Benoît De Courson, Daniel Nettle
2021 · Scientific Reports
AbstractHumans sometimes cooperate to mutual advantage, and sometimes exploit one another. In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust. We created a model of cooperation and exploitation to explore why this should be. Distinctively, our model features a desperation threshold, a level of resources below which it is extremely damaging to fall. Agents do not belong to fixed types, but condition their behaviour on their current resource level and the behaviour in the population around them. We show that the optimal action for individuals who are close to the desperation threshold is to exploit others. This remains true even in the presence of severe and probable punishment for exploitation, since successful exploitation is the quickest route out of desperation, whereas being punished does not make already desperate states much worse. Simulated populations with a sufficiently unequal distribution of resources rapidly evolve an equilibrium of low trust and zero cooperation: desperate individuals try to exploit, and non-desperate individuals avoid interaction altogether. Making the distribution of resources more equal or increasing social mobility is generally effective in producing a high cooperation, high trust equilibrium; increasing punishment severity is not.
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There are too many articles on inequality driving crime. Here's the first that popped up on google: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8 Even just applying basic logic to it suggests it is true. You arguing against it is absurd
>have little to nothing to do with monetary policy. False. A monetary policy that prioritizes universal access to basic needs leads to less overall crime. It may not be sufficient, but it is a major factor[1]. 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8
South Africa’s violent crime problem isn’t despite its wealth, it’s because of the wealth and, crucially, the inequality in its distribution. Higher inequality is associated with higher crime and lower social trust. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8
> Inequality is one of a number of fake issues that are major unhelpful distractions. Inequality causes crime in developed nationsp[0]: > Comparing across industrialised societies, higher inequality—greater dispersion in the distribution of economic resources across individuals—is associated with higher crime and lower social trust. These associations appear empirically robust, and meet epidemiological criteria for being considered causal. Inequality also has health impacts[1]. "The evidence that large income differences have damaging health and social consequences is strong." 0. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02779...
> Presumption that poor areas must mean getting to deal with junkies, means dealing with violence, well, that is a morally bankrupt view. Very disagree. It is not immoral or prejudicial to note the simple reality that, in aggregate, poverty and crime are correlated[0], and in part because poverty creates conditions where crime is more likely[1]. That doesn't mean that any particular person is doomed to crime because they're poor, or can't improve. Of course they can, and of course nobody should assume that a particular person is a criminal based on membership in a socioeconomic class (or any other class). But it's just true that poverty and crime are correlated. There are…
confounding factors (police are more likely to arrest a poor person, and more likely to merely warn a rich person), but nothing suggests that crime is merely equally prevalent among poor and non-poor populations. I applaud the compassion, and I agree that individuals bear the moral weight of doing the right thing, but let's not deny facts in service of those principles. 0. https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/28019/chapter/2118222... 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8
> Yet I don't know of any other major urban area in a developed country that has the kind of crime we see here. Every other major city in America has similar levels of violent crime https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... Crime in the USA is high compared to most developed nations, that is true, however, this helps your OP's argument, as many attribute this to the USA's stark income disparity, which correlates strongly with crime. https://journalofeconomicstructures.springeropen.com/article... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8 https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-star... > As a city with a $9 billion budget (for…
just 800,000 people; that's $11k for every person living here) they can afford better safety nets than anywhere. Just because the money is there, doesn't mean it's being spent correctly. This seems true for the entire nation: the richest country on earth for some reason still has homeless people. In my opinion this is because the most progressive politician that can managed to be elected in the USA at any level of government would be considered a conservative in most other countries. Therefore the kinds of "safety net" an American politician might try to introduce aren't actual, evidence-based effective solutions. For example, as linked prior, healthcare access likely causes reduced crime. The USA clearly has enough money to provide free healthcare for all citizens, since Americans pay more than anyone on earth for healthcare: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4193322/ . So, it's a good idea for many reasons to simply provide free healthcare for all citizens. Yet we need not discuss here the myriad of reasons such propositions in ANY form are dead on arrival at any level of government in the USA. This issue seems mirrored in SF. The SF government seems more interested in engaging in performative politics than actual progressivism. > Chris Sacca tried to give SF free wifi 15 years ago, and they wouldn't accept it. This seems too out of date to matter. Anyway, the reason for rejection seems sound to me: https://web.archive.org/web/20091009152536/http://www.sfgov.... TLDR google wanted user data and control of utility poles. > During covid, the SF school board decided one of their highest priorities would be to spend 10s of millions to rename their schools The first sentence of this article is: "The San Francisco Board of Education will ultimately keep the names of dozens of public schools in a case of high-stakes second thoughts." They didn't end up changing the names so I'm not sure what you're talking about. > SF made all shoplifting of goods valued less than $950 a misdemeanor. Which means it's up to the cops whether they want to investigate, and the DA whether they want to prosecute. Not sure who you're trying to blame here, in my experience SF cops are notoriously lazy. Are you suggesting that if we dangle the "carrot" of nuking some kid's life with a felony charge for stealing an expensive bag, the cops will work harder at their job? Misdemeanor charges aren't a good enough motivator for cops? Anyway, not sure how this is dysfunctional, I don't want resources spent on protecting the interests of Balenciaga or whatever, I'd much rather cops focus on, you know, solving murders. So far every reply making blind jabs at a spectre of "progressive politics" has been like this. It saddens me that so many on this forum are thirsty for simple Hammurabi code style punitive justice systems despite the reams of evidence that it's ineffective.
Sure, though if we're talking about crime, inequality is probably the strongest correlation to crime rates.[0] "In industrialised societies, the prevalence of exploitation, in the form of crime, is related to the distribution of economic resources: more unequal societies tend to have higher crime, as well as lower social trust." 0. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8
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