8 ms·

The cause is the same as it always has been: it is easier for some people to get to the desired standard of living by stealing/other crime than by working. Why

• Rizz 5y ago
  Is it crime or is protest? We all know Amazon will let its workers die in hurricanes, harass its workers until they commit suicide, not pay their workers a living wage, and all this while the big boss goes flying around in spaceships for fun. I'm sure a lot of the "criminals" rationalize their behavior by knowing that whatever they do it can't ever be as bad as what Amazon does, they're even doing justice by fighting back when no-one else does. I'm sure this is more about being Robin Hood than people being evil to their core.
• truckerbill 5y ago
  Crime rates go up when inequality goes up.
  • KSteffensen 5y ago
    Is crime rate proportional to inequality or poverty?
    • user-the-name 5y ago
      Inequality implies poverty, so this question is pointless.
      • nitrogen 5y ago
        No, they are orthogonal. A society split between middle class workers and billionaires still has inequality without poverty. A society of 100% poverty has no inequality.
        • user-the-name 5y ago
          But that does not actually happen. In practice, inequality means poverty.
        • jan_Inkepa 5y ago
          Some people define poverty as being in the lower X percentile of wealth. > https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn07096/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn07... "Two commonly used measures are: people in relative low income – living in households with income below 60% of the median in that year; people in absolute low income – living in households with income below 60% of (inflation-adjusted) median income in some base year, usually 2010/11." This is however a bureaucratic definition of poverty that I don't accept as capturing the everyday meaning, but I thought it might be of interest to mention. I remember being under the poverty line and thinking "this doesn't count. I don't accept that I'm living in poverty." Knowing these technical uses made me regard official-sounding news and reports about 'poverty' quite differently. (The bottom of the article talks about a group giving a more lay-compatible definition "The Social Metrics Commission (SMC) proposed a new based on the extent to which someone’s resources meet their needs. This accounts for differences among households such as costs of childcare and disability, savings and access to assets." which seems more meaningful if you're interested about absolute standards of living).
          • cloverich 5y ago
            That's good to know. I had similar feelings about wealth. At one point my wife and I were in the bottom 10% or lower, because of our student debt. Yeah when we graduated medical and dental school we had pretty negative net worth. But... does it really make sense to claim we had no wealth? Or that someone who made 20k a year with no debt should trade places with us? I think wealth and inequality studies are important, and if they don't address this issue they are misleading, even meaningless statistics.
    • hnaccount_rng 5y ago
      Since poverty is (at least typically) defined relative to some average those two things are not as disconnected as you may think. But in general I'd expect crime to be a "least worst option" choice and I seem to remember research to that effect. Although I wouldn't be able to find that now again, so take it with an appropriate amount of salt.
  • iamben 5y ago
    Was discussing this with some friends recently. The general agreement was social media has exacerbated inequality. It was always there to a varying degree - but there's a big difference between seeing a movie star or musician flexing expensive clothes and shoes on MTV or in a magazine to seeing Johnny Average who went to your school flexing them on Instagram. One is attainable and "why don't I have this", the other you don't worry about. Furthermore we seem to have such an easy money culture right now - if you get caught in a crypto or NFT or memestock or whatever bubble on FB or Twitter, 'everyone' is rich with no effort (and they can teach you how for 99$ a month!) - why shouldn't you be rich without working?!
  • ramoz 5y ago
    Do crime rates go up when you stop policing actual crimes?
