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by Blind groper » Tue Jun 24, 2014 8:17 am
Pinker is a scientist. He is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and he is respected by his scientific peers world wide. As a scientist, his research is dedicated to finding hard data. His writings are, as Jim pointed out, back by extensive bibliographies, and are far from 'made up'.
On murder rates.
Murder is one crime that has been of concern throughout history, for obvious reasons. This means that records of its frequency have been kept by numerous societies for the last several thousand years. We have that data. When the data is collated to show changes in murder rates, it is enlightening.
For example : in the western world, there was a major rise in murder rate towards the end of the 1960's, which stayed high till the early 1990's. Then there was a major drop. Why?
That is easily explained, since it 'coincides' exactly with the peak in the number of young adults following the baby boomer explosion of births. Murder is more frequently carried out by young male adults, from mid teens to just over 30 years of age. When there are more such young male adults, murder rates rise. After about the year 1990, the number of such people in the population dropped substantially, and so did the murder rate.
Another such pattern is murder rates in the American wild west. When areas were first populated, largely by young men, with no legal justice system, murder rates were high. When the law moved in, and when young women also became a part of that society, marrying the wild young men, murder rates dropped.
The point is that individual justice is a lousy substitute. What is needed is a full and proper legal system, with law makers, police, and a court system, and a penal system to take care of punishing the convicted criminals. When all that is in place, crime falls. If society relies on libertarian ideas of community justice, crime flourishes.