Haven't we been doing "tough on crime" policy for decades now? We had the entire war on drugs, which we're really only just now collectively pulling back from and realizing was a mistake. We passed prohibition on alcohol. We did stop-and-frisk, all that crud. And our mental illness diagnoses and treatment processes are better today than they've ever been (even if the overall health care system is a mess). We know more about mental illness today than we did in the past, and we have more effective medication and psychological techniques for dealing with it. The overall reduction in violent crime over the long-term in America is a success story, we genuinely have made America safer and less violent. And yet, here we are.
So my question to anyone who acts like there's a very simple causal link from violence/crime/illness to inequality is, "why isn't your strategy working then?"
I think this kind of stuff is generally a lot more complicated than pointing to a single cause; I don't think that inequality is the single cause of every social problem. But if I am going to point to a single cause, it's probably not going to be based on the strategy that we aggressively targeted for multiple decades that didn't yield the results people are now promising. I get a little bit annoyed by people who keep saying, "no you don't understand, if we're even tougher on crime, then we'll see the results. We just haven't been tough enough yet."
At some point, it starts to feel more like "tough on crime" is a philosophy rather than a data-driven, falsifiable theory.
The recent decriminalization of looting has also resulted in a surge of stealing and crime in cities. Businesses have to spend a lot to armor their stores, hire security guards, and cover the losses. Many just close up shop and flee. This will increase poverty and inequality.
The problem is that we saw crime increases before police protests and defunding movements, including in cities that aren't in California, so it really doesn't make sense to blame the recent "defund the police" movement for all of that increase. When you actually sit down and do the math, there is no strong correlation between police defunding/reforms and the recent crime wave -- cities that didn't alter their policing strategy also saw increases in crime.
The other thing that's worth bringing up once again is that people don't just claim that decreasing crime... decreases crime. They claim it decreases inequality, they claim it's responsible for decreasing other ills. But the only stats that they're ever interested in are crime stats, at which point they just kind of jump to the conclusion that "of course businesses will have to spend more money to armor stores."
There's not good data to support this -- the most convincing example is San Francisco, which when you dig into, also doesn't really hold up. Store closings in San Francisco aren't that much higher than the rest of the country.
> This will increase poverty and inequality.
And again... opposed to before?
What's frustrating about this is that we have a strategy we're trying -- tough on crime -- that is not reducing inequality. And whenever anyone suggests alternative strategies, the response is, "that will make inequality worse." But the existing approach is not working right now. It's all based on fear of what's about to happen. It's not based on looking back at historical data and saying, "we implemented stop and frisk and then people got better jobs." Because that didn't happen.
It's always based around this idea that society is about to fall apart, not tangible data that crime rates are causal for the other harms.
Good questions. But the data doesn't back up your conclusion.
You can point at other countries, you can bring up anecdotes, but the overall trends in the US do not match what you're saying. We're still in a scenario where crime rates seem to be decoupled from protest/decriminalization rates, and where store closure rates across the country don't line up neatly with areas that have decreased policing/prosecution strategies.
It doesn't matter how logical your theory seems when written down if it doesn't hold true in the real world. You can bring up any argument or example you like, but I'm still going to keep asking you about that broader trend. Either there is a component to this that you are missing that overrides the effect you would expect to see -- or the causal effect isn't there. But unless you're going to claim that the data is wrong, one of those things has to be the case or else we would see a strong correlation between economic health of cities and whether or not they changed police/prosecution strategies, and we don't. As best as we can see, stuff like homicides are rising in every city, and every city is struggling with store closures regardless of what they've done recently with their police forces.
I also never said that 100% of inequality was caused by crime. I said that crime is a cause of inequality. Just like smoking is a cause of death.
It's pretty obvious that crime causes a reduction in the standard of living of the criminal, his family, and his community. I understand that obviousness is not proof, but you seem to thing it doesn't. Why do you think that?
Well, short answer to all of them, I'm not 100% certain, but apparently not for any reasons that show up predictably in national trends. :)
You want me to treat this like it's a personal question, but whatever answer I give you doesn't matter if it doesn't reflect what other people are doing.
If I tell you that I would choose to open a business in the high-crime area, are you going to be shocked and concede the argument? Of course not. You know on some level that asking someone's opinion on a web forum is not the same thing as examining national economic trends.
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> I also never said that 100% of inequality was caused by crime. I said that crime is a cause of inequality.
If you're just saying that crime is a contributing factor, sure I buy that, absolutely. But that's a very different thing then complaining that people have the causation backwards. We might as well say that both crime and inequality contribute to each other in subtle ways, crime/poverty being a cyclical problem is just as obvious of a conclusion, so I'm not sure what your objection is if that's the case.
