Rich age-of-death data exists in the form of thousands of Inquisitions Post-Mortem, these are “Post-Mortem” property examinations of very wealthy “Royal tenants”, genealogies of English peers, and parish data1.

The data displays a unique case of pre-modern equality lost to the modern world, the wealthy do not do much better than the poor, the results of an age in which the burden of mortality is determined mostly by diseases that spare neither commoners nor kings2. But there is one group that seems to buck the trend and it all thanks to the worship of god, kind of, here is demographer Josiah Cox Russell explaining who and why:

“An interesting group, the pillar saints, seems to offer a chance to study the possibilities of the span of life then. Few of them died younger than seventy and many lived far beyond the "three score and ten." While a few of them began their pillar careers early in life, most of them 35 seem to have started between the ages of twenty and forty- five. Instead of living to between fifty and sixty-one, their normal expectation, most of them survived far beyond these ages….One important physical factor was the isolation of these saints from those ordinary human contacts which expose people to contagion. While they did occasionally permit persons to come up the ladder to the very top, this permission was seldom given. Most visitors apparently ascended no higher than the top rung of the ladder: many indeed did not have the courage to climb that high even with the encouragements of a saint at the top. The ladder did not rest against the pillar except when in use. This should probably have prevented rats from climbing the pillars, bringing the bubonic plague with them…Since contagious disease was probably the greatest factor in mortality then, its absence permitted the saint to live much longer than the average citizen of those centuries.”3

Russell presented this idea in his 1958 book "Late Ancient and Medieval Population" and it would be interesting to try and test it.

From the small sample of pillar saints4 (AkA Stylite) that had historical mentions of their age of death a remarkable longevity is apparent with an average age of death of 83.1.

Several problems exist here, one is exaggeration about the age of death of saints, second is that people who haven’t died early are more likely to become notable to historians, and a third is small sample size.

To correct for these we will extend the age dataset to medieval hermits given the same logic on the effects of social distancing on longevity is also applicable here, and we will compare the age of death to equivalent groups of notable persons who will also face biases in the same direction concerning exaggeration of their age of death.

Adding 16 medieval hermits5 to the data the average age of death of 24 pillar saints and hermits is around 77, still remarkably long.

Who shall we compare them to? In a dataset of 300,000 famous people born between the 24th century BCE and 1879, the mean age of death has been around 60 since time memorial6.

A study by Robert Kastenbaum7 showed that non-martyred saints are longer lived, in a sample of several hundred saints, the mean age of non-martyred saints was 66.8 and 69.9 in non-martyred male saints. Based on the previous lifespans mentioned we will compare the sample of saintly isolates to ages 60, 67, and 70 for the males in the sample.

Doing that we see that they indeed have a statistically longer lifespan

Although the sample size here is still rather small, the tests lends support to Russell’s hypothesis that those who eschew the material world stay in it the longest.

2

As a matter of fact, the British royal family used to have lower life expectancy at birth than commoners.

5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hermits

"Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”

1 Samuel 15:3

When one reads both ancient and modern history he’s struck by an interesting difference in the behavior of soldiers between the two periods, the killing of those who were defeated or surrendered was a lot more common in the past (or on special occasions, sacrificed to the gods1).

From the history of the Neo-Assyrians which is one damn massacre after another in which Ashurbanipal brags about creating “A pillar of the dead” and “A pillar of the living”(?whatever that means), to the Peloponnesian war which opened with two massacres, one of the Thebans by the Plataeans, then another by the Thebans and Spartans of the Plataeans2, Furthermore, consider that Carthage was destroyed by the Roman3, Susa by the Arabs and Baghdad by the Mongols, Yet When one reaches the modern period we do not find massacres of similar magnitude or frequency in the American Revolutionary or Civil War4.

At least that is my impression, which is not worth as much as actual data on this subject except as an intution to be tested. So what is the data? the “Historical Conflict Event Dataset”5 Practically does the whole work for us, it contains over 8000s battles since 1500 B.C. and classifies whatever a massacre occurred in/after battle, all that is left is to download the data and plot the trend over time.

Historically more than 1 out of 10 battles contained a massacre or was followed by a massacre. A strong deviation from the historical trend occurred in early modern times, after 1600 massacres quickly became less than half as frequent as they used to be. Overall 10.5% of battles before 1600 contained a massacre but only 3.6% of them did after 1600.

This transition toward lower rates of violence in battle looks remarkably similar to the pattern of decline in historical rates of homicide found by Manuel Eisner6 in which a strong post-1600s decline is also observed and it’s also similar to the decline in rates of regicide in which we see a strong downward trend somewhat earlier.

It’s also similar to a trend starting a little earlier, the decline in the proportions of nobles who died in battle, discovered by Neil Cummins7 by utilizing the fact that when a battle happens a large number of nobles die on the same day and looking at deaths among nobility who coincide to the same day. (The red line in the graph below is a comparison with a genealogical study by Hollingsworth, looking at the proportion of violent deaths in English Ducal families, both proportions refer to male deaths from violence.)

It’s also possible that there is a direct connection with the decline in noble deaths in battle being partly due to a decline in battle massacres and the same might be true of the decline in regicide (which includes battle deaths) given that a non-trivial number of rulers died in battle.

Also possible that battles have gotten less bloody once the noble warrior castes were less involved in them, given the violent proclivities of some noble groups in the Middle Ages.

It also fits the trend line in the percentage of bashed-up skulls in a sample of 4738 crania in the archeological records of Europe8.

It’s worth thinking for a moment about what form of violence is recorded by datasets of cranial trauma. In my opinion, it’s unlikely to be majority homicide because the sex ratio of medieval victims of homicide was around 25 males/females and this ratio has trended downward in the modern era to 5.8 males/females9 yet the ratio we see here is closer to a bit more than 3 males/females and does not trend downward (much) over time.

This indicates to me that the type of violence recorded by cranial trauma includes not just homicides (and attempted homicides) but other forms of less targeted violence such as the indiscriminate civilian casualties of war and raids, as this would tilt the sex ratio to become more even and uniform over time. (Actual battlefields are excluded from such datasets, in any regard only a few of them were found in the archeological record10)

So the result in the decline in massacres is in line with various datasets, all of which point to a similar trend of reduction in violence in the transition from the medieval to the modern period, sweet.

