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A large study from all of Sweden has found that increasing people's incomes randomly (actually, increasing their wealth, but you can convert wealth to income via an interest rate very easily) does not reduce their criminality. The authors find that via a cross sectional model, people with higher incomes are less likely to commit crimes (this just compares rich people to poors and sees rich people are less criminal), while when they switch to a "shock" model where people who won what is effectively a lottery don't see reduced criminality in either themselves or their children. This is a pretty big blow for the "poor people are more criminal because they don't have money for their basic needs" theory.
Original study here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31962/w31962.pdf
Marginal Revolution post discussing this here (also reproduced below, post has an additional graph at the end on the link): https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/why-do-wealthier-people-commit-less-crime.html
I don't think this result quite disproves "poverty => crime" except for a very naive version of that theory. Plausibly, growing up under poverty could impart habits and resentments that a late-life sudden injection of cash would not undo, any more than a 30something lifelong incel would become a well-adjusted normie with normie attitudes towards women if given plastic surgery and a flask of post-singularity AGI-designed pheromones to make him irresistible.
(The naive version would be something like "I have no money, so I calculate that going to steal some is the highest-EV action for me to take now". I doubt that real-life decisions to do crime are usually taken in this fashion; more likely that it's similar to those culturally evolved cassava processing rules, which would also linger for a while even if you supplied tribes with non-toxic GMO cassava. Presumably pro-crime poor communities outcompete anti-crime ones.)
An empirically correct (though not, as of the current year, large) example of a causal impact of child poverty on adult criminality is via lead exposure. Childhood lead exposure causes reduced IQ and conscientiousness in adults, which causes crime. Childhood lead exposure is strongly correlated with poverty, and giving money to poor parents will generally cause them to reduce their children's lead exposure (in the leaded petrol era, by moving to nicer places with less traffic pollution, in the modern era where most lead exposure is via peeling paint, by maintaining their homes better or moving to more expensive rentals with less shitty landlords).
The "people commit acquisitive crime because they have no other way of meeting basic needs" version of "poverty causes crime" is something of a weakman - I don't think I have seen it pushed in channels where everyone respects everyone else's intelligence. (I agree it is being pushed by expensively credentialled basic white chicks on social media). The most common sophisticated versions of the theory are the Spirit Level guys' theory (felt - i.e. relative - poverty stresses people out, making them more likely to commit crimes) and the adverse childhood experiences theory (chaotic upbringing affects children in a way which makes them more likely to commit crimes, and a lack of money can cause chaos in relevant ways).
Poverty causes bad parenting causes fucked-up kids causes crime is actually plausible - the evidence for near-zero shared environmental effects comes from twin and adoption studies, and most career criminals come from a family background that is sufficiently messed-up that it would get them excluded from twin and adoption studies.
‘Effed up parenting produces criminals’ is probably true, but I don’t think ‘poverty causes effed up parenting’ is, I think that the sorts of people who will seriously eff up being parents eff up everything else too, and are poor as a result.
'Effed up parenting is the wrong idea - the problem is providing a grossly inadequate environment for the child. Homelessness* does that for example, and poverty is causative of homelessness. (So, of course, is NIMBYism). In fact inadequate housing in all its many forms (lead is just the best studied example) is a fairly obvious case where poverty causes inadequate environments that wouldn't show up in twin and adoption studies, and could plausibly affect adult IQ.
Childhood malnutrition is another obvious example - this was a known issue 100 years ago (certainly in the UK a major driver of the early expansion of the welfare state was the number of army recruits who were medically unfit due to the effects of childhood malnutrition) but I don't know how significant it is in the contemporary US (it isn't a big issue in Western Europe). In third world countries there is pretty good evidence that you can reduce childhood malnutrition by giving people money.
"Are there practically significant ways in which giving poor parents money would improve childhood environments in a way which produces long-term benefits?" is a profoundly important and hard empirical question to which the answer is "Yes" in the third world, but which we can't answer in the first world because asking the question correctly involves crimethink-adjacent ideas like "A naive correlational analysis is genetically confounded enough to be worthless." If you think the answer is obviously "Yes" or obviously "No, with the partial exception of lead abatement" then you are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect.
* Homelessness as in living in shelters, sleeping in cars, couchsurfing etc. Street homelessness has complex causes with drug addiction and untreated mental illness being major factors, but simple homelessness is either caused by a short-term emergency (like a messy breakup or a house fire) or by not being able to afford housing.
Thanks for the clarification.
