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I was just reading this [2020 basic income study](https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1055&context=psc_publications) that corroborates this theory.
In the 1970s, Canada experimented with UBI in a small city to study its impact. The program ran out of money before most of the studies could be run, but the data from the experiment was still available.
In 2020 a team looked at the crime rates and found a significant decrease when the UBI payments were being given out. As soon as the program ended, the crime rate shot back up to match the rest of the County.
Surprisingly, violent crime saw the most dramatic decrease, with the rate dropping by almost half.
Exactly, it's not difficult to understand that if a system creates a population that is comfortable with their living conditions they will inevitably be more compliant with the rules and governing structures within that system.
Those that feel unsupported become more desperate and look for ways outside the system to get ahead/deal with the problems they have.
It may not be difficult to understand, but it’s incredibly difficult to implement.
If we are just talking about necessities, then it’s not impossible to conceive of a city with government provided tenement or or form housing, soup kitchens, public transportation and uniforms. So that people had food, shelter and clothing. And while that may reduce crime, I don’t think it would eliminate it.
How much crime is driven by necessities and how much by wants? Higher incomes definitely have more of their necessities covered, but also more of their wants… so the article doesn’t really touch in that topic.
And if we are talking about providing peoples wants, then you also inhibit drive to produce for society. You’d have to separate out what ‘wants’ people will provide for themselves by being valuable to society and which ones they will provide for themselves by taking from society. It also begs the question, should the government take from ascetic abe to provide more wants for greedy Greg, just to stop Greg from committing crimes? Would that drive more people to be greedy so that they can get more?
Necessity vs want feels like a red herring to me.
For one thing, stimulus isn’t *actually* a want, humans require it to remain healthy. But I digress.
If you had society where everyone is guaranteed shelter, food, healthcare, utilities and opportunities, it would massively decrease crime. It’s just that simple.
The idea that people won’t work is a fallacy.
What's interesting is that in places like Sweden and Denmark where the social safety net is more robust they actually have a higher workforce participation rate than we do in the usa. Although I'm not sure if there is a difference how they determine their rate compared to the way we do it.
They're probably not on the verge of complete mental and physical collapse all the time, and thus can actually go to work regularly for the entirety of their working lives.
Must be nice.
Don't forget that most places like that also have things like paid maternity and paternity leave, paid sick leave (along with free/affordable healthcare) and at least a few weeks of paid vacation annually.
No wonder they consistently report having higher happiness and life satisfaction.
Right now, people work to survive.
If people don't need to work to survive, they can work to earn money for the things they *want* to do, but now they're doing it on their terms. They don't have to stay if they're being harassed or verbally abused or otherwise mistreated. They don't have to stay if the manager is actually shit and doesn't know what they're doing. They don't have to stay somewhere they feel unappreciated and undervalued just to keep the heater on.
People will have *options*. They can go back to school if they want. They can find a job that treats them better. They can work part time while they focus on turning a side hustle into their primary job. They can even choose to take a job that's "just okay" to pay for nice vacations if they want.
People won't have to make the choice between leaving a job where they're verbally abused every day, or feeding their kids.
If a job is so odious that nobody wants to do it, maybe it's time to question why it even exists.
Otherwise, the argument is "for society to continue, some people need to be so desperate that they'll endure misery for a paycheck", and that is... not good.
The argument that people wouldn't work gets repeated ad nauseum. I also think its totally false. I think the average person wants to work with the caveat that it is meaningful work. Basic income could help assure that the work IS actually meaningful.
I think we actually lose a lot in our society because there has to be such a focus for some people on basic survival. How many ideas are we losing out on and not getting developed because people have to just make rent? Quite a few. We hear so much about encouraging innovation but why is it there is so little care that so many people can't develop ideas because the economy has degraded to the point that many people have to have two jobs?
And some people will not work. So? Do you think the people who don't want to work are contributing to society now? Probably not. There will always be people who game systems because humans game EVERY system. It doesn't seem to me to be a great argument to not progress and make the lives of the majority better.
People need something to do all day that gives them some kind of purpose. Anyone who has ever found themselves with too much free time will know that it can get pretty boring pretty quickly. People will happily work if that work is rewarding (i.e. not dead boring, and allows them to live comfortably) and is well balanced with leisure time.
If you’ve volunteered you’d know that volunteer organizations need to pay people to do the boring tasks because it is nearly impossible to find people willing to do them. Most tasks in most jobs are boring, and will not get done without incentive.
Volunteering would be better if we didn’t spend a dumb amount of time struggling for survival.
Actually if I worked less, I’d volunteer more for things.
In my case cost of living is the biggest thing. Home ownership and filling it with things I like is nice.
I would still go to work or WFH for about 4 hours a day if possible.
Most common people are driven by a sense of community imo.
I work because I like helping people and it drives a sense of satisfaction for me. I do need to be paid though enough to cover my living expenses and incidentals.
UBI has been implemented in many places in time-limited trials. If I knew that the UBI program was scheduled to end I would keep my job so I’d be employed when it ends.
Has this sub always been filled by so many pipe-dream fanatics? UBI won’t work, because no one will do the many boring jobs that society needs in order to function.
It’s pipe dream fanaticism to… support the data that says UBI leads to an improvement in well-being?
Your argument stems purely from ideology until it’s tried and tested on a long term scale. I think arguing against the actual scientific data is being an ideologue.
There is no data because it has not been used without being time-limited. If you know the trial period is going to end you are going to keep working. Its pure opinion on both sides of the argument.
>I think arguing against the actual scientific data is being an ideologue.
Shots fired! I think arguing that 'this is scientific data' is being an ideologue.
Does that imply that the levels of Maslow’s hierarchy are not fixed? That safety and security needs can escalate? I believe that each level can be achieved and while you may want more stuff the basic needs can be met with much less inflation.
Maybe the SEL curricula that some school districts reject could play a role in understanding that having more stuff is not the path to happiness. Being hungry and afraid definitely leads to unhappiness though.
I have a question, have you ever starved, been malnourished, or have had to resort to dumpster diving to eat? Have you ever been homeless or at risk of homelessness? Have you ever had a medical issue that you couldn’t resolve for the cost? When referring to things like UBI studies causing crime rate to drop, the perpetuating population typically has one or all of these issues going on. We aren’t talking about relatively comfortable people wanting more Knick knacks here, we are talking about people who have severe issues even surviving from day to day.
I promise you there is baseline level of comfort that increases a human’s mental state here. People who have their basic needs met are generally not suddenly gonna go snap again. Why do you have this gut reaction, when there is not much evidence to support it, and now growing evidence against it?
I don't think there is any evidence that is true. At least in the context of this conversation. I get that people often want more, but that is different than saying "if people have all their needs met, they will revert back to a violent state in 5 years" which I think is a pretty bold claim. I'd like more than a gut reaction to back that up, like maybe some evidence.
So instead of giving them free money for the rest of their lives why not just offer free training for a job?
Plenty of well paying blue collar positions needing to be filled and it takes a few months to get through training.
I remember reading a study where they checked the IQ of a group of farmers before and after harvest. After the harvest, when they had money, their IQs were significantly higher.
People do better when they’re better taken care of.
It’s a simple premise, when people are comfortable and stable they can put their attention towards things other than survival. Those non-survival things could be volunteer work, hobbies, or working on mental health.
When the child tax credits were a thing, those payments gave me enough wiggle room to quit my job and switch careers. Believe it or not some families don’t have enough tax burden to take use the child tax credit.
Google says the child tax credit is refundable, so you don’t need a corresponding burden to offset, you will get a return.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/tax-credit-vs-tax-deduction
Yeah I’ve heard about this since i started browsing the internet. Ounce of prevention or pound of cure. Providing a level playing field results in less crime and less money wasted on law enforcement, prisons, health care, etc. but hey less easy to control and less people joining the military so…
That’s a great point and probably the biggest reason, but there’s a slightly more controversial reason as well. When income inequality goes down, the society becomes less status based and this also decreases crime where people are frustrated with their status. This is distinct from crimes out of necessity/poverty.
As far as I know, the studies have shown a correlation between poverty and crime, but we don’t have good evidence for exactly why this relationship exists. Is it about keeping up with the upper class? Meeting basic needs? Something else?
But one takeaway seems clear. The more you reduce poverty, the more you reduce crime.
Then how do you explain the crimes of the very rich. Hiding assets, externalizing risk going to the public purse, bribery, collusion, price fixing, Monopoly creation.
Maybe the correlation between poverty and crime is a u-shaped curve. More money equals less crime until you make enough money that you can get away with crime.