This does not mean that all types of violence have been reduced, in terms of war deaths the 20th century was quite possibly more deadly than previous ones and this is somewhat of a paradox if the nature of men has become more peaceable after the Middle Ages why has war remained so lethal up to the industrial age? one likely cause is the greater ability of modern states to recruit a larger share of their population into warfare, this would mean that even if individual battles are less deadly, casualties could still be much higher, another element is the mass killing committed by states against civilians in the name of an ideology which is of a somewhat a different nature to the senseless killing committed by rouges in anger. After all, improvements in the ability of men to exert self-control, the explanation that Eisner believes drives the decline in violence, would not stop ideologically motivated killing by persons believing they are doing the right thing.

To sum the whole thing up in no more words, a picture11:

Edit:

Since this post was published, one of the explanations brought forward to explain the decline in rates of massacres is that due to the increase in the documentary records smaller and less bloody battles have been recorded post-1600, somewhat against that explanation, the datasets include a 1-5 scale of the size of many battles and when separating the rate of massacre based on the size of battles it appears that in both pre and post-1600, it is smaller battles that have higher rates of massacres, therefore it’s unlikely that greater recording of smaller engagements influences the overall pattern.

Post note:

Yet, in a sample of 43,992 male offenders from Austria, we see that a higher BMI is associated with a significantly lower risk of arrest for a variety of offenses.2 with each upwards movement of 5 in the BMI index from the category of people with a BMI of 18.5-25 the odds of committing a violent crime (“against life and limb”) decreases by about 20-25%.

The same pattern is seen in a sample of 1019 inmates incarcerated in the Tennessee and Illinois state penitentiaries between 1831 and 1892.3

One obvious explanation for this pattern is that heavier people are unhealthier and therefore find it more difficult to commit various strenuous activities that are involved in criminal offending (i.e. assaulting people, running away from the cops). Aside from physically constraining certain activities, having a higher body weight lower the desire to be active by making physical activity less comfortable45.

Another possible causal pathway is thru the relationship between testosterone, crime and weight. We know that in samples of prison inmates and college undergraduates testosterone levels correlate with criminal offending, particularly violent criminal offending6, we also know that obesity is related to the decline in testosterone which is related to the feminization of society. Perhaps the best evidence of a causal relation between BMI and testosterone is that in longitudinal studies tracking weight loss and testosterone levels, higher rates of weight loss are related to greater increases in testosterone.7

This should mean that as people gain weight they would experience lower rates of testosterone and lower rates of offending.

It is also notable that the obesity epidemic was taking off just as crime rates in the U.S were declining, Men aged 20-40 had a BMI of between 23-26 for cohorts born between 1940-1960 but latter cohorts had a BMI of 24-28 with faster raises in BMI toward the higher value during this age span, increases in the obesity rates were also faster in those of lower socioeconomic status which is where the crime is.8

All of this could mean that the obesity epidemic is an unrecognized factor in the 1990s decline in crime aside from obvious factors such as increases in the rate and length of imprisonment, as a matter of fact since long-term imprisonment causes weight gains in prisoners9 the two factors could interact with one another.10

1

Correlation matrix from the GSS of 907 people, BMI negatively relates to:

• educ - number of years of school

• realinc - family income

• wordsum score - a verbal intelligence test

• pasei10 - father’s socioeconomic status

• masei10 -mother’s socioeconomic status

The result for wordsum is weak but we see a more robust result between cognitive ability and BMI in this study of 12,250 siblings:

8

“Quantifying the impact of genes on body mass index during the obesity epidemic: longitudinal findings from the HUNT Study”

"The gods Ninurta and Nergal, who love my priesthood, gave me the wild animals of the plains, commanding me to hunt” - Ashurnasirpal II, 865 BC.

How Extensive is male specialization in hunting? In 98.4% (861/875) of cultures in the ethnographic atlas and in 87.3% (138/158) of cultures in the Standard cross-cultural sample, males make the sole contribution to hunting, in the rest, males make the lioness share of the contribution.1

In the 20 cultures in the Standard cross-cultural sample in which females contribute to hunting, males still supply the overall majority of calories from hunting.

Why are Men from across all cultures specialized in hunting? Like anything else in human behavior, the answer lies in the forces of natural selection. In 22 Societies from across the world, especially good hunters are reported to have more wives.2

Where quantitive evidence exists, looking into the reproductive success of ‘good’ and ‘poor’ hunters, and of ‘Hunters’ and ‘non-hunters’. We see that good hunters in Ache and !Kung communities have 1.5 times as many kids as poor hunters and that hunters have twice as many kids as non-hunters among Lamalera islanders and Merian turtle hunters.3

In two more hunter-gatherers groups, the Hazda and Siberian fishermen4, hunting skill is positively correlated with fertility, among the Hadza being a good hunter is the single most valued trait in a potential husband.5

For the Meriam turtle hunters, we even have a sibling study showing that the large differences in reproductive success remain when looking at siblings within the same family6 (one hunt the other doesn’t), indicating that it is the activity of hunting that is casual in the reproductive differential between hunters and non-hunters rather than some familial confound.

So male hunting specialization and the selective forces that shaped it are cross-cultural meaning they go back to our common ancestor or older. Hunting is old, the oldest spears discovered are the 380,000-400,000 Schöningen spears from the German bogs. Those spears weren’t used by homo sapiens ( we weren’t out of Africa yet) but by one of our relatives, maybe Neanderthals, if so, spear hunting possibly goes back even further to our common ancestor with Neanderthals and Denisovans. Perhaps Homo- Ergaster was spear hunting, looking at the physiology of the skeleton of the 1.6 million years old Turkana Boy, with his long forearms and fully upright posture he was certainly capable of doing so, and the Acheulian hand-axes he was manufacturing were just as complicated to make as a pointy stick.

Those long eons of selection for hunting in Men had their effect on the physiology and cognitive abilities of Men. One such effect should be selection for upper-bodied strength, In Hazda hunting reputation is correlated with greater upper-body strength7, so it’s no surprise that male athletes can lift 30% more weight than Female athletes.8

We also naturally see large sex differences in throwing ability, from the earliest ages there is a 1.5 S.D sex difference in throwing ability, which grows to a 3.5 S.D in adulthood, this is a larger sex difference than the more well-known male-female difference in hand grip strength.