More to the point though, saying "it's a factor" isn't necessarily the same thing as saying it should be the primary factor we focus on. We have a lot of data now saying that pulling the lever on crime is not influential enough to seriously impact inequality. At best, that's the conclusion we can draw from that data.
Saying that crime is a weak cause of inequality that doesn't show up in national trends is effectively the same thing as saying we can kind of ignore it when talking about inequality. Because it obviously doesn't matter enough to be visible.
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> It's pretty obvious that crime causes a reduction in the standard of living of the criminal, his family, and his community. I understand that obviousness is not proof, but you seem to thing it doesn't. Why do you think that?
I think it's complicated -- I think that the correlation between poverty and crime rates is much higher than the correlation between inequality and crime rates, and there might be a couple of reasons for that. Crime rates contain a lot of crimes against communities, and inequality is not always focused within communities, so maybe there's a contributing factor there? Maybe it's that there are thresholds of inequality of outcomes that need to be present before they start influencing people's behavior? Or maybe because crimes are influenced by existing poverty, crimes do more to keep communities at existing levels rather than lower their outcomes further? Heck, maybe it's just that only certain crimes impact or are influenced by inequality and the data is not granular enough to pick out meaningful trends. I certainly buy that white-collar crimes like wage theft could reasonably have an impact on national economic outcomes. But I think my biggest conclusion is that anyone who claims to have a perfect explanation for any of that stuff is either selling something or deluding themselves.
I do know what the data says, which is that decreasing crime levels have not lead to decreasing inequality. I do know what the data says about policing, which is that police budgets and policies at least in the short term don't really seem to be affecting the economic health of cities in any predictable way. I do know what the data says about crime rates themselves, which is that there doesn't seem to be any really strong trend I can find that's predictive of how much of an increase in crime a given city will have seen over 2020-2022.
The actual data about the recent crime increases gets really confusing the closer you look at it. Homicides and violent crimes are up, property crimes are not rising by the same amount -- by some metrics they're going down. This is really weird, it doesn't fit with a lot of narratives. It doesn't fit with narratives about lawlessness and degradation of society, but it also doesn't fit super-well with narratives about times being tough during the pandemic, because on the surface we would expect thefts to rise more than homicides in that case. People have offered explanations that maybe people traveling less makes it harder to steal things? Which... maybe that's true. It's a plausible theory, but there's not really data to back it up.
Regardless, I don't think that the right way to approach any of these questions is to say, "I have a theory that seems obvious to me, it doesn't match with the data, but I'm not sure what the better theory is so I'm just going to keep confidently asserting it." I think at some point it's better to take a step back and say, "I notice I am confused." I don't really need to offer you an alternative explanation as to why inequality is going up in order to disprove that crime is a major reason. I can just point at the numbers and say that if crime was a major reason, the numbers would be different. You don't need to replace a theory to prove it wrong.
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Now, could crime be a contributing factor to inequality? I guess. Maybe crime causes inequality trends and inequality trends cause crime. Both seem obvious from some explanations, and there's about the same amount of data for both conclusions -- which is to say, not much. But clearly these metrics are not strongly correlated, so if we're interested in tackling inequality, this might not be the best place for us to focus our efforts.
1. Crime causes stress in high crime neighborhoods.
2. Crime impoverishes neighborhoods by causing people to spend money to protect themselves, hiring security guards, armoring their businesses, and simply driving businesses away.
3. Crime impoverishes families when members get jailed.
4. Crime impoverishes criminals because a criminal record greatly restricts opportunities for productive employment
5. Crime prevents criminals from getting an education
6. Crime is a zero-sum, adversarial economic system. Cooperation in a free market is far, far more productive to those who participate in it
A person committing crimes will impoverish himself, his family, and his community.
Okay, that's an interesting theory. Violent crime rates have decreased dramatically across America over the past several decades. Has inequality gone up or down?
Because if it's gone up, then decreasing crime rates didn't do what your theory says they should do. The theory doesn't really matter that much if we can point at two arrows going in opposite directions and say, "look, making one of the arrows go down didn't make the other one go down."
I'm kind of picking on you here, but to be clear, we can ask the same question in the opposite direction -- inequality has gone up by many metrics even though crime has gone down by many metrics, so clearly inequality doesn't have as much of a direct effect on crime rates as people say it does, or else crime rates wouldn't have gone down.
But no matter what way you're looking at it, these really simplistic models just don't hold up to even surface-level scrutiny like, "are they playing out in the real world?" There has to be more complicated stuff going on or else the numbers would be different. And so it's just frustrating to hear people say, "the correct answer is to keep doing the exact same things we've been doing, and to hope that the results are different."
There has been ample opportunity for policies focused on crime to prove that they solve these social issues, and they haven't solved them.
