Who Were the Sea Peoples?

While researching the cause of the apparent (as Shonk noted, it may be an artifact of bad stats) spike in the homicide rate in the early 1900s, the tremendous immigration of that first decade popped out as a possible cause. I googled to find out what has been said about that, and discovered papers like this . What is interesting is that researchers have been purporting to answer the question of whether a high rate of immigration might lead to a surge in crime, but in fact seem to be answering the question "Are immigrants more likely to be criminals than the native born?" The paper linked to above discusses earlier studies, and they all seem to have proceeded in the same way, by examining incarceration rates for immigrants versus natives, to see if immigrants are more likely to be criminals. But that is only one possible way in which a high immigration rate might cause a high crime rate. And that worry should not be discounted: for instance, if the United Kingdom discover...

There have been a number of explanations put forward, new policing techniques and the waning of the crack epidemic among them. But I think the most important explanation has been largely overlooked: planners (mostly) stopped mucking about poor neighborhoods. To understand my point here, consider Jane Jacobs: Statistical people are a fiction for many reasons, which is that there treated as if infinitely interchangeable. Real people are unique, they invest years of their lives in significant relationships with other unique people, and are not interchangeable in the least. Severed from their relationships, they are destroyed as effective social beings--sometimes for a little while, sometimes forever.  In city neighborhoods, whether streets are districts, if too many slowly grown public relationships are disrupted at once, all kinds of havoc can occur--so much habit, instability and helplessness, that it sometimes seems time will never again get in it's licks. She goes on to qu...

"With all social relationships in a free state presumably dependent on mutual trust, it is not surprising that the courts of eighteenth-century Massachuseyys treated instances of cheating and deception far more severely than overt acts of violence." (p. 107) This is an interesting contrast with Rothbard's theory of crime in The Ethics of Liberty .