This is one message I wish I could hammer into normal urban libs: the typical criminal does not commit a single crime or a handful of crimes. A tiny minority commit nearly all crimes, and when you incarcerate them the crime goes away. It isn't the case that mysterious systemic forces cause the crime to re-equalize after you lock up one career criminal, there isn't another one waiting in the wings to take his place.
“””
Isn’t this wrong for exactly the reason you state for it being true? Like, crime is power law distributed. But that means most criminals are in the 80% who commit one or two crimes rather than the 20% committing nearly all the crime.
I get what you're calling Kitten out for here, but also the median criminal isn't committing 1-2 crimes total in between jail stints, if we're talking about petty theft, etc. Maybe 1-2 crimes/week is closer to a median?
I've seen estimates that shoplifting yields an arrest around 1/100 incidents. So 100 shoplifts per year, or 2/week, would translate to 1 arrest/year.
Meanwhile your top shoplifters are averaging an arrest every month or two for petty theft, which is how you get to hundreds of arrests over a decades-long career. So that would translate to 600-1200 shoplifts/year, or 2-3 shoplifts/day, so around 10x what my proposed median criminal would be doing.
Shoplifting isn’t a great example because the data for it really sucks.
We sort of just impute the number through shrinkage and anecdotes. There is no actual data on any of it. Worse, if you look into shrinkage solutions, literally all customer nonpayment is considered shoplifting.
Of course, that means not all shoplifting is theft: there’s a lot that gets “stolen” because people forget something in a cart, weigh produce wrong, scan things wrong, miscount items, and so forth. None of this is theft in the legal or moral sense.
I also wouldn’t consider theft by small children an issue worthy of my tax dollars, being in the realm of a stern talking to. Nor am I interested in eliminating the scourge of employees converting wastage to shrinkage. Indeed, if retail includes food service (and it does in some datasets), the total value of this conversion could be staggering.
The important thing, though, is that there’s no way to know what these non-theft factors represent.
Alright, a lot of that is fair enough, but strikes me as too extreme in refusing to make an estimate. Theft tends to be underreported in general and petty theft specifically, so the data on it is always going to be flawed. But I think you'll find that most petty thieves are opportunistic, and that still translates to a LOT of crimes over time for the median petty thief.
You can look at things like clearance rates for burglary. Seems to be roughly 10%. Of course, that requires someone noticing and filing a police report. Which anyone can agree is going to be far more common with personal property than in retail stores. On that basis, 1% clearance seems like a pretty reasonable order-of-magnitude guess for retail shoplifting.
You could probably narrow that further with a deeper investigation into shrinkage.
For that number to work, they’re clearly just filing police reports when they have a repeat offender that they’re legitimately trying to catch, at least for whatever period and place that data set covers, so the denominator is artificially small. I made this point in my comment, though maybe I confused the issue by using the term “clearance rate”. The real percentage we’re trying to estimate is arrests/crimes.
Meanwhile burglaries are more likely to result in a police report, if only for insurance purposes, or because it’s generally a more serious crime.
I can see the stat repeated all over the place that 1-2% of shoplifts result in an arrest, though maybe that’s a bad number. But you can see this anecdotally in all the kleptomaniacs that admit to shoplifting basically being a lifestyle, multiple shoplifts every single day, yet their arrests are way less common than that.
The issue is we are declining to lock up that 20%. The policy in many major cities is to not lock anyone up even after committing a dozen non-felonies, and to increasingly raise the bar for what qualifies as a felony. In SF you can clean the shelves of a Walgreens thirty times and never see prison.
Well, to me, the issue is that the statement was simply wrong.
I also don’t think there’s anything like a reason worthy of going all Straussian on it. The truth is that we don’t have that many police in cities relative to the amount of crime and basically no prosecutors relative to it.
It’s not surprising that we decline to do something about bike thieves and shoplifters when the raw manpower necessary doesn’t exist.
And, like, you should have been more pointed on SL (I forget what that stands for) whining about Gladwell. Broken windows theory is wrong because it’s not the evidence of crime which makes people do more crime, it’s that there’s no evidence of getting caught.
