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Poverty does not cause crime. Instead, poverty and criminality are linked by common behavioral causes (high time preference, low impulse control, etc.). You can
by gottorf 1y ago
Poverty does not cause crime. Instead, poverty and criminality are linked by common behavioral causes (high time preference, low impulse control, etc.). You cannot reduce crime by reducing the gap between the rich and the poor, because the poor are not committing crime to escape poverty.
Intelligent people are very bad at modeling the minds of people like this. It's a blind spot I see fairly often.
- Citizen8396 1y agoBoth can be true. Ostensibly, reducing poverty-related crime would allow resources to be effectively deployed against the remainder.
- rayiner 1y agoThere’s no such thing as “poverty related crime.” My dad’s village in Bangladesh is dirt poor, but has very little crime.
- jacquesm 1y agoYou keep making the weirdest comparisons. What does your dad's village in Bangladesh have to do with crime rates in DC or any other city in the United States? This is just absurd, you're pulling in utterly unrelated factoids - which are anecdata at best and which we are going to have to believe at face value - to supposedly support your point, which if we generously assume that they are true still would not do so.
- rayiner 1y agoI assumed the person asserting that poverty causes crime was generally familiar with the crime statistics for poor countries in asia and africa (Bangladesh being an archetypal poor country in Asia). Specifically, the homicide statistics, which are the most reliable proxy for crime because homicides are well reported even in developing countries. And if you aren’t familiar with the homicide statistics in asia and africa, how can you have an opinion on poverty and crime?
- beedeebeedee 1y agoWealth disparity drives crime
- xyzzyz 1y agoNo, that’s absurd. When poor people kill other poor people, this is not a fault of rich people who happen to live nearby.
- CyberDildonics 1y agoThey didn't say that at all. They didn't say killing, they didn't say fault and they didn't say anything about people "nearby". Statistically they are right, inequality correlates heavily with crime. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-stark-relationship-between-income-inequality-and-crime https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-star...
- xyzzyz 1y agoNo, the claim was that inequality drives crime, and all you’re showing is correlation. As I’m sure you’re aware, correlation is not causation.
- CyberDildonics 1y agoThat's fine to say when there is another cause you can identify. For social statistics, most of the time it's people attributing two things together when the underlying cause is money. In this case that's just a rationalization for what you want to be true.
- beedeebeedee 1y agoThere are too many articles on inequality driving crime. Here's the first that popped up on google: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8 Even just applying basic logic to it suggests it is true. You arguing against it is absurd