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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.
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.
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.
And most developed countries now are below replacement fertility, great success!
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.
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.
Sweden? The TFR was pushed up above 2.1 in the 80-90s after some reforms.
The swing up started too early to just be due to the boomers and our baby boom was kind of tiny.
There might be other explanations as well such as people who delayed childbirth finally got around to it (maybe due to better conditions?), which then didn't translate to sustained higher rates as the fertility then went down again.
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