The big problem isn’t that some punk kid broke out the window of an abandoned factory, it’s that there weren’t any consequences *at all*. Not just that once, but literally every time. People see that and either indulge their worse angels or they subtly shift their views on morality.
I may make other comments, but this is (probably) incorrect: “The Potosi silver mines were run like the Caribbean sugar plantations. The life expectancy of a slave in the mines was less than a year.”
If he is referring to actual chattel slaves in the mine, then the figure might be correct. The Spanish tried and failed to introduce African chattel slavery; high mortality was the prime reason for the failure. (There were other reasons, because the efforts also failed in Mexico, where the issue wasn't excess mortality.) Other the other hand, if he is referring to the “mitayos,” e.g., the indigenous workers subjected to the centralized labor drafts, then the figure is much too high.
OTOH, the Huancavelica mercury mines were horrendous, although I am unaware of actual mortality estimates. Mercury is nasty stuff.
It's interesting, I have almost exactly the same feelings towards Scott Alexander. He seemed like a light in the darkness 10 years ago but I now find him increasingly absurd. I think that's because he was the first really good writer to push back against wokeism in an intellectually robust and rhetorically effective way (i.e. he wasn't just preaching to the choir about feminazis, he was actually articulating a penetrating critique that the other side couldn't dismiss out of hand). To people like us that felt like a lifeline to sanity at the time.
I suspect his arc is similar many comedians. Comedy and insightful cultural critique generally come from outsiders. Comedians who are hilarious when they're playing small clubs in their 20's inevitably loose their edge when they hit 45 and start collecting residuals from their sitcom. Success breeds acceptance breeds a homogenous audience that demands a particular kind of thing and you don't want to risk disappointing it. Few people are independent-minded enough to maintain their creativity and risk-tolerance in the face of that.
I will always defend Scott, and it's pretty rich for pseud like myself to demand perfect life-destroying honesty from him. The worst part is just that he's not as interesting to read as a defender of bland liberal norms.
"One of the consequences of the Great Sort is that most people are sheltered from truly different levels of cognitive strata their entire lives, which is why so many people find this information shocking or hard to believe."
Thank you for putting succinctly a concept I've tried to spell out in comments; this is great to have as a short-hand.
“But basically the ubiquity of porn made women aware for the first time what male sexuality is actually like, and it repulsed them. They were happier not knowing, they wish they didn't have to be aware of the kind of imagery and production that gets men off.” No. First, the reverse is even more true. It taught teen boys that women like to be treated that way. Second it’s all lies. We’re acting like men (and boys!) organically like that stuff. But they don’t. It’s the result of 20 years of escalating “porn” consumption which most of these guys are hate-watching.
They don’t need to be conditioned that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying they engineer the product to exploit biological predispositions, heedless of the consequences. I believe it’s a deliberate attempt to make men hate women and women fear men. And it’s working. It’s literally terrorism.
Oh stop it. Porn companies, like all businesses, care only about their own bottom line. They're giving males whatever keeps them clicking. To see some nefarious social-engineering plot in that is to give them far too much credit. If they were capable of that kind of intentional manipulation then they would put it to a much more directly self-serving end.
Not what men what, what they hook boys brains on. And really? Only fans is aipacs biggest donor. The companies are definitely a tool of the most nefarious people in the world. You f ok by think these companies owners are reckless? It’s not a conspiracy I certainly don’t blame the joooos I’m saying these companies owners can’t believe what they’ve gotten away with. They’re giddy about it. Weird these constant defenses of the worst people. You just badly don’t want to see it. You hate men.
“””
This is one message I wish I could hammer into normal urban libs: the typical criminal does not commit a single crime or a handful of crimes. A tiny minority commit nearly all crimes, and when you incarcerate them the crime goes away. It isn't the case that mysterious systemic forces cause the crime to re-equalize after you lock up one career criminal, there isn't another one waiting in the wings to take his place.
“””
Isn’t this wrong for exactly the reason you state for it being true? Like, crime is power law distributed. But that means most criminals are in the 80% who commit one or two crimes rather than the 20% committing nearly all the crime.
