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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!
Don't worry we will get the non-developed countries. Sub-Saharan Africa is the last holdout, but we're coming for them too.
Are you a misanthrope? An antinatalist?
No, but I don’t have “number (of humans) go up” as a terminal value. I think most people wouldn’t be thrilled about high or even replacement level fertility if all of those children being born were going to spend the their entire lives in conditions equivalent to a Soviet gulag or a Caribbean sugar plantation. That’s how I feel about high fertility in a context in which the children being born will spend their lives in societies like those which prevailed before the 20th century.
I don’t view falling fertility rates as good in and of themselves, simply as markers of things I DO view as good, such as female emancipation, wealth, literacy, the demolition of traditional clan-kinship structures, etc.
Declining population is bad for a society.
but if the rat utopia is any indication, it is also inevitable.
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