Is it really a bad thing to hanker after a, perhaps imagined, past of full-employment and low crime where an ordinary man could afford the rent or the mortgage on a decent house?
There is often an imagined past, but vending machines on the outside of shops is not. I was there and I remember the local shop having a Polo machine outside. The shopkeeper could lock up and leave it and come back in the morning and take any money out and add more Polos and it was extremely unlikely that someone would either rob it or vandalise it.
No-one does this today. I know someone who makes some smart vending machines and they all have to be within a space where someone is working, and somewhere that can be locked up at night.
And this is all the fault of the politicians. I don't always like to say that. Often, problems are the choices voters make and who they choose. But in this case, the public never stopped asking for criminals to be stopped and dealt with.
And one effect of bad private spaces is that it leads to a growth of private spaces, of people trying to create private moats. So, the train is full of people swearing in front of your children, you think maybe you'll get a car instead. The swings in the park are knackered, you take the kids to an indoor play centre. If you want to not live amongst criminals and litterbugs, you move to the affluent market town full of people who were taught to behave properly that doesn't even need policing. And then you work to stop new housing being built, to protect your lifestyle, so you don't have to live near the crappy people.
You have to build the incentives across society. Whether in terms of how families are formed, or how much people shopkeepers can deal with shoplifters, or always making sure there's enough cells for every convicted prisoner. It is just not good enough to not address crime. It's bad for the people receiving it and it's also bad for teenagers who should be corrected and will live better lives on the straight and narrow.
I’ve been living in Kraków for the last 3 years and it is just like the world you remember - clean streets, well-maintained parks, lots of police patrols and far less antisocial behaviour. There is still, unfortunately, a lot of graffiti and the taxes are higher, because all those public services have to be paid for, but it doesn’t need to be a nostalgic dream.
I'm a lefty but, still, I share about half of your "far-right" nostalgia. I find the explosion in regulations bewildering and wonder where they came from. Who was it who decided we need all these new rules and regulations? Why are the paving-stones so broken and why aren't the street-lights working? Like you, I also wish we saw the occasionally policeman on patrol and I wish all those minor crimes would not be ignored.
We have a bunch of thieves who waltz into my apartment building a couple of times a week to steal all the parcels. We have the thieves on camera but the building manager says he is not allowed to share a description of them for fear of libel and the police don't seem interested in catching them despite dozens of reports. How did we get there?
There are, undoubtedly, a whole bunch of problems that have got much worse since my youth in the 70s but about half of the problems you mention were much worse in the 70s than they are now. Crime is down. Murders are way down from their peak in 2000 and about where they were in the mid 70s. You only have to watch an episode of Call the Midwife to see that not everyone lived comfortable lives in the 50s and 60s and the streets of London were not as pristine as you remember.
It may be because I live in a lefty city but the streets around my house are swept everyday and the bins are emptied and the flowers are taken care of. Our road-sweeper even has a similar hat to the bloke in the banner at the top of this page. The local businesses leave their furniture outside and it is not stolen or damaged.
I share your disgust at the accumulation of regulations and the massive growth in budgets even as services dwindle from where they were. But, like some of your other commenters, I don't think it's useful to pretend that everything is worse than it used to be. I recently came back to England after a couple of decades away and I was really surprised at how well-kept most places are. Inner London looks really nice compared to when I used to live there (Hooray for gentrification!) and it's a pleasure to walk around my city and see all the outdoor cafe tables and pub furniture. It feels almost European!
I bet that if we focused properly on what has got better and what has got worse we'd have a much better shot at fixing the broken stuff. I expect the lefties as well as the "far-right" would agree on that.
As far we can determine that is true, but crime rates now are a fraction of what they were in the 80s and 90s and the trend has been downwards for a quarter of a century.
I think it is fine to hanker for these things -and social care, NHS, local authorities have been severely hampered by needless austerity since 2010. I appreciate your thoughtful writings from what I see as a centre-right perspective. How have decent Conservatives let this happen on their watch? I'm really perplexed.
The problem is this old life doesn't exist outside of Hollywood and Hallmark films.
