Hahaha. Great point.

The U.S. is one of the higher-trust societies, socially, while also being extremely racially diverse.

It sounds like pro-social culture and your people being rich probably matter more than race, and Eastern Europe has a critical deficit in both of those. :p

Mostly thanks to "inheriting" it from russia in form of being post-soviet satellites... it took decades for most countries (and for other it is still in progress) to get from "you need bribe or connections to get anywhere in bureaucracy" for example.

What do you mean? For instance, Poland escaped Soviet block, is almost unilaterally composed of Polish people, and yet look at the chart: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

The countries with lowest crime numbers in EU per capita are (ordered by crime rate increasing): Slovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Cyprus, Slovenia, Czechia, Poland, Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Romania.

All of them are socially pretty homogenous. Most of them escaped Soviet block. Some even escaped Soviet Union. On the other hand, look at the countries from the other side of chart (this time, rate decreasing): Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Germany.

As this data concerns only EU, there is no UK here, but as I remember, it had around 3x crime rate as the Republic of Ireland, which would put it on the tops of the EU list.

Of course, increased diversity might not be the only differentiator between the countries from the top of the list and those from the bottom, but I think it defeats your point (almost as if you were racist for having irrational fears against living in a post-soviet society, which aren't backed by numbers).

I think focusing exclusively on latest data is problematic. Many post soviet countries had huge amounts of crime in the 90s and early 2000s. Crime rates gradually decreased after they joined the EU until they reached their current levels.

The degree of ethnic homogeneity did not increase during that time, if anything it slightly decreased (or significantly in some major cities).

One possible explanation is that people willing to engage in low level crime simply moved to richer western countries because well they were (and still are) richer... e.g. in Norway Lithuanians are the second largest group of people who are imprisoned (after local Norwegians). The situation is similar in some other Western European countries. I'm not an expert but if I wanted to rob/steal from people and businesses I'd probably do that in Norway, Germany, or Switzerland rather than Romania or Lithuania. The risk versus reward ratio seems much better there. Also there prisons are way nicer (especially in Norway).

This is disingenuous to say that people emigrated in order to do crime. But you could also find statistics on sexual assaults which also suggest that rape is a lot more prevalent in western europe (and probably, that the rates since the 90s didn't change much on the east).

I would say, that based on my experience on growing in Poland (I was born in 1998), the people become richer and suddenly everybody now seems to be minding own business. So after you fill some economic needs, the will to pick on people decreases. But that will is surely dependent on how much you trust others are think similar (and won't rob you).

Anyway, the parents' commenter point was > near perfect "ethnical cohesion", doesn't stop crime or increase trust in any way

I can't see why should it be true. Perhaps it doesn't stop crime completely, but perhaps it actually increases trust. Based on the argument above we can't know.

> This is disingenuous to say that people emigrated in order to do crime

Why? Obviously the majority of those who emigrated did not do so with the intention to commit crimes. However some people did. The question is whether they are under/over represented in the emigrant population.

Another aspect is that high emigration generally results in better conditions for those who remain due to higher demand for labor. Which might also decrease crime due to lower unemployment/higher wages.

> Perhaps it doesn't stop crime completely, but perhaps it actually increases trust

According to https://ourworldindata.org/trust Eastern European countries have lower interpersonal trust compared to most Western European countries and especially Scandinavia.

Of course it's also a question of attitude. And people in different cultures might interpret the question differently and/or be predisposed to answer it in a certain way even. Then again being from the region myself I can't really say that people here trust others more than in WE, ussually it's the opposite especially outside of certain social groups.

That's true for countries in which russia directly meddles. Countries that thrown off the yoke, like Czechia or Poland have one of the lowest crime rates in the world.

You might be correct now. They are probably correct about the 90s or early 2000s.

Then again crime rates in Belarus for instance don't seem to be much higher than in Poland or Lithuania.

That's one of the sources of Lukashenko's legitimacy, just as economic growth is a source of CCP's legitimacy. Russia has to reason to destabilize Belarus since their ruler is complicit.