Obviously the rate was 0 in 1850 because cars didn’t exist. You need a steady state of car ownership for theft comparisons by population to make sense. More recently the number of cellphone thefts spiked as more people owned cellphones, its true but not an accurate reflection of overall crime.

Historically you can do numbers of thefts vs numbers of cars but that’s not a great. There was 61.7m passenger cars + 12.7m commercials vehicles in the 1960’s vs 140.7m passenger cars + 42.8m commercials vehicles by 1988.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1246890/vehicles-use-uni...

From 1990, the numbers increase roughly with population: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle...

328,200 / 61.7m= 0.53% of vehicles stolen in 1960, vs 1,432,900 / 140.7m = 1.02% in 1988, huge jump but less extreme than 183 (1960) vs 657 (1990).

By 1960 the overwhelming majority of households in America already had cars. Increasing number of cars beyond that (to modern times where many households have 2 or even more cars) is unlikely to have played a significant role. This is indirectly corroborated by the fact that near to every other form of crime was much lower in 1960 than modern times, as well. The two exceptions being burglary, whose levels we fell below and have stayed below since 2014 (well at least as of 2019 data), and murder which was just statistical noise.

Historically what happened is that crime started rising in the mid 60s and then reached catastrophic levels in 80s-90s to the point that many were predicting the complete collapse of society. This is what drove all of the 'tough on crime' rhetoric and legislation of that era, or a certain politician's choice of referring to a certain demographic group as 'super-predators.' Crime rates then began plummeting over the next 30 years into modern times. And now we're back to seeing a rise in many forms of crime. What remains to be seen is whether it's noise, or whether we're headed 'into the 80s' again.

Or maybe 30 years from now we'll learn that we've all poisoned ourselves inadvertently, again.. The lead-crime hypothesis [1] is one explanation for the absurdly high rates of crime in the 80s-90s, and then it's subsequent collapse.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

22% of households still didn’t have cars in 1960. We can get into why households is a poor metric but 1960 was simply a low point not a long term average.

Murder per 100k. 1960 5.1, 2014: 4.5, 2019 5.0. Go back to 1950: 5.3, 1940: 6.3 and it hit 9.5 in 1934.

PS: Lead is one factor post 1960’s, but changing demographics is another. The post war baby boom adds a lot of kids who aren’t killing anyone as preteens/young teens but average into population statistics. The low point of births during WWII is especially important when those years line up with older teens more likely to commit crimes. Add in a good economy and it’s a perfect storm for low crime.

I would not be entirely surprised if the homicide rate was higher during the Great Depression and WW2, but I'm not really sure what that means, if anything. Please cite the data you're referencing, and stop cherry picking. I don't expect you to get decadal averages or whatever, but at least get something pretty averagish looking for the 'group' of time we're talking about. Comparing local mins to local maxes is something we ought leave to lying politicians.

Yeah the vehicular ownership rate only increased from 80% or whatever in the 60s to about 90% now a days. But I'm not saying that's why the increase in vehicles probably isn't a big factor. What I'm saying is that vehicular theft is a very intentional crime. Crimes like phone theft are highly opportunistic - somebody sees a fancy phone somebody forgot, and just decides to pocket it. So more people have more phones means more crime due to more random opportunity. But car theft is overwhelmingly a targeted crime, so changes in the number of cars is going to have a pretty negligible effect above some baseline point. It's like bank robbery - you're not going to just inherently have more bank robberies per capita because there are more banks.

The US only has national death registry starting partway though 1933. Thus 1934 isn’t arbitrary it’s the cutoff before you need to extrapolate statistics from incomplete information.

Here’s one scholarly analysis, but I don’t want to get into various assumptions underlying such extrapolations: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2061893?x=-53.76031957390146&y=...

Households generally hold multiple people, a spouse, teen, or grandparent without a car can’t have their car stolen.

As to car theft being targeted, chop shops can only sell parts to people repairing actual cars which promotes theft based on the number of cars. Similarly local communities don’t represent the demographics of the entire country. Poor communities in 1960 had vastly fewer cars than they do today.

Bah, come on with this nonsense. You obviously know the problem there. Not only is that data noisy as, that paper you're linked isn't even reporting said data but trying to challenge it. As the paper leads with, "Did the United States experience a surge of homicide early in the century? Various scholars answer "yes", but..." Well, then what are we going to do? Have me cite the various scholars while you cite the ones challenging them, and we see who has the most twinkies at the end?

Similarly on the car stuff, I do agree with you. You can't strip cars for profit unless there's a minimally large number of people using cars, but we were obviously well beyond that point by 1980! 80% of households had cars! It's not like there was a shortage of people needing/wanting parts. That's far more than enough to create all the sort of venues necessary to be able to comfortably resell parts.

Oh I agree the data is nosy, that’s why I didn’t quote anything before 1934. We don’t have anything approaching good data going back 3,000 years, but you don’t need precise numbers to notice say piracy is down dramatically from the age of sail. Even fragmentary evidence works when the differences are that large. Compare the global average rate of executions to fragmentary historic numbers and you don’t need to extrapolate.

> It’s not like there was a shortage of people needing/wanting parts

The problem here is you get a lot of different parts from a single stolen car. Steal 10 Honda Civics and you might be able to use almost every part from the first car, but by the 10th only those parts you have 10 buyers for are valuable.

The equilibrium is a function of the number of cars people own and the percentage of mechanics willing to use stolen parts. So even if a handful of people can steal an arbitrarily larger number of cars the limiting factor is mechanics willing to use stolen parts. Total number of mechanics scale with number of cars, but the percentage of those that are criminals can vary through time.

I'd sum up here using your example of executions, because I think it segues nicely. I'm sure you realize a big factor in the reduction of executions is because we greatly limited the use of execution. In 16th century England things as absurd as vagrancy were punishable by death! [1] Idle hands are the Devil's workshop, taken to extremes. That's part of the reason I feel so strongly on this (historic crime/violence, not cars) topic. When you're that liberal with your use of excessive punishment, there's not much room left for casual criminality. And modern examples like El Salvador show that this recipe still works.

On the car thing, I think you made some good points. I regret dragging us down this line of argumentation which has been pretty strained, though informative! You were talking about light crime in general, and I voluntarily picked cars. That was pretty stupid. Anyhow, it's been fun meeting another impassive argumentative data whore. May our kind spread! And may we disagree again, soon!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit...