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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24582 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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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

It’s well known that people with lower incomes commit more crime. Call this the cross-sectional result. But why? One set of explanations suggests that it’s precisely the lack of financial resources that causes crime. Crudely put, maybe poorer people commit crime to get money. Or, poorer people face greater strains–anger, frustration, resentment–which leads them to lash out or poorer people live in communities that are less integrated and well-policed or poorer people have access to worse medical care or education and so forth and that leads to more crime. These theories all imply that giving people money will reduce their crime rate.

A different set of theories suggests that the negative correlation between income and crime (more income, less crime) is not causal but is caused by a third variable correlated with both income and crime. For example, higher IQ or greater conscientiousness could increase income while also reducing crime. These theories imply that giving people money will not reduce their crime rate.

The two theories can be distinguished by an experiment that randomly allocates money. In a remarkable paper, Cesarini, Lindqvist, Ostling and Schroder report on the results of just such an experiment in Sweden.

Cesarini et al. look at Swedes who win the lottery and they compare their subsequent crime rates to similar non-winners. The basic result is that, if anything, there is a slight increase in crime from winning the lottery but more importantly the authors can statistically reject that the bulk of the cross-sectional result is causal. In other words, since randomly increasing a person’s income does not reduce their crime rate, the first set of theories are falsified.

A couple of notes. First, you might object that lottery players are not a random sample. A substantial part of Cesarini et al.’s lottery data, however, comes from prize linked savings accounts, savings accounts that pay big prizes in return for lower interest payments. Prize linked savings accounts are common in Sweden and about 50% of Swedes have a PLS account. Thus, lottery players in Sweden look quite representative of the population. Second, Cesarini et al. have data on some 280 thousand lottery winners and they have the universe of criminal convictions; that is any conviction of an individual aged 15 or higher from 1975-2017. Wow! Third, a few people might object that the correlation we observe is between convictions and income and perhaps convictions don’t reflect actual crime. I don’t think that is plausible for a variety of reasons but the authors also find no statistically significant evidence that wealth reduces the probability one is suspect in a crime investigation (god bless the Swedes for extreme data collection). Fourth, the analysis was preregistered and corrections are made for multiple hypothesis testing. I do worry somewhat that the lottery winnings, most of which are on the order of 20k or less are not large enough and I wish the authors had said more about their size relative to cross sectional differences. Overall, however, this looks to be a very credible paper.

In their most important result, shown below, Cesarini et al. convert lottery wins to equivalent permanent income shocks (using a 2% interest rate over 20 years) to causally estimate the effect of permanent income shocks on crime (solid squares below) and they compare with the cross-sectional results for lottery players in their sample (circle) or similar people in Sweden (triangle). The cross-sectional results are all negative and different from zero. The causal lottery results are mostly positive, but none reject zero. In other words, randomly increasing people’s income does not reduce their crime rate. Thus, the negative correlation between income and crime must be due to a third variable. As the authors summarize rather modestly:

Although our results should not be casually extrapolated to other countries or segments of the population, Sweden is not distinguished by particularly low crime rates relative to comparable countries, and the crime rate in our sample of lottery players is only slightly lower than in the Swedish population at large. Additionally, there is a strong, negative cross-sectional relationship between crime and income, both in our sample of Swedish lottery players and in our representative sample. Our results therefore challenge the view that the relationship between crime and economic status reflects a causal effect of financial resources on adult offending.

People only commit crimes due to poverty when they are truly desperate. A person who has no food may steal, even if they are a mentally sound and moral person.

People who commit crimes in welfare states are criminals either because of mental issues such as low Iq, low impulse control and psychopathy, or they want status. The young man who gets into a violent fit of rage and stabs someone when someone cut in front of a line at a night club isn't going to be less violent with more money. The factor that is commonly ignored is social status. A young man with no money, who lives in a ghetto, has poor academic results, has never travelled and doesn't have the looks for instagram is going to be the ultimate low status loser. Imagine using tinder as a cleaner, living with three friends in a dumpy apartment on the wrong side of town. In Sweden, members of this class often have the added disadvantage of being immigrants from countries with an average height well below the average height in Sweden and speaking subpar Swedish. If that guy becomes a gangster, he is a somebody. People will respect him, women will like him, and he will walk past the bouncers who used to reject him.

