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Australia has Experienced One of the Most Astonishing Drops in Crime Ever Recorded by Any Country
Feb 8, 2021
The old newsroom adage, “if it bleeds, it leads,” did not apply to Australia recently, as editors covered the front pages with positive headlines about one of the world’s most dramatic drops in crime rates ever reported in a developed nation.
Since 2001, break-ins have fallen by 68%, motor vehicle theft by 70%, robbery by 71%, attempted murder by 70%, and murder rates by 50%, while overall homicide including manslaughter plummeted by 59%.
A comprehensive report in the
Sydney Morning Herald provides the details of the precipitous fall, while also attempting to explain this bettering of society.
Expose bad ideas; don’t stifle them - Businesslive
17 January 2021 - Of the two books I received as Christmas presents, I am well into Martin Amis’s unusual, thrillingly revelatory autobiographical novel Inside Story. The second, Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, is first on the to-be-read pile at my bedside.
Michael Morris
Of the two books I received as Christmas presents, I am well into Martin Amis’s unusual, thrillingly revelatory autobiographical novel
Inside Story. The second, Steven Pinker’s
Enlightenment Now, is first on the to-be-read pile at my bedside.
So it seems a bit of a cheat to share lines from page 453 of Pinker’s volume, spotted while idly flipping through it after shedding the wrapping: “We will never have a perfect world,” he writes, “and it would be dangerous to seek one.”
rock star harvard professor steven pinker. he is best known for the better angels of our nature. his friendship with bill gates. or a 2007 talk with millions of views. author of a brand-new best seller enlightenment now. the case for humanism, science and progress. welcome, mr. pinker. back in my days they taught the meaning of life course. how did you get into the job doing that? well, i teach introductory psychology. i stumbled across data showing that rates of homicide have fallen by a factor of 35 since the middle ages. that just stunned me. like most people, i assumed violence was getting worse and worse. the more i looked at data on how often people harm each other, the more i came across graphs showing rates have come down in 70 years. rates of violence against women,
yes. . obviously the media have a responsibility to report on what s going wrong, to report on suffering and injustice. but they also have a responsibility to report on what s going right. even if it doesn t result in an event on a thursday. because otherwise people can become cynical and fatalistic. they can think why try to make the world a better place if it just gets worse and worse no matter what we do. oren tkors radical solutions. smash the machine. the society is in such a disaster that anything would be better than what we have now. and people take for granted institutions like democratic governments, the rule of law, science. we re out of town. thank you for joining me. the book is called enlightenment now. i ll be right back.