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Notes -
It is not a motte and bailey. This is precisely what I meant.
Australia is a good counterexample, and I've always wondered why their crime rate isn't higher. I looked into it very briefly, and there are a few things that explain why. First, the crimes were mostly limited to petty theft. The more serious criminals were simply executed:
whereas many criminal gangs even require you to commit murder as a prerequisite for membership.
Second, Australia was not exclusively founded by convicts. They were diluted significantly by regular free immigration. I couldn't find the number I was hoping for (average % of ancestry from convicts), but there is this stat that 20% of White Australians have at least some convict ancestry, so presumably the overall percentage is quite low, perhaps at around 10%.
Adding these factors along with the regression to the mean effect, and we should expect a negligible difference in the crime rate of modern White Australians, whereas the same would not hold under the criminal association theory I gave for the travelers. I don't have a pulse on your last point on the historical plausibility of this idea; perhaps you could fill us in?
Downthread, someone mentioned evaporative cooling, which would be an even stronger mechanism than what I'm proposing, so adding that in should be sufficient to account for the remaining difference.
Yeah the convict population of Australia is always massively overstated. They were one of the first major migrant waves, but the Gold Rush in Australia multiplied the population with free men. There were approximately 200k white Australian inhabitants (which was about 30-40% convict/convict-descent) prior to the Gold Rush in 1851, and about 2 million White Australians 30 years later in 1880.
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