Those throwing ability differences are so large that 70-74 Male athletes in throwing sports still outperformed the youngest Female athletes.9

Since evolution doesn’t stop below the neck, selection for the physiology that prompts hunting success also means selection for the cognitive abilities that would do the same, that is why Men are better at visualizing the motion of objects through space. There is an early arising sex difference in spatial perception and spatial visualization that reaches a 2/3 standard deviation difference in adulthood10.

A review of several hundred cross-cultural studies showed that both Preubescent and adult Men are better at spatial reasoning, that Men are better at maze navigation, map reading, and route memorization, that Men engage in more exploratory behavior and have better mental rotation ability and outperform Women on Pigat’s water task11

The Fruits of Women the Gatherer

As Men were shaped by their subsistence strategy so were Women. Male Hazda cited foraging ability as the most important trait in a spouse12 but what sort of traits contribute to foraging success? a clue is found by looking at the sort of traits that have been under relaxed selection in groups as they moved from a diet based on foraging to one based on agriculture.

Those traits are related to color, smell, and taste perceptions, they are important because they help foragers distinguish between the enormous variety of potentially forageable food. For olfactory-related genes (which overlap with genes related to taste perception), we have genetic studies13 showing relaxed selection since the dawn of agriculture:

In humans, approximately 60-70% of olfactory genes are pseudogenes; this probably reflects a decreasing need for olfactory perception in great apes and especially in humans (Gilad, et al. 2003a; Rouquier, et al. 1998). Indeed, relaxed selection has been described for most human olfactory genes (Gilad, et al. 2003a; Somel, et al. 2013) leading to fast accumulation of mutations in these genes (Gilad, et al. 2003b; Miyata and Hayashida 1981). According to our results, this process has also been taking place during recent human microevolution.

On top of this evidence, we know groups like westerners and the swidden-horticulturalists Semelai display poor odor naming ability but in comparison their hunter-gatherer’s neighbor, the Semaq Beri, find odor naming as easy as color naming.

For color vision the story is the same, in a review of the rate of red-green color blindness among populations long settled, not-long settled (or of mixed heritage), and hunter-gatherers, hunter-gatherers had 2.5 times lower rates of color blindness than the long-settled populations.14

The rate of red-green color blindness was universally higher for Men than Women, Here are the results for hunter-gatherers in which for many groups the rate of color blindness among women was zero or close to zero.

Reviewing 95 cross-cultural studies, Women were found to be better at visual discrimination and color discrimination, to be better at identifying colors and odors, have higher olfactory sensitivity and acuity, and to have better taste acuity/sensitivity15.

All of the classical skills in which foragers are more skilled at.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said safer horses.” - not henry ford1

In 1734 George Turner was riding his horse when it was suddenly frightened by a noise and started galloping, a turnpike opened its gate hurriedly to prevent a crash but on and on the horse went as people shouted for it to stop or slow down, ‘Son of bitch! You’ll do some mischief’, at last, the horse crushed into a woman, Ann Croft, as she was turning a corner:

“The horse barrelled into her, caught its hind leg in her petticoats as she rolled beneath it, and was brought to its knees. Turner went over the animal’s head and with one foot still in the stirrup lay momentarily in the roadway. He freed himself as the horse rose. It then bolted onwards down Sow-gelders Lane. Turner called to John Beacham who worked nearby, ‘For God’s sake brother, lend me a hand to help her up.’ They tried to lift her, but she lay dead on the ground; her head, kicked by the horse”2

George Turner would later be tried and acquitted of manslaughter (witnesses accused him of speeding, ‘riding at full speed’). Those types of accidents were incredibly common, England was a mobile society, an Italian visitor reported in 1557 that ‘there is no male or female peasant who does not ride on horseback’.3 We can confirm this observation with probate data in which around a quarter of workers owned horses.

From a study of Sussex’s coroner’s rolls of accidental deaths, 30% of all deaths happened during travel with 15% of deaths happening due to horses or vehicles.

Even the water was not safe from the horse menace, in 1581 John Swannycke was helping steer a ferryboat from the coast when a trampling horse drove him from his post, the boat turned in the wind and sank killing 16 people.4

How do the historical rates compare to the modern danger of car travel? Decent enough data is available for comparison in London’s “Bills of Mortality”. Between 1654-1735, 1030 people would die in London from Horses and Vehicles, comprising 8.3% of deaths.

When these numbers are converted to per capita rates and compared to modern rates of traffic fatalities we see that per capita deaths were around twice as high in pre-industrial London than they are now.5

If we could calculate the matter in the classical way of deaths per mile traveled, then the differences would undoubtedly magnify. Given the low distances that people traveled in the past one only has to look at the ridiculous travel times that existed from London to neighboring towns to realize that not only did people die at considerable rates from pre-modern travel, they were not getting very far while doing so.

Let us take a look at deaths by means of transport.

The worst offender here is the cart, these deathmoblies can reach weights of between one or two tons when fully loaded and had no suspension system or brakes. This means when the cart veers off the road it’s liable to overturn and kill you like it did to drunk Thomas Edwardes. Alternatively, you can take it slow like Edmund Gellybrand who was leading a fully loaded cart down a hill by heavingly leaning against it with his own body weight until he slipped, fell underneath it, and was crushed6.

So thank god for the Engine, so you don’t have to flintstone your Toyota.

“Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”

-The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The English, said Sir John Fortescue (c. 1470), "drink no water, unless at certain times upon religious score, or by way of doing penance.", looking at reconstructions of beer consumption from the middle ages to the pre-industrial era this was only a slight exaggeration. When estimating consumption from the amount of beer provided to soldiers, convicts, and workers or reconstructing consumption from tax revenues on beer we see that the average person consumed about a liter of beer a day, this is around four times as much as consumption in modern beer-drinking countries.

We see the same pattern with regard to wine in the winey countries.

Since modern consumption of alcohol is more diverse, let us put the historical consumption of wine and beer in terms of pure alcohol and compare it to latter rates of alcohol consumption1. When this is done we see that consumption of pure alcohol was at least 2-4 times higher in the past.

