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Falling Crime: Where have all the burglars gone?
- moron4hire 13y agoI think historians will look back at the early 21st century and note that Soma was best served digitally, rather than chemically.
- grabhive 13y agoPrecisely what I came here to say.
- pitt1980 13y agowhat does this mean? what is Soma?
- jrwoodruff 13y agoReference to 'Brave New World.' From Wikipedia: ...Soma is a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free "holidays". It was developed by the World State to provide these inner-directed personal experiences within a socially managed context of State-run 'religious' organizations; social clubs.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- throwaway1979 13y agoA fictional drug used to keep the masses in check. It is from the classic "Brave New World". His comment is quite cute in that regards :) Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
- tomrod 13y agoMy best guess: something referring to Brave New World/1984/Clockwork Orange? Or perhaps this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma
- kar-kub 13y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
- nslamberth 13y agoSoma was the recreational drug in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", a sci-fi dystopia book that presented a different view of the future than Orwell's 1984. In it, the government uses entertainment and technology to keep people within their assigned classes as opposed to military force and surveillance.
- bqe 13y agoThis sort of trite criticism of the hoi polloi is easy and lazy. People are better informed than ever, read more than ever, and are more satisfied with their lives than ever. You dismiss this monumental progress by calling it a drug.
- pessimizer 13y agoI need references for all three of those claims.
- mike_ivanov 13y ago> more satisfied with their lives than ever http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/05/chart-americas-rising-suicide-problem.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/05/chart-americas-r...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tmorton 13y agoThis article mentions, but undersells, the lead factor. Lead exposure causes cognitive problems in children, especially related to impulse control. The drop in crime correlates very well with lead cleanup. Kevin Drum (a left-leaning US journalist) has been making this argument: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-and-crime-linkfest http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-and-crime...
- outworlder 13y agoBut lead by itself can't be the major factor behind the crime drop. Countries such as Brazil have banned leaded gas even before the United States, and crime rates are still rising dramatically. It seems clear that other factors play a more important role. Things like police effectiveness, or economics. Edit: reference for lead ban dates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead Crime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Brazil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Brazil
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- weeksie 13y agoWhen was it effectively phased out in Brazil, though? Leaded gasoline was mostly gone in the US by the 1970s and there was a 20 year lag before the crime rate started dropping. The wikipedia article says lead was banned in the US in 1995, but it was definitely not widely available. However, if lead was widely used in Brazil right up until the ban date there (1989) then it would stand to reason that the crime rate wouldn't start dropping for another six or seven years.
- RyJones 13y agoI was buying leaded gas in Indiana as late as 1990, and had no trouble finding it in the general Illiana area. I don't think it's fair to say it was "mostly gone" in the 70s.
- oleganza 13y agoAll the robbery nowadays happens in the central banks and is called "QE".
- drcode 13y agoI think the reasons for this are: (1) People buy fewer used items in physical stores, i.e. fewer people buy stuff at pawn shops etc and a typical thief will never go through the effort of building up a decent eBay seller reputation. This makes it harder to monetize stolen property. (2) It's a self-perpetuating statistic, in that less crime means more resources/attention is given to the remaining crime (by the police and by the vigilance of citizens) which leads to even lower crime.
- thejteam 13y agoAnd, expanding on this, people carry less cash both on their person and in their homes.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoVery much this. I sold my motorcycle yesterday for ~$7K cash. Immediately afterwards I went to the ATM to deposit it. Who still keeps items of large value at home?
- marknutter 13y agoYeah, but they carry $500 smartphones with them now instead.
- drcode 13y agoRight, but how much would you get for that smartphone if you brought it to a pawn shop? Assuming you properly reset its data and convince the pawn shop owner it isn't stolen I bet you could get $30 at most. (And if the phone is locked down and the thief can't jailbreak it it essentially has a value $0)
- jseliger 13y agoOn the other hand, you could probably make a lot selling on Craigslist. I've been selling my family's old phones and computers for years, and the market is robust. Not $500 robust, but two-year-old iPhones go for about $200 (which, probably not coincidentally, is the upgrade price for a new phone).
