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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24655 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.

New but not surprising. People involved in retail theft prevention have known this forever. There is no reliable profile for a potential shoplifter. It can be anyone.

In the same way almost all Internet trolls are male and you can reliably exclude half the population, having worked in asset protection in retail apparel ages ago, I can tell you they're almost all exclusively female, and you can eliminate half the population.

Professional shoplifting gangs are active in DC and Northern Virginia and some of those are male.

Also a major problem on the West coast. Also younger men.

Some people have kleptomania. Winona Ryder was caught shoplifting, I don't think she would do armed robbery or carjacking.

Mm. Human beings are moral scavengers and opportunists far more then they are corrupted by some criminal pathology. The amount of well adjusted human beings in regular good conduct that come out of the woodworks when the wrong incentives align, are numerous beyond belief. However if the costs are high enough and the opportunities aren't there, you simply don't see it. The only human beings who have consistent principles are those you'd never want to live with or be governed by. Only at the extremes of human behavior do you see moral principles at work.

The only human beings who have consistent principles are those you'd never want to live with or be governed by.

I'll second SophisticatedHillbilly that this is the opposite of my experience. At least, out of all the people that I know somewhat well and would not want to live with or be governed by, every single one of them has demonstrated a lack of consistent principles - and, in fact, it's that lack of consistent principles that has largely translated to them being terrible to live with or to be governed by. On the other hand, the few people in my life who have demonstrated having somewhat consistent principles have tended to be more worth living with or being governed by compared to a random person. Often for reasons directly having to do with being principled.

The only human beings who have consistent principles are those you'd never want to live with or be governed by.

This honestly has not been my experience at all. Those with the strongest principles have consistently been the only people in my life worth keeping around. If someone doesn't have any values that they'll maintain when it's painful, then you're basically dealing with a particularly cunning animal.

I never said that people who don't have principles don't have any values. I'm saying most people will quickly abandon whatever principles they imagine they have when every incentive for doing so happens to run the other way. The principles most people think others have is moral marketing people engage in.

Virtually every human being you meet has a self-concept of being a morally upstanding individual. When you walk down the street, people aren't out to murder you and steal your possessions. And yet, almost every single one of those people have no qualms about picking up a $100 bill you just dropped and treating themselves to a nice meal or a crack rock. If people had solid principles, legal contracts, law enforcement and virtually every body of government would have no need to exist; precisely because people would have stable principles that police their own behavior.

Principles are about more than tolerating difficult moral challenges to your life. It's also the characteristic of every stubborn and bull headed person out there that refuses to learn or have his mind changed. Adolf Hitler certainly had moral principles when it came to the strength and sincerity of his convictions. We all know how that wound up. My own moral calculus is don't trust people, trust incentives.

almost every single one of those people have no qualms about picking up a $100 bill you just dropped

Speak for yourself and your own fucked up community. The people around me have gone a lot further for me than returning a $100, and I trust them deeply.

However, I understand your point, and the majority of the world's population is principle-less and incentive-driven. At the same time, I believe it is morally required to stand against incentives, and I think your way of thinking too often leads to a race-to-the-bottom mindset of "everyone else has no principles and follows incentives so I have to follow incentives too."

If you can resist that slide while maintaining your mindset, then frankly we're mostly in agreement.

And yet, I don't assume you're going around trusting people that easily with things that important to you. Or am I speaking too soon? What's your social security number? I didn't think so.

When it comes to matter, nobody actually believes the kind of thing you're suggesting. Count your blessings, because there are few people like that. That's my entire point. 300 million people don't readily obey law enforcement protocols out of recognition of their moral value. They're prudent moral calculators who fear imprisonment and retribution. Principles are a mile wide and an inch deep for most people. And unsurprisingly, the point at which they become porus and most flexible are when people see a gain in violating them.

You can stand against incentives if you want, but you'll find yourself at pains everywhere you go in trying to push back against them. You design 'with' incentives in mind, not against them.

I don't assume you're going around trusting people that easily with things that important to you. Or am I speaking too soon? What's your social security number? I didn't think so.

There are many people that I do in fact share sensitive information with. Those people are not you. I'm sorry if you have no one trustworthy in your life. I have many such people, who are trustworthy because of their commitment to principle.