Would you start a business in a high crime neighborhood, or in a low crime one?
If your dad was put in prison while you were growing up, would your standard of living go up or down?
Other things drive inequality. For example, if you would be paid $12,000 for a job, and $10,000 for not working, which would you select? Would your standard of living be higher or lower?
If decreasing crime decreases inequality, why did inequality rise while crime fell? Hypotheticals aside, something is clearly going on here that you are not accounting for.
> For example, if you would be paid $12,000 for a job, and $10,000 for not working, which would you select? Would your standard of living be higher or lower?
It's an interesting theory, but the problem with this explanation is that pandemic checks are too recent. Inequality trends were visible before 2019.
Crime is not the only variable affecting the economy. I gave you another variable - paying people to not work.
> It's an interesting theory
It's a question for you. Which would you choose?
As for trends, there's been a decades long increasing trend of people leaving their jobs for one reason or another and getting on disability. Disability pays less than their jobs did, but it's a workable life. Their standard of living went down, but it wasn't because of rich people. It was because they found a friendly doctor who could get them on disability, and they wouldn't have to work anymore.
> Crime is not the only variable affecting the economy. I gave you another variable - paying people to not work.
It sounds like you're saying here that crime doesn't have a strong enough effect on inequality to really practically matter when compared to other factors. Is that what you're saying? That other factors are so much stronger that they're able to actually reverse the trend we would otherwise expect to see?
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If you're trying to find the actual reasons why inequality has gone up, we can overlay a lot of charts on top of inequality levels that will show correlations, from welfare participation to market deregulation to housing prices to even mobile phone usage.
People can debate which of those theories are correct. But all of them are more plausible than the idea that crime rates are strongly correlated with rising inequality. I have some issues with the "welfare queen" narratives that people bring out, but blaming welfare is at least pointing to two numbers that are going in the same direction.
So, sure, I will happily grant that it is more plausible that welfare levels influence inequality than it is to say that crime rates are driving inequality. I will take some minor quibbles with the fact that spikes in welfare/inequality don't seem to be correlated in convincing ways (again, we saw economic trends around 2019/2020 that didn't line up with when people were given financial aide during the pandemic, which should probably strike you as at least a little bit odd). But yes, at the very least you're now pointing at graphs that both have a positive slope.
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> It's a question for you. Which would you choose?
I would genuinely, honestly choose to work, I am interested in maximizing my earning potential for multiple reasons. I also have side/entrepreneurial stuff I do anyway for profit, so it's really not feasible for me to even consider taking welfare that would be conditional on me not having a job or earning any additional income. And the numbers you're talking about are too low for me to live comfortably, and only the working option gives me a clear path forward to changing that number.
I don't think that answer matters to you, and I don't understand why you care about it. Obviously you don't think the answer I give above about my own work preferences is representative of the average American person, so why did you ask the question if the answer didn't matter to your argument?
So, you don't think an extra EIGHT MILLION people choosing disability payments over working is a significant factor in inequality?
> so it's really not feasible for me to even consider taking welfare that would be conditional on me not having a job or earning any additional income
You can still be setting yourself up in business. It takes a while before a business generates income. You could also use the time to upgrade your job skills so you could re-enter the job market at a higher pay level.
But I do admire your honesty there. I expect a not insignificant number of people would take the check, and have another source of income off the books.
> So, you don't think an extra EIGHT MILLION people choosing disability payments over working is a significant factor in inequality?
Like I said:
> People can debate which of those theories are correct. But all of them are more plausible than the idea that crime rates are strongly correlated with rising inequality.
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> and have another source of income off the books.
:shrug: This seems like a lot of trouble to me personally; I don't like the idea of either not putting income into the bank or not reporting it on taxes. Audits are nasty :). Maybe I'm over-cautious on that front, I guess people do sometimes choose not to report income -- but since I'd like to make significantly more than those numbers, I suspect that's a solution that wouldn't really work for me long-term unless all of my side projects/ventures stayed very small. At most I'd need to only do it short term.
Again though, I don't think my own preferences or choices matter that much here, I think looking at overall data trends is better than looking at personal anecdotes. I don't think it's really relevant to the conversation what I would or wouldn't do.
P.S. I am in favor of legalizing drugs because it will eliminate the associated crime.
P.P.S. An awful lot of people look at the obvious correlation between poverty and crime, and assume that therefore poverty causes crime. I strongly suspect it's the other way around - crime produces poverty.
P.P.P.S. No, I am not an advocate of being "tough on crime". I think most prison sentences are excessive. But decriminalizing and ignoring crime is the wrong answer. NYC's classifying armed robbery as not a violent crime is the wrong answer. (I've been robbed at gunpoint. Putting a gun in someone's face and threatening to blow their head off is a violent crime. Period.)
