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Comment by welshwelsh | Hacker News Reader

In modern economies, social services reduce crime. That doesn't mean that crime is caused by a lack of social services.

Part of the reason that social services are necessary is that modern society does not support traditional support networks such as those you might find in a village in Bangladesh. Many people today don't even have families they can turn to for help.

Increased crime rates today compared to the 50s are largely due to higher rates of reporting. In the 50s, crime in low income neighborhoods wasn't reported. It's much safer today, and continues to get safer every year.

Countries with excellent social safety nets, such as Finland, Japan and Germany have much lower crime than the US.

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> Increased crime rates today compared to the 50s are largely due to higher rates of reporting. In the 50s, crime in low income neighborhoods wasn't reported. It's much safer today, and continues to get safer every year.

Source? Homicide rates have been well reported since the 19th century, and they track the same general pattern as violent crime rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States. Also, I’m not sure how underreporting is an explanation since crime was higher at the turn of the 20th century and decreased after that.

> Countries with excellent social safety nets, such as Finland, Japan and Germany have much lower crime than the US.

Those countries are also homogenous and socially rigid compared to the US. Homicide rates in Germany and Scandinavia fell below the 5 per 100k (the current US level) way back in the early 1800s, long before the modern welfare state: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/homicide-rates-across-wes...

You picked Japan, Germany, and Finland, three countries that happen to have high social spending and low crime. But Korea also has low crime and has lower social spending than the US: https://mobile.twitter.com/oecd_social/status/98735230257827.... By contrast, Brazil has a very high crime rate with similar levels of social spending as the US.

The data just doesn’t tell the story about the root causes of crime that you want to tell.

> Homicide rates have been well reported since the 19th century, and they track the same general pattern as violent crime rates:

There is one confounder here which makes the tracking progressively less and less good for past 50 years, and makes it seem like the current crime rate look better than it actually is, relative to the past crime rates: improvements in trauma medicine.

Basically, what would be a homicide 50 years ago, today increasingly is “only” an aggravated assault, because of advanced treatments. If you adjust for that, if you assume that the standard of care today is unchanged for past 50 years, today’s homicide rate would likely double.

In addition, the 50s were a period of high wealth equality even though there were less social programs. After the Great Compression ended crime began to increase.

Racial homogeneity is proven to also contribute to lower crime rates. A very under looked reason.

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