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The murder that shook Iceland

theguardian.com

11–20 of 76 posts

Re: The murder that shook Iceland

#11
post #6

>a country with one of the lowest murder rates in the world I wonder why...

Probably the usual reasons. Homogeneity, social cohesion... These are probably not universally correlated with low crime but they certainly tend to be.

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention..., I suspect it has more to do with average wealth / standard of living combined with wealth inequality. "Social cohesion", whatever that means, is probably correlated, but I wouldn't be sure it's the underlying cause.

Re: The murder that shook Iceland

#12

>a country with one of the lowest murder rates in the world I wonder why...

Size of country plays a role. People in smaller communities know each other better which makes it harder to get away with murder.

Iceland only has about 300,000 inhabitants (the same as the city of Santa Ana, ca), and a lot of people are somehow related to each other. In fact, there's an Icelandic dating app that checks if the person you're interested in isn't related to you.

Re: The murder that shook Iceland

#13

>a country with one of the lowest murder rates in the world I wonder why...

Size of country plays a role. People in smaller communities know each other better which makes it harder to get away with murder.

Size of country and high, equitable standards of living.

Re: The murder that shook Iceland

#14
post #8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the usual reasons. Homogeneity, social cohesion... These are probably not universally correlated with low crime but they certainly tend to be.

How do you measure social cohesion? Crime rate might be one way, but then you've got yourself a tautology.

Economic inequality perhaps?

If you sort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq... by "CIA Gini %" and skip the countries where there is no data in that column, then sort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... by the "2010" column, then squint a bit at the top ten or twenty countries in each list, they look kinda correlated. (Or co-correlated with a whole bunch of other factors.)

Re: The murder that shook Iceland

#15
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you measure social cohesion? Crime rate might be one way, but then you've got yourself a tautology.

Economic inequality perhaps? If you sort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq... by "CIA Gini %" and skip the countries where there is no data in that column, then sort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... by the "2010" column, then squint a bit at the top ten or twenty countries in each list, they look kinda correlated. (Or co-correlated with a whole bunch of other…

According to Stephen Pinker, the correlation between inequality and violence is weak. It really surprised me, because I always assumed that they’d be linked.

Re: The murder that shook Iceland

#16
post #8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the usual reasons. Homogeneity, social cohesion... These are probably not universally correlated with low crime but they certainly tend to be.

How do you measure social cohesion? Crime rate might be one way, but then you've got yourself a tautology.

Willingness to trust strangers. https://ourworldindata.org/trust

Re: The murder that shook Iceland

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economic inequality perhaps? If you sort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq... by "CIA Gini %" and skip the countries where there is no data in that column, then sort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... by the "2010" column, then squint a bit at the top ten or twenty countries in each list, they look kinda correlated. (Or co-correlated with a whole bunch of other…

According to Stephen Pinker, the correlation between inequality and violence is weak. It really surprised me, because I always assumed that they’d be linked.

If anything, as hinted above, there are lots of other confounding factors. Also, Wikipedia's wealth inequality list looks a lot less similar to murder rates than the income inequality list I posted above. Would you know off the top of your head if Pinker wrote about wealth or about income inequality? (Or yet another measure?)
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