    • callmeal 5y ago
      > Do crime rates go up when you stop policing actual crimes? No they don't. See all the studies that disprove the "broken windows theory" that tried to prove that crime rates go down when you enforce policing. https://carder.uk/threads/does-broken-windows-theory-work.118226/ https://carder.uk/threads/does-broken-windows-theory-work.11... The first book to disprove the broken window theory was Bernard Harcourt 's Illusion of Order, published in 2001. The author points out that over the 30 years of the existence of this theory, it has never been empirically confirmed, on the contrary, the available research contradicts it. The theory also relies on arbitrarily defined categories of "order" and "disorder", "law-abiding citizens" and "violators." The first book to disprove the broken window theory was Bernard Harcourt 's Illusion of Order, published in 2001. The author points out that over the 30 years of the existence of this theory, it has never been empirically confirmed, on the contrary, the available research contradicts it. The theory also relies on arbitrarily defined categories of "order" and "disorder", "law-abiding citizens" and "violators." First of all, the drop in crime in New York occurred simultaneously with the corresponding process in the entire United States. In another study, Harcourt notes that the drop in crime rates in New York coincided with the end of the crack drug epidemic. Christina Sterbenz adds that this trend has been fueled by declining unemployment (during the 1990s, its rate fell by 40%). Criminologist Ralph Taylor is sure that socio-economic is a significant factor that affects the crime rate. Returning to the experiment with two cars - in the Bronx initially there was a low level of welfare, and in wealthy Palo Alto, a researcher must intervene in the experiment to provoke vandalism. The theory of broken windows has also failed to pass the test of a massive social experiment. In 1994, the US government introduced the Moving to Opportunity program, which relocated 4,800 impoverished families to prime locations. The program was implemented in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Baltimore. Three quarters of the resettled households were on the brink of poverty, and two thirds of the participants were African American. According to the theory, in the new environment the level of their involvement in offenses should have, but this did not happen, since the move did not improve their financial situation, but emphasized the social gap with their neighbors.
• mtsr 5y ago
  > Humans will always crave to have more than each other ad will steal, loot, defraud, do anything to get there. Yes and currently society has many many ways for the privileged to get even more than others than they already have, in ways that are legally accepted even if they’re morally reprehensible. And as long as we don’t change that and make the playing field more even, I don’t think judging petty theft so harshly makes any sense at all.
  • refurb 5y ago
    Lazy argument. Working is always superior to stealing. Your words might try and cast them as morally equivalent, but they arent.
  • sharikous 5y ago
    When you don't judge theft harshly you actually promote a culture of dishonesty. It is the cruelest and vilest thing to do to those poor people who actually don't steal.
    • callmeal 5y ago
      > When you don't judge theft harshly you actually promote a culture of dishonesty. Yup. I wish we would start doing that. https://inthesetimes.com/article/walmart-corporations-wage-theft-labor-settlements-firms https://inthesetimes.com/article/walmart-corporations-wage-t... A scathing new report finds that hundreds of major corporations in the United States are repeat wage-theft offenders — committing the violations and then paying the subsequent fines as part of the cost of doing business.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
• buran77 5y ago
  When risking getting caught stealing is more attractive than working then it's safe to say the working opportunities for those people aren't worth almost anything. People take the easier option. You choose "lock your trains well" despite knowing the answer will be "crack those locks well" because it was the easy answer. The view is simple. Eventually the train will be a rolling mountain of steel protected by an army. Your fishing lure will cost an arm and a leg because protection costs are up. And the thieves will just be relegated to do slave work (the work that shouldn't exist in those conditions but society was too busy locking the train well to bother protecting its most vulnerable members) or starve because those are the only options on the table.
  • oefrha 5y ago
    > When risking getting caught stealing is more attractive than working then it's safe to say the working opportunities for those people aren't worth almost anything. That assumes thieves are rational actors capable of assessing risks at least somewhat accurately. Often times (the vast majority of times, even) they are not. It's also worth bringing up that certain American subcultures glorify criminals. The criminal lifestyle is seen as glamorous by a large number of people, while honest labor is just dull, whether it pays enough or not.
    • ckolkey 5y ago
      I think this is a fundamental attribution error... You're saying the person _is_ a thief, whereas I would say the person is _committing_ thievery. In the first case, it's the persons nature and no change in incentives would dissuade them. In the second, if you change the incentives so that thievery is less attractive (with its inherent risks) than just working for a good wage, the behavior would vanish.
      • oefrha 5y ago
        _People committing thievery_ more often than not aren’t rational actors capable of assessing risks at least somewhat accurately. There, exact same argument with a term you prefer.
• savolai 5y ago
  I've seen how tricky participating in society with a cheap android phone can get. Your memory runs out all the time when you try to have apps critical for everyday life, and your privacy is sold to highest bidder. Everything takes more time and is less reliable. Until we as a society can honestly look at what reasonable amount of well being in information societies looks like, it's tricky to tell those with less what is reasonable to expect of quality of life. Yes, mimetic desire is a real power too. Is that really what's at play here? Who has the right to draw the line between basic well being and an utopia?