The welfare state can never give people status. They can give food and some basic entertainment, but it will never make people happy or satisfied. It reduces underclass men to being rescue dogs and ersatz children for middle class girls with sociology degrees. That might be enough for someone who was recently freezing to death on the streets, but it isn't going to satisfy a 24-year-old pizza delivery man.

People who commit crimes in welfare states are criminals either because of mental issues such as low Iq, low impulse control and psychopathy, or they want status

Or out of opportunity. lenient sentences creates an incentive to commit crime, too.

The expectation of not being caught is the key incentive, not the lenient sentence if you are caught (at least with sentencing policies within the Overton window). A night in the cells is enough to make shoplifting not worth it if you expect to get caught.

maybe for a 14-year-old who stole on an impulse. for a career criminals, i am sure a long sentence is way worse than a night in the cell.

Most career criminals have the mental capabilities of 14 year olds.

It's more complicated than that. Otherwise the solution would be to mandate the death penalty for every crime out there.

there is a middle ground between do nothing and the death penalty though

The welfare state can never give people status, but it can reduce the status of low skill men who are more inclined to be providers and caregivers. Without the welfare state, lower class women have to make a trade-off between sexy bad boys and dependable good guys. With the welfare state, they don't.

Women always had the option of working to support themselves in lieu of getting married- and lower class women in most of history expected to both work(sometimes from home) and marry, social inequality and poverty are a hell of a drug. They just didn’t, pre-welfare state, have the option of becoming a single mom.

And I want to pause here- being a single mom is bad. It’s bad for the woman(although I suppose basing policy decisions on saving people from their own bad decisions isn’t great), it’s bad for the kid(s), it’s hard on the extended family and broader society. It actually is a major fault of the welfare state that the option of becoming a single mom becomes relatively more appealing.

To women, marriage itself is a sign of a high status woman. The welfare state only made it economically feasible to get by without a man, but the loss of cultural stigmatization was what legitimized single motherhood.

The revealed behavior by women seems to show that they prefer single motherhood over marrying below their station of at least, the station they believe they have.

If so, we'd be seeing more crimes in the advanced welfare states than in other states, which we aren't seeing.

Except the comparison point would have to be (welfare state with X GDP and Y demographics) vs (no welfare state with X GDP and Y demographics). Is there even a similar set of states we can compare? Given the impact of demographics and wealth on the type of state that the public builds, is it even possible to have one?

The liberation of women from the age-old dilemma of "marry this guy and have six of his kids or become a prostitute" is one of the greatest triumphs of human history, on par with the elimination of smallpox and possibly the invention of agriculture. Thank you industrial revolution and twentieth century social democracy.

Give it another century and I think the opposite will prove true. If social trends are any indication, the most liberated generation in history would tell me that OnlyFans and soft prostitution will always be their highest aspiration in life. Their words. Not mine.

The dichotomy you presented that's imposed on them by their biology, is just the unfortunate tragedy of being female. And it's even more unfortunate to accept that society can get along just fine without women's happiness or independence. It can't survive without mans participation. And those two things directly oppose each other on almost every point.

I agree it is one of the greatest triumphs of human history and we can thank the industrial revolution for that, but you don't need social democracy for it, even in modern day China women can freely not marry or become a prostitute but be extremely successful.

There's also a large amount of sex trafficking in places like Seattle and San Francisco, supposed bastions of liberal democracy.

I wonder which country has a higher percentage of women being forced into prostitution - China or the United States?

My guess would be the United States but low confidence.