1. Crime of almost all types is lower in most places (only recently has there been a small surge) What we see is availability bias where you see every door dash theft from everywhere, all at once and throughout time.
2. The cleanliness / roads is a misnomer as well. Just go back to NYC in the 70s and 80s.... or wait.... go back up until 1950, and NYC was, literally, a cesspool.
3. Door dash is mentioned but think about that.... the average citizen, or even the lower class ones who live in rougher neighborhoods, can afford to not only buy dinner out but have it delivered by another human at premium prices.
4. That past existed at what standard of living? Smaller house, no TV, limited Radio, very little retirement, etc. etc. It's not that salaries haven't kept up.... it's that our standard of living exploded. If you went, today, and lived the same standard of living as 1950... You could do it on a very simple salary. By that I mean house, car, and amenities (which you wouldn't have many)
5. What you described is a nostalgia bias, typically by people who never lived in that time frame. These are Gen Xers, by and large, who lived through the worst crime, the worst, decrepitness, and the worst in social upheaval during and shortly after the Vietnam war. They don't want to go back to their childhood, they want to go back to their grandparents one as they imagine it...
That's just a few points to consider about those thoughts.
What data is there on the 50s and 60s and how reliable is it? I can find stats showing that recorded crime in the UK peaked in the 90s and is lower today than it was in the early 80s.
There are some methodological inconsistencies (and the current British Crime Survey series only goes back to 1981) but no doubt at all that levels of reported/recorded crime rocketed from the 1970. This is from a BBC bitesize article.
Counter-Point.... In away, the 50s would certainly be considered amazing after coming out of the Depression AND WWII… then it got choatic again…
What’s also missing is that there was the Draft for the Korean war and that had about the same number of dead but more total casualties than Vietnam so that wasn’t even a ‘great’ time…
Oh, and don’t forget the start of the cold war panic and Mcarthyism… Then you got into the 60s and 70s protests / riots / draft for Vietnam, etc. and then the crazy crime of the late 70s to mid 90s.
I can’t find a lot about that period to really be nostaligic about.
Of course that existed. I’m living in a rare outpost where it still does exist, though rapidly eroding.
Fifteen years ago, yoofs smashing flowerpots was - here, in our behind the times little enclave -pretty noticeable. Dealt with by parents getting together, BTW.
You’re jaded - you don’t remember a Time Before. You think its mythical - but us, we’re speed running the last 60 years and can see the decline clearer than you can.
I'm not sure it's so rare is my point. Where is all this smashing of flowerpots happening un contested? My point is that it's better today.... My point is the nostalgia for what you think was back there is myopic and missing context becasue it wasn't better...it was worse. The 50s had greasers and gangs roaming around, the 60s had race riots, the 70s had anti war riots, Crime outside of inner cities is lower. Standards of living are higher.
What existed back then was worse than today. I'm not the jaded one here. You're the one who thinks it's worse now, not me. Put the mirror down and stop looking behind you at Hallmark cinema nostalgia.
I hanker for some of this, just as Simon does, being a similar age.
But I also recognise it wasn’t all rosy, some things were terrible. Standards of living were lower, life expectancy was shorter, food was more expensive etc. I don’t hanker for those things.
I’d like to live in a place where we kept the clean streets, politeness, affordable housing, lower crime etc. but gained new technology, medical advances etc. I think it should have been possible to have all those improvements, without losing the good things. I want my smartphone, but I also want to wander around town without worrying ing about it being snatched off me by some kid on an e-bike, and if they did, I’d want the police to get on the case.
So why did it go wrong, and why did it go right? Were there unavoidable trade offs, or is something else at play?
The remembered politeness might be partly nostalgia, but the physical and economic changes are unquestionably real. Younger folks weren't there so they don't believe it was possible.
There is often an imagined past, but vending machines on the outside of shops is not. I was there and I remember the local shop having a Polo machine outside. The shopkeeper could lock up and leave it and come back in the morning and take any money out and add more Polos and it was extremely unlikely that someone would either rob it or vandalise it.
No-one does this today. I know someone who makes some smart vending machines and they all have to be within a space where someone is working, and somewhere that can be locked up at night.
