I mean something like, modernity has led to improvements to a whole bunch of different things (and also worsening in some small number of other things). It doesn’t seem all it would be all that surprising to me that improvements would on average have some sort of directional effect, even if a priori predicting that effect (easier to do crime vs easier to prevent crime) is hard.
Ah, I should have clarified what you meant before responding.
modernity has led to improvements to a whole bunch of different things … It doesn’t seem all it would be all that surprising to me that improvements would on average have some sort of directional effect
I agree with this assessment, but modern-ness has been increasing at a reasonable rate for the past six decades at least. If modernity just caused a bunch of changes with a net effect on crime, we would see a (relatively) steady increase. The time distribution of changes in crime rates tells us something else is going on.
Unless an argument gives good reasons why—for example—there is some property of the 90s that produced an exceptional number of improvements which reduced crime and very few which increased it, as opposed to other decades where the improvements both increased and reduced crime and mostly cancelled out, then that explanation suffers a big complexity penalty.
Even if all the arguments as to why certain technologies decreased crime rather than increasing it seem solid, we should be very suspicious of the coincidence of them all happening at once. That sort of thinking smacks of post-hoc rationalization and the conjunction fallacy.
I mean something like, modernity has led to improvements to a whole bunch of different things (and also worsening in some small number of other things). It doesn’t seem all it would be all that surprising to me that improvements would on average have some sort of directional effect, even if a priori predicting that effect (easier to do crime vs easier to prevent crime) is hard.
Ah, I should have clarified what you meant before responding.
I agree with this assessment, but modern-ness has been increasing at a reasonable rate for the past six decades at least. If modernity just caused a bunch of changes with a net effect on crime, we would see a (relatively) steady increase. The time distribution of changes in crime rates tells us something else is going on.
Unless an argument gives good reasons why—for example—there is some property of the 90s that produced an exceptional number of improvements which reduced crime and very few which increased it, as opposed to other decades where the improvements both increased and reduced crime and mostly cancelled out, then that explanation suffers a big complexity penalty.
Even if all the arguments as to why certain technologies decreased crime rather than increasing it seem solid, we should be very suspicious of the coincidence of them all happening at once. That sort of thinking smacks of post-hoc rationalization and the conjunction fallacy.