Comment by Clubber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Clubber | Hacker News Reader

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Yup, sorry for the bad math. Brain fart.

>And, crucially, there were many changes between 1950 and 2023 that made it easier to prevent homicides: material technology got way better in the form of smartphones, ubiquitous cameras, DNA evidence

These are good at solving crimes, but not preventing them. As BLM rioters (not protesters) knew and Jan 6 people didn't is that a simple surgical mask will foil most camera system identification.

>shock trauma units (that turn would-be murders into attempted murders)

This is true, but you still have to get the patient into the hospital in time. Gunshots and stab woulds turn fatal really fast.

>and an aging population that's less prone to homicide in general.

We are aging, but our largest demographic currently is between 19-40 (prime time age).

>If you took all of those things away and tried to fight 2023's homicide rate with 1950's tech, you'd find we have quite a few thumbs on the scale today.

Perhaps a little.

> These are good at solving crimes, but not preventing them.

In the long run, solving crimes is preventing them because crime (especially serious violent crime) is Pareto-distributed.

> This is true, but you still have to get the patient into the hospital in time. Gunshots and stab woulds turn fatal really fast.

The major innovation of shock trauma units just was getting patients to high-end hospitals really fast. In the 1970's, Baltimore began using helicopters to airlift critical patients to a city-wide shock center, which was considered outlandish at the time but paid off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_Adams_Cowley_Shock_Trauma_Ce.... The system works well enough that Baltimore now has roughly two non-fatal shootings for every fatal one. That's great for the survivors but tends to mask the scale of the violence, as a lot fewer of those victims would have survived without Dauphin helicopters.

> We are aging, but our largest demographic currently is between 19-40 (prime time age).

This sounds like a statement about one possible way to divide the population into histogram bins in 2023 rather than a comparison of population structure between 1950 and 2023. Since 1950, the most murder-prone fraction of the population (men in their 20's) has decreased by about 10%. (https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...). There are various reasonably ways of making that comparison but they all give the same qualitative answer supporting the common-sense observation that the US population pyramid has aged.

>In the long run, solving crimes is preventing them because crime (especially serious violent crime) is Pareto-distributed.

How does that work? If you are saying because the violent criminals are now in jail, that's completely discounting new generations.

>That's great for the survivors but tends to mask the scale of the violence, as a lot fewer of those victims would have survived without Dauphin helicopters.

Ya, I'll buy that.

>This sounds like a statement about one possible way to divide the population into histogram bins in 2023 rather than a comparison of population structure between 1950 and 2023.

I linked both population trees somewhere.

>Since 1950, the most murder-prone fraction of the population (men in their 20's) has decreased by about 10%.

You need to provide some data for that, I don't see how that's possible since it's not accounting for baby boomers or for population growth (unless you mean as a percentage). GenX was quite a small generation, but the Millennia's are quite large.

Great conversation though!

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