'Indictable offense' is a particular kind of crime, and one that changes over time as laws change and reporting improves. It even says that improved reporting is responsible for part of the effect in the first dot-point after the graph. The graph itself is explicitly titled "known to police" because of exactly this issue. To take that graph and claim a 50-fold difference in actual crime is extremely disingenuous.
Moldbug is saying that the Victorians nearly abolished crime and that the modern UK government can't - so is the solution the same as in Victorian times: just don't record so much of it?
'Indictable offense' is a particular kind of crime, and one that changes over time as laws change and reporting improves.
Yes, but the change can be in both directions. Improved reporting means more offenses get recorded; but changes in how society perceives crime means things that used to be indictable offenses (such as stealing a pair of scissors) no longer are--either the laws are taken off the books entirely, or they are no longer enforced because people don't think it's "fair" to convict someone of a crime if all they did was steal a pair of scissors. These two effects work in opposite directions.
It even says that improved reporting is responsible for part of the effect in the first dot-point after the graph.
But it doesn't say how much, because it can't; there's no way to know. And it does not say what difference changes in the laws and in society's perception of crime made, or whether that difference was, as I suggested above, in the opposite direction.
is the solution the same as in Victorian times: just don't record so much of it?
I think the solution Moldbug is implicitly suggesting is to make it clear to everyone that if you commit a crime, you will be caught and you will be punished; in other words, he is saying the problem today is with society's attitude towards crime.
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99...
Crime statistics are on p. 14.