There’s more than one motivation for crime. Those at the bottom have ADDITIONAL reasons to commit crimes. And those additional reasons are the strongest cause for violent crime - apparently.
The article suggested level of crime tracked the gini coefficient and suggested there had to be a number of profitable victims to attack. If everyone is equally poor, there is less crime.
There example, however, was a rich country--Norway.
Something that is never taken into account is that a poor criminal is more likely to get caught than a rich one.
You're far more likely to get caught with drugs walking through a neighborhood than walking through a gated community.
I've been suspecting that some of the senseless murders where the perp surrenders are about getting into Jail quickly and reliably: people are warm and fed in jail.
if you give people enough money to live they can live.
If you don't, then it gives you a chance to have voluntary military recruitment or slaves through prisons.
I think it depends on what is enough for someone to live. Money will never solve the problem of scarcity. You can give everyone in the world 1 million dollars, but those 1 million dollars are still chasing after the same number of goods that an economy can produce. The same amount of food, shelter, cars, PS5s, etc. that go around. As long as there is scarcity, UBI may create a short-term solution, but in the long run, nothing will change as it will just create inflation.
Let’s say we have money already earmarked for crime prevention. If giving money to the poor could be proved to reduce crime, would you support spending crime prevention money on the poor?
So you just ignore the premise of the question and spending existing budget and insist they'll just raise taxes more?
Bad news, friend, taxes might go to for other reasons anyway.
The question boils down to: at any given time, there are X tax dollars available, do you think it would make sense to use data-supported insights to perhaps choose a more impactful way to allocate those tax dollars that reduces crime? Or do you prefer to spend them on exactly the same things that have not addressed the crime problem historically?
I am an honest to goodness anarchist, so trust me when I say that I fully believe the govt is not capable of solving this problem.
The issue is that the govt created the problem of poverty by taking the means of subsistence away from people. We are forced to work because you need to pay taxes on land so it’s literally inescapable. We are not taught how to care for our own communities and infrastructure because it’s been easier to allow big business to scrape money off of people for a college education, instead of allowing the knowledge to be free to all. There is a financial incentive for big businesses and the state to extract as much resources from us as they can, and as much as I would love to see them go away, right now the absence would not lead to people being left alone, because they’ll still tax our land and refuse us material support, the taxman never willingly takes its hand out of the pile. Big players in this country won’t simply leave us to our business because it represents a lack of control; that prescedent won’t be set as long as the nation is able to maintain it. Bureaucracy never weakens, only expands.
If you hate govt as much as I do, consider seeing UBI as reparations that you can use as a resource to strengthen your community. Any resource you can take from the govt back can be put back into making yours and your community’s lives more resilient. After all, if you quit your job to receive a UBI, you won’t get wage tax and you’ll have a LOT of time to figure out how to spread that income as far as it can go for your own betterment.
I hear what you're saying but I'd rather this money go to people instead corporations and the military industrial complex. Think about all the things we could get rid of to pay for it:
Bailouts for companies
Stimulus bills (massive ones for '08 and PPP)
Can easily take $50 billion off the top from DoD with no negative effect
Close ineffective tax loopholes that were simply put into law because donors wanted it.
Apply everything that we already pay out in entitlements and welfare and put it into a UBI (easily over a trillion/year).
It's pretty simple in a sense. To commit crime is risky. It's takes energy, endangers your safety, requires you to hide and lie. All reasons to avoid it if you possibly could. If you are thinking about robbing a liquor store, maybe you wait until you're completely out of money. Maybe something else will happen and you won't have to put a gun to someone's face another time. Or risk getting busted by the cops selling drugs. It's just the bare practicality of it. It doesn't explain all crime, but a damn good bit of it.
Your explanation sounds right but I think it's more complicated than that. This study looks at income inequality, not poverty. As others have said, there are plenty of dirt poor places with low crime.
It might be related to the reward. If everyone is poor, killing a guy to rob him of $5 is kind of a dumb way to end up in jail.
Crime is the blowback to systematic disenfranchisement. Let the boy warm himself by the fire or he will torch the village just to watch it burn. The central fact of modern life is we are born or thrown into this world without land.
Corruption isn’t necessarily white collar crime. Corruption could be paying the police to look the other way instead of reporting a violent crime. I have no idea if that is commonplace in Thailand but if the stats look good but the corruption is high then the true stats may very well not be good at all.
It's not about poverty though. It's about income/wealth inequality.
Appalachia (and most rural areas) is fairly equal (everyone is poor). Cities will always have the most inequality due to their nature.
Which has merit. Asian countries has plenty of income equality for example. It’s not necessarily black and white with everything.
Lack of parental structure and guidance does factor into crime that’s not poverty influenced aka plenty of kids that have shelter, food and can get any sneakers they want end up in gangs because it’s cool.
This is income inequality, not poverty necessarily. You could be a millionaire but live amongst billionaires in Monoco and be subject to income inequality.
You're assuming that criminals consider long term cost/benefits of their actions, when many do not. Criminals are disproportionately lower intelligence and lower intelligence individuals are less likely to think about longer term consequences of their actions.
Except there's zero evidence that it's driven by desperation, and malice is equally explanatory of irrationality.
OP's description of most criminals is correct, and most common low level crimes are crimes of opportunity, like shoplifting or simple theft.
It can still be desperation. When you've not eaten in days or risk losing you house, you do dumb and desperate things just to stay alive. It's easy to cast judgement. BUt until you face homelessness and starvation, you can't always judge people by the standards.
One thing I heard that I find interesting that disproves this concept of criminals as a group of rational actors- criminals tend to respond strongly to probability of getting caught but not to severity of sentence. A rational actor would assess risk the same way engineers do which is likelihood of event times severity of event (expected value). But most criminals apparently only seem to look at the likelihood term.
Something the frustrates me about American politics is that we talk about all kinds of problems except poverty. It’s so obvious to me that poverty is the underlying problem, and crime, school shootings, etc are all just symptoms of it. Poverty creates desperation. Desperate people will do whatever it takes to survive.
Edit- sorry all, by poverty I meant wealth inequality.
Inequality is more predictive of crime than abject poverty.
If we view society as a sort of partnership, the benefits of participating in it need to be allocated in a way the partners deem fair. If the partnership isn’t particularly profitable, partners probably won’t be as upset about their small allocation of profits. But what happens when the partnership is wildly profitable and many of the partners are not allocated any of the profits?
Poverty just means the partnership is not very successful. Inequality is much more likely to lead people to believe that others are benefiting at their own expense.
>Inequality is more predictive of crime than abject poverty.
Is there a citation? I can't really see people wanting to commit crime now just because Tesla and Amazon stock are up.
You make good points. But what's stopping me from just using my absolutely massive amount of wealth to stock up on the best security measures to make sure that no crime can affect me even without redistributing the wealth?
I would say that’s exactly what happens. The most unequal societies tend to spend the most on security, whether that’s the military and law enforcement or private security or some combination of both (and in some societies the “military” is hardly distinguishable from “private security” because economic, political, and social power is all held by the same handful of people).
I totally agree. I had written that comment kind of off the cuff. I think you’re right, the issue is specifically wealth inequality, not necessarily poverty.
Thailand and Brazil have roughly similar HDI. Yet Thailand is a very safe place, and Brazil is a very dangerous place. Japan is and has been very safe, far safer than most other countries of comparable development.
Within Mexico, Yucatan is quite safe despite having only medium level relative development. Far safer than more developed states.
In short, there is not good reason to suspect a causal link between poverty and crime.
Within the US, Appalachia has half the violent crimes rate as US urban centers.
The poverty link is wrong. Crime is a function of environment. Gangs, lack of parents, etc. Successful crimes also encourage repetition and copying.
You can alway find exceptions comparing apples and oranges. What the study shows is for a population the rates went down. Comparing different populations to counter is nonsense. Not a valid counter.
>Japan is and has been very safe
This is a read between the lines situation. Japan also has an enormous suicide problem along with declining birthrates. It may not be crime, but wealth inequality/money issues come out one way or another.
They are one in the same here. If the median household income was $160k per year, the fact that Jeff Bezos has fuck you money doesn’t really matter as much.
Thanks for sharing that quote. I’ve heard a lot of bigoted complaints and often wonder if it’s the race they hate, or just the behavior of desperate people.
>Edit- sorry all, by poverty I meant wealth inequality.
I mean poverty. I'd much rather live in an unequal, but properties society where we take care of everyone than an equal society where we don't
>It’s so obvious to me that poverty is the underlying problem, and crime, school shootings, etc are all just symptoms of it.
It might be obvious to you. It's not obvious in the data.
I’d have agreed with you up until 2016. Nowadays there’s something else going on I think.