Is this a historical overestimate? Probably not, in fact, there are several ways in which we might be underestimating historical consumption, most alcohol consumption in the past was from the local mono-drink but we should be still missing some amount of alcohol drunk by wine drinkers in the beer-drinking countries and vice versa and also the small amount consumed by spirits. In the medieval city of Ghent where there is data from 14th-century tax revenue on the consumption of both wine and beer2 per capita, annual consumption is:

• ~40-liters wine

• ~1300-liters beer (Such high figures are probably partly the results of the wealthy state of the city following the black death)

When reconstructing consumption from taxes there is also the matter of personal production not captured by taxation, beer being a major product of consumption was consuming 12.5% of people’s salaries3 and was subsequently contributing around a 1/34 of government revenue in England and a 1/4 of government revenue in Holland5, an amount equivalent to the contribution of Spanish silver to the revenue of Spain in the mid 17th century6. To avoid paying dues many people engaged in the personal production of beer, English probate records show that a third of households had brewing equipment7. Historical statements also are in line with the quantitive estimates, here is William Marshall talking about the drunken state of English workers:

In this country the waste of malt is beyond measure. Beer and ale are not only brewed unreasonably strong; but the quantity allowed to workmen is unnecessarily great. That which is termed ‘beer’ or ‘small beer’ is nearly equal in strength, to the harvest mild ale of many counties … In hay and corn harvest the customary allowance is a gallon of beer a man (in hot weather they drink more), and, besides this, mowers expect two quarts of ale, and never have less than one … With some difficulty I got turnep hoers to accept of two quarts of beer and one of ale: they demand two of beer and two of ale! enough to stupify any man, and to make a sober man drunk from morning to night.8

For English soldiers, it’s long been accepted to receive 8 pints of beer (4.5 L) as a daily ration9 an amount so great it probably was not wholly consumed, people did not have to use all their ration and they could also share it with their families. Nevertheless given that such quantities of alcohol were commonly supplied to historical armies the average soldier in the past didn’t just get angry for battle he got pissed. For sailors the beer supplied was of the strong kind (10%-15% alcohol) since this was the only kind that preserved itself well in the sea, hence drunk as a sailor. Such large consumption among workers and soldiers would mean that around a quarter to close to half of the calories in their diet were from booze.10

This all had the usual social implications, in the archdeacon court of Colchester there were 756 prosecutions for drunkenness between 1600-40, comprising around 2% of all offenses in the court11.In an online project detailing over a hundred fatal accidents from Tudor England, we find multiple people falling drunk into ditches drains, or rivers, one of which is a priest. We also bare witness to a drunk driving accident “Edwardes had too much of the drink and drunkenly hit one of the horses with a stick so hard that it left the road and pulled the cart up a hill in the field, overturning it.”.

The Industrial Revolution and its Consequences

England transitioned to a low rate of beer consumption toward the end of the 18th century, looking at the more granular data on Malt beer consumption we see that this transition coincided with the timing of the onset of the British industrial revolution (1780-1800s).

Society is transformed in several ways, Whereas beer expenditure used to consume 12.5% of people’s salary in 1734 in the 1800s it consume only 1-3%. In the English poll tax of 1379-81 we can see that a total of 2.5% of the medieval workforce is comprised of brewers, in 1841 this is reduced to only 0.3 of the labor force.

This transformation occurred in Britain first and would only later spread to other areas, as seen in U.S data:

We can zero in on the industrial era transformation in alcohol consumption further. Economic historian Hans-Joachim Voth looked at data on 2800 English people recorded in the old Bailey as witnesses answering the question “‘What were you doing at the time of the crime?”, using this data we can look at people’s behavior, namely their drinking behavior through time.

In the first of the following graphs, we see when people finish their workday, around 17:00. In the second graph, we see when people start drinking, the answer for the 18th-century cohorts is that drinking starts during the workday and already by 17:00 around 30% of people already drank liquor. In the 1830s this is no longer the case drinking on the job has seem to have been eliminated, people only start being recorded as drinking after 16:00. Society has been transformed by commercial forces.

Other industrial behavioral changes are also seen in Hans-Joachim’s work such as an increase in work hours to around 3500s yearly hours of work and the elimination of “sacred Monday” as a day in which time is taken off work (along with a declining importance of other religious and political days off).

It’s also notable that the “temperance movement” at the time was of marginal importance, we can see that by looking at the number of newspaper mentions of temperance. The economically driven transformation toward the low consumption of alcohol occurred first, only later after that this transformation was already set a movement would develop to support the restriction of alcohol consumption.

First the material changes and then the cultural changes.

Postnote: Wine & Beer

Wine was originally domesticated around north Iran and spread to the Caucasus and Greece, adopted by the Greeks it made its way around the Mediterranean becoming part of Greco-Roman culture and remaining the favorite drink in the romance languages speaking regions of Italy and France.

Because Wine usually has higher alcohol content than beer, we see in my estimates that the high estimates of alcohol consumption in English and Germanic regions are similar to the average value of alcohol consumption in Italy and France.

This might imply that historical rates of alcohol consumption were higher in wine-drinking countries. This conclusion receives some support from the better 19th-century data on alcohol consumption in which we see Italy and France leading.

This makes me wonder, do regions that drank wine less prone to alcohol-related problems than regions that drank beer?

1

Wine is taken to be 12% alcohol, the same number is used in modern estimates of the alcohol content of wine (see Alexander & Holmes, 2017). The percentage of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 6.2% to 10.7%, the percentage of alcohol in “small beer” is around %5 and in “strong beer” it’s around 13.5%, the relative consumption of small and strong beer is depended on whether we use the numbers from “Vandelint 1734” or the estimates in the studies mentioned in table 2.1 in “Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe”.

“Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness”-p.75 provides the following estimates of the % alcohol in beer based on pre-modern beer recipes:

Later (page 77) the book mentions strong beer might not have been as strong as 15% and provide a lower estimate of 12% alcohol, Iv’e took a middling estimate of 13.5% for strong beer for the calculation of the percentage alcohol consumed in the average diet of premodern beer drinkers.

6

7

9

“Zoology is still a minority subject in universities, and even those who choose to study it often make their decision without appreciating its profound philosophical significance.” - The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins.

As we are told by anthropologists human beings are endlessly diverse in their behavior.

Some live in groups, waving or showing some other token of acknowledgment to a familiar face, while others are utterly solitary. If they're also territorial then when met by another member of their race they will puff up their chest, expose their fangs and stretch their tails as a show of intimidation, if not they will simply completely ignore them as if they were an inanimate object. Of the groupish kinds, some form tight communities engaging in communal eating and play, while others form selfish herds who gather together to use each other as meat shields when attacked by predators, as the humans in those herds constantly jockey for favorable positions to avoid predation they contour themselves in marvelous ways as they travel through the air and sea.

