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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24594 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.

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 think it’s a general progressive aversion to the idea of bad behavior having bad outcomes and good behavior having good outcomes- criminals must be poor because poverty, a floating cloud thing that latches on to people through no fault of their own, causes crime, and not because being a criminal is a bad decision. It’s not hard to notice criminals are blacker than average for whatever reason- you can blame it on HbD, bad culture, ‘systemic racism’, the god of thieves really hating sagging pants, whatever. And in the progressive worldview that causality only goes one way.

It’s not only race and crime; progressive Christianity also hates the idea of divine punishment for sin, whether in this life or the next, and divine reward for justness. Maybe moldbug’s calvinism thesis isn’t just schizoposting, or maybe there’s some other reason. But progressives in general, and all over their lives, mostly don’t believe the link between good behavior and good things, and bad behavior and bad things, and to a lot of them- it’s a tragedy. I’ve listened to progressives cry about how good behavior isn’t rewarded by society and that’s why so many of the deserving poor are immiserated. I don’t think this thesis is true, but I understand how wealthy blue tribers could think it is.

I think it’s a general progressive aversion to the idea of bad behavior having bad outcomes and good behavior having good outcomes

I think this is a bad model. You can find people who think like this, but it's a specific case of a broader disagreement over the actual mutability of outcomes.

(American) Conservatives adhere to a kind of socio-economic Calvinism and think outcomes are fixed, so we should be preoccupied with punishing bad behavior so they can't ruin it for everyone else. This is important for the conservative world view because without it they're just the latest round of elites explaining why it's god's will that they're rich and you're poor.

Progressives believe outcomes are changeable (as do most people left of center, though their specific analysis varies) and often think focusing on punishment for bad behavior is a distraction or outright impediment to improving outcomes. This is important to the progressive world view because without it they're just pissing straight up.

(American) Conservatives adhere to a kind of socio-economic Calvinism and think outcomes are fixed, so we should be preoccupied with punishing bad behavior so they can't ruin it for everyone else. This is important for the conservative world view because without it they're just the latest round of elites explaining why it's god's will that they're rich and you're poor.

Americans in general have a lot of strange political and economic juxtapositions.

Take the protests that were happening in France not too long ago, with Macron and compare him with Trump's activities. If you look back to when Trump was elected, almost no western liberal would've disagreed that he was a disaster for the US, and that someone like Macron was a success for France. But if you come up to today, the exact 'opposite' had been proven true.

The roots of people's anger with Macron going far back, had to do with him wanting to implement some pretty sound macroeconomic reforms. One thing he wanted to do was increase the diesel tax, which would e reduced their budget deficit and helped lower CO2 emissions. Their fiscal position would've been stronger, and that would've increased international confidence and investment in France so the bottom half of the population could benefit. But the population naturally didn't want to tolerate short-term pain for long-term gain, so it didn't happen.

If you look at Trump, he had the trust and confidence of the bottom 50%. When he attacked the establishment, he was venting the anger of that half of the population that felt ignored and cast by the wayside. So when he got elected, it had a cathartic effect on the bottom half of the population, in a way you didn't experience those protests in DC. The average incomes of Americans has stagnated over the course of the last 40 years, and quite noticeably. We bviously have a right to be angry, but the problem with our society is that we too strongly emphasize the principle of liberty over addressing social and economic inequalities.

The problem with western liberalism is that we tend to believe that as long as elections are held and people can vote freely and equally, that that 'alone' is sufficient for our stability and prosperity, and it isn't. The government also needs an active and responsible hand in raising the quality and standard of living of it's citizens. And believing in the former above stated fiction, it means that we internalize our own economic woes and failings, and attribute them to our own personal incompetence and not broader social conditions.

Trump's policies of running larger deficits in relatively good times was destined to bring pain later on, as everybody who paid attention could foresee, while Macron could've ameliorated some economic woes, if only the population would've remained patient with him. But they didn't. Liberals messed up where Trump was concerned, by focusing too much on 'the man'. If liberals wanted to regain the trust of voters, that involves taking a stance against the status quo that blocks meaningful reform from taking place.

But the population naturally didn't want to tolerate short-term pain for long-term gain, so it didn't happen.

That's because t's easy to lie, mislead, or just be overly optimistic about long term gains. On the other hand, it's hard to be wrong about the short term pain.

Right, and, making transportation more expensive is going to have economic ripple effects that are hard to predict.

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