Such a dilemma never existed. There's a reason that 'spinster' is a word used in English to describe a single woman. It's how they very often supported themselves. If we take England in 1377 as an example, a full third of adult women were single, and 10-20% never married at all. The idea that the only options were marriage or prostitution is a fantasy, formed (as far as I can tell) by people extrapolating the experience of the midcentury American housewife far off into the past and across the planet.

In 1300 AD, London had 18 brothels employing hundreds of prostitutes. These brothels were regulated, incredibly, by the Bishop of Winchester.

As the entire population of London was less 30,000 we can infer that perhaps 5-10% of the women in London at the time were prostitutes.

Prostitution was certainly a much more common career path during the Middle Ages. And life expectancy for prostitutes was very short. So I would say that, yes, many women were facing awful choices at the time. This shouldn't be surprising. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, Malthusian conditions applied more often than not. A large percentage of people, both men and women, did not get enough to eat.

Prostitution was certainly a much more common career path during the Middle Ages

...for the small minority of women who lived in London and/or other major cities. By far the most common occupation for both men and women would have been "small-scale subsistence farmer"

London was a pretty huge outlier in a lot of ways though. You probably had what, 2-3 million people in England? And there were only a handful of cities with London being the biggest by far. Nowhere else would have even close to that concentration of people who had enough money to hire a prostitute.

You probably had what, 2-3 million people in England?

Actually almost 5 million! But it would crash to under 2 million by 1450 thanks to the Black Death and its many echoes. The ones who survived the plague enjoyed much higher quality of life as Malthusian constraints were lifted.

Nowhere else would have even close to that concentration of people who had enough money to hire a prostitute.

I think you're probably right. But what a revealing statement. Things were so bad that women who might have wanted to resort to prostitution couldn't because there weren't enough clients with means to pay!

But what a revealing statement. Things were so bad that women who might have wanted to resort to prostitution couldn't because there weren't enough clients with means to pay!

It just shows that rich men were concentrated in cities, and their extra wealth was greater than the higher cost of living of the city.

What do you find revealing about this? Is the idea that there were huge wealth disparities in the past a revelation to you?

Things were so bad that women who might have wanted to resort to prostitution couldn't because there weren't enough clients with means to pay!

Isn’t this an (odd) interpretation of virtually any supply and demand curve? The only thing stopping me from stripping naked on public TV is that nobody is willing to pay me a billion dollars to do it.

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More like 5-7 million.

Reliable statistics from the medieval era are pretty non-existent but 10% actually seems to be about the rate at which women became prostitutes in the 19th century. It was quite common. Significantly higher than say, uptake on OnlyFans is today. You can also swap "prostitute" for "indigent." Nobody ever accused spinsters of living comfortably.

I've said it before and I'll say it again about this particular factoid - 10% of women or 10% of urban women? We are talking about societies which were 80-90% rural, and the brothels were in the towns - and mostly in the large towns and cities. So 5-10% of women in London per jeroboam (and presumably less in smaller towns) being prostitutes equals 1% or slightly less of all women being prostitutes.

10% of all women being prostitutes in the 19th century (where? it matters!) per To_Mandalay would mean that either 30% or more were prostitutes in the big cities, which I don't think anyone has suggested, or that there was a culture of prostitution even in village-sized communities.

30% or more were prostitutes in the big cities, which I don't think anyone has suggested

Some people did actually. I was thinking not of London but of 19th century New York. According to this book estimates of the percentage of young women in NY who were prostitutes over the 19th century ranged from 1% all the way to 40%. The author says that 5 - 10% seems likely because the police tended to lowball their figures and reformist societies to overstate them. He also suggests that during economic downturns the number may have gone above 10%. Obviously the numbers are extremely uncertain because moralists had a motive to exaggerate them, and at the same time a lot of prostitution was part-time and freelance, and so slipped under the radar. What seems clear is that women being driven to prostitution out of economic desperation was many times more common than it is today.

I have no idea what prostitution looked like in village communities or to what extent it existed. In the 19th century medium-to-large towns and cities in the USA and Western Europe are pretty much the only places with anything resembling reliable statistics.

