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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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