- tsax 13y agoAt least one was at my apartment. Macbook Pro =(
- briancurtin 13y ago> In Chicago, where crime has been slower to fall than elsewhere, local politicians this year thanked hotspot methods for the lowest murder rate in half a century. What year are they talking about? 2012 was the highest in something like 10 years, and 2013 is on pace with 2011.
- hardwaresofton 13y agoThe financial sector
- abfan1127 13y agoCongress! Sorry, had to say it... nobody else had!
- superflit 13y agoThe burglars went to the internet. Low exposure to police and easier ways to attract victims. (scams, rip off schemes, ponzi)
- bubbleRefuge 13y agoYeah, to generalize, IMHO, a big part of this is there has been a move from blue collar to white collar crimes. Having grown up in South Florida myself, certainly there is anecdotal evidence of that. South Florida leads the nation in medicare fraud reaching possibly into the billions. Mortgage fraud was another linchpin during the financial crisis. There are tons of call centers in the area full of drug addicts who peddle every sort of scam you can think of to the gullible types in flyover country : automobile warranties, gold , carbon credits, home warranties. The latest craze is tax return fraud. Here's an old article about medicare fraud: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/23/60minutes/main5414390.shtml http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/23/60minutes/main5414... "They've figured out that rather than stealing $100,000 or $200,000, they can steal $100 million. We have seen cases in the last six, eight months that involve a couple of guys that if they weren't stealing from Medicare might be stealing your car," Ogrosky explained."
- SCAQTony 13y agoI live in "Lost Angeles" and former police chief Bill Bratton took credit for any statistic he could. It's my belief that the reason for crime reduction here in L.A. is that the standard of living has gone up via social services and drugs as a income vehicle are more ubiquitous. (See the first 60-seconds of the intro to the film "Layer Cake" where the bank robbers realize they "are in the wrong game..." http://youtu.be/QHKI8zMHCjE http://youtu.be/QHKI8zMHCjE ) Then there is credit card fraud too which is non-violent. In other words info and contraband crimes.
- EGreg 13y agoThere is a simple reason: computers and the internet. It makes people more docile and satisfies their urges. Porn for sexual urges, social media for "socializing", google and wikipedia for knowledge etc. That last part also makes everyone more educated. Which also correlates to less (blue collar) crime.
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoSimple and likely wrong. Violent crime started falling in the early 1990s, before the internet had much of any penetration outside academia.
- EGreg 13y agoYou're talking about only the USA. Actually, violent crime spiked in late 80s and then was coming down from that spike in the 90s, so there's that confounding factor. Most of the crime in the late 80s was juvenile crime in fact. It might have had to do with the culture of the time (inner city gangs, etc.) A better way would be to compare what people focus on / use on a daily basis today vs in the 80s. If you are restless today you can pacify yourself with a mobile phone. In fact it's an addiction that gives you a boost of dopamine. And the virtual world is much less .... physical and violent, which reduces people's tendencies over time. Another great pacifier of the 20th century is consumerism. Feel bad? Buy an ikea, veg out in front of the TV. There is a great documentary about how the PR industry was invented and Freud's theories about the "collective ego" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW_rIdd69W8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW_rIdd69W8
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoI'm talking across the industrialized world. The availability of the internet and other 'pacification networks' may be a contributing factor but it's clearly not the driving force.
- EGreg 13y agoWell violence in Britain started to go down a decade later than in the USA, so your time frame counterexample doesn't work for that.
- michaelwww 13y agoCrime has gone white collar. The march of progress goes on.
- adventured 13y agoMy first thought is pure economics. 1990 or so forward saw a massive increase in the standard of living globally on average. US GDP almost doubled over that decade, and I suspect the same is true for most of the industrialized world. So why isn't crime rising now, with big financial and unemployment problems? The countries with those problems are still consuming their past wealth to pay for current entitlements, which is keeping the social contract alive temporarily. And if that theory is correct, the next 10 to 15 years will see a meaningful increase in crime. Another thought - just a half-silly toss out, but perhaps the Web played a role. It changed a lot of social behaviors, and that would have began in the early to mid 1990s in the industrialized world. It altered how and where people spend their time; how they do their shopping; how they communicate; how often they leave their homes; knowledge available when it comes to almost everything, such as instantly being able to look-up good / bad neighborhoods based on crime. I first got online around 1994/95, at 14 years of age, and it's almost hard to remember time before the Web. I have to consciously remind myself that it wasn't always there.
