The joys of data

If you are as fascinated by the cultural measure provided by various rates you might be interested to know that burglaries have been going down for a long time and divorce rates are doing the same dive, despite the frequency with which they are misrepresented.

P.S. The first of the divorce links is a long PDF of a paper, even if you have no interest in reading the whole thing you might want to check out the part on trends in marriage and divorce for a graph of divorce rates that goes back to the nineteenth-century. The second link is just a short post on the Freakonomics blog.

Update: I just found the new article TNR has on the horrors of our current imprisonment rate and how changing the way we look at imprisonment might help with lowering the crime rate. Basically, it seems that consistency of punishment has a far, far greater effect on crime than does the severity of punishment. If you are curious, I linked to several other explorations of this stuff a few months ago.

Update II: Too Sense has some problems with the TNR article that I think are well worth reading, though I am warning that balanced comment is not exactly what Too Sense does. This is why I adore them, but still.