Try as you might Jack, you can’t blame this American-specific gang problem phenomenon on liberal elites, who have had less power in America than anywhere else. Moreover, the problem with violent gang crime continued to rise throughout the 1970s and 1980s as the law and order people steadily turned the US justice system into something so wackily severe it was completely without precedent in liberal democratic history.

If we have to try to pin the American gang violence anomaly on some bit of government policy, the obvious example would be the cultural rightist availability of weapons, which would be a necessary – although not sufficient – cause.

Historically, the murder rate in Australia in the 19th century was much higher than it is now. I doubt even Jack could ascribe that to some Gramscian New Left plot.

Yes, it was the same in America. And in 18th century Britain crime was a danger genuinely on par with illness. During the early 20th century crime rates plummeted as did penal severity. Now if we operated according to Jack’s Razor (an embarrassingly butchered misinterpretation of Occam), this should mean that the decline in cultural rightism caused a decline in crime rates. Of course, we cultural progressives would not let ideological convenience slip us into making a stupid anti-scientific assumption like that. You can’t expect populist rightwingers to have such basic intellectual principles.

Jack, please realise that Occam’s Razor does NOT mean uncritically accepting common sense assumptions, refusing to rule out rival explanations, ignoring construct validity or assuming that covariation is causation. If doctors had followed Jack’s Razor, they’d still be bloodletting people with red faces…

You are wrong to suggest that the war on crime was caused by the increase in crime.

The crime rate began to increase from the late 1950s, due to the baby boom entering the years of crime commission – not because of multiculturalism. The war on crime only started occurring in the mid-1970s. The war on crime was caused by a whole series of intense conflicts at the time, including white reaction against progressive change in the 1960s. It was part of the Southern Strategy to capitalise on the resentment felt by certain whites towards minorities and the ‘undeserving’. Jack I know you believe in the school of Hard Knocks, but it is important that you do not mistake psychological perceptions of the cause of rising crime for the actual cause of rising crime.

The most important point is that the fear of crime and perception of crime’s prevalence continued to increase throughout the 1990s, even as crime was falling. This suggests that the perception of crime, and its actual occurrence, are two very different sociological phenomena that just happened to overlap for a little while. The production of ice cream per capita probably increased as well, but no one would suggest that this had a causal relationship to the fear of crime.

The fact is that even at its peak, crime is an unlikely cause of serious injury. Yet, in surveys, people will always exaggerate the amount of people hurt or murdered in crime compared to more mundane things like illness, etc. Whenever you get people to give a quantitative rate estimating the likelihood of crime in a particular area they will almost always seriously overstate it. This isn’t to suggest crime isn’t an issue, or that crime didn’t increase. It is simply to say that people are misinformed of its prevalence – ‘pop’ wisdom just isn’t always right, you know Jack.

Incidentally, Jack, the ‘victims of crime’ movements who push for longer sentences are dominated by middle class whites.

Bored in HK, Mick Young was the last sitting member of the ALP who had ever done a day’s work.

The current crop of ALP pollies really are a drab lot. Not that the LN/P’s are the ones to set the pulse racing.

In 1950 the ALP represented the cream of the working class. And it now represents the scum of the middle class.

Kim Beazley Snr.

Why has the fear of crime increased far faster than an increase (or decrease of late) in the actual rate of crime? And why did this take place over the last 40 years? The proliferation of the mass media sounds like a commonsensical explanation. People now hear and see scary crimes far more than they used to.

David, your suggestion that public concern over the massive increase in crime 1965-95 was just a beat up by shock jocks or a joe citizen’s phobia is a diagnostic of cultural elitist ignorance of, and arrogance over, the populus.

It is also a staple of post-Gramsci New Left culture studies, a pretty dull one at that. MOst people take the news and op-eds with a large grain of salt. It is word of mouth and insurance premiums that really hit home.