Some groups are constructed by families comprising males and females while in others a single birthing female reproduces almost all members of the group, except several males who migrate to the communal hive to provide the sperm for the giant extended family. In such societies, each member of the commune works not for himself but selflessly sacrifices for the betterment of the whole. In some families, males provide extensive parental care, in others less so, while in several groups the female would decapitate the male during the act of copulation his only parental contribution is the feast his corpse would provide to the young produced from the semen preserved in her egg sack.

In some societies, Men regularly engage in competitive and oftentimes violent behavior in an attempt to acquire Women while in many others Men are fearfully guarded at home from roving bands of Women who rape and pillage all that is in their way.

In a few social groups Male violence is a constant factor while in many others it's solely regulated to the mating season (July - August) when Males grow their hair, fangs, and horns as they are transformed externally and internally in preparation for violent combat.

In most societies, Women form strong and lasting bonds with their kids while in a couple of societies when close to giving birth the mother would do so secretly in another person's home in the hope that they would take care of the child (confusing him as their own).

In most times and places, a great deal of effort is invested in raising kids but in one or two tribes almost all effort is invested in reproduction, after exhausting themselves swimming up a river or climbing to a tall tree top, copulation will ensue and then death, the kids will have to raise themselves.

And all of this is but a few examples of the enormous possible diversity of humanity

Postscript

Every time someone talks of “human culture being endlessly variable" I reach for my encyclopedia of animal behavior (it's quite large and may be wielded as a weapon). Human behavior may be infinitely variable but even if it is, it's a small infinity bound within much larger sets, a tiny subset of all that exists in nature boxed into place by the forces of selection and the evolutionary history of man. Most species are rather solitary it's not just their genes that are selfish it's the whole shebang, even if you are a member of their species "They don't think about you at all", This applies even to animals one usually thinks of as social, most species of bees for example are solitary.

For solitary species that do not treat their kind with dispassion, they treat it with disdain, usually due to sexual & territorial competition, often both, this is the case for many of our ape relatives, gorillas form territorial harems, orangutangs meet and mate, the sight of another male is often greeted by hostility by both species, there are no male bonds, no war, no friend to help you move or make a body. So one aspect of human uniqueness is that "man is a wolf to man" in the sense that like wolfs Man is a social animal, but not just any social animal, many groups in nature are based on fake altruism they gather together to avoid predators. Crows will call their "buddies" to feast on carcasses but will only do so when the risk of predation exists, they will not bother to do so if there are enough crows1 (aka meat shields) around them.

Prehaps the social species that most resemble human social behavior are ants, they build large and specialized structures (ventilation tunnels, defensive perimeters) herd animals (aphids), farm (fungus gardens), wage war and keep slaves, have large-scale cooperative societies in which specialized roles are held by “individuals” and mutual aid and medical treatment is provided for one another ( it’s no wonder Sociobiology was written by an entomologist!). But the basis of their whole society is utterly foreign to us, rather than being the result of reciprocal altruism it is based on genuine brotherly (read: sisterly) love between one giant extended family It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but it so in ants.

Aside from our unique social arrangement, human familial relationships are rather unique as well, largely monogamish, high degree of parental investment (even if the investment is sometimes performed by one parent), no mating season or significant seasonality of behavior, no changing sex like many mollusks, no widespread hermaphroditism like in plants, basically no to allot of things.

So human culture is not endlessly variable because human beings are not endlessly malleable. Since humans dispersed out of Africa over 50k years ago and segmented themselves into thousands of communities across the globe human culture had endless time and many subjects to randomly shift and vary the behavior of Man but it did not do so in every possible direction, there are no roving bands of Women (sorry to disappoint) no tribe in which mothers do not care for their kids and no Man is an island.

So if LH is bad for your fitness why is it still around? (also if we all came from ambidextrous apes how come there are still ambidextrous apes around?) After all, there have been millions of years for selection to operate and raise RH to fixation. The answer must be that LH holds some advantages that have kept the trait ongoing in the population in non-trivial frequencies.

One theory for LH advantage is “Frequency-Dependent Maintenance of Left-Handedness in Humans” by Michel Raymond, the idea is that in groups that face high rates of physical combat being left-handed may grant an advantage because a left-swinger is used to fighting right-swingers, who are more common in the population, while they are not used to fighting him. Under those conditions, the rate of left-handedness will rise in the population until it will become common enough to eliminate the advantage of having an unusual fighting style.

Several things are going for this theory, The fiercer sex is more LH than the fairer sex. In the largest study on this subject, a national geographic survey of 1.4 million Americans, LH was 25% more common in men than in women and that difference remained constant across birth cohorts2.

There is a large over-representation of LH in sports in which the athletes are facing an opponent, while the same is not true for sports in which athletes are bowling alone.

This data from Raymond’s original article and further studies have confirmed it, such as this study of senior athletes in the top 200 rankings:

Looking at fighters in particular, a study of 13,800 professional boxers and mixed martial artists showed not only greater LH among fighters but also a higher probability of winning. (although over-representation in a sport may constitute better evidence for greater ability than higher probability for victory, this is because one can imagine a situation in which enough left-handers enter a sport until LH is no longer an advantage)

People’s natural intuitions are in line with this, among people who thought handedness mattered for the chance of winning a fight, 79.8% thought left-handers were more likely to win3.

If the present intution of Lefties’ combat ability extended to the past, It may explain some peculiar historical references such as when Judges 20:16 brag about having 700 left-handed warriors who could ‘sling a stone at a hair and not miss’ and when Chronicles 12:2 reference bowmen who were ambidextrous.

It could also offer some explanation about anti-left-handed bias, the common custom of a handshake, likely invented to present peaceful intentions by showing the dominant hand is not carrying a weapon, fails with lefties and the checking of weapons on the right side of the body has not saved Eglon, king of Moab from being stabbed by Ehud the israelite4 (If you ask me the king’s guards were slacking off).

Left-handedness among the hunters-gatherers

If the frequency of LH is maintained due to a combat advantage, do we see elevated levels of LH among some highly violent societies? there is some non-conclusive for this, in a small sample of traditional societies higher rates of LH are seen in tribal groups with higher rates of homicide (Handedness here is not the writing hand but the knife/machete hand or tool-using hand). Interestingly, the Yanomamo, A group in which Napoleon Chagnon showed Men who committed homicide have higher rates of reproductive success5, have the highest rates of LH.

