[lbo-talk] Rate of violence over the long term (was Re: Why Is America So Violent?)

[Mr. WD]

On 5/14/07, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
>
> [WS:] The above is a statistical fallacy, since crime is not randomly
> distributed.  It concentrates in certain sub-cultures.  Therefore, citing
> population-wide crime rates is seriously misleading.  For some social groups
> - it overestimates the risk of criminal victimization, thus fueling crime
> scares that we witness in this country.  For other groups - it grossly
> underestimates that risk.

That is certainly true -- and has probably been true for at least the
past 90 years or so, but has this been true for, say, the past 500
years?  As I said earlier, my understanding is that interpersonal
violence in the West was was far, far more rampant in earlier
centuries (e.g. people murdering each other over minor personal
affronts, etc.)  Then -- again, so I've heard -- since the advent of
industrialization, the rate of interpersonal violence declined rapidly
and has since remained relatively steady since the 1920s or so.

If this really is the long term trend, I think it raises two
interesting questions, namely: 1) why did  industrialization suddenly
make life more precious?  2) why does everyone seem to think American
culture is so much more violent today than it has been in the past?

-WD