World’s biggest problem: CRIME
The biggest unaddressed problem in the world today is crime between individuals and within families and other groups. We tend to focus on the crimes of governments, but they pale in comparison.
The following website reveals the distribution of crimes among the world’s nations ranked from worst to best, #1 through #146. Venezuela stands at #1 as the most unsafe and tiny Andorra as the most safe at #146. The four safest major countries are Oman, Taiwan, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp
My interest in these numbers stem from the constant barrage of crime news coming from the United States. This was to be expected due to the lack of gun controls. I was surprised to learn there were 55 countries that were less safe than us. The figure show that Russia is much safer than the U.S. and China is way safer than both..
Uppermost in peoples minds are the homicide rates in the world, calculated per 100,000 people. In the most recent figures for 2020, there were 458,000 total murders. This surpasses totals for wars, insurrections and terrorism. The deaths due to drought, famine and other natural disasters are not included.
Here’s how the regions of the world rank, best to worst, in their murder rates per 100,000 people:
World average: 5.8 - Europe: 2.2 - Asia: 2.3 - Oceana: 2.5 - Africa: 12.7 - USA: 15.
Comparing to Russia where I now live, the murder rate has declined ever since 2018 when it stood at 8.21 to a rate of 6.8 in 2021. You can dig deeper and check these numbers in the special UN report:
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/global-study-on-homicide.html
I took an interest in these numbers because my niece was headed for a Spring Break in Cancun, Mexico at an all-included resort. The murder rate for Cancun in 2021 was 44.9, the highest in Mexico. Also I get questions from family and friends about safety in Russia. To be sure there are established ways to avoid becoming a statistic and these abound on the internet.
When I talk about a safer world in this column, I generally think about the criminalities of nations and the selfishness of elites. I believe these can be fixed. But how does one deal with the fact that there are just some bad people out there. I believe there are answers in sociology, anthropology and psychology; we just need to mobilize these disciplines to find answers that start in the cradle. For the hopelessly mentally ill, they need to be segregated from society for their and everyone’s protection.
What I am saying, if in a “new AI world” we can give priority to civil crimes, war crimes and disaster mitigation, there is no problem humans can’t solve, maybe with a big assist from AI.