We can look at some further tentative data, possibly there is a way to compare LH in agricultural and pre-agricultural societies. A reconstruction of LH in historical societies6 was created by looking at statues and paintings in which a tool or a weapon is in use:

This could be compared to reconstructions of handedness in pre-agricultural societies, done by comparing the frequency of left-handed hand stencils to right-handed hand stencils in cave painting7:

The assumption here is that the left-handed painted right-hand stencils and vice versa, but there are some problems of interpretation here, “Faurie C, Raymond M. (2003)” got a group of people to draw hand stencils with a blow-pipe and got frequencies consistent with those in the Gravettian caves, this was because the left-handed people draw right-handed stencils while the right-handed did not do the reverse as much. While in some respect such an experiment is very compelling on the other hand side it’s hard to see these results as anything but the consequence of chance, it is also not clear how such an experiment would replicate in various caves with differing proportions of left and right prints. N. Uomini & J. Steele8 also mention criticism of the experiment, pointing out that the placement and orientation of various prints in the cave would make it impossible to paint them using a blow-pipe which would make it harder for people to make a print of their dominant hand.

So the Left-handed advantage in violence seems fairly well supported by the athletic studies while its effect on the proportion of LH across various populations has something going for it, but more stabbing are needed.

1

5

Reproductive success among the Yanomamo:

6

This reconstruction is not granular enough to see the interesting pattern of the fall and rise of 19th/20th-century LH. 19th-century reconstructions of LH are quite ingenious, using methods like counting the waving hand of people in old photographs.

8

This is, of course, terrible news. It would mean that our universe, teeming with life forms at vastly different stages of cosmic evolution, has a very large Gini coefficient. The negative implications of such inequality cannot be overstated. Since the broad-scale distributive properties of societies, i.e., states, planets, and, by reasoned extrapolation, galactic sectors, positively relate to all the negative ills of our great society, human history has finally become explicable. Our poor, nasty, brutish, and long history has undeniably been inflicted by such large-scale inequalities. Our hominid ancestors spearing those Denisovans losers is an inevitable consequence of 1% of intelligent life controlling 99% of solar output. That's just the sort of thing that happens when a single species has such a large share of the pie.

Furthermore, if broad-scale social distributions causally relate to social ills, then a large amount of social ills is evidence about the broad-scale distribution. Since we know population density relates to violence, an undeniably causal effect, the large amount of violence on our planet raises the possibility that we are in a very populated galactic sector. With each life snuffed here, we are raising the chances for alien life elsewhere; it's no wonder space exploration took off after WW2.

The fact that alien life might be closer than we think is a very exciting realization since it means we might be able to meet and tax them. If they are indeed far more advanced than ourselves, they would immediately consent, if not outright propose it to us. As a matter of fact, in a highly unequal universe teeming with life, it's somewhat of a paradox why no aliens have found us and given us universal basic income yet.

While possible advancements in basic income and taxes are all well and good, what is really needed is a much more radical solution to fix overpopulation and inequality, and lucky for us, there is one in store. Due to inflation and entropy, the universe is rapidly expanding and equalizing in all directions. A great fix is in store, an inevitable one that is due to the fundamental materialistic forces that drive history in the direction of progress. Such happy news is not happy to all; the long-standing fascist forces of order will argue, as they always do, that a fine solution to inequality such as entropy would lead to chaos and disorder and that the current non-equal arrangement is what makes everything run, from trains to our bowl system. While it may indeed be the case that long-term increases in entropy and inflation would lead to the heat death of the universe, this is not the first time sacrifices have had to be made in the name of equality, after all, it might not even be as bad as communism.

Postscript

So, does inequality casually relate to violence?

Taking all years in all countries that have available data for homicide and the GINI coefficient, there is no correlation between changes in the GINI coefficient and changes in the rate of homicide.

If we look at the cross-sectional relationship between the GINI and the rate of homicide, we do see a positive correlation, but when we look at the yearly data within a country, there is no clear positive relationship between the two variables. The two following graphs are illustrations of that fact, using the 32 countries with the most complete data.

If we take the 65 countries with the most complete data, the weighted correlation of all the within-country correlations is r = -0.04, meaning there is no correlation between the GINI coefficient and the rate of homicide within countries.

So the cross-sectional correlation is due to some third variable or variables that relate to both inequality and rates of homicide; this is not surprising, generally speaking between countries, "bad" things correlate with other "bad" things, and "good" things correlate with other "good" things. For example, this partial list of things that correlate with national IQ is copied from Lynn & Becker. Since all of those things correlate with a single variable, they all correlate with each other, from inequality, GDP, and meat consumption to the rate of leprosy, social trust, and the freedom index.

There is shared variance between many positive properties, this is why Kirkergad talks about a general social-economic factor and why old-timey cultural anthropologists saw cross-sectional correlations between indicators of complexity in societies and so built general social complexity indexes, a work continued by new-timey cultural anthropologists showing a general factor of social complexity.

The implications of all of this are that if 100 variables all correlate with each other, then you have 4950 different correlations, and if the reason why they correlate is due to a few general factors, almost all of those correlations will be spurious, meat consumption doesn’t cure leprosy, trust doesn’t cause wealth, and inequality doesn’t cause violence. This is why it’s important to use the noggin when thinking about how likely one thing is to cause the other, like inequality and violence., Should we have even expected this relationship to be casual? Well, should we expect the GINI coefficient of our galactic sector to be casually related to anything? When people talk about the relationship between GINI and various factors, there doesn't seem to be any effort to put forward a reasonable theory about how it would have even been possible to have a casual influence on stuff like homicide. Usually, what is proposed are some vague statements about how inequality is a consequence of some unfairness in our society and that unfairness drives people to violence, but that would make both inequality and violence the result of some third variable, not directly casual, so why even bring it up? The reason is ideological; people want the government to treat the reduction of inequality as a goal, so they focus on it and work backward to connect it to negative results, and if their theories imply that the relationship between inequality and negative results is due to some third variable, they don’t care about this since that omitted variable is not the focus of their moral outrage. The explanation closest to implying a direct causal relationship is statements regarding how inequality causes anger, which may lead to violence—riots breaking out as people get the latest World Bank statistics delivered to their doorstep, for example.