In modern times we still see that prostitutes tend to concentrate in cities and that rural men will travel to cities to use their services. So the percentage of prostitutes among the rural populace was likely far lower than in the city.

Everyone in this discussion seems to ignore the social issues with prostitutes in small communities, where people are much more aware of the behavior of people in the community than in the city.

And most developed countries now are below replacement fertility, great success!

Don't worry we will get the non-developed countries. Sub-Saharan Africa is the last holdout, but we're coming for them too.

Are you a misanthrope? An antinatalist?

No, but I don’t have “number (of humans) go up” as a terminal value. I think most people wouldn’t be thrilled about high or even replacement level fertility if all of those children being born were going to spend the their entire lives in conditions equivalent to a Soviet gulag or a Caribbean sugar plantation. That’s how I feel about high fertility in a context in which the children being born will spend their lives in societies like those which prevailed before the 20th century.

I don’t view falling fertility rates as good in and of themselves, simply as markers of things I DO view as good, such as female emancipation, wealth, literacy, the demolition of traditional clan-kinship structures, etc.

Declining population is bad for a society.

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Unless you have a very wide definition of "welfare state", modern countries tend to be below that whether they are welfare states or not, and many of them first dipped below replacement in the interwar period already.

What countries wouldn't you consider as welfare states? For me, maybe China, I'm not 100% sure. US and European countries redistribute a fuckton of money for sure.

Singapore and Korea? They're not welfare states, are amongst the richest places on Earth, and have the lowest fertility in the world.

The problem is the middle road between patriarchy and equiality. Either don't give women access education and work, or equalize social expectations and have husbands to take an equal share of chores, housework, childcare, etc.

The middle ground puts too much stress on women, and pushes the most agentic out of the country.

In response to all the discussions below, I'd like to submit this Aporia piece on the Baby Boom:

The Baby Boom was the sudden rise in fertility, beginning in the late 1930s, of the wealthiest and most advanced countries in the world. It is often associated with the end of World War II, but actually began before then. These countries include the Anglosphere (Ireland, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia), the Nordics (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland), the wealthy continental European countries, occupied but victorious in World War II (France, Netherlands, Belgium), and the German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), which mostly lost World War II.

…

Many theories of fertility decline claim that it is the inevitable result of various good things: technological advancement, wealth, education, science (through weakening religion), urbanization, individualism, and declines in childhood mortality. Since (almost) no one really wants to go back to being high mortality, low-tech, extremely poor, rural, and ignorant, the story goes, we simply need to live with it. There is good empirical evidence for all of these things mattering, but what the Baby Boom shows is that it is possible to have it all. You can have a rich, rapidly growing, technologically sophisticated, personally free and individualist, urban, long-lived and fertile society. There’s no need to choose between slow extinction and preindustrial poverty.

…

There are several popular, but wrong, explanations for the Baby Boom. These come up in almost any discussion of the Baby Boom, so it is worth debunking them.

[1]. Generational income levels. In this model, popularized by Richard Easterlin, large cohorts lead to lower wages (relative to expectations) leading to low fertility leading to small cohorts leading to high wages leading to high fertility. This would be convenient, since it would suggest population would naturally reach an equilibrium and thus long-term population aging and decline is not a problem. It was plausible in 1978 when it was proposed, but has completely failed since then, with small, post-Boom cohorts across Europe having lower fertility than ever. It has also been refuted by showing that cohort effects (birth year) don’t particularly matter for the beginning of the Baby Boom, with it instead being explained by period effects (changes during the Baby Boom rather than changes in the years those who participated in the Boom were born).