Yeah, sorry, it’s become a pain point to me.
People are deeply invested in every part of crime except getting the facts about it right, which has made me overly prickly, I guess.
I get what you're calling Kitten out for here, but also the median criminal isn't committing 1-2 crimes total in between jail stints, if we're talking about petty theft, etc. Maybe 1-2 crimes/week is closer to a median?
I've seen estimates that shoplifting yields an arrest around 1/100 incidents. So 100 shoplifts per year, or 2/week, would translate to 1 arrest/year.
Meanwhile your top shoplifters are averaging an arrest every month or two for petty theft, which is how you get to hundreds of arrests over a decades-long career. So that would translate to 600-1200 shoplifts/year, or 2-3 shoplifts/day, so around 10x what my proposed median criminal would be doing.
Shoplifting isn’t a great example because the data for it really sucks.
We sort of just impute the number through shrinkage and anecdotes. There is no actual data on any of it. Worse, if you look into shrinkage solutions, literally all customer nonpayment is considered shoplifting.
Of course, that means not all shoplifting is theft: there’s a lot that gets “stolen” because people forget something in a cart, weigh produce wrong, scan things wrong, miscount items, and so forth. None of this is theft in the legal or moral sense.
I also wouldn’t consider theft by small children an issue worthy of my tax dollars, being in the realm of a stern talking to. Nor am I interested in eliminating the scourge of employees converting wastage to shrinkage. Indeed, if retail includes food service (and it does in some datasets), the total value of this conversion could be staggering.
The important thing, though, is that there’s no way to know what these non-theft factors represent.
Alright, a lot of that is fair enough, but strikes me as too extreme in refusing to make an estimate. Theft tends to be underreported in general and petty theft specifically, so the data on it is always going to be flawed. But I think you'll find that most petty thieves are opportunistic, and that still translates to a LOT of crimes over time for the median petty thief.
You can look at things like clearance rates for burglary. Seems to be roughly 10%. Of course, that requires someone noticing and filing a police report. Which anyone can agree is going to be far more common with personal property than in retail stores. On that basis, 1% clearance seems like a pretty reasonable order-of-magnitude guess for retail shoplifting.
You could probably narrow that further with a deeper investigation into shrinkage.
Why would I compare it to burglary clearance rates? This story, if you scroll down, includes the shoplifting clearance rate: https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/sex-assault-convictions/
It’s triple that of burglary, which is what you’d expect given that stores nearly all have cameras that have been strategically placed.
This is why I’m not confident in this exercise. You started it and were wrong right from the jump.
For that number to work, they’re clearly just filing police reports when they have a repeat offender that they’re legitimately trying to catch, at least for whatever period and place that data set covers, so the denominator is artificially small. I made this point in my comment, though maybe I confused the issue by using the term “clearance rate”. The real percentage we’re trying to estimate is arrests/crimes.
Meanwhile burglaries are more likely to result in a police report, if only for insurance purposes, or because it’s generally a more serious crime.
I can see the stat repeated all over the place that 1-2% of shoplifts result in an arrest, though maybe that’s a bad number. But you can see this anecdotally in all the kleptomaniacs that admit to shoplifting basically being a lifestyle, multiple shoplifts every single day, yet their arrests are way less common than that.
The issue is we are declining to lock up that 20%. The policy in many major cities is to not lock anyone up even after committing a dozen non-felonies, and to increasingly raise the bar for what qualifies as a felony. In SF you can clean the shelves of a Walgreens thirty times and never see prison.
Well, to me, the issue is that the statement was simply wrong.
I also don’t think there’s anything like a reason worthy of going all Straussian on it. The truth is that we don’t have that many police in cities relative to the amount of crime and basically no prosecutors relative to it.
It’s not surprising that we decline to do something about bike thieves and shoplifters when the raw manpower necessary doesn’t exist.
And, like, you should have been more pointed on SL (I forget what that stands for) whining about Gladwell. Broken windows theory is wrong because it’s not the evidence of crime which makes people do more crime, it’s that there’s no evidence of getting caught.