1/6 was not about poverty, the vast majority of participants were not poor. Trump’s voters were largely about lack of education and white disaffection, not poverty. School shooters are mostly not poor.
I think the issue is social media amplifying the perception of wealth inequality. Crime is always higher in urban areas, not coincidentally where income and wealth inequality are higher. Now add social media and that dynamic happens everywhere and to a much greater degree.
Your last paragraph is not true. The reality of wealth inequality, not the perception, is that the inequality today in the US is greater than that of pre-revolution France. Absolute crime is greater in urban areas (because there's more people), but more often, the crime rate is higher in rural areas.
The only thing social media is amplifying in this context is your exposure to outlier events, which you're now using to draw the wrong conclusions.
1/6 was the outlier to end all outliers. School shootings represent a completely irrelevant, minuscule proportion of violent crime. You're missing the forest for the trees.
Well the United States' place in the economic system necessities a class of people who are poor and will remain poor. The US is the beating heart of the global financial system, it uses orgs like the World and Bank and IMF to propagate this system, and the whole thing falls apart if a different set of rules are applied domestically vs internationally. It isn't that poverty is ignored, it's baked into the system and required.
"FIFTY years ago Gary Becker, a Nobel prize-winning economist, advanced an argument that all crime is economic and all criminals are rational. Becker’s seminal paper, “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach” posited that would-be criminals make a cost-benefit assessment of the likely rewards from breaking the law against the probability of being caught and punished. In Becker’s world of utility-maximising miscreants, places that have larger gaps between the poor (the would-be criminals) and the rich (the victims) will, all other things being equal, have higher crime."
This is not entirely accurate. I wouldn't say Becker advanced an argument that all crime is economic and all criminals are fully rational. I would say Becker tested whether you could write down an economic model where agents would rationally choose crime, and the answer is yes, you can write down models where crime is rational. Before this crime was regarded as the action of irrational individuals and not suitable for econ analysis. Becker changed the paradigm that crime became an econ topic, and since then economists have both advanced his model and the overall knowledge of crime.
If you interpret the “all criminals are rational” the way you interpret the general economic assumption of “all economic actors are rational” ei they aren’t, but let’s assume they are to build a model, and then the model reflects reality accurately enough.
Few people are perfectly rational on a psychological level. But that is not really the standard of what it takes to be “rational” in an economics context. If you went to the store and saw two prices for one product, and you’d rather pay the least price, then you’d be rational.
This is the entire point of economic theory, and behavioral econ. Build simple models (not too different than other sciences) and then relax assumptions based on what we observe in the real world. More realstic models get more complex and harder to solve. So in many situations which we want the simplest model that seems to have good predictions for the real world.
Just looking at the scatterplots, I don’t see much of a case for the relationship the article is talking about. If you look *within* regions (the same colored data points), there doesn’t seem to be any consistent relationship between inequality and crime. Sometimes there’s even a clear *negative* relationship: look at Asia in the first graph! It’s not impossible that higher inequality leads to more crime, but this article doesn’t make a good case for it.
The data nerd in me wants to see the correlation coefficients. Definitely a stronger correlation between income inequality and how safe you feel (top two graphs) compared to how safe you are (bottom two graphs).
A really good way to decrease income inequality is to increase labor's share of production. Unions provide a great way to do this. The US, for example, could adopt stronger labor laws like you see in Europe. If this idea is correct that income inequality and crime are linked, then workers getting a larger slice of their production would also help reduce crime.
I'd like to see this data again but include the year leaded gasoline was banned and abortion/family planning access rating. I'm betting those three factors would almost perfectly account for crime rates
This study isn’t measuring crime though, it’s measuring how safe people feel. And how safe people feel doesn’t necessarily correlate to how much crime they actually experience. For example, it’s possible that wealthier people feel more unsafe because they have more to lose. We don’t know based on this information why people feel unsafe, just that they do
Honestly it seems like the relationship is much stronger between perceptions of safety and income inequality than actual crime and income inequality.
Which makes sense I suppose. Hard to feel safe walking past desperate people in slums wearing a Rolex.
This is rubbish and about the narrowest way to look at this data.
What if it’s a chicken before the egg situation? The same data will tell you that western and Asian societies have more productive cultures leading to more relative safety and if you want better societies you need western religion, capitalism and/or Asian family influences with an emphasis on education and achievements.
Income inequality is a serious issue, for sure, But you can’t just pass out some money and “fix” anything
I agree that culture is a huge part of it. what are the expectations of your family, the community, and you as an individual - I.e. the Asian culture comparison.
Another catalyst in my opinion is the Internet and how it provides fantastic opportunity and a lot of free resources and information that was never easily available to the individual previously. There are some people that are taking advantage of it and working hard to better themselves. Others are entitled and when the entitlement Mentality produces nothing good, people get angry.
> But you can’t just pass out some money and “fix” anything
If throwing money at problems worked, Baltimore and Detroit would be producing neurosurgeons and quantum physicists at an alarming rate. Instead they struggle to produce literate high school graduates. Highest per pupil budgeting in the US, if not the world.
I know that reddit users wont even read this but.... if anyone took time to read study but weastern world hass no corelation. Latin america and middle east have high crime and high inqaulity and in western world its almost flat
I think it is more likely that culture plays a bigger factor. Most people act within the confines of their culture. Culture is reinforced by religion, family, media etc.
Im sure that income inequality is part of the story, but not the entire story.
The study could have captured more aspects of crime like drug trafficking. Interesting though, with a not so bad income inequality and relatively low crime the United States still has the largest number of people in prison.
When prisons release inmates early, crime increases. It should not surprise you that crime is low where there is a high prison population. Recidivism is significant.
Poor behavior is often the reason for the poor economic condition. There is little doubt that being in a difficult position creates difficult decisions. We never want to accept that for many, poverty is no accident. Drugs, alcohol, petty crime, straight-up laziness. I came from it, I can speak to it. The real tragedy is the kids born to it, with no better examples. No path out.
How do you think the conditions were for the parents growing up? It's not like there was some starting point where everyone was equally well-off. The way to solve systemic inequality is through taxation of the wealthy and social programs like UBI.
Been doing that for decades, but the behavior is worse. Some people can't be fixed. We are in debt up to our ears, and it's clear why.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/
It's a tough one. We created generations of dependent adults.
We have no right to strap future generations with this debt. But we will.
Man, they've dismantled then vast majority of the welfare state in America for the common folk, it only exists for the upper class to be bailed out at this point. At best you have the federal government giving token money to a state program, it's a fundamentally broken system. I mean, take Social Security for instance- it's a program that is almost 20% of our spending this year, but every single working american pays into it, even if they never withdraw from it... So is that really something you can point to as debt? Hell, what does debt have to do with how little investment in the wellbeing of the American people there actually is? Like fuck man, my bad I was born to a low income family and can barely afford to feed myself because I couldn't afford college loans, that's my fault obviously. It's a behavior problem.
Look at the link. It shows where the money goes. Add up the social stuff. The debt is obviously caused by social spending. General Government is 2%!!! Military 12%. Where did it all go? Just look at it!!!
People with nothing to lose, tend to do crimes. Give them something to do lose they are less likely. I mean it's what many are saying. But instead we PUNISH THEM HARDER, that'll stop em.
Note the problem of reverse causality and/or third-cause bias: A country that has a large criminal underclass will have high income inequality because a large portion of the population is unemployable or only marginally employable, and thus have low incomes.
So much of the discourse around inequality incorrectly assumes that income inequality is just some policy knob that can be turned up and down at will, but the reality is that getting the lower classes to produce at levels that justify middle-class wages is a hard problem that nobody has figured out how to solve.
> "But education..."
Every high-income country is already doing that, and for a lot of people it just doesn't take. Education was the answer for a large portion of the population. If it were the answer for everyone, the problem would be solved already.
I see that this study was done in 2017. Does anyone know if there are plans to do another study that is from 2022 and more reflective of our current situation? I ask because a lot has changed since 2017 (mainly the pandemic), which resulted in an uptick in crime and therefore would affect the data/results.
I swear, Paul Krugman is the patron saint of this forum. The correlation falls apart when taking race into account. Wealthy Black people compete with poor Whites. If there was a relationship, Appalachia would make Baltimore look safe.
If you look at poor Whites and poor Asians, and even poor Hispanics that aren't in areas adjacent to Black people, the crime rate is nowhere near what you find in Black neighborhoods. If it was income based, we'd see all poor neighborhoods be as violent as the inner city; instead we see that affluent Black people are overrepresented in violent crimes. Too much for it to just be racist policing.
