Closer To The Ideal

Why do people think crime is getting worse?

The year 2009 was a grim one for many Americans, but there was one pleasant surprise amid all the drear: Citizens, though ground down and nerve-racked by the recession, still somehow resisted the urge to rob and kill one another, and they resisted in impressive numbers. Across the country, FBI data show that crime last year fell to lows unseen since the 1960s – part of a long trend that has seen crime fall steeply in the United States since the mid-1990s.

At the same time, however, another change has taken place: a steady rise in the percentage of Americans who believe crime is getting worse. The vast majority of Americans – nearly three-quarters of the population – thought crime got worse in the United States in 2009, according to Gallup’s annual crime attitudes poll. That, too, is part of a running trend. As crime rates have dropped for the past decade, the public belief in worsening crime has steadily grown. The more lawful the country gets, the more lawless we imagine it to be.

I’ve written before about how safe New York City is.

I was just recently in Atlanta. I ran into a woman who seemed to think there was more war in the world now than ever before. I told her what I’ve read, which is that there is less war now than at any other time known to historians. She looked at me like I was crazy.

I am not sure what is going on, but it seems like a lot of the public wants to believe the world is in worse shape than it is. There is, after all, a segment of the population who believes that the threat of Islamic terrorism is the worst threat America has ever faced – as if the Soviet Union, with enough nuclear weapons to end all life on earth, was somehow a joke, something to laugh at.

Are these misperceptions due to Americans dislike of reading history? I get that the economy is bad, but violence everywhere seems contained. Why do people believe otherwise? What reference points do they use?

Obviously I’m biased, since I’m trying to do a start-up in New York, but everything about this rings true:

Tumblr and Posterous are the two most prominent “tumblogging” sites, i.e. sites that make blogging more straightforward by making it easier to post media. Both were launched within six months. (Actually, Posterous was started later than Tumblr.)

But now Tumblr has been an Alexa Top 100 site for a while and is still growing strong. Meanwhile Posterous has about 4 times less uniques. Yet Posterous has everything to win: it’s a Y Combinator company with top-tier investors like Chris Sacca and Mitch Kapor. Its founders are experienced software engineers with computer science degrees from Stanford. How come it’s eating dust from a small startup started by a high school dropout?

The answer is as easy as it is counter-intuitive: Tumblr is a New York company and Posterous is a Silicon Valley company.

Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.

Posterous is extremely well engineered. There’s nothing wrong with it. Every single thing about it is well thought out. But it’s not just that it’s less pretty (though it is). It’s just not designed as well as Tumblr is.

…In fact, everything about Posterous is nice. It’s very nice. I’m not here to bash Posterous, I think it’s a tremendous product and I wish them the best of luck.

But everything about Tumblr is better designed. I used the landing page as one example, but there are tons of features where Tumblr shines by its gorgeous design.

Meanwhile Posterous is typical of the Silicon Valley engineering mindset where everything is measured, ranked, weighted. It’s like Google. And having terrible design like Google is great if you have a technology edge. But if you’re in a market where what matters is design edge, that’s not enough. There needs to be great design, by which I don’t mean looks (though they’re important), but how it works for the end user.

…The first is that New York has truly come of age as a startup hub, with its own “style”, its own way of doing things, its own mindset, which can sometimes — not always, but sometimes — kick Silicon Valley’s ass.

Incanter is a statistical package written in Clojure. It brings some bits of the R-language to the JVM.