And this is all the fault of the politicians. I don't always like to say that. Often, problems are the choices voters make and who they choose. But in this case, the public never stopped asking for criminals to be stopped and dealt with.
And one effect of bad private spaces is that it leads to a growth of private spaces, of people trying to create private moats. So, the train is full of people swearing in front of your children, you think maybe you'll get a car instead. The swings in the park are knackered, you take the kids to an indoor play centre. If you want to not live amongst criminals and litterbugs, you move to the affluent market town full of people who were taught to behave properly that doesn't even need policing. And then you work to stop new housing being built, to protect your lifestyle, so you don't have to live near the crappy people.
You have to build the incentives across society. Whether in terms of how families are formed, or how much people shopkeepers can deal with shoplifters, or always making sure there's enough cells for every convicted prisoner. It is just not good enough to not address crime. It's bad for the people receiving it and it's also bad for teenagers who should be corrected and will live better lives on the straight and narrow.
I appreciate the attempt to strip the politics away from this particular version of nostalgia
I’ve been living in Kraków for the last 3 years and it is just like the world you remember - clean streets, well-maintained parks, lots of police patrols and far less antisocial behaviour. There is still, unfortunately, a lot of graffiti and the taxes are higher, because all those public services have to be paid for, but it doesn’t need to be a nostalgic dream.
I'm a lefty but, still, I share about half of your "far-right" nostalgia. I find the explosion in regulations bewildering and wonder where they came from. Who was it who decided we need all these new rules and regulations? Why are the paving-stones so broken and why aren't the street-lights working? Like you, I also wish we saw the occasionally policeman on patrol and I wish all those minor crimes would not be ignored.
We have a bunch of thieves who waltz into my apartment building a couple of times a week to steal all the parcels. We have the thieves on camera but the building manager says he is not allowed to share a description of them for fear of libel and the police don't seem interested in catching them despite dozens of reports. How did we get there?
There are, undoubtedly, a whole bunch of problems that have got much worse since my youth in the 70s but about half of the problems you mention were much worse in the 70s than they are now. Crime is down. Murders are way down from their peak in 2000 and about where they were in the mid 70s. You only have to watch an episode of Call the Midwife to see that not everyone lived comfortable lives in the 50s and 60s and the streets of London were not as pristine as you remember.
It may be because I live in a lefty city but the streets around my house are swept everyday and the bins are emptied and the flowers are taken care of. Our road-sweeper even has a similar hat to the bloke in the banner at the top of this page. The local businesses leave their furniture outside and it is not stolen or damaged.
I share your disgust at the accumulation of regulations and the massive growth in budgets even as services dwindle from where they were. But, like some of your other commenters, I don't think it's useful to pretend that everything is worse than it used to be. I recently came back to England after a couple of decades away and I was really surprised at how well-kept most places are. Inner London looks really nice compared to when I used to live there (Hooray for gentrification!) and it's a pleasure to walk around my city and see all the outdoor cafe tables and pub furniture. It feels almost European!
I bet that if we focused properly on what has got better and what has got worse we'd have a much better shot at fixing the broken stuff. I expect the lefties as well as the "far-right" would agree on that.
As far we can determine that is true, but crime rates now are a fraction of what they were in the 80s and 90s and the trend has been downwards for a quarter of a century.
I think it is fine to hanker for these things -and social care, NHS, local authorities have been severely hampered by needless austerity since 2010. I appreciate your thoughtful writings from what I see as a centre-right perspective. How have decent Conservatives let this happen on their watch? I'm really perplexed.
I wonder were crime rates higher but among criminals, rather than the broader population?
A lot of people would be OK with higher crime rates as long as they were confined to those who had ‘opted in’ so to speak
The problem is this old life doesn't exist outside of Hollywood and Hallmark films.
1. Crime of almost all types is lower in most places (only recently has there been a small surge) What we see is availability bias where you see every door dash theft from everywhere, all at once and throughout time.
2. The cleanliness / roads is a misnomer as well. Just go back to NYC in the 70s and 80s.... or wait.... go back up until 1950, and NYC was, literally, a cesspool.
