[lbo-talk] Marx without quotation marks

[Philip Pilkington]

>
>
> A little investigation with The Google yielded this:
> http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-23.pdf
>
> There may well be methodological issues, but the FBI says that in 1960
> the "violent" crime rate was 1887.2 per 100,000, whereas in 2002 the
> violent crime rate was 4118.8 per 100,000.  The highest rate was
> 5950/100K in 1980.
>
> So there's definitely an increase.  Personally, I found this rather
> surprising.
>
> I know that scholars have tried to estimate the murder rate over the
> course of several hundred years by examining medieval legal records
> and found it to be way higher in earlier centuries.  Don't have any
> cites though -- if anyone has any, I'd be very interested.
>
> -WD
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> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>From the moment I became socially conscious this has always shocked me.

Christ on a stick... I'll be honest, I didn't expect that. My point of
reference here, as I said, is the suicide rate. Ireland proves an extremely
interesting example because it only really properly modernised in the past
twenty years. Although we weren't exactly living on potato skins and
salt-water beforehand, we certainly were not a modern economic society in
any sense of the term.

But look at the price paid. Don't forget to take into account that wealth is
increasing as time goes on and unemployment (usually a major factor) is
decreasing:

http://www.aware.ie/online%20books/suicide.html

The increasing suicide trend, both internationally and in Ireland, is now a
major public health problem. This is particularly so for young men, where
there has been a four fold increase in the suicide rate in Ireland since
1990, making it the most common cause of death in young people.


>From the moment I became socially conscious this has always shocked me.