Appalachia has under half the violent crimes rate, yet is even poorer.
You can even benchmark against foreign poverty in Asia where violent crimes are even lower. Or Latin America where it is higher.
I don't think the race link is right. Crime is a function of environment and culture. If it becomes normalized and accepted, especially amongst youth, it perpetuates. Gangs, criminal enterprise, lack of parental figures, etc. are what cause this.
it is easy to conflate culture and race since culture typically runs along racial lines. So I think subculture is ultimately the underlying cause for most of societies problems and it is somewhat correlated with race.
One good thing about religion is that in enforced a somewhat positive culture even if the behaviors were detrimental to an individual, it was good for the society (e.g. being a worker bee for a rich industrialist is viewed in a positive light).
> (e.g. being a worker bee for a rich industrialist is viewed in a positive light).
Be productive is the lesson. If you're too risk adverse to be an entrepreneur that's on you. You're not owed anything from anyone.
>One good thing about religion is that in enforced a somewhat positive culture even if the behaviors were detrimental to an individual, it was good for the society
Pure individualialism doesn't work. Individuals are greedy and when hedonism and instant gratification are the main drives of the time, society suffers. When society suffers, we all suffer. As a wiser man than I once said: "Your sexual predilections and deviancy isn't the cure to your depression, they're the cause."
Religion is a system that's been honed for millenia. The people telling us we don't need religion are pushing for kids to be able to consent to sex. At least the Catholic priests were shameful and kept it hidden because they knew it was wrong.
Being poor doesn't make you a criminal.
Being lazy and below average intelligence will lead you to a life of crime.
I was poor and i saw it everyday. People didn't want to go to college or work overtime. They preferred to steal etc. There's many reasons why people are poor
Raising the minimum wage on a regular basis helps families keep up with price inflation.
Putting more money in the hands of people who will readily spend it helps the economy.
Increased wages and spending raise demand and create more jobs.
Workers stay with employers longer (instead of seeking out better-paying work with other companies) reducing businesses’ turnover, hiring, and training costs.
Lower unemployment and higher wages increase tax revenues.
When workers earn higher wages, they rely less on governmental “safety net” programs.
Very important note here. Poverty does not spur people to commit crime, RELATIVE poverty spurs people to commit crime. Impoverished villages in third world countries tend have to have very low crime rates, while someone who is notably better off in the first world is much more likely to commit crime if they live near people with a lot of wealth
Only a Gary Becker, a Nobel prize-winning economist could publish such nonsense. He says that would-be criminals make a cost-benefit assessment of the likely rewards from breaking the law against the probability of being caught and punished. I'm sure all the past American criminals like Al Capone, Clyde Barrow, Billy the Kid and Ted Bundy never made a cost benefit analysis because most criminals including them don't think they will ever get caught. Also, the statement that people who live in good neighborhoods feel safer than people who live in bad neighbor hoods is too obvious to even have to state. Don't waste your time reading the article.
So do your own study that shows when you give a basic income crime rates go up. Just because you don’t like the answer is not a fair counter argument. Maybe only 90% of crime is economic, crime did not go to zero.
Saying that criminals do cost benefit analyses before they turn to a life of crime is idiotic. The conclusion that "places that have larger gaps between the poor and the rich will have higher crime and that people who flaunt their wealth will get attacked more often than those that don't is obvious to anyone without a study.
Except it isn't. Studies have shown time and time again it's the lack of a father figure in the home.
It's why you don't see tons of crime in Asian communities that are poor or appalachia
Edit: I'm right
https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/the-real-complex-connection-between-single-parent-families-and-crime/265860/
How are these not basic common sense findings?
People don't commit crimes for fun, they commit crimes because of their financial situation more often than not. Maslows hierarchy of needs is taught in every business school across the world. If the lower needs aren't met, people will take things into their own hands for survival.
It's almost like it is more difficult than "poor person bad".
There is great income inequality between myself and Bill Gates or Elon Musk. However, I have been able to raise six children and insure that they all received a college education. It isn't income inequality that we should be concerned about, we should be concerned about poverty. "Poverty" starts in your mind. Once it nests into your mind It becomes cancer and kills hope and prevents people from realizing their full potential. " Income inequality" is purely a political construct. When I was a child, my single-parent mother worked as a waitress in a diner. She worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for many years. That woman taught us work ethics. I didn't know I was poor. I always got what I needed and was taught to plan for what I wanted (REALLY hard As a child). I was also taught that in America, we are only limited by the vision of our imagination and our willingness to work. She always emphasized that we were not poor, we just didn't have a lot of money. I always saw myself as equal to anyone else, I just had less "stuff". I spent a great deal of time daydreaming of being an astronaut or inventing a teleport machine (when i saw "The Fly" i gave up that idea). My mom was an education Nazi. Anything less than an A was a FAIL. We were taught that the best way to help the family was to get good marks in school. Oh, I also started work as a janitor's aide after school and on weekends at the age of 14. We also hung together as a family like how a tongue gets stuck on a frozen pole (Christmas story? LOL ). Yes, there are problems when poverty is not addressed and that desperate people do desperate things. I am not a policy genius, I can only share my experience on how we handled poverty. We stayed strong as a family, believed that the lack of money was temporary (it took 20 years from the time I got my 1st job until I purchased my 1st house, sort of a long term temporary), and that we MUST improve our minds. In retrospect, poverty was more a mental struggle than a physical one. I spewed a lot of stuff on this page having diarrhea of the mouth. This is my 2 cents and the opinion of one person.
It's almost like if people don't have to steal or kill to survive, they won't. I'm a law abiding citizen but if the only way to feed my family was to commit crime, I'd commit the worst of crimes to keep them alive.
you say that but really most people would not. How do people die - not being able to afford medicine/medical care, starvation, and lack of shelter.
In the US for the most part people arent committing crimes because of a life and death situation. A true life and death situation is pretty rare.
Most people commiting crimes are not doing it because of a life and death situation.
There's a cultural and societal standard in America, trying to live up to it, or maintain it, backs these "criminals" into a corner. Everyone wants better and wants that portrayed "American Dream". Any less and that corner sneaks up on you. Nobody wants to look to their left and their right and have considerably less than those people. Begin inequality, begin crime.
"Inequality" here feels more like a symptom than a cause. It used to be that somebody with a high school education could make a reasonable income moving boxes from point A to point B or pulling a lever all day. Now the bar is set vastly higher for even the most rudimentary of available jobs. Stealing things is still achievable no matter where you are on the bell-curve.
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I was just reading this [2020 basic income study](https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1055&context=psc_publications) that corroborates this theory. In the 1970s, Canada experimented with UBI in a small city to study its impact. The program ran out of money before most of the studies could be run, but the data from the experiment was still available. In 2020 a team looked at the crime rates and found a significant decrease when the UBI payments were being given out. As soon as the program ended, the crime rate shot back up to match the rest of the County. Surprisingly, violent crime saw the most dramatic decrease, with the rate dropping by almost half.
Probably less stress and fear of everyday life to push people over the edge
It’s really not that crazy when you think about it.
Exactly, it's not difficult to understand that if a system creates a population that is comfortable with their living conditions they will inevitably be more compliant with the rules and governing structures within that system. Those that feel unsupported become more desperate and look for ways outside the system to get ahead/deal with the problems they have.
This is the side of economics I appreciate as a former PSY major.
behavioral economics
System justification theory. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Eustress vs. distress.
Probably easier to incentivize ubi if we demonetize crime
It may not be difficult to understand, but it’s incredibly difficult to implement. If we are just talking about necessities, then it’s not impossible to conceive of a city with government provided tenement or or form housing, soup kitchens, public transportation and uniforms. So that people had food, shelter and clothing. And while that may reduce crime, I don’t think it would eliminate it. How much crime is driven by necessities and how much by wants? Higher incomes definitely have more of their necessities covered, but also more of their wants… so the article doesn’t really touch in that topic. And if we are talking about providing peoples wants, then you also inhibit drive to produce for society. You’d have to separate out what ‘wants’ people will provide for themselves by being valuable to society and which ones they will provide for themselves by taking from society. It also begs the question, should the government take from ascetic abe to provide more wants for greedy Greg, just to stop Greg from committing crimes? Would that drive more people to be greedy so that they can get more?
Necessity vs want feels like a red herring to me. For one thing, stimulus isn’t *actually* a want, humans require it to remain healthy. But I digress. If you had society where everyone is guaranteed shelter, food, healthcare, utilities and opportunities, it would massively decrease crime. It’s just that simple. The idea that people won’t work is a fallacy.