While we are at it, it is worth mentioning that if you look at very long-term trends in the homicide rate and inequality, the two variables are fairly discordant. After the Black Death, homicide skyrocketed in the 14th century just as inequality was in decline; later, inequality started to rise just as rates of homicide were dropping. Even in recent times, the two trends seem to diverge in opposite directions on the graph.

Not to suggest I believe in a casual relationship in the opposite direction,

That would be silly.

I was thinking about a similar natural experiment regarding generals. Generals are often portrayed as motivated by a deep duty toward their country, the ancient sources are full of such descriptions:

Plutarch tells us that when Aristides "the just", who was instrumental in setting up the Delian League/Athenian Empire, was responsible for the public treasury, he would supplement any missing funds with his own money and would pay himself back if any extra funds were discovered (I could believe half of that).

We are told by Nepos that Epaminondas, the general who defeated the Spartans and set up Boethian hegemony in Greece, responded to a Persian bribe by stating:

"There is no need of money in the matter; for if what the king desires is for the good of the Thebans, I am ready to do it for nothing; but if otherwise, he has not gold and silver enough to move me, for I would not accept the riches of the whole world in exchange for my love for my country”

We are even told that when Themistocles, the victor in Salamis, who defeated and defected to the Persians, was ordered by the King of Kings to attack Greece, he could not bear the task and committed suicide by drinking bull’s blood (which is not toxic).

The alternative explanation is given to us in the motives of one man, whom even the ancient world could not help but to treat with a measure of cynicism.

His first entrance into public life, they say, was connected with a contribution of money to the state, and was not of design. He was passing by when the Athenians were applauding in their assembly, and asked the reason for the applause. On being told that a contribution of money to the state was going on, he went forward to the bema and made a contribution himself. The crowd clapped their hands and shouted for joy — so much so that Alcibiades forgot all about the quail which he was carrying in his cloak, and the bird flew away in a fright. Thereupon the Athenians shouted all the more, and many of them sprang to help him hunt the bird.

That is prestige, glory, and the imperishable fame that comes with the job, along with having writers and poets say splendid things about them and getting a month or two named after themselves (or all of them in the case of Commodus).

The Choice

Generals often face the choice of whether to attack the enemy alone and reap the full glory of success or to work together with another general, which would increase their odds of victory but would mean sharing the triumph.

While I do not have the ability to go through and quantify all instances when that choice is present, that exact dynamic existed in three of the most important battles in the history of Rome since the Punic War, showing it was neither marginal nor inconsequential.

Around 113 BC, Rome would face a massive Germanic invasion from Jutland by a tribe called the Cimbri. Together with their neighbors, the Teutons, they would ravage the borders of the Roman Empire, killing tens of thousands of legionaries. To face them, Rome gathered an 80,000-strong army, divided under the leadership of Consul Gnaeus Mallius Maximus and Proconsul Quintus Servilius Caepio. Caepio decided he could take on the Germans alone. He attacked with his half of the force and got everyone there killed (except himself), which isolated Maximus' part of the army and got them killed.

This was the worst disaster that the empire has suffered since Cannea, as a matter of fact, it was as big a disaster as Cannea, if not worse. Afterward, with the Cimbri marching toward the borders of Italy, unprecedented dictatorial power would be placed in the hands of Gaius Marius, who would completely reform the Roman military.

Marius himself was far from being the embodiment of civic virtue; nearing 70 and still glory-hounding, he would steal a command post from his former lieutenant, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, which would precipitate a civil war between the two.

Could the next disaster be even worse? Sure, how about the fall of Rome? In 378, the Goths were invading, advancing toward Adrianopolis with 10,000–20,000 men. Valen, Imperator Romanorum, while moving to stop them, received a letter from his niece and emperor of the west, Gratian, that he was coming to aid him. The problem was that Gratian already got his victory against the Lentienses, it was Valen's time to shine, so he attacked alone and got most of his army killed (including himself). Ever since then, the Goths were a permanent feature of the inside of the Roman Empire and would play a significant part in the collapse of its western half.

How could things go down from here? Well, we still have half of the empire left, and that half would come under threat from a massive invasion of the Saracens, who would conquer most of the east spreading the religion of Muhammad.

After several defeats of a large number of legionaries stationed next to the borders of the empire, Emperor Heraclius ordered a large force to be assembled under two generals, Theodore (brother of the emperor) and the Armenian Magister militum, Vahan. After an initial encounter with the Arabs, Vahan and Theodore quarreled, the Armenians proclaimed their own general emperor, and Theodore left. When the Arabs attacked Vahan had to face them alone and lost. This was the battle of Yarmuk, the most significant defeat the Byzantines experienced against the Arabs, after which Heraclius, hard-pressed to recruit another army, would be forced to leave much of the east to fend for itself for a while (he would also somewhat lose his mind). Of course, the eastern empire would never recover, and so Istanbul is not Constantinople (yes, I am aware of Manzikert). 

Other, less "natural experiment style" moments of ego over empire were also common; in the battle of Cannae, the Romans placed two generals over the army who would alternate command every day; in the battle, each commanded from its separate wing instead of the center which got them killed or ran out of the battlefield leaving the army with no command at all. Lest anyone think the moderns are superior, in WW2, the US Navy and Air Force, unwilling to have any of their cryptographic teams placed under the other divided the work between them, one decrypted messages received on even days and the other on odd days. This continued until FDR ordered them to cooperate, unwilling to take separate briefings by each of them.

Enter fact-checkers. First, there was a lot of hand-waving,  quoting a warning on the FBI website (i.e., USA TODAY and BBC) that "some entities use the figures to compile rankings of cities and counties. These rough rankings provide no insight into the numerous variables that mold crime". If data regarding the amount of crime committed in each city does not provide insight into its relative ranking with regard to crime rates, it’s not clear what does, the vibes?, experts?

Among the bad-vibes there was some actual data cited, prelimineary data on homicide in Republican and Democrats run cities was avalibale for 2019-2020 and a calculation that spread on twitter was cited on the BBC, NYTimes and others showing:

Together with a later calculation of 51 cities showing a similar change in crime in D and R cities, this was taken as definite proof for the "crime rose the same" position.

But there are problems. The calculated rise in crime was performed by taking the rate of change in each city and averaging all those rates together. This is problematic since ‘R’ cities are smaller and have a lower homicide rate to begin with, many of them have a very low sample size of homicides for each year. Since the smaller the sample size, the larger the variance, yearly changes in such cities may simply be due to random chance rather than an actual increase in violence.