I fully agree that most people are not principled. I do not expect them to be, but I do not think being principle-less is any more acceptable because the majority of people do it. I am happy to simply prune my own social circle of those I see lacking in principle. Even having done so, I am left with a much, much larger circle than the average person anyway.

The whole point of having principles is that by being unmoved by incentives, you open the possibility of changing the incentives themselves. If enough people hold that lying is evil, then you push the cost-benefit balance away from lying. To follow incentives, or design with them in mind, is to cede the power of incentive-setting to those who won't budge.

Your example is pretty poor, you cannot tell someone "you don't trust everyone on the internet so no one can be trusted". Moreover, you ca. trust a random person and yet not trust a person arguing that "people just follow incentives"

Isn't Japan famous for people consistently turning in wallets with all the money inside, and similar stories? The, people in small towns not locking their doors things also seems related. I imagine that high-trust societies exist, and modern western urban centers just happen to be lower-trust, currently. Especially in 'public' spaces. I would bet there are at least some high-trust enclaves within most major cities where the norms shift closer to Japan.

I don't know that much about Japan to say, but knowing quite a bit about Singapore, they're known quite well for the same thing. And I can assure you in a place that's literally called "a shopping mall with the death penalty," it isn't because they all have solid principles and a good heart. China (at least based on self-reported data) has some of the lowest rates of financial fraud, greatly outstripping the metrics credit card companies report on here in the US. It's also one of, If not the only country on Earth where you can be executed for economic crimes. Asian societies are some of the strictest most tightly controlled State's you'll find in the entire world. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm guessing you haven't had much experience dealing with Asia.

As far as small, closely knit towns being safe, sure that's a thing. To me there's little that has to do with "principles" about that, and that example goes to my point more generally. That these cases exist in pockets and you have to go looking for them to make them stand out in the argument.

I don't want to be confused with being a moral relativist, I'm not. I'm challenging the common understanding about how people reason morally in practical everyday terms. People aren't as principled as they would have you believe.

And yet China is the least likely of these countries to return a wallet.

https://twitter.com/debarghya_das/status/1738571424095502504/photo/1

Makes sense why they have those laws then.

I have been to Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, multiple times and lived and worked in Beijing China for over a year.

Chinese workers do not live or act as if they are under some sort of totalitarian state. They call in from work at the drop of a hat, or take two hour lunches to get in a few rounds of tennis (this was not just because they were rich or well connect, one of the regulars at the court was literally a beat cop). I would also say that the average Chinese is not very principled, less so than the average westerner in my experience. They are obsessed with 'face' and looking good but will lie and cheat at every opportunity. I would just assume their self reported fraud data is fraudulent.

Taiwan and Hong Kong seem mostly the same, honestly, maybe a bit more 'liberated' but the base Chinese cultural programing seems to go hard.

Japan feels VERY different culturally, and really seems like a high trust society. It is true that interacting with Japanese police can be onerous, especially for foreigners. Still, given the massive gulf in behavior between the Japanese and the Chinese it is hard for me to accept that it is down stream of how draconian their respective governments are. The simplest and most obvious form of this is queueing. Everyone, everywhere in Japan will queue properly into lines and wait their turn, and nobody, anywhere in China will do the same, but I could be unaware of the death penalty anti-cutting laws in Japan.

Honestly though I am not sure how much I disagree with you.

People aren't as principled as they would have you believe.

Seems, almost trivially true and correct to me.

The example of the money on the ground stood out to me, because I honestly think a significant number of Japanese people would actually take money they found to the police lost and found. While I don't think this behavior is driven by the strictness of their State, I am not confident in saying it is because the Japanese are more principled, in the abstract. I would rather say, that principles are easier to hold when everyone around you holds them. This would also be my explanation for the small town effect.

I imagine that after a critical mass of defection only a handful of people would continue to hold to principals while everyone around them constantly defected. There is a sense in which only those people ever really had principles at all. Still, I value fair-weather principles. I think Liberalism, is a sort of coordinated attempt to get everyone to agree to some core principles and follow them and this is valuable and good, and should be encouraged.

