00:35:07.300This is a problem with something is going wrong in society itself.
00:35:11.280Where we think that, for some reason, knives are just a normal thing.
00:35:14.520I think this was a domestic occasion because there was a 50-year-old woman who was also arrested and questioned but not charged in connection with this.
00:36:00.360So, just to give you their summary, in fact.
00:36:02.840So, in 22-23, there were 50,000 offences involving a sharp instrument in England and Wales, which is 4% higher, but obviously lower than 2020.
00:36:10.280Since then, the total number of offences involving a knife or sharp instrument, which includes Greater Manchester, but excludes Devon and Cornwall, because the recording system apparently is something weird.
00:36:22.400But I can't imagine there isn't that much in Devon and Cornwall.
00:36:25.540It has gone down slightly, but again, it's not anything significant.
00:37:44.760Yeah, so this is where I got the thing.
00:37:46.900And so, you'll notice that there are, I mean, parts that are not necessarily very diverse, where they have much larger numbers of stabbings now.
00:38:21.740For example, Gwent in Wales, a small area of Wales, they had the largest percentage increase in knife offences from 284 in 2022 to 372 in 2023, 96% Welsh.
00:39:24.520But, obviously, in a sincerely believing religious society where there's more monitoring and more of a sense that this is just intrinsically wrong, as opposed to what penalty I might pay right now.
00:39:36.340So, yeah, there's going to be less inhibition to commit these kinds of crimes.
00:40:00.740Yeah, they don't need to work anymore.
00:40:02.320I mean, even in the 70s and 80s, it was normal to have a job as a kid, as a teenager.
00:40:06.460You kind of had to, and your parents would make you if you didn't want to do it.
00:40:10.060It's really hard to get one now, though, when you're competing with the entire third world at very low wage rates.
00:40:15.300I mean, I remember, again, I'm born in 97, I remember trying to go and get Saturday jobs, and I had a couple, but you couldn't just walk up to somewhere and hand your CV in.
00:40:23.880You have to either do the sort of multiple rounds of interviewing process because they've already advertised online via LinkedIn, or you're competing for, you know, your Saturday shift at McDonald's with...
00:40:34.040Sure, but even if they aren't working, don't just, why are they roaming the streets?
00:40:38.980No, get them to go to, like, Scouts or something.
00:40:59.260I mean, that is a massive proportion, obviously, but it's not just kids.
00:41:02.980And so, you know, like, for 82% of the cases, it's adults doing this.
00:41:10.380So there's just this huge, like you say, breakdown in social norms, where the expectation inside of me, and when I was a kid, if I got into...
00:41:19.500If I had a problem with someone, well, I'd have a fight with them, right?
00:41:22.780And, okay, I might get a bloody nose or something.
00:41:29.400And that seems to have escalated to where, well, we've both got knives, so we're going to have a knife fight now, which is obviously atrocious.
00:41:37.660And, of course, the authorities just don't know what to do.
00:41:39.860But, of course, we had knives as kids.
00:41:41.480We just would have never thought about using them.
00:45:52.720This is why we brought you on today to chat about your work.
00:45:55.700Because you've done a lot of investigation into what heritable traits might incline you to be persuaded by what political beliefs, if I know correctly.
00:46:03.880Yeah, although, you know, I'm not a specialist in political psychology.
00:46:06.960People like Jonathan Haidt, and there are many others, investigate these things.
00:46:30.480So when you look at a population, we're trying to explain the differences in those populations with respect to a trait that can be attributed to genetics rather than other factors.
00:46:40.780It's about 30 to 40 percent for political ideology.
00:46:43.220How do you know that it's genetic and not just the consequence of being raised in a household that is Republican or Democrat?
00:46:50.220Well, one obvious way to do this is look at twin studies.
00:46:53.200So identical twins that are raised apart in very different environments.
00:46:56.240We've got tens of thousands of those twin pairs now.
00:46:59.020Follow them throughout their life course and look at, you know, what's the political ideology of those around them, their school, their parents, etc., and look at how they end up.
00:47:06.880And by political ideology, we don't mean vote labor or vote conservative.
00:47:10.720It's more like your personality traits that tend to incline you in one direction or another.
00:47:15.700And look, these systematically differ between men and women on average and between individuals.
00:47:20.860So, yeah, these kinds of things can explain some of our behavior.
00:47:24.820How do you feel about retributive justice?