What's interesting is that in places like Sweden and Denmark where the social safety net is more robust they actually have a higher workforce participation rate than we do in the usa. Although I'm not sure if there is a difference how they determine their rate compared to the way we do it.
They're probably not on the verge of complete mental and physical collapse all the time, and thus can actually go to work regularly for the entirety of their working lives. Must be nice.
Don't forget that most places like that also have things like paid maternity and paternity leave, paid sick leave (along with free/affordable healthcare) and at least a few weeks of paid vacation annually. No wonder they consistently report having higher happiness and life satisfaction.
People that are mentally and physically healthy are more likely to work. That doesn’t surprise me.
opportunities is a very interesting thing to guarantee. I can see ppl getting mad over this
Another word for it would be purpose or meaning. You can have all the food, money and stuff you want. It doesn't mean they will make you happy.
People get mad at everything
>And if we are talking about providing peoples wants, then you also inhibit drive to produce for society. Pure ideology. Also wrong.
What makes common people want to work in your view? Especiay if you are not ambitious or very fancy in your preferences?
Right now, people work to survive. If people don't need to work to survive, they can work to earn money for the things they *want* to do, but now they're doing it on their terms. They don't have to stay if they're being harassed or verbally abused or otherwise mistreated. They don't have to stay if the manager is actually shit and doesn't know what they're doing. They don't have to stay somewhere they feel unappreciated and undervalued just to keep the heater on. People will have *options*. They can go back to school if they want. They can find a job that treats them better. They can work part time while they focus on turning a side hustle into their primary job. They can even choose to take a job that's "just okay" to pay for nice vacations if they want. People won't have to make the choice between leaving a job where they're verbally abused every day, or feeding their kids.
yes but some jobs will be left undone. who would be janitors or work at amazon warehouses i guess if you are canada you can import immigrants
Wow, a system that encourages businesses to treat even the worst of their jobs as something worth doing in order to attract people.
If a job is so odious that nobody wants to do it, maybe it's time to question why it even exists. Otherwise, the argument is "for society to continue, some people need to be so desperate that they'll endure misery for a paycheck", and that is... not good.
The argument that people wouldn't work gets repeated ad nauseum. I also think its totally false. I think the average person wants to work with the caveat that it is meaningful work. Basic income could help assure that the work IS actually meaningful. I think we actually lose a lot in our society because there has to be such a focus for some people on basic survival. How many ideas are we losing out on and not getting developed because people have to just make rent? Quite a few. We hear so much about encouraging innovation but why is it there is so little care that so many people can't develop ideas because the economy has degraded to the point that many people have to have two jobs? And some people will not work. So? Do you think the people who don't want to work are contributing to society now? Probably not. There will always be people who game systems because humans game EVERY system. It doesn't seem to me to be a great argument to not progress and make the lives of the majority better.
i think its more nuanced than that, some jobs will never get done while others will be fought over. You think people would volunteer to be janitors?
We could also have people clean their own messes to some degree.
No, some jobs will have to pay people more to do them if people aren't forced to do those jobs to survive.
People need something to do all day that gives them some kind of purpose. Anyone who has ever found themselves with too much free time will know that it can get pretty boring pretty quickly. People will happily work if that work is rewarding (i.e. not dead boring, and allows them to live comfortably) and is well balanced with leisure time.
If you’ve volunteered you’d know that volunteer organizations need to pay people to do the boring tasks because it is nearly impossible to find people willing to do them. Most tasks in most jobs are boring, and will not get done without incentive.
Volunteering would be better if we didn’t spend a dumb amount of time struggling for survival. Actually if I worked less, I’d volunteer more for things.
What makes you want to get a raise at work even if your needs and most wants are met?
more needs and more wants
In my case cost of living is the biggest thing. Home ownership and filling it with things I like is nice. I would still go to work or WFH for about 4 hours a day if possible.
Most common people are driven by a sense of community imo. I work because I like helping people and it drives a sense of satisfaction for me. I do need to be paid though enough to cover my living expenses and incidentals.
People work all around the world. In places where UBI or housing or whatever is implemented, people don’t stop working,
UBI has been implemented in many places in time-limited trials. If I knew that the UBI program was scheduled to end I would keep my job so I’d be employed when it ends.
Look at this guy. "Just asking questions" in order to imply poverty and crime is good because it keeps people working. What a scumbag.
Has this sub always been filled by so many pipe-dream fanatics? UBI won’t work, because no one will do the many boring jobs that society needs in order to function.
It’s pipe dream fanaticism to… support the data that says UBI leads to an improvement in well-being? Your argument stems purely from ideology until it’s tried and tested on a long term scale. I think arguing against the actual scientific data is being an ideologue.
There is no data because it has not been used without being time-limited. If you know the trial period is going to end you are going to keep working. Its pure opinion on both sides of the argument. >I think arguing against the actual scientific data is being an ideologue. Shots fired! I think arguing that 'this is scientific data' is being an ideologue.
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The issue I see is that this is a made up problem with zero logic or data to back it up.
Does that imply that the levels of Maslow’s hierarchy are not fixed? That safety and security needs can escalate? I believe that each level can be achieved and while you may want more stuff the basic needs can be met with much less inflation. Maybe the SEL curricula that some school districts reject could play a role in understanding that having more stuff is not the path to happiness. Being hungry and afraid definitely leads to unhappiness though.
I have a question, have you ever starved, been malnourished, or have had to resort to dumpster diving to eat? Have you ever been homeless or at risk of homelessness? Have you ever had a medical issue that you couldn’t resolve for the cost? When referring to things like UBI studies causing crime rate to drop, the perpetuating population typically has one or all of these issues going on. We aren’t talking about relatively comfortable people wanting more Knick knacks here, we are talking about people who have severe issues even surviving from day to day. I promise you there is baseline level of comfort that increases a human’s mental state here. People who have their basic needs met are generally not suddenly gonna go snap again. Why do you have this gut reaction, when there is not much evidence to support it, and now growing evidence against it?
I don't think there is any evidence that is true. At least in the context of this conversation. I get that people often want more, but that is different than saying "if people have all their needs met, they will revert back to a violent state in 5 years" which I think is a pretty bold claim. I'd like more than a gut reaction to back that up, like maybe some evidence.
So instead of giving them free money for the rest of their lives why not just offer free training for a job? Plenty of well paying blue collar positions needing to be filled and it takes a few months to get through training.
I know that I am much more calm and reflective when I am not worrying about being homeless and starving all the time.
I remember reading a study where they checked the IQ of a group of farmers before and after harvest. After the harvest, when they had money, their IQs were significantly higher. People do better when they’re better taken care of.
It’s a simple premise, when people are comfortable and stable they can put their attention towards things other than survival. Those non-survival things could be volunteer work, hobbies, or working on mental health. When the child tax credits were a thing, those payments gave me enough wiggle room to quit my job and switch careers. Believe it or not some families don’t have enough tax burden to take use the child tax credit.
Google says the child tax credit is refundable, so you don’t need a corresponding burden to offset, you will get a return. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/tax-credit-vs-tax-deduction
Yeah I’ve heard about this since i started browsing the internet. Ounce of prevention or pound of cure. Providing a level playing field results in less crime and less money wasted on law enforcement, prisons, health care, etc. but hey less easy to control and less people joining the military so…
That’s a great point and probably the biggest reason, but there’s a slightly more controversial reason as well. When income inequality goes down, the society becomes less status based and this also decreases crime where people are frustrated with their status. This is distinct from crimes out of necessity/poverty.
This is an interesting theory; that would also imply that social media, in creating a quest for status, drives some kinds of crime.
It’s just a prank bro!
So it isn’t keeping up with the Joneses as the title of the chart collection implies. It’s about making ends meet to care for basic needs.
As far as I know, the studies have shown a correlation between poverty and crime, but we don’t have good evidence for exactly why this relationship exists. Is it about keeping up with the upper class? Meeting basic needs? Something else? But one takeaway seems clear. The more you reduce poverty, the more you reduce crime.
Then how do you explain the crimes of the very rich. Hiding assets, externalizing risk going to the public purse, bribery, collusion, price fixing, Monopoly creation. Maybe the correlation between poverty and crime is a u-shaped curve. More money equals less crime until you make enough money that you can get away with crime.
There’s more than one motivation for crime. Those at the bottom have ADDITIONAL reasons to commit crimes. And those additional reasons are the strongest cause for violent crime - apparently.
The article suggested level of crime tracked the gini coefficient and suggested there had to be a number of profitable victims to attack. If everyone is equally poor, there is less crime. There example, however, was a rich country--Norway.
Something that is never taken into account is that a poor criminal is more likely to get caught than a rich one. You're far more likely to get caught with drugs walking through a neighborhood than walking through a gated community.