Chinese workers do not live or act as if they are under some sort of totalitarian state. They call in from work at the drop of a hat, or take two hour lunches to get in a few rounds of tennis (this was not just because they were rich or well connect, one of the regulars at the court was literally a beat cop).

It's interesting then how similar our observations are, yet we still seem to disagree. One of my biggest gripes with Americans who comment on Asia, is in precisely pointing out that despite the overt presence of the CCP in nearly every corner of the country, a country like China who has 'always' been autocratic, stretching back to the beginning of civilization, it's remarkably democratic and representative in addressing the material needs and demands of the population. Which goes to show you that despite the CCP's totalitarian leanings, the average working Chinese person doesn't feel an overbearing presence breathing down his neck and dictating his actions to him.

i would also say that the average Chinese is not very principled, less so than the average westerner in my experience. They are obsessed with 'face' and looking good but will lie and cheat at every opportunity. I would just assume their self reported fraud data is fraudulent.

There you go. You don't need "principles" to have morality. Policymakers have known forever that people respond to coercion far more than appealing to people's moral idealism. Relying on the good will of principled actors is not a recipe for a functioning society, because there are so few people that have it and it's far too inconsistent to make it workable on any large scale.

Japan feels VERY different culturally, and really seems like a high trust society. It is true that interacting with Japanese police can be onerous, especially for foreigners. Still, given the massive gulf in behavior between the Japanese and the Chinese it is hard for me to accept that it is down stream of how draconian their respective governments are. The simplest and most obvious form of this is queueing. Everyone, everywhere in Japan will queue properly into lines and wait their turn, and nobody, anywhere in China will do the same, but I could be unaware of the death penalty anti-cutting laws in Japan.

That's another thing I was going to point out. High levels of homogeneity correlate with high levels of social trust. "We" may view their style of governance as draconian, to them it's just the way things are. That's something I find annoying about Americans who live abroad, come back and later criticize the governments of the country's they lived in because of a lack of civil liberties. Different societies have radically different views of what they believe a citizen's relationship to their government should be. How Americans come back home without learning a thing about the people who live there is disappointing.

Honestly though I am not sure how much I disagree with you.

Same here.

More comments

Surely you are not suggesting that it’s not possible to reason probabilistically about who is more or less likely to shoplift? I don’t think anyone believes that it is possible to definitively rule anybody out, but I would be shocked if it’s not possible to draw useful and reliable conclusions about whom to devote more resources to focusing on.

I think it's middle class or above teenage girls who are the most likely to shoplift. But if we assume that upper-SES teenage girls are only a small percentage of the US population, then screening for everyone is more prudent. Otherwise, you will miss a lot of potential shoplifters.

My guess is that demographic is over represented in frequency, but not dollar value. They tend to steal trifles for personal use, not to offload to a fence.

I’m not sure. As in the sense of using demographic data, it doesn’t appear so. That doesn’t mean you can’t build a psychological model, or notice dress or behavior that’s more common with shoplifters than the general public. I see a guy in a big bulky puffer jacket in June, I’d bet on him being a shoplifter.

  • As in the sense of using demographic data, it doesn’t appear so

Are you lying on purpose or are you actually this ignorant? The demographic data is quite clear. Blacks shoplift at drastically higher rates than whites or Asians.

As in the sense of using demographic data, it doesn’t appear so

Blacks are a lot more likely to shoplift and commit crimes in general.

I also assume that the viral photos you sometimes see of black hair products in anti-shopliftimg cases next to white hair products without any additional protections are done by retail chains based on their actual shrinkage data and not because they're racist.

I'm also curious if anyone has tried to collect data on which Walmarts have a checkout within the make-up section vs. those without and compare it to the demographics of the surrounding neighborhoods. My anecdotal experience is that checkouts within the make-up section are more common in more ghetto area Walmarts.

Alternatively, this may be more about who buys stolen goods than about who actually steals them, if shoplifters are fairly likely to be professional rather than stealing for personal use.

In the same way people rate disaster recovery based on whether the local waffle house is open or no, you could probably do similar based on how the local supermarket is structured.

I always do get a twisted sort of amusement seeing how the same store chain can have a radically different structure and layout based on the local socio-economics.

Everything except Aldi.

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