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It keeps me puzzled: why inequality per se is a culprit? Poverty? I would get it. But how the fact that someone is richer than you justifies shoplifting is bey

It keeps me puzzled: why inequality per se is a culprit? Poverty? I would get it. But how the fact that someone is richer than you justifies shoplifting is beyond my understanding.

throwaway894345 5y ago
I can’t speak for anyone besides myself, but growing inequality implies more poverty (more poor people, poor people get poorer, etc). So if poverty begets crime and (growing) inequality begets poverty, then inequality begets crime. There may also be other vectors through which inequality begets crime as well. Maybe it’s possible to have a kind of inequality where the rich get richer without the poor getting poorer (although I suspect it would just mean that the purchasing power of a dollar falls even though the poor have as many dollars as they had before) but in practice in America I think we have the kind of inequality where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer (and more numerous).
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  According to [1] the official poverty rate in 2019 was 10.5 percent, down 1.3 percentage points from 11.8 percent in 2018. [1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-270.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    Hmm, interesting. Any idea how the picture looks at the 5-year or 10-year trend (year over year clouds just be an anomaly)? What about the degree of poverty (we could have fewer poor people but they could be getting poorer)?
    - AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
      From [2] it looks like poverty has been going up and down staying within 10-15% range for the past 50 years. I'm sure it's possible to construct a measure which will show that poverty went up - as it's equally possible to show the opposite - but either will mostly likely be overfitting, i. e. hand-picking data to prove the desired point. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        To be clear I’m not trying to construct anything; I’m just expressing a curiosity.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  I don’t get where this notion comes from. As late as the early 1970s we had actual starvation in the US (not “food insecurity”). Poverty is definitely definitely going down, not up.
  - eevilspock 5y ago
    fairness matters. Especially as this is a shared planet. Rich people should not be able to monopolize it, nor monopolize political power, have better criminal justice, be treated as better people, and then leverage this monopoly to make people work for them for the lowest possible wage and extract all the value from that labor as "their" profit. What if one argued that some enslaved people in 1850 Georgia were better fed than before they were kidnapped from Africa. All ok then? And why should rich people complain if there were a revolution and they were relegated to the middle class? The middle class of 2021 live longer and have better healthcare than the kings of even 100 years ago. What rights does anyone have to anything? By what reason doed anyone have a claim to injustice?
    - AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
      The problem is that unlike poverty and equality, fairness is a vague philosophical category.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I wasn’t thinking on 50 year timescales, more like the last decade. But I may well be wrong even on that point.

It keeps me puzzled: why inequality per se is a culprit? Poverty? I would get it. But how the fact that someone is richer than you justifies shoplifting is beyond my understanding.

throwaway894345 5y ago

I can’t speak for anyone besides myself, but growing inequality implies more poverty (more poor people, poor people get poorer, etc). So if poverty begets crime and (growing) inequality begets poverty, then inequality begets crime. There may also be other vectors through which inequality begets crime as well. Maybe it’s possible to have a kind of inequality where the rich get richer without the poor getting poorer (although I suspect it would just mean that the purchasing power of a dollar falls even though the poor have as many dollars as they had before) but in practice in America I think we have the kind of inequality where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer (and more numerous).

AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
According to [1] the official poverty rate in 2019 was 10.5 percent, down 1.3 percentage points from 11.8 percent in 2018. [1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-270.html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Hmm, interesting. Any idea how the picture looks at the 5-year or 10-year trend (year over year clouds just be an anomaly)? What about the degree of poverty (we could have fewer poor people but they could be getting poorer)?
  - AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
    From [2] it looks like poverty has been going up and down staying within 10-15% range for the past 50 years. I'm sure it's possible to construct a measure which will show that poverty went up - as it's equally possible to show the opposite - but either will mostly likely be overfitting, i. e. hand-picking data to prove the desired point. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      To be clear I’m not trying to construct anything; I’m just expressing a curiosity.
bradleyjg 5y ago
I don’t get where this notion comes from. As late as the early 1970s we had actual starvation in the US (not “food insecurity”). Poverty is definitely definitely going down, not up.
- eevilspock 5y ago
  fairness matters. Especially as this is a shared planet. Rich people should not be able to monopolize it, nor monopolize political power, have better criminal justice, be treated as better people, and then leverage this monopoly to make people work for them for the lowest possible wage and extract all the value from that labor as "their" profit. What if one argued that some enslaved people in 1850 Georgia were better fed than before they were kidnapped from Africa. All ok then? And why should rich people complain if there were a revolution and they were relegated to the middle class? The middle class of 2021 live longer and have better healthcare than the kings of even 100 years ago. What rights does anyone have to anything? By what reason doed anyone have a claim to injustice?
  - AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
    The problem is that unlike poverty and equality, fairness is a vague philosophical category.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I wasn’t thinking on 50 year timescales, more like the last decade. But I may well be wrong even on that point.