I believe that(a diet of 90% gruel is after all not very appetizing or nutritious and you'd fix it pretty quickly if you could afford something else), but I'm pretty sure that the dominant case of childhood malnutrition in the US is either shitty parenting(it's just easier to let them eat sweets instead of insisting on dinner) or poor cultural practices(blacks and underclass whites don't eat fruit and will only eat vegetables in highly specific forms that have much of the nutrition leached out, so picky kids miss out on important nutrients). It has the same causes as food deserts- people from certain backgrounds would eat steak if they could afford it but they can't so they eat cheap sausage, bread, and desserts with a soda, and it never occurs to them to eat veggies rice and chicken.
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Poor communities often have poor access to law enforcement (i.e. the police are often absent, abusive, or unhelpful) for social/political reasons, which allows criminal behavior to flourish, which increases antagonism from law enforcement, which increases distrust of law enforcement, which allows criminal behaviors to flourish...
This is often compounded by weak law enforcement also encouraging anti-social behaviors which may be adaptive in that environment but not in others. E.g. in a community with weak law enforcement, being willing to fight may be important to not being victimized (even if that norm also leads to stupid fights over petty disagreements). In a community with robust law enforcement, being willing to fight gets you arrested for assault.
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Sure, but this is nearly indistinguishable (apart from some renaming) from the claim that the causes of poverty are endogenous.
The difference remains that instrinsically poor people's children would still be high risk to have crime habits whereas non-instrinsic early exploure would not.
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Is neuroplasticity really a surprise new concept for you? Language acquisition in children vs adults is a popular culture-neutral example.
Certainly!
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Are you seriously trying to argue that nature and nurture are the same thing? Getting your legs cut off by a bear when you're 4 will also impart lifelong struggles, but you probably should not describe a mauled person's wheelchair as an intrinsic trait.
I am not making any claim about whether they are "the same thing" in some abstract sense.
I am saying that they share the property of being stable even under large external shock. They can be different things but be alike in that way.
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Of course, it doesn't disprove anything. It just adds another wrinkle to the defense, but wrinkles accumulate until an idea starts to look old and haggard. Each wrinkle reduces the explanatory power of the hypothesis, since there are more and more exceptions, caveats, outliers, and improbabilities piling up around the thing meant to be explained. In the extreme, you reach a point where the argument is essentially that of Descartes' demon--P is true despite appearing for all intents and purposes to be false. That is, P has no functional role in explaining anything happens, but it is nonetheless asserted to be the true hidden cause of everything. That is, it ceases to be an explanatory hypothesis.
I would say this is approximately where feminists are with patriarchy, or where racism-mongers are with white supremacy, and so on. Unfortunately, the wrinkles don't seem to have much diminished their power and influence. The explanatory power of hypotheses seems to bear little relation to their political power, at least so long as societies are wealthy enough to offset their costs. In fact, it seems as though the political power of a hypothesis is actually diminished by too much explanatory power, since the latter makes it specific and inflexible and disallows easy picking and choosing of its application.
Sometimes I fear that successful rational criticism of popular political ideas can be counterproductive, since it often has the effect of merely reducing their explanatory power while actually increasing their political utility. It kind of refines and purifies them, alerting them to potential soft spots and weaknesses that need to be patched over. The end result is an idea that means less and has more to say, an idea that can account for everything and demand anything. In other words, and ideal ideology for political action. Science sure as shit doesn't keep this in check, but the economic costs and dead bodies do tend to pile up eventually.
I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but I think I may be accidentally arguing against the entire purpose of this forum.
Yes and I think the 20th century showed us that the right sort of ideology can persist despite the megadeaths stacking up due to their mismanagement. I suppose the good news is 21st century Americans are more pampered and disobedient than mid-century Soviets and Chinese communists. So maybe we'd stop following ruinous policies sooner. One can hope.
Surely if progressive policies were so ruinous we'd expect to see anti-progressive strongholds like the Deep South substantially outperforming progressive strongholds like New England.
The topic under discussion is policies so bad that the bodies are piling up. Neither Vermont nor South Carolina are currently suffering from some Great Leap Forward style policy disaster.
Whatever complaints I have about American progressives, they aren't racking up megadeaths like communists. But if somehow they or their conservative opponents did, I would hope Americans are less obedient than Soviet peasants and don't passively go along with ruinous policy.
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Criminality causes poverty.
Left just likes reserving their sympathy for the worst people. They consider themselves superior for it, because any shmuck can have sympathy for a victim of violent crime, but only sophisticated people (or other criminals) would have it for the violent criminal.
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