[2]. Household appliances and antibiotics. In this model, recently popularized by Works in Progress, household appliances popularized after WWII reduce the costs of childbearing and antibiotics reduce the risk of various STDs as well as reducing maternal mortality. Since incentives matter, the story goes, easier and safer childbearing means more births. This would be very convenient (all we need is rapid economic growth, which we want anyways!) but has the twin problems that the size of the Boom was inversely correlated with appliance rollout and the beginning of the boom predates the fall in STDs. Also, this model predicts you should see Baby Booms in every country when appliances and antibiotics first spread, but that didn’t (doesn’t) happen. The vast majority of the world only had (or is having) a single demographic transition, rather than the double-transition pattern of the Boom countries.

[3]. Contraception failure. In this model, the Baby Boom is just a marriage boom combined with an inability to practice fertility control due to ineffective contraception. This would not be very convenient, since it suggests that the only way to revive the Boom is to imitate Ceaușescu’s Romania, which (almost) no one wants. The trouble with this hypothesis is that marital fertility actually declined in many Boom countries during this period, suggesting married couples got better, not worse, at controlling their fertility.

The Baby Boom is a Marriage Boom

The proximate cause of the Baby Boom is not a mystery. Almost all births during the Baby Boom were within wedlock, meaning that fertility was a function of (1) nuptiality and (2) marital fertility. In 15/22 countries (8/15 if excluding Southern/Eastern Europe, Ireland, and Japan), marital fertility actually decreased during the Baby Boom, meaning that the entire Boom is explained by more marriage. Only in the US, France, and Austria does marital fertility increase explain more than 15% of the Baby Boom, so when looking at it as a West-wide pattern, we can effectively reduce the Baby Boom to a marriage boom: more people getting and staying married at younger ages.

…

So what caused this marriage boom? The answer appears to be a rise in young men’s status compared to young women’s7. The marriage boom can be explained almost entirely by a combination of female labor force participation (down), young male wages (up), and male unemployment (down).

…

This model actually understates the case, because it uses total female labor force participation, rather than the relevant variable, which is labor force participation for young women. An overall decline in female labor force participation masks the fact that there was actually an increase in female labor force participation among older women (in part due to World War II; women who got jobs in factories while men fought often stayed after the war), which in turn drove down wages (and thus labor force participation) among younger women.

…

Wages are not the only way to measure status. After briefly reaching parity at the zenith of first wave feminism, young men during the Baby Boom again greatly exceeded their female counterparts in educational attainment.

…

Note that what matters here is relative gains, not absolute gains. Women did not make less money and were not less educated in 1960 as compared to 1930, merely less so in comparison to their male peers.

…

What ended the Baby Boom?

In three words: second wave feminism. By this I mean the suite of changes referred to as the Sexual Revolution (no fault divorce, normalization of premarital sex, delegitimization of marriage as the normative form of the family), combined with a concerted political campaign to raise women’s relative economic and social status. Fertility in every Boom country, as well as in several countries that didn’t experience the Boom but had slightly above-replacement fertility (such as Italy and Japan), cratered within a few years around 1970 (the time of the social and legislative triumph of second wave feminism) to well below replacement, and never recovered. But what are the precise mechanisms?

The most common answer is the Pill, which made cheap, effective, convenient contraception widely available. But this is highly confounded with second wave feminism, because this movement pushed for its legalization. Where you see second wave feminism and not the Pill, as in Japan, you see the same decline around 1970, and no further drop once the Pill is legalized8.

I think the whole thing is worth a read for those debating here.

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Everyone knows the answer to this question and is always cognizantly, tiptoeing around the solution. There is no straddling a middle ground between achieving the objectives of equality and keeping to more natalist, patriarchal norms. Short of imposing an Afghanistan style, Islamic theocracy on women (the part everyone is too afraid to mention in public), you're not likely to see a resolution to this issue.

Financial incentives and social support aren't likely to offer a path to a solution either. The poorest societies in the world have the highest rates of fertility and childbirth. Ed Dutton wrote an interesting piece on this.

What country has gotten its fertility above replacement again by equalizing social expectations? Israel, Saudi, and Argentina are the developed countries which have had above replacement tfr recently and neither is especially feminist by developed world standards.

