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There'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

• marknutter 13y ago
  If 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 ago
    Absolutely. 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 ago
      Poverty 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 ago
        Has 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...
  • fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    To some degree. Which do you think most people would prefer? Crime Welfare Gainful Employment
    • astrodust 13y ago
      It's always the one with the most reasonable chance of producing the best outcome. In some environments that's crime. There's no jobs and the welfare can't pay the bills. In others it's welfare, as there's no jobs and nothing to steal. Thankfully, most of the time it's gainful employment that comes out on top. Low risk, steady rewards, and significantly more affluent than welfare or prison.
  • PeterisP 13y ago
    The future doesn't need us - or at least many of us. Already now we have no need whatsover for 15-20% of population to get jobs, as demand for low-skilled labor is permanently reduced. Soon it will be 30%, 40% and more. As soon as robots for stocking shelves, driving trucks and flipping burgers will be cheaper than minimum (or any livable) wage, we can expect that there will be no practical need whatsoever for large parts of population to work - the goods/services will be more and better if they don't get involved, and instead of "job" the question is how social policy will distribute resources to them - welfare, universal income, crime or starvation?
    • marknutter 13y ago
      This is a fallacy that is levied every generation, that automation and technological advances will lead to mass unemployment in the future. It completely ignores the fact that new types of jobs are created all the time and that there's always something that will require expertise and hard work. Instead of assembling widgets in a factory it will be working with data and information.
      • PeterisP 13y ago
        Please take note that currently these new types of mass jobs are not being created; there is already observable mass structural unemployment, and there are no new major economy sectors that need a lot of people. In recent years the jobs "working with data and information", i.e., white collar middle-class clerical jobs are exactly those shrinking because of automation, not growing; they were growing 20 years ago but not in 2010s. Where is the next wave? Historically new sectors opened up three times, but it's not a natural law that requires that to happen once more. There are some new jobs created in software engineering and product design, however, they are an order of magnitude less than the shrinking areas. Unlike the earlier shifts towards artisanal, industrial and later service jobs which could employ a majority of population, the new industries need relatively tiny numbers of employees - such as the (classic, exaggerated) example of 140.000 employed by Kodak vs 11 by Instagram. The "new new" jobs are scalable - i.e., you need a few of the best specialists that can cover some need X for a billion people, instead of earlier nonscalable jobs where there was a need also for lots of average and below-average employees to fulfill the quantity of work. The whole modern "information age" that we enjoy needed only 3-5 million engineers to create it, that's 0.1% of the global working population. Even the ever-shrinking farming currently needs more people than the Silicon Valley 'digital economy'.
• omegaham 13y ago
  Actually, welfare benefits are much lower than they were under Johnson's Great Society programs. They declared a War on Poverty back in the 60s, and it did about as well as the current War on Drugs. We've actually been cutting welfare benefits for some time, culminating in the reforms done under the Clinton administration.
  • DanI-S 13y ago
    Not all of the original article's statistics were based in the US, though. Few European countries were cutting welfare until 2008.
  • vacri 13y ago
    Are those lower benefits spread across a wider demographic, or has the demographic been reduced as well? Just wondering about "10% of the population on $$" versus "40% on $"...