is Yes. I go into it quite a bit in The Secret Peace book, a lot of which is based on Steven Johnson's work in Everything Bad is Good For You. I'm revisiting it again here because I just found this interesting article in the A. V. Club, in which Leonard Pierce delves deeply into the issue.

Pierce's main concern is not whether or not we're living in a cultural golden age - to him, as to me, it's just obvious we are. ("… the older I got, the less patience I had for the retro-minded bores of every age who bitched and moaned about how nothing was as good as it was during the years when they just happened to be in college.") His concern seems to be why people don't believe it. After all, "With communications technology, increased globalism, and the seemingly endless proliferation of the Internet, it literally has never been easier to listen to any kind of music, watch any kind of movie, read any kind of literature, or experience any kind of culture you choose. Films that only two decades ago were almost impossible to see outside of big-city festivals or film schools can now show up in your mailbox within a day or two of a request for them. Television shows—in what even the jaded admit is a golden age of television—can now be watched in a variety of ways at almost any time, often without advertising. Technology has made rare books less rare, cult comics less cultish, and global culture more local."

He comes up with some really thoughtful explanations for why it's hard for people to believe we have it good nowadays. Check out the article to find out what they are.

Majority of world now educated

The WorldWatch Institute reports that educational attainment is steadily rising worldwide. In 2010, worldwide, over 61 percent of adults (15 and older) finished at least some secondary school (high school) during their lifetimes. This had been 36 percent back in 1970 and 50 percent as recently as 1990 (see chart I made.) This leaves now only about 1 in 10 adult males and 1 in 5 adult females worldwide who have had no schooling whatsoever.



Besides the fact that education should be considered an a priori good in and of itself, rising levels of education help push forward so many other secret peace trends. As I mentioned in a recent post, I believe a major force pushing peace forward is the spread of information to a wider base of people. With more information in the world, and more people able to access it and understand it, those people are also now able to process it and generate their own new knowledge, contributing to the virtuous cycle.

Wear your seat belt!

I never thought I'd be writing this, because I am decidedly not a car person. I moved to NYC and got rid of my car seven years ago because I hate to drive. And a few months ago my wife had her foot run over by a van! Nevertheless, I just got around to reading Superfreakonomics (which was a great read, and, not surprisingly, is being flagged by spellcheck here), and it has some nuggets of positive news about driving.

Nearly 40,000 people died in U.S. traffic accidents in 1950, it says. That's roughly the same number as today, but that masks the good news, which is that we drive a lot more today and there are a lot more cars on the road. So the rate has dropped: the rate of death per mile driven was five times higher in 1950 than it is today.

Seat belts are a huge part of that, and the book describes how Robert McNamara (yes, that Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense one) was the person at Ford who pushed for them originally. Prior to that, they were used in airplanes, but no one had thought to put them in cars. However, turns out it's much easier to install seat belts than it is to get people to wear them, and for decades, they didn't. But the rate of people wearing their seat belts in the U.S. has risen from 11% in the 1970s to 21% in the mid-1980s, 61% in the mid 1990s, and over 80% today. It's estimated that seat belts reduce the risk of death in an accident by as much as 70%; since 1975 they have saved about 250,000 lives. Each seat belt costs about $25 to put in a car, making them one of the most cost-effective lifesaving devices ever invented.

PS> Btw, if we go back even farther in time, transportation was even more dangerous. In 1900, for example, horse accidents killed 200 New Yorkers, 1 in every 17,000 residents. And that's not taking into consideration diseases spread by widespread horse dung (200,000 horses in NYC meant 5 million pounds of horse manure a day.) In 2007, 274 New Yorkers died in car accidents, but with more people that works out to only 1 in every 30,000 residents.

New buses revolutionize my street

We live in Manhattan between 1st and 2nd Avenues. Over the last two months or so, the city has repaved and repainted those two streets, and it's all part of a big experiment to revolutionize the city's bus system. I read about it in this New York Magazine article.

See, it's simply too expensive and time-consuming to work on the subways now, unfortunately, but the buses are super cheap by comparison, offering great return on transit investment. Recently, cities around the world, such as London and Bogotá, have had a lot of success revamping their bus systems. So New York is trying it out in a few places, including these two avenues now. "These, along with the Bx12 line in the Bronx, are being promoted as trial programs for what [MTA head Jay Walder] hopes will be, by the end of his tenure, a reconfiguration of the city’s streets. 'When the city adopts a world-class ‘Bus Rapid Transit’ system, people are going to have a tough time, efficiency-wise, telling a bus apart from a subway—it’s going to be like a subway with a view,' predicts Kyle Wiswall, general counsel for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign." Here are some of the great ideas they're implementing:

1. The buses have their own dedicated lanes, reserved exclusively for them, which really improves the overall speed.


2. New buses are built lower to the ground, making them easier to board and thus speeding up boarding times. They also have two entrances.