  • DocTomoe 5y ago
    I've been using cheap (~150 Euros) chinese Android phones for years now. I have not experienced memory running out (my current one has some 256 GB, I think), and privacy selling is a problem caused by apps, not by the hardware - you'd be surprised the amount of info your average iOS app sells. This Android vs. iOS thing is not about technical capabilities, it's about elitism - and elitism always breeds jealousy, and thus thievery. Lao Tse knew this in 500 BC: "By not prizing goods hard to get, you will cause the people to cease from robbing and stealing."
    • donkeybeer 5y ago
      The poor most probably aren't using 150 euro phones, and he probably meant RAM more so than storage.
      • DocTomoe 5y ago
        Well, that's the lower end for smartphones these days, and the one I am using has 4GiB of RAM, the same amount the iPhone 13 has. Again, this is not about technical specifications, it's about faux elitism and the problems that come with it.
        • saagarjha 5y ago
          Comparing RAM on Android and iOS devices is not going to give you any reasonable insight into how well the device runs.
• jl6 5y ago
  > Why crime us going up? It’s not. The long term trend in property crime in the US is down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
  • ggreer 5y ago
    That article hasn't been updated for the massive increase in crime from the past two years.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • CamperBob2 5y ago
    Difficulty: people may not even bother reporting minor property crimes anymore, because the police (and, more important, the prosecutors) DGAF.
    • smcl 5y ago
      You might not realise it but you've recreated a famous bit from the news satire "Brass Eye" - a news presenter shows some crime statistics and follows it up with the words "So much for recorded crimes, but crimes we know nothing about are going up as well" and displays this graphic: https://twitter.com/dannyjeremiah/status/472109093260648450 https://twitter.com/dannyjeremiah/status/472109093260648450
  • nomel 5y ago
    Much has been decriminalized in California, so I question if these types of statistics can be accurate.
    • jl6 5y ago
      Theft has been decriminalized in California?
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
• mysecretaccount 5y ago
  > defunding police Police budgets are, by and large, still increasing in the US.
  • ramoz 5y ago
    Faced with massive demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd, the Los Angeles City Council took a dramatic and symbolic step last year, cutting $150 million from the Police Department’s budget and promising to put that money into other social services.
    • yakz 5y ago
      Are you saying that the LAPD budget isn’t increasing?
      • yakz 5y ago
        From looking at the budgets from 2014[1], it's increasing. Also the "$150 million" cut figure is the difference between the council approved budget and the mayor's proposed budget, not the difference from the previous year. In billions of dollars: 2014-2015: $1.338 2015-2016: $1.438 2016-2017: $1.485 2017-2018: $1.578 2018-2019: $1.609 2019-2020: $1.733 2020-2021: $1.721 2021-2022: $1.760 The city also took on $47 million in overtime debt in the year that the budget was cut [2] [1] https://lacontroller.org/budgets/ https://lacontroller.org/budgets/ [2] https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/la-cut-the-police-budget-then-banked-47-million-in-overtime-debt-to-officers/ https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/la-cut-the-police-budget...
    • mysecretaccount 5y ago
      As another commenter pointed out, this is not accurate.
• bradlys 5y ago
• roenxi 5y ago
  That is basically a longform way of saying "people will steal if their personal economics makes stealing rational". While extremely true it doesn't give a toehold into the problem to decide what to do next. The question here is really what specific policies and cultural forces are shaping the economic realities that these people are living in. If nothing else, we should ask why someone isn't having great success hiring a few thick-knuckled train robbers away from their life of crime and running a very profitable security business.
• bildung 5y ago
  It's pretty well-established empirically, over long periods and multiple countries, that this is mostly about income inequality. Not about overall wealth, not about new gadgets. Want to reduce theft and (juvenile) violent crime? Than reduce income inequality.
• meltedcapacitor 5y ago
  "Humans" don't do this in Zurich or Tokyo but do it in Haiti and downtown LA. Could it be that context matters?
• dusted 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure most people would prefer a standard of living where they don't need to steal.
• teekert 5y ago
  "The cause is the same as it always has been: it is easier for some people to get to the desired standard of living by stealing/other crime than by working." This is based on the (imho) wrong assumption that people prefer stealing over working when it's easier. But this is not true, people prefer to work but they need to live and their children need to live. You should remove the necessity to steal by building a social infrastructure that helps struggling people. The case for this is nicely details in "Human Kind" by Rutger Bregman [0]. [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52879286-humankind https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52879286-humankind