The big problem isn’t that some punk kid broke out the window of an abandoned factory, it’s that there weren’t any consequences *at all*. Not just that once, but literally every time. People see that and either indulge their worse angels or they subtly shift their views on morality.
Sure "the typical criminal" is wrong because it neglects the long tail of minor criminals. It should really be "the typical arrestee" or similar.
Mea culpa, live format and minimal editing.
I may make other comments, but this is (probably) incorrect: “The Potosi silver mines were run like the Caribbean sugar plantations. The life expectancy of a slave in the mines was less than a year.”
If he is referring to actual chattel slaves in the mine, then the figure might be correct. The Spanish tried and failed to introduce African chattel slavery; high mortality was the prime reason for the failure. (There were other reasons, because the efforts also failed in Mexico, where the issue wasn't excess mortality.) Other the other hand, if he is referring to the “mitayos,” e.g., the indigenous workers subjected to the centralized labor drafts, then the figure is much too high.
OTOH, the Huancavelica mercury mines were horrendous, although I am unaware of actual mortality estimates. Mercury is nasty stuff.
My bona fides: https://www.broadstreet.blog/cp/159821049
> they would have to watch porn almost every other day, which seems high
Uhhh
Sweet Simon
It's interesting, I have almost exactly the same feelings towards Scott Alexander. He seemed like a light in the darkness 10 years ago but I now find him increasingly absurd. I think that's because he was the first really good writer to push back against wokeism in an intellectually robust and rhetorically effective way (i.e. he wasn't just preaching to the choir about feminazis, he was actually articulating a penetrating critique that the other side couldn't dismiss out of hand). To people like us that felt like a lifeline to sanity at the time.
I suspect his arc is similar many comedians. Comedy and insightful cultural critique generally come from outsiders. Comedians who are hilarious when they're playing small clubs in their 20's inevitably loose their edge when they hit 45 and start collecting residuals from their sitcom. Success breeds acceptance breeds a homogenous audience that demands a particular kind of thing and you don't want to risk disappointing it. Few people are independent-minded enough to maintain their creativity and risk-tolerance in the face of that.
Yeah.
I will always defend Scott, and it's pretty rich for pseud like myself to demand perfect life-destroying honesty from him. The worst part is just that he's not as interesting to read as a defender of bland liberal norms.
"One of the consequences of the Great Sort is that most people are sheltered from truly different levels of cognitive strata their entire lives, which is why so many people find this information shocking or hard to believe."
Thank you for putting succinctly a concept I've tried to spell out in comments; this is great to have as a short-hand.
“But basically the ubiquity of porn made women aware for the first time what male sexuality is actually like, and it repulsed them. They were happier not knowing, they wish they didn't have to be aware of the kind of imagery and production that gets men off.” No. First, the reverse is even more true. It taught teen boys that women like to be treated that way. Second it’s all lies. We’re acting like men (and boys!) organically like that stuff. But they don’t. It’s the result of 20 years of escalating “porn” consumption which most of these guys are hate-watching.
Maybe there is some truth here for the more gonzo stuff, of which obviously there is plenty.
But the idea that men / boys need to be conditioned to be turned on by hardcore porn is pretty silly.
They don’t need to be conditioned that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying they engineer the product to exploit biological predispositions, heedless of the consequences. I believe it’s a deliberate attempt to make men hate women and women fear men. And it’s working. It’s literally terrorism.
Oh stop it. Porn companies, like all businesses, care only about their own bottom line. They're giving males whatever keeps them clicking. To see some nefarious social-engineering plot in that is to give them far too much credit. If they were capable of that kind of intentional manipulation then they would put it to a much more directly self-serving end.
Not what men what, what they hook boys brains on. And really? Only fans is aipacs biggest donor. The companies are definitely a tool of the most nefarious people in the world. You f ok by think these companies owners are reckless? It’s not a conspiracy I certainly don’t blame the joooos I’m saying these companies owners can’t believe what they’ve gotten away with. They’re giddy about it. Weird these constant defenses of the worst people. You just badly don’t want to see it. You hate men.
Of course they don’t, that’s the point: their sexuality is being weaponized against them.