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoIf you haven't read it, Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature is a tour-de-force on the factors that have reduced violence of all kinds.
- casca 13y agoWhile I do support some of Pinker's arguments, there are objections to many of his assertions. This piece is a good, well referenced academic challenge: http://www.zcommunications.org/steven-pinker-on-the-alleged-decline-of-violence-by-edward-s-herman-and-david-peterson http://www.zcommunications.org/steven-pinker-on-the-alleged-...
- RyanMcGreal 13y agoThe linked article mainly answers Pinker's data with anecdotes and US-hating (however justifiable). Notwithstanding Herman and Peterson's radical critique of Pinker's Enlightenment liberalism and some quibbles about selecting preferential methods of evaluation for casualty counts, they completely ignore the fact that Pinker's data analysis actually encompasses their outraged counterexamples. That is, everything Herman and Peterson say about US postwar military adventures is more or less correct, but that doesn't undermine Pinker's argument that overall rates of violence have been in steady decline for centuries. Neither high levels of civilian casualties nor military industrialism nor mercantilism nor imperialism nor ideological conflict nor genocide nor civil war were inventions of the 20th century - an in all cases, their overall global trajectory has been downward. With respect to WWI and WWII, Pinker goes to a great deal of trouble to explain and justify his argument that they represent outliers - trouble Herman and Peterson dismiss with dripping sarcasm but no counter-arguments. Sidenote: there are only 8 footnotes, of which one is a note that the essay was first published elsewhere. The only references to critiques of Pinker's book (rather than general references to studies on particular wars or American militarism) are a few references to critiques of Pinker's assertion that pre-civilization nomads lived violent lives. One reference refers to anthropologist Douglas P. Fry, but while Fry takes issue with Pinker's case for rates of violence in pre-civilization societies, he does not disagree with Pinker's main thesis: "Pinker’s basic claim is itself largely on target: Physical violence has been decreasing over recent millennia."
- anovikov 13y agoAs a Marxist, i see an explanation of this in that the crime thrives in societies numerically dominated by proletariat: people who have nothing to lose are easily motivated into crime, much easier their children with no view of the future. When the proletariat declined in numbers, so did the crime.
- CapitalistCartr 13y agoYou may well be right. Then comes that big step from Hypothesis to Theory. Lots of research, boring work digging through white papers, reading old journals, constructing tests, requesting funding, and finally analyzing results. That is why hypotheses are like opinions, everyone has one, but real, hard data is respected. “What are the facts? Again and again and again--what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history"--what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!" Heinlein
- ottoparts 13y ago"In the land of truth the man with one fact is king" Linton Barwick
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoSerious question. Aren't there more proles now?
- brador 13y agoIt's more profitable, with less risk, to steal cellphones by mugging/pickpocketing/grab and running. One job can net an easy $200. Six a night and you're rolling in Benjamins.
- rwhitman 13y agoI don't think enough emphasis is put in these studies on the rise of cheap entertainment for bored male youth. Teenage boys that normally would have been running around in the streets committing entry level crimes are now glued to their Xbox. The declines in crime also happen to correlate with the ubiquitousness and availability of video games. As they get cheaper and more violent, crime goes down. Sure policing has gotten better, and crime prevention tech has advanced, but these studies tend to ignore the fact that would-be criminals rarely leave the house anymore...
- mrpizzadelivery 13y ago+1 to this! Also consider the endless entertainment available via the internet. Today for about $50 per month I have access to a plethora of streaming movies and television shows via Netflix, practically unlimited news to read, and many more forms of entertainment at my finger tips. Just 20 years ago I might have paid $4 per move rental at the video store. I'm honestly wondering if the fall in crime is due to the rise of the super couch potato lifestyle similar to that portrayed in the movie Idiocracy.