3. You pay before you board, from a vending machine that gives you a receipt.


4. Bus shelters are larger and hold more people.


5. Soon, buses will be equipped with signal priority, meaning they can keep traffic lights green as they approach.


6. There are new exclusive bike lanes, too, and parking has been moved to the other side of them (meaning, curb, bike lane, parking, car driving lanes, bus lane.) So, parked cars form a buffer between the bike lane and the rest of the traffic, which is much safer.

I'm anxious to see how this works and hope it's successful enough to be implemented elsewhere in the city soon. My alternative is waiting for the Second Avenue Subway, which was first proposed in 1929 and still not due to open (in part) till 2016. Until then, I'll happily take the bus.

Photo: You can see the new First Avenue includes speed boosts!

The economic crisis reveals clues to pushing the secret peace forward

I just finished reading The Big Short, Michael Lewis's account of the subprime mortgage crisis from the perspective of the few rare people who saw it coming and bet on it, shorting the market and eventually making lots of money. It is brilliantly written and fun to read, highly recommended. Listen to this passage, in which he describes one group of those rare investors starting their investigation:

"Typically when they entered a new market - because they'd found some potential accident waiting to happen that seemed worth betting on - they found an expert to serve as a jungle guide. This market was so far removed from their experience that it took them longer than usual to find help. ... Eventually they figured out that language served a different purpose inside the bond market than it did in the outside world. Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders. Overpriced bonds were not "expensive"; overpriced bonds were "rich", which almost made them sound like something you should buy. The floors of subprime mortgage bonds were not called floors - or anything else than might lead the bond buyer to form any sort of concrete image in his mind - but tranches. The bottom tranche - the risky ground floor - was not called the ground floor but the mezzanine, or the mezz, which made it sound less like a dangerous investment and more like a highly prized seat in a domed stadium. A CDO composed of nothing but the riskiest, mezzanine layer of subprime mortgages was not called a subprime-backed CDO but a "structured finance CDO." "There was so much confusion about the different terms," said Charlie. "In the course of trying to figure it out, we realize that there's a reason why it doesn't quite make sense to us. It's because it doesn't quite make sense." ... The subprime market had a special talent for obscuring what needed to be clarified."

If the secret peace were half of a vast historical Manichean struggle, that paragraph would be a perfect description of its evil dark half. In the book, I claim that the main force pushing civilization closer to peace is the snowballing spread of information. If that's true, then theoretically anything that hinders the free flow of information is detrimental to the cause of peace. And here we see a perfect example. The obfuscation described above was a huge contributing factor to the entire economic crisis.

Other examples abound. My wife and I are constantly surprised at how difficult it is to navigate the health insurance system; that's a sign that it was intentionally created that way. For the same reason, some stores make it hard to find prices on products, and some web sites make it hard to unsubscribe from newsletters. These are, sadly, often not accidents or signs of bad design; they are signs of skillful design, at least from the point of view of evil.

But the whole theory of the secret peace is that the good news is outweighing the bad. And that means there are more instances now of people sharing information and being transparent than in the past. So I'll leave you with two quick examples from the NY Times:

Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s
By Gina Kolata

"In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain. Now, the effort is bearing fruit with a wealth of recent scientific papers on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s using methods like PET scans and tests of spinal fluid. More than 100 studies are under way to test drugs that might slow or stop the disease. And the collaboration is already serving as a model for similar efforts against Parkinson’s disease."

In a Twist, Nonprofits Review Technology Failures
By Stephanie Strom

"Technology’s potential to bring about social good is widely extolled, but its failures, until now, have rarely been discussed by nonprofits who deploy it. The experience in Guyana might never have come to light without FailFaire, a recurring party whose participants revel in revealing technology’s shortcomings. ... Behind the events is a Manhattan-based nonprofit group, MobileActive, a network of people and organizations trying to improve the lives of the poor through technology. Its members hope light-hearted examinations of failures will turn into learning experiences — and prevent others from making the same mistakes."

Crime STILL dropping, despite recession

USA Today: the FBI announced that "violent crime dropped 5.5% last year despite a deep recession that has made millions desperate. It was the third such drop in a row and a continuation of the downward trend going on for almost 20 years. News coverage of the event was perfunctory, the political posturing minimal."

Common sense says that crime would go up when the economy's bad, right? But, "As the Great Recession demonstrates, losing a job doesn't suddenly turn law-abiding people into criminals." Violent crime has dropped more than 40 percent from its peak in the early 1990s.

This raises two questions: Why is crime so low? And, why don't people know it?

As to why crime is so low, there are many theories. From what I've read, I tend to think the three largest contributing factors (there are probably many) are better policing methods, better anti-crime technology (more video cameras, for example, and easier ways to find stolen cars), and more people in prison. Incarcerating a record number of people causes other problems, though, which I get into more in the Secret Peace book.

And why don't people know about the low crime rate? Why do some of mine and my wife's relatives still fear that when we walk around New York City at night, we are really walking around New York City circa 1975? Probably for the same reason everyone doesn't know other Secret Peace trends, too - they're gradual and less easily conceived of as compelling news stories. Here's hoping that word spreads, since having low crime but still living in fear is no fun at all, and diminishes the hard work that the police and others put into getting us here over the last few decades.