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...