- s_q_b 13y agoCheap entertainment, available and effective family planning, and reduction in environmental toxins (e.g. lead) would all be likely suspects to me. We looked at this once in class from a quantitative perspective, and IIRC, family planning was the only one that comported with the data.
- wilfra 13y agoNice one, ya probably true. Smartphone and camera ubiquity probably also plays a role. Just as cops know if they try to Rodney King somebody it will be on YouTube an hour later, so are criminals aware there will be a bunch of digital evidence. Support is given to this by the fact that many of the crimes that are rising are things people can't witness you doing (bank fraud, identity theft etc). And it's definitely not a silver bullet doing this. It's a combination of all of the factors in the article and here on HN and more we haven't thought of, all doing their part.
- 13y ago
- danso 13y agoA little OT, but related to current events: Detroit, which has been facing fiscal problems, has enjoyed a drop in crime even though budget deficits has forced the city to cut hundreds of officers: http://news.yahoo.com/detroit-crime-down-murder-rate-173600203.html http://news.yahoo.com/detroit-crime-down-murder-rate-1736002... And yet the murder rate is relatively stagnant, and this year reached a peak: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/04/16352612-weve-lost-respect-for-life-detroit-records-deadliest-year-in-decades?lite http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/04/16352612-weve-los... How to reconcile these things? Is crime really falling, or have reporting standards changed? Or, if cops can't respond to reports, do the reports ever get filed?
- roc 13y ago> "How to reconcile these things?" 1. 'urban lead' is a studied off-shoot of the lead hypothesis. Detroit's lead situation is a studied and known problem. So lingering crime in Detroit is actually expected under the lead hypothesis. Particularly as the population shrinks and the remaining citizen 'average' shifts poorer, with a more-toxic environment. 2. 'structural' crime. Opportunists considering theft as a means to an end might be dissuaded as the risk/reward equation shifts. But convincing a (drug) gang that it's no longer a good idea to murder a rat/rival is much more difficult. 3. Detroit's shrinking police coverage. The police department has explicitly warned people away from certain areas of the city, because they don't have the resources to provide effective coverage. This can only be interpreted as an 'opportunity' for structural crime. http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/08/14294269-visit-detroit-at-your-own-risk-police-union-warns?lite http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/08/14294269-visit-de...
- vacri 13y agoCriminologists understand that crime moves in waves, and different crimes move differently. Crime overall might be down, but a particular class of crimes might have risen. This is not an unusual state of affairs, but the news for the general public has no interest in educating people on this topic - after all, they need something with which to excoriate politicians; something will usually be 'on the rise', so politicians will be 'failing' in the whole field.
- seivan 13y agoSweden.
- DanI-S 13y agoThere's no mention of the rise of the welfare state. I'd be surprised if the presence of an economic safety net didn't have an impact on people's willingness to commit crime. In the end, I'm sure the answer is a combination of all these factors. As individuals and as a species, we get better at living as time goes on.
- marknutter 13y agoIf it's true that welfare makes it less likely for someone to commit a crime then wouldn't that also mean it makes them less likely to get a job?
- DanI-S 13y agoAbsolutely. In fact, many welfare schemes are designed to encourage young people to stay in education rather than dropping out early to work. In any case: since poor, unemployed young men commit crime, and we're never going to see 100% employment, lifting them out of poverty will reduce the impact of crime on everyone else. Intolerable for Ayn Rand; pragmatic for the rest of us.
- lmickh 13y agoPoverty rates have actually increased since the introduction of welfare and welfare reform in the US. Long term stability of your proposal aside (see the jump in Disability dependencies that followed the welfare reform), it doesn't match the data that shows a drop in crime over the same time period.
- spamizbad 13y agoHas it really? It dropped significantly in the 60s and 70s. Following that period, it tended to track economic trends (Poverty goes up during recession, comes back down during the good times) Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/11/poverty-in-the-50-years-since-the-other-america-in-five-charts/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/11/p...
- xradionut 13y agoHere's another factor to consider: Sometimes crime is under reported or covered up or not acted on. I've known of property and other crimes that did not show up in the statistics/annual reports of a particular city. The city in question was/is known for low crime and used that as a selling up point to attract businesses and home buyers. I'd be surprised if this was the only municipality that "fudged" their numbers.