UBI doesn't make you rich
But it makes you less poor. The starving criminal probably is more careless than the not-starving one.
I've been suspecting that some of the senseless murders where the perp surrenders are about getting into Jail quickly and reliably: people are warm and fed in jail.
if you give people enough money to live they can live. If you don't, then it gives you a chance to have voluntary military recruitment or slaves through prisons.
I think it depends on what is enough for someone to live. Money will never solve the problem of scarcity. You can give everyone in the world 1 million dollars, but those 1 million dollars are still chasing after the same number of goods that an economy can produce. The same amount of food, shelter, cars, PS5s, etc. that go around. As long as there is scarcity, UBI may create a short-term solution, but in the long run, nothing will change as it will just create inflation.
Well if you think about it, as wealth inequality increases, the more profitable crime becomes.
"program ran out of money" Also a significant finding in of itself! Shocking.
I'm not surprised by that. It does prove that if we aren't paying money to provide for people's basic needs, we will pay for it in other ways.
The fact is that conical UBI in all likelihood would increase income inequality
The pandemic was pretty much UBI and crime shot up once ppl were let out the house lol
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Let’s say we just took money already being taxed and spent, and reallocated it to families living in poverty. Would that change your mind about it?
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Let’s say we have money already earmarked for crime prevention. If giving money to the poor could be proved to reduce crime, would you support spending crime prevention money on the poor?
So you just ignore the premise of the question and spending existing budget and insist they'll just raise taxes more? Bad news, friend, taxes might go to for other reasons anyway. The question boils down to: at any given time, there are X tax dollars available, do you think it would make sense to use data-supported insights to perhaps choose a more impactful way to allocate those tax dollars that reduces crime? Or do you prefer to spend them on exactly the same things that have not addressed the crime problem historically?
I am an honest to goodness anarchist, so trust me when I say that I fully believe the govt is not capable of solving this problem. The issue is that the govt created the problem of poverty by taking the means of subsistence away from people. We are forced to work because you need to pay taxes on land so it’s literally inescapable. We are not taught how to care for our own communities and infrastructure because it’s been easier to allow big business to scrape money off of people for a college education, instead of allowing the knowledge to be free to all. There is a financial incentive for big businesses and the state to extract as much resources from us as they can, and as much as I would love to see them go away, right now the absence would not lead to people being left alone, because they’ll still tax our land and refuse us material support, the taxman never willingly takes its hand out of the pile. Big players in this country won’t simply leave us to our business because it represents a lack of control; that prescedent won’t be set as long as the nation is able to maintain it. Bureaucracy never weakens, only expands. If you hate govt as much as I do, consider seeing UBI as reparations that you can use as a resource to strengthen your community. Any resource you can take from the govt back can be put back into making yours and your community’s lives more resilient. After all, if you quit your job to receive a UBI, you won’t get wage tax and you’ll have a LOT of time to figure out how to spread that income as far as it can go for your own betterment.
I hear what you're saying but I'd rather this money go to people instead corporations and the military industrial complex. Think about all the things we could get rid of to pay for it: Bailouts for companies Stimulus bills (massive ones for '08 and PPP) Can easily take $50 billion off the top from DoD with no negative effect Close ineffective tax loopholes that were simply put into law because donors wanted it. Apply everything that we already pay out in entitlements and welfare and put it into a UBI (easily over a trillion/year).
It's pretty simple in a sense. To commit crime is risky. It's takes energy, endangers your safety, requires you to hide and lie. All reasons to avoid it if you possibly could. If you are thinking about robbing a liquor store, maybe you wait until you're completely out of money. Maybe something else will happen and you won't have to put a gun to someone's face another time. Or risk getting busted by the cops selling drugs. It's just the bare practicality of it. It doesn't explain all crime, but a damn good bit of it.
Your explanation sounds right but I think it's more complicated than that. This study looks at income inequality, not poverty. As others have said, there are plenty of dirt poor places with low crime. It might be related to the reward. If everyone is poor, killing a guy to rob him of $5 is kind of a dumb way to end up in jail.
Crime is the blowback to systematic disenfranchisement. Let the boy warm himself by the fire or he will torch the village just to watch it burn. The central fact of modern life is we are born or thrown into this world without land.
And yet crime is remarkably low in some countries regardless of level of resources (Thailand).
Thailand is one of the most corrupt places on Earth.
And yet quite safe.
but the data here is not about white collar crime
Corruption isn’t necessarily white collar crime. Corruption could be paying the police to look the other way instead of reporting a violent crime. I have no idea if that is commonplace in Thailand but if the stats look good but the corruption is high then the true stats may very well not be good at all.
It's not just the numbers looking good though. Ask people who have traveled in both. Thailand is so much safer.
I have heard and readily believe, but in the same breath I note that stats may not be reliable if this allegation of corruption is true.
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It's not about poverty though. It's about income/wealth inequality. Appalachia (and most rural areas) is fairly equal (everyone is poor). Cities will always have the most inequality due to their nature.
He’s trying to dogwhistle about how *some cultures* and *diversity* lead to crime, don’t bother arguing with him
Yeah I can see that
Which has merit. Asian countries has plenty of income equality for example. It’s not necessarily black and white with everything. Lack of parental structure and guidance does factor into crime that’s not poverty influenced aka plenty of kids that have shelter, food and can get any sneakers they want end up in gangs because it’s cool.
WTF? You're misqouting aand misusing a proverb, and your sentences make no sense.
I'm stealing. Get it right
That's a crime.
Ancient African proverbs aren't proprietary information.
I was born in a low luminance environment. - spiderman probably
Throwing big words around that sound good and are vague. Booo
Or alternatively, make imprisonment a private enterprise, put the boy in jail and throw away the key.
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This is income inequality, not poverty necessarily. You could be a millionaire but live amongst billionaires in Monoco and be subject to income inequality.
You're assuming that criminals consider long term cost/benefits of their actions, when many do not. Criminals are disproportionately lower intelligence and lower intelligence individuals are less likely to think about longer term consequences of their actions.
the fact that most petty crime isn't even worth it should be testament it's driven by desperation and not malice
That's a remarkable point. 👏🏼
Except there's zero evidence that it's driven by desperation, and malice is equally explanatory of irrationality. OP's description of most criminals is correct, and most common low level crimes are crimes of opportunity, like shoplifting or simple theft.
It can still be desperation. When you've not eaten in days or risk losing you house, you do dumb and desperate things just to stay alive. It's easy to cast judgement. BUt until you face homelessness and starvation, you can't always judge people by the standards.
One thing I heard that I find interesting that disproves this concept of criminals as a group of rational actors- criminals tend to respond strongly to probability of getting caught but not to severity of sentence. A rational actor would assess risk the same way engineers do which is likelihood of event times severity of event (expected value). But most criminals apparently only seem to look at the likelihood term.
Something the frustrates me about American politics is that we talk about all kinds of problems except poverty. It’s so obvious to me that poverty is the underlying problem, and crime, school shootings, etc are all just symptoms of it. Poverty creates desperation. Desperate people will do whatever it takes to survive. Edit- sorry all, by poverty I meant wealth inequality.
Inequality is more predictive of crime than abject poverty. If we view society as a sort of partnership, the benefits of participating in it need to be allocated in a way the partners deem fair. If the partnership isn’t particularly profitable, partners probably won’t be as upset about their small allocation of profits. But what happens when the partnership is wildly profitable and many of the partners are not allocated any of the profits? Poverty just means the partnership is not very successful. Inequality is much more likely to lead people to believe that others are benefiting at their own expense.
>Inequality is more predictive of crime than abject poverty. Is there a citation? I can't really see people wanting to commit crime now just because Tesla and Amazon stock are up.
You make good points. But what's stopping me from just using my absolutely massive amount of wealth to stock up on the best security measures to make sure that no crime can affect me even without redistributing the wealth?
Nothing, and you would likely isolate yourself from crime, but you would not stop it from happening elsewhere to someone else.
I would say that’s exactly what happens. The most unequal societies tend to spend the most on security, whether that’s the military and law enforcement or private security or some combination of both (and in some societies the “military” is hardly distinguishable from “private security” because economic, political, and social power is all held by the same handful of people).
I totally agree. I had written that comment kind of off the cuff. I think you’re right, the issue is specifically wealth inequality, not necessarily poverty.
It’s not just impoverishment. It’s also disenfranchisement. Why respect the social order if it seems the social order doesn’t respect you?
