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There are people who still desperately cling onto the notion that crime is directly a result of poverty. It is very hard for them to explain how Baltimore (GDP per capita of ~$60k USD) has more murders annually than Italy ($35k).
Oh, Italy also has roughly a 100x larger population (60 million vs 600 thousand). But of course they are famously free of organized crime.
Maybe the real underlying cause is that murder rate is inversely proportional to pizza quality?
Starting to think this would show up as a strong correlation...
One of my coworkers used to live in Boston. He insists that one particular pizza joint was a money laundering operation. Walk in to pick up, see that it looks nothing like your order, take it and leave anyway because the only staff are straight out of a Seagal movie.
It wasn't in Arlington, was it? I recently went to a small local pizza joint there that was completely empty except for the guy behind the counter. Looked like a pretty normal older gentleman, but he seemed very unhappy about me walking in and offering to buy something from him, the 2 slices of pizza I ordered took much longer than I would have expected to prepare, and the pizza wasn't very good, and it made me wonder if some money laundering was going on. Maybe this is an entire genre of pizza joints.
And now I'm reminded of this Tumblr thread on hole-in-the-wall pizza joints as possible mob fronts. The OP:
And perhaps my favorite bit:
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No idea, but I think this was in the 90s.
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What does the histogram look like? A bimodal distribution is compatible with the poverty->crime theory.
The nation’s capital is next door; they’re included in the same pay scale. I doubt white-collar policy wonks are smashing windows for drug money. But they’re definitely bringing up that GDP per capita.
I believe Jordan Peterson once said the strongest correlation in social science is between income inequality in a place and the rate of male homicide -- and the second-strongest is between IQ and various indicators of life success.
It would not at all surprise me to find such a bimodal distribution in a place known for criminality, if that correlation is indeed as strong as he let on.
I'm still quite sad about what happened to JP. Benzos, and getting off Benzos, definitely did a number on him. His podcast isn't that bad, but dunno what's going on with his Twitter. Canada also did him really dirty and put a huge chip on his shoulder.
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As you can see the among EU and US states, those which have the lowest gdp per capita are all EU ones. Yet the states, EU or US, which have the lowest murder rate per capita are also all EU ones. Any explanation why relies upon microgeography to explain away the anti-correlation shown @johnfabian, must look at the wider picture.
The bimodal distribution is an argument against using average GDP to assume away poverty. Clearly, poor people can exist even when wealthy ones are nearby.
Is it actually anti-correlated? I would expect two similar curves, each with a negative correlation between wealth and murders. But one of them was flattened by two world wars and an iron curtain. I can’t draw plots at the moment, but I bet you could make all sorts of correlations with the right gerrymandering.
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Even ignoring the circumstance that GDP (especially per capita) tells you almost nothing about real poverty, productivity or really anything and this might as well be Catholics wondering why the number of people with perfect pitch is not correlated with Gross Holy Water Consumption, I thought it's fairly well accepted that what matters for the poverty -> antisocial behaviour is not absolute wealth but perceived relative wealth. Italians in Italy are not surrounded by a society that is conspicuously more affluent than they are.
I would never claim that poverty has no effect on crime. I think besides being on some intuitive level obvious there are very broad relations one one can see, that go beyond simply that people who commit crimes tend to have the same kind of cognitive impairments that also keep one poor.
But this supposed iron law that crime is purely the product of poverty is something you see repeated everywhere where even the simplest of glances at the correlation can see how patently false that is.
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I do not accept this claim. I am sure that many people in polite company articulate as much, I doubt the sincerity of the belief. I have too much experience with people that are obviously relatively poor posing absolutely no threat to me and people who don't seem to be in any particular financial stress being the kind of people I want to avoid. I also don't see a plausible mechanism to go from low perceived relative wealth to just throwing garbage on the ground in your own neighborhood; the more obvious causal chain is that people that lack intellect and impulse control are poor because of their low intellect and poor impulse control, which also leads to their antisocial behavior. People that are poor by circumstance don't engage in the same level of antisocial behavior.
I’m also reluctant to blame perception/envy, but how about cost of living?
I dunno. I still can’t decide if a 10th percentile income would have more buying power within a big economy or a small one. Intuitively, I think the small one, but the math isn’t checking out…
I am fairly confident, though, that housing regulations + property value combine to put a floor on housing costs. So it’d be possible for places with higher inequality to chop off the bottom of the supply, leaving more people homeless. Hence California.
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Except sex crime of course.
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Well I would kill for a good pizza, so that tracks.
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