- pitt1980 13y agoit seems that those trend are too dramatic to simply be a case of fudged numbers with no underlying change on the ground (not that numbers can't be fudged, just that if you were fudging numbers you wouldn't fudge them that much)
- bluedino 13y ago> Sometimes crime is under reported or covered up or not acted on. This could not be more true where I live, and with police departments shrinking nationwide, I would guess that it's true in other places as well. Plenty of people are still getting their back doors kicked down while at work, and come home to find their laptops and consoles, and television missing. You call the police, and they'll show up 4 hours later, and all they really do is put your name on a list. It's basically up to you to go around and search pawn shops and craigslist to find your stuff. Most people don't even bother to call the cops, and don't bother filing an insurance claim since an LCD TV is $450 and the insurance deductible is $1500, not to mention the rise in rates or risk of getting your coverage dropped. Reported crime is down. That's about it.
- PeterisP 13y ago1) For many categories measured in the original article (murders, armed robberies of stores) it's not likely that a major part is unreported; 2) For simple thefts, of course, a large portion is not reported because people don't bother - but are you really arguing that in suddenly all the (very different) countries people started reporting crimes much less than 20 years ago; or that municipalities in 2000'ies are fudging numbers much more massively than they could in 1980's?
- codex 13y agoI wonder if easier access to contraception, pornography and abortion have decreased the number of youth without access to opportunity and/or supervision.
- VLM 13y agoheritability either biologically or by culture of crime? Anyone with a genetic/cultural predisposition to addiction died as a crack addict in 1980-something, therefore no kids with the same predisposition alive in 2013? Don't have to be dead, just a reproductive failure. No kids, kids taken away, life in prison, etc. Another interpretation is most crime is done by young urban males. A recent-ish development is the Daddy-figure has basically disappeared from the lives of those people, criminal or non-criminal alike. Therefore no following in Dad's footsteps if you have no idea who or what a Dad is. Which is too bad when Dad's not a dirtbag, but if he is, its probably a net positive. Lack of employement opportunities, especially among the most disadvantaged, means the most disadvantaged kids are no longer latchkey kids?
- pawrvx 13y agoWelfare.
- liquidcool 13y agoSince this piece mentions burglary in specific, I found it thriving in Southern California (OC), but in a very specific fashion. Very careful criminals are using the following M.O.: - Parking garages with no cameras - Security is part time, and they wait until they're gone - They hit only cars that are unlocked, so no breaking, just entering - Occasionally, if they see a big score like a laptop, they will break a window, but probably as their last act before getaway. - They hit a building only once every few months, when people have let down their guard again. I'd never heard of this until I was a victim, and the police told me the were aware of it but couldn't catch them. Then I asked around and they've hit buildings in several cities. Simply remembering to lock your door and leave nothing obvious on your seats will protect you. I bring this up because although the crimes are reported to the police, I wonder how much they are reflected in statistics like these.
- lifeformed 13y agoWhat are people leaving in their cars that are worth taking?
- kevincrane 13y agoLaptops and cameras are the two things that would jump out to me. It should be obvious to you or me that you'd bring those inside for the night, but a lot of people don't out of convenience (some members of my family are/were guilty of this). Or maybe it's a work laptop and you just have no need for it inside.
- liquidcool 13y agoIn addition to laptops and cameras mentioned, they also go through your glove box. They stole my (prescription) sunglasses and my $5 phone charger probably thinking it was worth $30. But some people leave their GPS in there (not everyone has a smartphone for that), or they forget their phone, or maybe keep some emergency cash there.
- dangayle 13y agoThey've all moved to Spokane, Wa and become real estate agents or car thieves
- bluedino 13y agoWait - I thought New York city's crime rate actually rose 4 percent because of all the iPhone thefts? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2212093/Spike-iPhone-robberies-causes-New-York-crime-rate-rise.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2212093/Spike-iPhone...
- desas 13y agoThe daily mail is not a reputable source for anything.