3. Door dash is mentioned but think about that.... the average citizen, or even the lower class ones who live in rougher neighborhoods, can afford to not only buy dinner out but have it delivered by another human at premium prices.
4. That past existed at what standard of living? Smaller house, no TV, limited Radio, very little retirement, etc. etc. It's not that salaries haven't kept up.... it's that our standard of living exploded. If you went, today, and lived the same standard of living as 1950... You could do it on a very simple salary. By that I mean house, car, and amenities (which you wouldn't have many)
5. What you described is a nostalgia bias, typically by people who never lived in that time frame. These are Gen Xers, by and large, who lived through the worst crime, the worst, decrepitness, and the worst in social upheaval during and shortly after the Vietnam war. They don't want to go back to their childhood, they want to go back to their grandparents one as they imagine it...
That's just a few points to consider about those thoughts.
Crime rates in the 50s and 60s were significantly lower than today.
What data is there on the 50s and 60s and how reliable is it? I can find stats showing that recorded crime in the UK peaked in the 90s and is lower today than it was in the early 80s.
There are some methodological inconsistencies (and the current British Crime Survey series only goes back to 1981) but no doubt at all that levels of reported/recorded crime rocketed from the 1970. This is from a BBC bitesize article.
Counter-Point.... In away, the 50s would certainly be considered amazing after coming out of the Depression AND WWII… then it got choatic again…
What’s also missing is that there was the Draft for the Korean war and that had about the same number of dead but more total casualties than Vietnam so that wasn’t even a ‘great’ time…
Oh, and don’t forget the start of the cold war panic and Mcarthyism… Then you got into the 60s and 70s protests / riots / draft for Vietnam, etc. and then the crazy crime of the late 70s to mid 90s.
I can’t find a lot about that period to really be nostaligic about.
You’re writing from an American perspective. Simon is in the UK. We did not have Vietnam or half the other nonsense you experienced in the US.
That's a valid critique. I got sucked into the milliue that everything right wing ends up coming back to conservative expereince in the US.
Of course that existed. I’m living in a rare outpost where it still does exist, though rapidly eroding.
Fifteen years ago, yoofs smashing flowerpots was - here, in our behind the times little enclave -pretty noticeable. Dealt with by parents getting together, BTW.
You’re jaded - you don’t remember a Time Before. You think its mythical - but us, we’re speed running the last 60 years and can see the decline clearer than you can.
I'm not sure it's so rare is my point. Where is all this smashing of flowerpots happening un contested? My point is that it's better today.... My point is the nostalgia for what you think was back there is myopic and missing context becasue it wasn't better...it was worse. The 50s had greasers and gangs roaming around, the 60s had race riots, the 70s had anti war riots, Crime outside of inner cities is lower. Standards of living are higher.
What existed back then was worse than today. I'm not the jaded one here. You're the one who thinks it's worse now, not me. Put the mirror down and stop looking behind you at Hallmark cinema nostalgia.
I wrote an analysis of your point and even used your quote here.
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/apocalypse-always
I wrote an in depth analysis based on these topics trying to uncover the data. https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/apocalypse-always
I hanker for some of this, just as Simon does, being a similar age.
But I also recognise it wasn’t all rosy, some things were terrible. Standards of living were lower, life expectancy was shorter, food was more expensive etc. I don’t hanker for those things.
I’d like to live in a place where we kept the clean streets, politeness, affordable housing, lower crime etc. but gained new technology, medical advances etc. I think it should have been possible to have all those improvements, without losing the good things. I want my smartphone, but I also want to wander around town without worrying ing about it being snatched off me by some kid on an e-bike, and if they did, I’d want the police to get on the case.
So why did it go wrong, and why did it go right? Were there unavoidable trade offs, or is something else at play?
The remembered politeness might be partly nostalgia, but the physical and economic changes are unquestionably real. Younger folks weren't there so they don't believe it was possible.
Depends on what you do to bring “back” that golden age.
What you can't understand is that not everything is mediated and commodified.
There's no mirrors/Hallmark/Hollywood here - my personal memories and what's been handed down by my own people paint a different picture.
Greasers and Vietnam protesters don't figure that large.
Its organic culture