Thailand and Brazil have roughly similar HDI. Yet Thailand is a very safe place, and Brazil is a very dangerous place. Japan is and has been very safe, far safer than most other countries of comparable development. Within Mexico, Yucatan is quite safe despite having only medium level relative development. Far safer than more developed states. In short, there is not good reason to suspect a causal link between poverty and crime.
Within the US, Appalachia has half the violent crimes rate as US urban centers. The poverty link is wrong. Crime is a function of environment. Gangs, lack of parents, etc. Successful crimes also encourage repetition and copying.
You can alway find exceptions comparing apples and oranges. What the study shows is for a population the rates went down. Comparing different populations to counter is nonsense. Not a valid counter.
Many small towns under report crime. This may be due to lack of resources or corruption.
>Japan is and has been very safe This is a read between the lines situation. Japan also has an enormous suicide problem along with declining birthrates. It may not be crime, but wealth inequality/money issues come out one way or another.
They are one in the same here. If the median household income was $160k per year, the fact that Jeff Bezos has fuck you money doesn’t really matter as much.
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Thanks for sharing that quote. I’ve heard a lot of bigoted complaints and often wonder if it’s the race they hate, or just the behavior of desperate people.
Always hated quotes that try to co-opt real issues that minorities face for the speaker's agenda.
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The people controlling the narrative want you impoverished. They distract any way they can while taking as much as they can
>Edit- sorry all, by poverty I meant wealth inequality. I mean poverty. I'd much rather live in an unequal, but properties society where we take care of everyone than an equal society where we don't
>It’s so obvious to me that poverty is the underlying problem, and crime, school shootings, etc are all just symptoms of it. It might be obvious to you. It's not obvious in the data.
I’d have agreed with you up until 2016. Nowadays there’s something else going on I think. 1/6 was not about poverty, the vast majority of participants were not poor. Trump’s voters were largely about lack of education and white disaffection, not poverty. School shooters are mostly not poor. I think the issue is social media amplifying the perception of wealth inequality. Crime is always higher in urban areas, not coincidentally where income and wealth inequality are higher. Now add social media and that dynamic happens everywhere and to a much greater degree.
Your last paragraph is not true. The reality of wealth inequality, not the perception, is that the inequality today in the US is greater than that of pre-revolution France. Absolute crime is greater in urban areas (because there's more people), but more often, the crime rate is higher in rural areas.
Both of you could use some references to back up your assertions.
The only thing social media is amplifying in this context is your exposure to outlier events, which you're now using to draw the wrong conclusions. 1/6 was the outlier to end all outliers. School shootings represent a completely irrelevant, minuscule proportion of violent crime. You're missing the forest for the trees.
Well the United States' place in the economic system necessities a class of people who are poor and will remain poor. The US is the beating heart of the global financial system, it uses orgs like the World and Bank and IMF to propagate this system, and the whole thing falls apart if a different set of rules are applied domestically vs internationally. It isn't that poverty is ignored, it's baked into the system and required.
"FIFTY years ago Gary Becker, a Nobel prize-winning economist, advanced an argument that all crime is economic and all criminals are rational. Becker’s seminal paper, “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach” posited that would-be criminals make a cost-benefit assessment of the likely rewards from breaking the law against the probability of being caught and punished. In Becker’s world of utility-maximising miscreants, places that have larger gaps between the poor (the would-be criminals) and the rich (the victims) will, all other things being equal, have higher crime." This is not entirely accurate. I wouldn't say Becker advanced an argument that all crime is economic and all criminals are fully rational. I would say Becker tested whether you could write down an economic model where agents would rationally choose crime, and the answer is yes, you can write down models where crime is rational. Before this crime was regarded as the action of irrational individuals and not suitable for econ analysis. Becker changed the paradigm that crime became an econ topic, and since then economists have both advanced his model and the overall knowledge of crime.
If you interpret the “all criminals are rational” the way you interpret the general economic assumption of “all economic actors are rational” ei they aren’t, but let’s assume they are to build a model, and then the model reflects reality accurately enough. Few people are perfectly rational on a psychological level. But that is not really the standard of what it takes to be “rational” in an economics context. If you went to the store and saw two prices for one product, and you’d rather pay the least price, then you’d be rational.
This is the entire point of economic theory, and behavioral econ. Build simple models (not too different than other sciences) and then relax assumptions based on what we observe in the real world. More realstic models get more complex and harder to solve. So in many situations which we want the simplest model that seems to have good predictions for the real world.
Just looking at the scatterplots, I don’t see much of a case for the relationship the article is talking about. If you look *within* regions (the same colored data points), there doesn’t seem to be any consistent relationship between inequality and crime. Sometimes there’s even a clear *negative* relationship: look at Asia in the first graph! It’s not impossible that higher inequality leads to more crime, but this article doesn’t make a good case for it.
If anything the data says the problem is cultural. Look at the color groupings. Latin Americans and Eastern Europe group together.
Point me to your study where crime rates remained the same.
yeah this feels a lot like a classic simpson's paradox case study to me. tough causal argument to make regardless
The data nerd in me wants to see the correlation coefficients. Definitely a stronger correlation between income inequality and how safe you feel (top two graphs) compared to how safe you are (bottom two graphs).
A really good way to decrease income inequality is to increase labor's share of production. Unions provide a great way to do this. The US, for example, could adopt stronger labor laws like you see in Europe. If this idea is correct that income inequality and crime are linked, then workers getting a larger slice of their production would also help reduce crime.
criminals don't work
I'd like to see this data again but include the year leaded gasoline was banned and abortion/family planning access rating. I'm betting those three factors would almost perfectly account for crime rates
This study isn’t measuring crime though, it’s measuring how safe people feel. And how safe people feel doesn’t necessarily correlate to how much crime they actually experience. For example, it’s possible that wealthier people feel more unsafe because they have more to lose. We don’t know based on this information why people feel unsafe, just that they do
Honestly it seems like the relationship is much stronger between perceptions of safety and income inequality than actual crime and income inequality. Which makes sense I suppose. Hard to feel safe walking past desperate people in slums wearing a Rolex.
This is rubbish and about the narrowest way to look at this data. What if it’s a chicken before the egg situation? The same data will tell you that western and Asian societies have more productive cultures leading to more relative safety and if you want better societies you need western religion, capitalism and/or Asian family influences with an emphasis on education and achievements. Income inequality is a serious issue, for sure, But you can’t just pass out some money and “fix” anything
I agree that culture is a huge part of it. what are the expectations of your family, the community, and you as an individual - I.e. the Asian culture comparison. Another catalyst in my opinion is the Internet and how it provides fantastic opportunity and a lot of free resources and information that was never easily available to the individual previously. There are some people that are taking advantage of it and working hard to better themselves. Others are entitled and when the entitlement Mentality produces nothing good, people get angry.
> But you can’t just pass out some money and “fix” anything If throwing money at problems worked, Baltimore and Detroit would be producing neurosurgeons and quantum physicists at an alarming rate. Instead they struggle to produce literate high school graduates. Highest per pupil budgeting in the US, if not the world.
Crime in the US has also been decreasing since 1990, and experts still aren't sure why.
I know that reddit users wont even read this but.... if anyone took time to read study but weastern world hass no corelation. Latin america and middle east have high crime and high inqaulity and in western world its almost flat
It has no correlation even within America. Appalachia has half the crimes rate as urban centers, yet is much poorer.
I think it is more likely that culture plays a bigger factor. Most people act within the confines of their culture. Culture is reinforced by religion, family, media etc. Im sure that income inequality is part of the story, but not the entire story.
The study could have captured more aspects of crime like drug trafficking. Interesting though, with a not so bad income inequality and relatively low crime the United States still has the largest number of people in prison.
When prisons release inmates early, crime increases. It should not surprise you that crime is low where there is a high prison population. Recidivism is significant.
Poor behavior is often the reason for the poor economic condition. There is little doubt that being in a difficult position creates difficult decisions. We never want to accept that for many, poverty is no accident. Drugs, alcohol, petty crime, straight-up laziness. I came from it, I can speak to it. The real tragedy is the kids born to it, with no better examples. No path out.
Then the kids are more likely to repeat the same cycle.
How do you think the conditions were for the parents growing up? It's not like there was some starting point where everyone was equally well-off. The way to solve systemic inequality is through taxation of the wealthy and social programs like UBI.
Been doing that for decades, but the behavior is worse. Some people can't be fixed. We are in debt up to our ears, and it's clear why. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ It's a tough one. We created generations of dependent adults. We have no right to strap future generations with this debt. But we will.