- rqfowler 13y agoJail
- sumodds 13y agoWallstreet ;)
- Tichy 13y agoI have no absolute numbers, but in recent years I have heard far more about attempted burglaries than in the decades before (in Germany). It sounds to me as if the burglars are mostly professionals, driving with trucks into suburbs to find empty houses. On the other hand I also wonder what is there even left to steal. Apple might singlehandedly sustain burglaries because their gear is the only stuff worth stealing these days? Then again an acquaintance told me when her flat was burglared the thieves took everything, including photographs and files. I suppose there might be villages somewhere in eastern countries dedicated to scanning those files for bank account information.
- Yourfags 13y agoI think the simple answer a lot of these comments are pointing to is: civilization, wealth, progress, whatever you want to call it, but more and more people are aware of how nice life can be and also see that it doesn't really appear without hard work, course this is merely a hypothesis, but I think it's a pretty common sentiment in the first world that hard work creates an easier life.
- gummify 13y agoI'm pretty sure I saw a documentary recently about the increase in juvenile crime and the increasing occupancy rates in jails. Also, what about biological disposition and hormonal influence?
- djdj123 13y agoLiving in a bay area city with a recent alarming increase in armed robbery due to a shrinking police force (guess which one), I would suggest that crime, like real estate, is local, local, local. Perhaps Times Square and Talinn are safer than before, but the negative dividends of the crack epidemic, the rise of gangs and guns and glorification of criminal culture, the lack of parenting in at risk communities, and the collapse of municipal finances since 2008 has left cities like mine in the US with soaring violent crime rates.
- jhprks 13y agoThis is a worrying news indeed. Decreasing in crime in general can lead to letting our guards down. Less demand in security systems and personal firearms. The police and the federal security agencies may experience decline in applicants. It is wiser to have more bad people in the society doing bad things, so that the good people can defend themselves. The government should do something about this, sigh...
- ackfoo 13y agoManufacturing was outsourced to China starting in the 1990s, resulting in a flood of cheap consumer goods. Inexpensive labour means artificially low prices, which means in turn that most consumer goods are not worth repairing because the cost to repair them with North American or European labour is prohibitively expensive. It is cheaper to replace the item if it breaks. This has led to a decline in two professions: electronics/appliance repair and thievery. Just as it doesn't make sense to repair most consumer goods, it doesn't make sense to steal them, either. The street price of stolen goods is a tiny fraction of the new or even the used goods price. When new prices are so low, the miniscule price of stolen goods means that it is not worth the risk of getting caught stealing. The decline in domestic manufacturing may also have a bearing on other crime rates. Depression and hopelessness in a population, paradoxically, do not necessarily lead to increased violence. Look at any enslaved population; the first job of the keepers is always to create hopelessness, so that the population is easier to control. Violence declines in any enslaved population--at least, violence against the keepers. And violent crime among the enslaved is rarely reported, partly because the keepers don't care and partly because the enslaved do not trust the keepers. Criminals have either become anergic or else they have switched to confidence scams like organized religion. Religion, unfortunately, does not get reported as a crime. Edit:sp.
- dschiptsov 13y agoYou like it or not, but the famous "Broken Windows" and bandwagon effects are in play. Crime falling in some places just because being dumb looter or thief is less respectable than being "easy" credit consumption bunny. Why should you try to knock down a drunk for a smartphone, or press some fast-food stall for money while you can drive a cheap new Korean car "brought" without even first payment. But in places like Russia even this doesn't work. These miserable rednecks will never learn (being uneducated and unemployed have no access to A-class credit) and because they are the wast majority, anyone who is trying to lead modern consumption lifestyle are regarded as a peacock or even gay. And, of course, being a low-level criminal is inferior comparing to a "successful" corrupted official of any kind, driving $100k cars on the very same streets. It is very common in Russia to see people who live in a miserable soviet time panel housing blocks, but having a luxury car in a parking lot. So, street crime falls with easy credit, but this is only temporarily. Any severe economic disturbance and you will have it all back on the streets.
- doctorstupid 13y agoVirtue to them is that which makes modest and tame: with that they have turned the wolf into a dog and man himself into man's best domestic animal. - Nietzsche
- sjg007 13y agoOnline.