It is false and silly to imply that “white flight” and conservative “Law and Order” campaigns were just an irrational or iniquitous reaction to a bogeyman cooked up by the media. Your conclusions about the probability of crime victimiztion do not square with the awful facts on the ground when the Culture War raged:

The United States Crime Index Rates Per 100,000 Inhabitants went from 1,887.2 in 1960 to 5,897.8 in 1991. By 1991 the crime rate was 313% the 1960 crime rate.

…Approximately thirteen million people (approximately 5% of the U.S. population) are victims of crime every year. Approximately one and a half million are victims of violent crime.

The tragedy is that the most vulnerable and frequent victims of crime were minorities, the very people that liberals feigned to help.

You are also pretty myopic about public opinion in the good old days. During the Depression era the general public was agog with “shock horror” stories about crime and gangsters. These became a staple of films. But actual crime was not so bad. So people did not take such depictions to seriously since they knew “thats entertainment”.

It was a different story in the post VN war era. The massive increase in multicultural and subcultural diversity combined with a spectacular collapse in traditional authority certainly kicked over quite a few legal traces.

We now have a vast panopoly of Big Brother systems just to keep a lid on crime – more cops, prisons, monitoring devices, fences, locks, gated communities, insulated condos, protected borders, private security, bouncers. Crime has cost us the liberty we playfully enjoyed as children.

David says:

Well almost nobody is subjected to daily criminal invasion, Jack.

Actually some minority communities do live in a constant state of siege. Such as indigenous ones who are now falling overthemselves in placing curfews on uruly youth.

But cultural elites do well to stay clear of such hell holes. Particularly since their inept and inane policie have done so much to make them worse.

David says:

And I am talking about scientific facts here: when you compare what the perceived likelihood of crime to the actual rate, you will find the average person has drastically inflated beliefs about the pervasiveness of crime…This is not a lefty hermeneutic conspiracy theory: it is a simple fact – most people are empirically wrong about crime.

Now you want to put primate pyschology on trial and convict humanity of having “incorrect feelings” about such trifles as the risk of murder. Tell me, how does that argument go down when you quarrell with your wife? Like a lead zeppelin with mine, I’ll tell ya.

You sound like a person who has never been mugged, robbed or set upon by ruffians. I wonder what it feels like to be such a person. Sheltered, I expect.

I lived in NYC during the early nineties. I can tell you that anyone who lived in that jursidiction in that time and failed to take precautions wound up victimized.

WHat really triggered the conservative reaction was the evident positive correlation b/w liberal cultural policy and social pathology. That was the reason behind the political success of the first generation neo-conservatives – Wilson, Murray, Glazer and so on. Liberals mugged by reality.

AUS is in the happy position of being behind the US in such matters. I suspect that a large part of Howard’s appeal to the general populus is his evident intention to keep us that way.

David says:

Jack its a real shame you can’t make a decent argument and have to resort to crap like this:

Come on old boy. Just yanking your chain a wee bit. You should be in my shoes when the fur starts flying.

Shorter jack: Only strocchiverse data is admissable. And it’s all about the boomers.

It is boomers who are forever banging on about the political timidity and cultural conformism of “post-” modern youth. I merely report, apparently you can only deride.

Gramsci’s work has done alot of mischief to impressionable New Lefty minds, convincing them that the only obstacle to the complete success of their program was the wilful malice of certain cultural apparati.

It causes people like Kim to grind down Occam’s Razor to a blunt stump. Her attempt to interpret the right-ward cultural tilt of politicians and populus as a defensive crouch to ward off the nebulous threat of shock-jocks and tabloids is painful to watch.

The simplest explanation of Cultural Right populist policies is Cultural Right political preferences. That is why FF vote is going up and GREENs/DEMS vote is going down.

Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.

Kim says:

Wouldn’t the kiddies have had their opinions shaped or controlled by that conservative/authoritarian/nationalist/populus-ist private school education yr always banging on about when you want to prove some other part of the endless dialectic boondogle that is the Cultural Dries hypothesis?

Kiddies have their opinions shaped by experience, example and exhortation just like everyone else. The conformist institutional medium of private schools incarnates the conservative (ie authoritative, integrative, gradualist) ideological message. The results speak for themselves, a generation fairly hip suits.

