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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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Well, alright then:

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.

It's a dead horse. The idea that poverty in and of itself causes crime (rather than crime causing poverty, or people who suck being poor criminals) doesn't have much support at all, but it's one of the axioms of modern social democracy (gotta tax the rich to give more to the poor so the poor don't revolt, after all) and also progessivism, so it's unchallengeable in practice.

Now do you guys see why I want to add 100 million more poor third worlders to Europe? Progressive modernity can not be convinced it is wrong, it has to fail, and fail spectacularly. And what better way to make it fail than giving it the exact same things it wants and says are good and will lead to a better life for everyone, only to have their belief system crumble due to an unstoppable force of human social nature that they have spent decades trying to convince everyone (including themselves) does not exist.

  • -22

Don't you worry it will cause a Dark Age? Civilizational collapse doesn't seem good for anyone, or do you not expect it will get that far?

Or is the satisfaction of saying, "I told you so," worth what you believe will be European civilization "fail[ing] spectacularly?"

Wouldn't you rather hope that social science develops and we create societies that facilitate the thriving of human nature?

Civilizational collapse doesn't seem good for anyone, or do you not expect it will get that far?

Oh I don't expect civilisational collapse, I expect things to become more like they are in the third world, which is to say, not that bad if you're near the top of society on one of a multitude of different axes (e.g. you have social elites, political elites, entrepreneurial elites, professional elites, academic elites, military elites, all you need to live a comfortable life is be one of these or close to being one of these or be the family of one of these), however it will be in such a state that the modern welfare state white elephant collapses under its own weight and has to be abolished, alongside all the other currently "fashionable" social theories which all Good Right-thinking People believe.

Indonesia seems like a good goal to me, and nobody would say it is undergoing civilizational collapse, Jakarta is a modern highly technologically advanced city, no reason humanity can't thrive in such a society.

(But yes, getting to go "I told you so" will be very nice too, extremely cathartic after all the shit and excessive taxation I've had to endure).

  • -11

South Africa is the society you describe and the ANC is full of idiotic and largely falsified progressive theories.

all the shit and excessive taxation I've had to endure

oh you poor dear. I guess we should destroy our culture to make it up to your poor beleaguered brahmin head. Please sir accept my apologies for the excessive taxation.

That's all well and good, but it's not bringing my money back is it?

Who forced you to stay in the shitty tax-heavy West where you were losing money compared to your homeland?

Back home we don't have the sorts of high paying jobs like the one I do here. These jobs do exist in places like Hong Kong and Singapore and the US but I have family reasons for not wanting to move too far away from the UK, at least not right now. Money is not the only thing that matters.

  • -10
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