In this column you compare (or contrast?) the crime figures from this last century. I have no problem with the answer, but a though occurs to me.
Is it possible that the homocide rates (per capita) have not gone above the rate of the 30’s because of advances in medicine?
An example - A man was stabbed in the chest, hitting a lung.
In the 30’s, could he have been saved?
In the 00’s (or 80’s - 90’s if you prefer) Wouldn’t he have a good chance of being saved?
I don’t mean to question your answer, but…
well, yes I do!
Hrm … that’s a toughie. My first instinct was to compare rates of recovery for emergency-room admissions related to violent crimes in the 1920s-1930s vs. the 1970s-1990s, but an increase in violent-crime-recovery rate might merely indicate a social trend toward beating people up without trying to kill them.
You might try comparing the attempted-murder rates of both epochs instead, but that would include things like shooting at your victim and missing, which don’t reflect any advances in emergency medicine.
I think one should include disease as a danger. Certainly murder and other violent crime is a danger, but when we are talking a crime at a rate 6 or even 100 per 100,000, that is small compared to the rates of diseases like polio or whooping cough or rhumatic fever, all diseases that killed more than murderes did.
edct,
I don’t know whether it should be included or not. I suppose it makes sense to in terms of the column. Influenza alone killes a butt-load of people…
Dangers could include disease and accidents. And, I agree that location accounts for greater or smaller risk. For example, I know a fellow who was a small child in Appalachia during the late 50’s. He and his sister were almost attacked by a mountail lion (while walking home from a neighbor’s). Back then a child could be seriously injured by a host of things in his home environment.
It’s hard to believe the advances made in disease control. Like my dad says, if you lived to be five years old, they could assume you’d make it. Since our granparents’ time, life expectancy has risen as much as 40 years. Interestingly, this is not due so much to medical advances, as it is advances in clean water supplies and proper disposal of sewage and solid waste. (please don’t beat me up … i don’t have a cite)
What society has done, IMHO, is trade new dangers for old. I don’t think that our kids are in any more danger than we were, but I am convinced that their dangers are different than ours.
“Danger” is too broad a term to be able to measure. Danger from what? If you mean disease and accidents, then it’s a safer world for people in industrialized countries like ours. The childhood death rate is an accurate measure of that. If you mean danger from crime, then the problem is in the changes in reporting. There’s no way of knowing, for instance, if domestic abuse has increased or gone down, since most domestic violence wasn’t reported in the past, anyway.
I always wondered about the “there’s a lot of crazy people out there…” kind of sentiment. I’ve stuck to the theory that the percentage of “crazies” is about the same for any population, and seems to go down a little for large populations.
Let me share two conjoined pieces of anecdotal evidence: I grew up at the border of suburban and rural near Albany, NY–to the left was cornfields and to the right was suburban housing right up to the city. In high school, I graduated with about 200 other students.
Now, I always thought (at least a little) that cities were filled with bad people and if you went there you’d certainly be mugged. I went to college in Rochester, NY and my first apartment was in a “bad” part of town. I moved around since, and a couple years ago I started really heavily seeking out live music and going to bars. Any night I’m out I’m often riding a bike by myself right in that same “bad” neighborhood. When I was back at home I went to see a band in Albany on Lark Street and my parents said that was a “bad” part of town … I come to find out that what my parents meant by “bad” all those years was that it was really cool.
The other thing was a discussion my friend and I had about schooling. One of the tangential points we talked about was the number of students being suspended. At my high school, I remember 2 or 3 students getting expelled. That’s about 0.25% of all 4 years in the school, and a number that seems a little low but generally kinda typical. The Rochester City School District has 32,000 students if I remember correctly so 0.25% is 80 students which all of a sudden is a “population” to be dealt with.
Anyway, just a couple thoughts to ponder. I think people tend to look at absolute numbers much more than percentages when they get so concerned about “crazies.”
Hey Johnny, I know that’s one of the Bad Astronomer’s pet peeves, but I think the usage of that phrase really just means “rose quickly”. After all, meteors are very fleeting, falling so quickly they are one bright flash in the dark, gone in less than a second. So it rose at a really quick flash.
But yeah, it is kinda oxymoronic, being that meteors fall.
err I meant to say that compared ot today living in that time peroid was like living in the dark ages
I’m told that my grandmas great grandmother thoguht the best inventions were 1 electric lights 2 cars 3 radios 4 penecillin<sp> 5 the meat and dairy section in a supermarket
In her day she said That you had to grow and raise your own food to make sure it was safe becuase there were no food laws and people geting seriously ill from bad or adlerated food was common and she had a hardcover version of The jungle and said it wasnt too far off the mark on society and food back then
So I guess in some ways the u.s is safer than it was in the “old” days
What’s changed isnt the amount of danger–it’s our willingness to accept a certain level of danger in our lives. Before 1940, women used to die during childbirth-and nobody complained. In the 1950’s, accidents were acceptable–(no seat belts in cars, no hard hats on construction workers, certainly no helmets on children riding bicycles!)In the 1970’s, sexual attacks were unheard of(because it was impolite to speak about it in public, so the dangers were “acceptable”.)
Nowadays, we openly discuss, and try to prevent, dangers that were just accepted as normal and unpreventable by our parents.