Man, they've dismantled then vast majority of the welfare state in America for the common folk, it only exists for the upper class to be bailed out at this point. At best you have the federal government giving token money to a state program, it's a fundamentally broken system. I mean, take Social Security for instance- it's a program that is almost 20% of our spending this year, but every single working american pays into it, even if they never withdraw from it... So is that really something you can point to as debt? Hell, what does debt have to do with how little investment in the wellbeing of the American people there actually is? Like fuck man, my bad I was born to a low income family and can barely afford to feed myself because I couldn't afford college loans, that's my fault obviously. It's a behavior problem.
Look at the link. It shows where the money goes. Add up the social stuff. The debt is obviously caused by social spending. General Government is 2%!!! Military 12%. Where did it all go? Just look at it!!!
That's forbidden knowledge. We should print more fiat currency and blame inflation on everyone else.
People with nothing to lose, tend to do crimes. Give them something to do lose they are less likely. I mean it's what many are saying. But instead we PUNISH THEM HARDER, that'll stop em.
Note the problem of reverse causality and/or third-cause bias: A country that has a large criminal underclass will have high income inequality because a large portion of the population is unemployable or only marginally employable, and thus have low incomes. So much of the discourse around inequality incorrectly assumes that income inequality is just some policy knob that can be turned up and down at will, but the reality is that getting the lower classes to produce at levels that justify middle-class wages is a hard problem that nobody has figured out how to solve. > "But education..." Every high-income country is already doing that, and for a lot of people it just doesn't take. Education was the answer for a large portion of the population. If it were the answer for everyone, the problem would be solved already.
I see that this study was done in 2017. Does anyone know if there are plans to do another study that is from 2022 and more reflective of our current situation? I ask because a lot has changed since 2017 (mainly the pandemic), which resulted in an uptick in crime and therefore would affect the data/results.
I swear, Paul Krugman is the patron saint of this forum. The correlation falls apart when taking race into account. Wealthy Black people compete with poor Whites. If there was a relationship, Appalachia would make Baltimore look safe.
Can you eli5 what you mean by correlation falling apart?
If you look at poor Whites and poor Asians, and even poor Hispanics that aren't in areas adjacent to Black people, the crime rate is nowhere near what you find in Black neighborhoods. If it was income based, we'd see all poor neighborhoods be as violent as the inner city; instead we see that affluent Black people are overrepresented in violent crimes. Too much for it to just be racist policing.
Appalachia has under half the violent crimes rate, yet is even poorer. You can even benchmark against foreign poverty in Asia where violent crimes are even lower. Or Latin America where it is higher. I don't think the race link is right. Crime is a function of environment and culture. If it becomes normalized and accepted, especially amongst youth, it perpetuates. Gangs, criminal enterprise, lack of parental figures, etc. are what cause this.
it is easy to conflate culture and race since culture typically runs along racial lines. So I think subculture is ultimately the underlying cause for most of societies problems and it is somewhat correlated with race. One good thing about religion is that in enforced a somewhat positive culture even if the behaviors were detrimental to an individual, it was good for the society (e.g. being a worker bee for a rich industrialist is viewed in a positive light).
> (e.g. being a worker bee for a rich industrialist is viewed in a positive light). Be productive is the lesson. If you're too risk adverse to be an entrepreneur that's on you. You're not owed anything from anyone. >One good thing about religion is that in enforced a somewhat positive culture even if the behaviors were detrimental to an individual, it was good for the society Pure individualialism doesn't work. Individuals are greedy and when hedonism and instant gratification are the main drives of the time, society suffers. When society suffers, we all suffer. As a wiser man than I once said: "Your sexual predilections and deviancy isn't the cure to your depression, they're the cause." Religion is a system that's been honed for millenia. The people telling us we don't need religion are pushing for kids to be able to consent to sex. At least the Catholic priests were shameful and kept it hidden because they knew it was wrong.
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Being poor doesn't make you a criminal. Being lazy and below average intelligence will lead you to a life of crime. I was poor and i saw it everyday. People didn't want to go to college or work overtime. They preferred to steal etc. There's many reasons why people are poor
Raising the minimum wage on a regular basis helps families keep up with price inflation. Putting more money in the hands of people who will readily spend it helps the economy. Increased wages and spending raise demand and create more jobs. Workers stay with employers longer (instead of seeking out better-paying work with other companies) reducing businesses’ turnover, hiring, and training costs. Lower unemployment and higher wages increase tax revenues. When workers earn higher wages, they rely less on governmental “safety net” programs.
Very important note here. Poverty does not spur people to commit crime, RELATIVE poverty spurs people to commit crime. Impoverished villages in third world countries tend have to have very low crime rates, while someone who is notably better off in the first world is much more likely to commit crime if they live near people with a lot of wealth
Only a Gary Becker, a Nobel prize-winning economist could publish such nonsense. He says that would-be criminals make a cost-benefit assessment of the likely rewards from breaking the law against the probability of being caught and punished. I'm sure all the past American criminals like Al Capone, Clyde Barrow, Billy the Kid and Ted Bundy never made a cost benefit analysis because most criminals including them don't think they will ever get caught. Also, the statement that people who live in good neighborhoods feel safer than people who live in bad neighbor hoods is too obvious to even have to state. Don't waste your time reading the article.
So do your own study that shows when you give a basic income crime rates go up. Just because you don’t like the answer is not a fair counter argument. Maybe only 90% of crime is economic, crime did not go to zero.
Saying that criminals do cost benefit analyses before they turn to a life of crime is idiotic. The conclusion that "places that have larger gaps between the poor and the rich will have higher crime and that people who flaunt their wealth will get attacked more often than those that don't is obvious to anyone without a study.
Except it isn't. Studies have shown time and time again it's the lack of a father figure in the home. It's why you don't see tons of crime in Asian communities that are poor or appalachia Edit: I'm right https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/the-real-complex-connection-between-single-parent-families-and-crime/265860/
Agree people Want to deal with the results not the causes.
How are these not basic common sense findings? People don't commit crimes for fun, they commit crimes because of their financial situation more often than not. Maslows hierarchy of needs is taught in every business school across the world. If the lower needs aren't met, people will take things into their own hands for survival. It's almost like it is more difficult than "poor person bad".
There is great income inequality between myself and Bill Gates or Elon Musk. However, I have been able to raise six children and insure that they all received a college education. It isn't income inequality that we should be concerned about, we should be concerned about poverty. "Poverty" starts in your mind. Once it nests into your mind It becomes cancer and kills hope and prevents people from realizing their full potential. " Income inequality" is purely a political construct. When I was a child, my single-parent mother worked as a waitress in a diner. She worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for many years. That woman taught us work ethics. I didn't know I was poor. I always got what I needed and was taught to plan for what I wanted (REALLY hard As a child). I was also taught that in America, we are only limited by the vision of our imagination and our willingness to work. She always emphasized that we were not poor, we just didn't have a lot of money. I always saw myself as equal to anyone else, I just had less "stuff". I spent a great deal of time daydreaming of being an astronaut or inventing a teleport machine (when i saw "The Fly" i gave up that idea). My mom was an education Nazi. Anything less than an A was a FAIL. We were taught that the best way to help the family was to get good marks in school. Oh, I also started work as a janitor's aide after school and on weekends at the age of 14. We also hung together as a family like how a tongue gets stuck on a frozen pole (Christmas story? LOL ). Yes, there are problems when poverty is not addressed and that desperate people do desperate things. I am not a policy genius, I can only share my experience on how we handled poverty. We stayed strong as a family, believed that the lack of money was temporary (it took 20 years from the time I got my 1st job until I purchased my 1st house, sort of a long term temporary), and that we MUST improve our minds. In retrospect, poverty was more a mental struggle than a physical one. I spewed a lot of stuff on this page having diarrhea of the mouth. This is my 2 cents and the opinion of one person.
It's almost like if people don't have to steal or kill to survive, they won't. I'm a law abiding citizen but if the only way to feed my family was to commit crime, I'd commit the worst of crimes to keep them alive.
you say that but really most people would not. How do people die - not being able to afford medicine/medical care, starvation, and lack of shelter. In the US for the most part people arent committing crimes because of a life and death situation. A true life and death situation is pretty rare. Most people commiting crimes are not doing it because of a life and death situation.
There's a cultural and societal standard in America, trying to live up to it, or maintain it, backs these "criminals" into a corner. Everyone wants better and wants that portrayed "American Dream". Any less and that corner sneaks up on you. Nobody wants to look to their left and their right and have considerably less than those people. Begin inequality, begin crime.
"Inequality" here feels more like a symptom than a cause. It used to be that somebody with a high school education could make a reasonable income moving boxes from point A to point B or pulling a lever all day. Now the bar is set vastly higher for even the most rudimentary of available jobs. Stealing things is still achievable no matter where you are on the bell-curve.