If I take the height of a million people in a city in 2019 and 2020, changes in the measured average would approximate actual changes in height, but if I take the height of 10 people in 2019 and the height of 19 people in 2020, changes in height would probably be due to random chance, and the same is true for changes in the homicide rate in the Republican city of Lubbock, which experienced 10 homicides in 2019 and 19 in 2020, which would represent a 180% rise in homicides.

This methodology is also open to problems with a ‘floor effect," since homicides cannot fall below 0; a city with 1 homicide per year can experience at most a 100% decline but has no limit on the percentage increase. (This is a more general point, looking at the numbers, I see no city that declined to zero in this analysis, in a wider analysis, this would pose a problem because some do).

Recalculating and comparing

A simple way to account for the problem of higher variance in smaller cities is to simply add together all the homicides that occurred in a given year in ‘R’ and ‘D’ cities respectivly and then to compare the rise from 2019 to 2020. (This data was avalibale in Jeff asher file here).

Here is the data for 66 cities:

Now we see that the total change in the number of homicides was much larger in Democrats cities, since it is ‘current year’ we can also look at the change in homicide between 2020-2021, another period in which rates of homicide increased across the US.

Once again we see a larger change in ‘D’ cities, as a matter of fact the percentage change was close to zero in ‘R’ cities.

So it seems probable that violent crime did not rise at the same rate across the political spectrum of cities; it rose more in ‘Democrat-run cities’.

All across the period, there is a growing disapproval of using the force. As of 2021, 21% of Americans say it is unacceptable for police to use force against a person who is attacking them! 40% disagree with using force against an escaped suspect, even more than they disagree with ever using force (maybe their objection is ontological; if a suspect has truly escaped police, it is logically impossible to hit him).

Is this a general objection to using violence?

Is this the better angels of our nature, making us all Eloi unwilling to use violence under any circumstance? Several questions in the GSS asking when it is acceptable for a civilian to hit an adult male allow us to examine this.

Three scenarios involve various crimes, making them a better comparison to a situation a policeman would be involved in. One scenario is Ever.

The only clear trend is in the opposite direction, there is growing approval for hitting a person for striking a child (mind you, not his child). Ironically, this growth in approval of violence is probably due to the growing unacceptability of hitting children. Disapproval for Ever was 33% in 1973 and 35% in 1994.

The problem seems not to be people using violence to stop crime, but police doing so.

Elite diffusion?

An argument has been made that the adoption of negative opinions with regard to policing is advanced by "the Elite". Safe in their neighborhoods and distant from crime they can allow themselves to adopt "luxury beliefs" that are disconnected from the reality of law enforcement.

At least on the narrow issue of police use of force, this is very much not the case.

Self identified Lower class and those with less than a high school degree show the most objection; this is not changed by looking only at white people and should not be affected by the fact that those categories contain more criminals as per the previous post, criminals do not differ much from the public in their opinion on police force.

The Political divide and conquer

The political divide on the issue is obvious; the left possesses greater sympathy for criminals and is therefore more disapproving of using force against them, yet the dynamic of the change is interesting. Liberals/Democrats moved on the issue, taking the public with them, while Conservatives/Republicans were left behind.

This same dynamic of the leftward movement with the public can be seen in the proportion of people who agree with the statement "courts are too harsh".

This also provides more support for the proposition that the left is less harsh on crime.

More generally, the aforementioned dynamic of leftward movement with the public, particularly on social questions, has been noticed before and can be seen in a variety of cases.

Why move?

This movement is occurring due to younger generations becoming increasingly liberal. On a 1–7 ranking from liberal to conservative, we can see that Americans have shifted almost 0.7 points in the direction of "liberal" from the oldest to the youngest generation.

We can go back and see that approval of police use of force coincided with changes in political ideology, and that increasing disapproval may go back to people born before the great rise in crime in the 1960s.

The same is true for whether courts are treating criminals too harshly. The trend has been ongoing for a long time and preceded the 1960s.

To touch a little on causality between increasing support for leniency on criminals and the 1960s crime rise, we can filter the opinions of people listed as working in law and see the same trend; as a matter of fact, they are even more lenient than the general public. We can also see support for greater leniency coincide with Google ngram mentions of "criminal justice reform" during the period the term was in use.

The good news here is that if you ever wanted to commit a crime, now might be a good time.

Addendum

People imprisoned/convicted ever and respondents arrested last year are similarly concerned with crime as the general public and overwhelming majority of them say too little is been done to stop it.

(Sample size for those arrested in the last 12 months is rather small, n=22, so no need to conclude they are more concerned with crime than the criminally inexperinced public.) 

Slight majority of those imprisoned ever or arrested in the last year state we are not harsh enough on criminals and plurality of those convicted of a crime are similarly inclined. Here we do see variance of opinion from the general public.

The fact that there’re more men than women who are convicted, arrested or jailed should not matter much when comparing the opinions of the crime prone to crime none since men and women hold similar views on the previous questions.

What are criminals’ opinion with regard to police use of force?

Majority of them approve of it to the same degree as the public, answering the question of whether it’s ever acceptable for police to hit somebody.

(Here arrested in the last year is not available and the variable in the leftmost graph is arrested ever, an inferior choice since it does not relate as much to being a criminal)

More relevant to themselves, support for use of force on an escaped suspect among the crime prone is equivalent to public support.

Here men and women do diverge in opinion.

So controlling for this we can look only at how male criminals and non-criminals respond to the use of force questions and when this is done we see the difference does not make much of a difference.

Another interesting relevant variable is people answering yes to being afraid to walk in their neighborhood, such people support harsher punishment and more enforcement of crime so this query is another measure of concern about crime.

Imprisoned, convicted and arrested last year are similarly afraid to walk in their neighborhood as the public (don’t worry about criminals they’re just as afraid of you as you’re of them (not really)).

It is also interesting to look at fear to walk in neighborhood over time and to see greater feeling of safety corresponds to the crime decline of the 90s.

But there is something interesting going on here. The reported change in safety is only driven by women, men’s feelings of fear don’t change much with the rate of crime.

Returning to the topic at hand, why is it that those who are likely to commit crime show similar concern of crime to the general public and a want of its enforcement? Well a thief thinks everyone steals but if everyone steals one must take great care to defend his property.

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