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> a rich but unequal society - it's much more peaceful. That's not true. Violence is caused by inequality. Areas where everyone's equally poor are about as pea

> a rich but unequal society - it's much more peaceful. That's not true. Violence is caused by inequality. Areas where everyone's equally poor are about as peaceful as areas where everyone's equally rich. It's dramatic inequality that causes violence. This is true no matter whether you look at neighborhood level, city level, national level etc.

dcosson 9y ago
Do you have any sources for this? I don’t see how it can possibly be true. For one thing I don’t see how you can define areas where everyone is poor. Even looking at a place like North Korea, the top government officials are very well off compared to the average person. In general, poorer countries are much less safe than richer ones. Poorer neighborhoods are much less safe than richer ones. I can see the point that even in those cases it’s often related to inequality, e.g. theres gang related violence because gang leaders are much richer than the average person in the area. But that’s a tautology, because there’s nowhere that has absolutely no inequality.
- 1ark 9y ago
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/338347?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/338347?seq=1#page_scan_t...
  - MR4D 9y ago
    Great paper by the way. If you look at the graph on page 8, you can see obvious clustering of poor countries vs other countries. This study does not compare the overall wealth of the countries against crime. The reason that is important, is that in a rich country, even poor people have many options. In a poor country like Venezuela, they don't. As a result, even if they had the same Gini coefficient, the crime would look much different. So when you take that into account (which is what I tried to do in my statement, but probably could have worded better), then being in a "rich but unequal" society is much better than a poor country of either high or low inequality. I think the high clustering of OECD countries demonstrates this.
- ace_of_spades 9y ago
  Did not read the paper linked to by sibling but there are diminishing returns to wealth for a person. So unequality might be perceived as more severe in low income countries than richer countries when the basic needs are met.
chmln 9y ago
Violence doesn't have much to do with inequality. They might be weakly correlated, but you'd have to go far beyond that to establish causality.

dcosson 9y ago

Do you have any sources for this? I don’t see how it can possibly be true. For one thing I don’t see how you can define areas where everyone is poor. Even looking at a place like North Korea, the top government officials are very well off compared to the average person. In general, poorer countries are much less safe than richer ones. Poorer neighborhoods are much less safe than richer ones. I can see the point that even in those cases it’s often related to inequality, e.g. theres gang related violence because gang leaders are much richer than the average person in the area. But that’s a tautology, because there’s nowhere that has absolutely no inequality.

1ark 9y ago
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/338347?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/338347?seq=1#page_scan_t...
- MR4D 9y ago
  Great paper by the way. If you look at the graph on page 8, you can see obvious clustering of poor countries vs other countries. This study does not compare the overall wealth of the countries against crime. The reason that is important, is that in a rich country, even poor people have many options. In a poor country like Venezuela, they don't. As a result, even if they had the same Gini coefficient, the crime would look much different. So when you take that into account (which is what I tried to do in my statement, but probably could have worded better), then being in a "rich but unequal" society is much better than a poor country of either high or low inequality. I think the high clustering of OECD countries demonstrates this.
ace_of_spades 9y ago
Did not read the paper linked to by sibling but there are diminishing returns to wealth for a person. So unequality might be perceived as more severe in low income countries than richer countries when the basic needs are met.

chmln 9y ago

Violence doesn't have much to do with inequality. They might be weakly correlated, but you'd have to go far beyond that to establish causality.