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The issue here is that the low status men aren't dependable, they are losers in every sense of the word, otherwise they wouldn't be low income. Getting a decent income (and keeping it) is piss easy and if you don't then there is something seriously wrong with you, and why would women want to date that? And even in this case you can easily get a mail-order bride, I know people who have. It's not hard and you don't need even a median income.

Moderately successful men on the spectrum with poor social skills that fail in the dating market is an entirely different issue.

The issue here is that the low status men aren't dependable, they are losers in every sense of the word, otherwise they wouldn't be low income. Getting a decent income (and keeping it) is piss easy and if you don't then there is something seriously wrong with you, and why would women want to date that? And even in this case you can easily get a mail-order bride, I know people who have. It's not hard and you don't need even a median income.

This is ridiculous. The overwhelming majority of work that is done to maintain and perpetuate civilization, is done by men who are "low status," on the lower end of the middle class, marginalized and almost never get respected or acknowledged for the work they do. Unless you consider engineers, garbage men, clergy, abused IT workers, overworked nurses, underpaid professors, unpaid researchers (need I go on?) as not contributing to the upkeep of society, then this argument holds.

Moderately successful men on the spectrum with poor social skills that fail in the dating market is an entirely different issue.

I think you've confused low status with being a 'deadbeat', the latter of which earn men a higher status with women in virtue of them being an 'outlaw' and disregarding society's rules. Which is part of the problem.

Sorry, I meant low income (and low status) men.

It followed from talking about 'underclass men' and then 'dependable men'. I only used low status once and then talked about low income.

I agree that much of society depends on the labour of low status men, but that isn't poorly compensated and these people aren't underclass. The criminals don't come from the economic middle/lower middle class or working class, they come from the underclass.

Well, my apologies then if I misunderstood. If that's how I was meant to understand you, then I agree with you.

Sorry for being unclear.

Well, yes. In a post-patriarchal welfare state, low-status, average midwit men are less likely to be dependable (i.e. eligible to become responsible husbands and fathers), because the incentives are meager. In a patriarchal society, they have every conceivable incentive to be so. Everything is interconnected, and incentives matter.

There are low status and low income men who aren't especially criminally inclined and are relatively more stable and dependable. There may be relatively fewer of them than historically, but they still exist. Welfare makes them less desirable, and on the margin incentivizes more short-term mating preferences and competition from everyone.

Have you actually interacted with these men at all? They are not dependable. At some point people become a negative value proposition for anyone that isn't desperate and it isn't the welfare state thats making women not desperate, its being able to work.

Yes I have. Have you?

I could tell any young woman coming of age in high school what her dating prospects should be, as far as finding a decent young man go, with a single datum. Let me see the suitors report cards and I can tell you which one probably has the better future ahead of him. You think that kid has a lower or higher 'status' than the football star who'll end up beating her and who's been a serial cheater from day 1?

Now tell me which one has more real 'value' to society?

Yes, half my family is working class or lower middle class. Some have fallen down to be underclass adjacent. I have also lived in underclass areas and worked jobs with the underclass.

You think that kid has a lower or higher 'status' than the football star who'll end up beating her and who's been a serial cheater from day 1?

Compared to what? The intermittent pizza delivery or Uber driver? The guy that has issues holding down a job as a hospice care giver? The guy occasionally cleaning subway cars at night? The part time gas station attendant? Almost all of them drug users and video game addicts? This is the underclass, not the construction workers or guys employed in the manufacturing industry. Those guys don't end up single or criminal either by the way, they're doing fine.

The football star that beats her might very well be the better option. And what's to say the other guys dont beat their spouses as well?

Neither of the groups have any value at present but one at least did something at some point in his life. There is some capacity there that might transfer to a kid.

Yes, frequently. I live embedded in a very poor region of the deep south. In fact, by the standards of most people here, I am a poor lower class blue collar guy.

If you're in a poor part of the US, it seems like a complication in the trend that American welfare laws effectively pay poor women not to get married.

What?

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