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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.

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.

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.

Surely you are not suggesting that it’s not possible to reason probabilistically about who is more or less likely to shoplift?

Demographically no, behaviorally on the other hand...

I half suspect that the prog preoccupation with idpol and demographics stems from an underdeveloped sense of social awareness. IE that in lacking the normal predator/danger sense and background theory-of-mind they find themselves defaulting to coarser easier to read signals.

I half suspect that the prog preoccupation with idpol and demographics stems from an underdeveloped sense of social awareness.

Related: we have deliberately and accidentally managed to make almost every way to read social class in strangers more difficult and unreliable. Imagine this scene from My Fair Lady, or its equivalent lines in the inferior Pygmalion original, today. The entire concepts behind the play almost don't make sense in today's world.

The modern upper class, such as it is, uses constant negro and lower class slang. The pattern of speech can be distinguished over time, but not cleanly and easily. It will take a minute or more of conversation, in a lot of cases, to reliably place someone as rich or poor, and hours to place them in a decile unreliably. Accents are muddled, or affected for gravitas. Where the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers specifically took classes to eliminate their accents, the modern upper class affects accents to seem plebeian.

Where fashion conscious they dress in fashions drawn largely from hip-hop, which in turn derive from street gangs and prison culture; where slovenly they dress in ways so pointlessly indistinct as to be unreadable. Unless one is very adept at reading branding, one cannot at a glance tell who is rich and who is poor. Where in Victorian England the clothing items chosen, the cleanliness and state of repair, the quality and thickness of the fabric, the cut, would all tell you instantly someone's social class. White collar and blue collar mean nothing with the abolition of dress codes in offices and the tendency for office workers to dress like Lumberjacks for fashion purposes. Tattoos are basically as common on young ivy leaguers as they are on bikers these days.

As a result, where in olden days one could rely on reading individuals by class, many now fall back on race, because skin color is one of the few things that can't be altered.

In England you can usually still tell status from accent (yes it’s not exact, but it never was, and it’s still usually accurate) and it doesn’t seem much different here. I suppose it allows for higher class POC with posh accents to distinguish themselves.

Fashions drawn from hip hop involve huge amounts of class-based status signalling, but like the majority of the American class system over the last 100-150 years it’s primarily wealth-based rather than determined by parentage or upbringing. If your wife likes clothes and bags and jewelry, she can tell you from looking at a woman whether she has (new) money or not, which is typically what passes for status in America.

I suppose it allows for higher class POC with posh accents to distinguish themselves.

I have been told multiple times that I speak exactly like an English person, said in such a way as to be a complement. I always feel like correcting this with "No, I speak English better than an Englishman" for, to borrow a quote from Pygmalion itself, "The English do not know how to speak their own language, Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it, speak it well" but I always think better of it and just accept the complement.

Also amusing are the times when I interact with locals say they only speak one Language, English, since that is all they ever need (with a hint of their language being so superior that they don't need to know anything else, these people by and large tend to be lower class and less educated too) and I always have a very snarky urge to butt in and correct them with "Actually, you speak precisely zero languages, the doggerel that comes out of your mouth can not, in good conscience, be called English", but again here I always think better of it and move on.

  • -11

Look man, this is a vague and general example of "boo outgroup" and it's not directed at anyone in particular here, but this schtick where you repeatedly post about how much you hate white people and Western civilization and rub your hands in glee at the thought of it being conquered is getting old, tired, and obnoxious as hell. Stop trying to edgepost, stop thinking you're a lord sneering at your inferiors. You've been banned before and if you keep this up you will be banned again.

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