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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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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.

I don't think this result quite disproves "poverty => crime" except for a very naive version of that theory. Plausibly, growing up under poverty could impart habits and resentments that a late-life sudden injection of cash would not undo, any more than a 30something lifelong incel would become a well-adjusted normie with normie attitudes towards women if given plastic surgery and a flask of post-singularity AGI-designed pheromones to make him irresistible.

(The naive version would be something like "I have no money, so I calculate that going to steal some is the highest-EV action for me to take now". I doubt that real-life decisions to do crime are usually taken in this fashion; more likely that it's similar to those culturally evolved cassava processing rules, which would also linger for a while even if you supplied tribes with non-toxic GMO cassava. Presumably pro-crime poor communities outcompete anti-crime ones.)

Plausibly, growing up under poverty could impart habits and resentments that a late-life sudden injection of cash would not undo

An empirically correct (though not, as of the current year, large) example of a causal impact of child poverty on adult criminality is via lead exposure. Childhood lead exposure causes reduced IQ and conscientiousness in adults, which causes crime. Childhood lead exposure is strongly correlated with poverty, and giving money to poor parents will generally cause them to reduce their children's lead exposure (in the leaded petrol era, by moving to nicer places with less traffic pollution, in the modern era where most lead exposure is via peeling paint, by maintaining their homes better or moving to more expensive rentals with less shitty landlords).

The "people commit acquisitive crime because they have no other way of meeting basic needs" version of "poverty causes crime" is something of a weakman - I don't think I have seen it pushed in channels where everyone respects everyone else's intelligence. (I agree it is being pushed by expensively credentialled basic white chicks on social media). The most common sophisticated versions of the theory are the Spirit Level guys' theory (felt - i.e. relative - poverty stresses people out, making them more likely to commit crimes) and the adverse childhood experiences theory (chaotic upbringing affects children in a way which makes them more likely to commit crimes, and a lack of money can cause chaos in relevant ways).

Poverty causes bad parenting causes fucked-up kids causes crime is actually plausible - the evidence for near-zero shared environmental effects comes from twin and adoption studies, and most career criminals come from a family background that is sufficiently messed-up that it would get them excluded from twin and adoption studies.

‘Effed up parenting produces criminals’ is probably true, but I don’t think ‘poverty causes effed up parenting’ is, I think that the sorts of people who will seriously eff up being parents eff up everything else too, and are poor as a result.

'Effed up parenting is the wrong idea - the problem is providing a grossly inadequate environment for the child. Homelessness* does that for example, and poverty is causative of homelessness. (So, of course, is NIMBYism). In fact inadequate housing in all its many forms (lead is just the best studied example) is a fairly obvious case where poverty causes inadequate environments that wouldn't show up in twin and adoption studies, and could plausibly affect adult IQ.

Childhood malnutrition is another obvious example - this was a known issue 100 years ago (certainly in the UK a major driver of the early expansion of the welfare state was the number of army recruits who were medically unfit due to the effects of childhood malnutrition) but I don't know how significant it is in the contemporary US (it isn't a big issue in Western Europe). In third world countries there is pretty good evidence that you can reduce childhood malnutrition by giving people money.

"Are there practically significant ways in which giving poor parents money would improve childhood environments in a way which produces long-term benefits?" is a profoundly important and hard empirical question to which the answer is "Yes" in the third world, but which we can't answer in the first world because asking the question correctly involves crimethink-adjacent ideas like "A naive correlational analysis is genetically confounded enough to be worthless." If you think the answer is obviously "Yes" or obviously "No, with the partial exception of lead abatement" then you are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

* Homelessness as in living in shelters, sleeping in cars, couchsurfing etc. Street homelessness has complex causes with drug addiction and untreated mental illness being major factors, but simple homelessness is either caused by a short-term emergency (like a messy breakup or a house fire) or by not being able to afford housing.

Thanks for the clarification.

In third world countries there is pretty good evidence that you can reduce childhood malnutrition by giving people money.

I believe that(a diet of 90% gruel is after all not very appetizing or nutritious and you'd fix it pretty quickly if you could afford something else), but I'm pretty sure that the dominant case of childhood malnutrition in the US is either shitty parenting(it's just easier to let them eat sweets instead of insisting on dinner) or poor cultural practices(blacks and underclass whites don't eat fruit and will only eat vegetables in highly specific forms that have much of the nutrition leached out, so picky kids miss out on important nutrients). It has the same causes as food deserts- people from certain backgrounds would eat steak if they could afford it but they can't so they eat cheap sausage, bread, and desserts with a soda, and it never occurs to them to eat veggies rice and chicken.

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