The small “c” conservatism of the youth cohort is not so bad. They dont have anything much interesting to say, but they say it very well.

“Hi BearCave. I’ll answer your question, but I’m still reeling from being called a ‘conservative’. I suppose you meant an ‘economic liberal’. I come down firmly on the side of social liberalism, if I can use that term.”

Fair point. Any reasoned debate here should take into account that we all exist on a spectrum of opinion. Sorry about calling you a Howard Hugger – that’s being a bit deliberately naughty when I already know to behave better

“I used the term ‘the main game’ narrowly to refer to the bases on which the WorkChoices legislation should be advocated.”

Oh, I know you did, Mr. Boingo. There was never any misunderstanding on this point. In fact, it’s my point that’s still being developed here.

The point being that “spectrum of opinion” (between Left and Right) is not all that is important. As a long-time, low-income earner myself, “scope of opinion” is also of value to me if my concern is whether low-income Australians are to be “stakeholders” in the national economy (as distinct from being a latent public that simply “eats cake” if or when the economic good times end and the Government of the day seeks quick solutions for keeping the numbers looking beautiful).

Union-aligned or non-union aligned, it is in my interest to maintain low-income earners as “an active public” to keep the scope of opinion wide, “regardless” of where between Left and Right that opinion is best positioned.

This is why I am launching the “Let them Eat Cake in ’08″ mock PR campaign to highlight the motivations of the pro-WorkChoices business lobby PR campaign.

Today’s modern-day “Let them Eat Cake” line comes from Ed in The Australian who writes:

“Ultimately, we believe Labor would be best to look elsewhere (other than Industrial Relations) to achieve the wealth distribution and equity results it is seeking. As the Howard Government has shown, the answer lies in the tax and welfare systems rather than labour market controls. ”

When Ed can reveal to me (and the rest of the World) how politics and policy can be handled separately, then I’ll be willing to listen to his ideas about why the tax and welfare systems need to compensate for an unfair Industrial Relations system.

Such an approach allows for analysis without synthesis. It’s quite apparent (especially so close to an election) that it’s not easy dealing with politics and policy separately (rather, the two are mixed together like the ingredients of a scrambled egg). Perhaps this explains annual $10 pay rises and annual $2 tax cuts for the poor?

If the assumption is already “low income earners are a latent public, albeit a tax-paying latent public”, then that makes way for making “prosperity” a modern day gospel instead of merely one phase in a business cycle.

The narrower scope of public debate also narrows the divide between Left and Right to “culture wars”, which I increasingly understand to be a corruption of the term “cultural literacy”, a quite unacceptable situation from my viewpoint, not to mention a step back into the Dark Ages (and you thought “winding back the I.R. clock” to 1904 is meant to be a scary prospect!)

I’ve had two responses on this thread (including the one from Bored in HK) helping to verify that WorkChoices isn’t about dealing with employment, productivity and wealth distribution “in synthesis”.

Which only validates modern day interpretations of a “Let them Eat Cake” attitude towards low-income earners by big business interests.

…From Justin

Mock-promoting the modern day virtues of “Let them Eat Cake in ’08″ and faith in “Prosperity forever and ever”, etc.

Anyway, the answer to your question is this: I have made myself unclear. WorkChoices’ virtues are not those which enhance productivity. I mean, as far as I know there is no evidence that says that individual agreements per se enhance productivity. Any effect is going to be marginal. It ought to be trite to say that, in the long-run, only expanding the capital structure (ie. investment) can enhance productivity and improve real wages.

My central point was that Howard had made a strategic error in adopting productivity as part of the economic case for WorkChoices, because it is probably indefensible. I used the term ‘the main game’ narrowly to refer to the bases on which the WorkChoices legislation should be advocated. I never meant to imply that productivity itself was not important or not part of the broader ‘main game’ of economic prosperity. Indeed productivity is absolutely critical.

Hope that clears things up for you.

Cheers
BBB