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Poverty does not cause crime. Instead, poverty and criminality are linked by common behavioral causes (high time preference, low impulse control, etc.). You cannot reduce crime by reducing the gap between the rich and the poor, because the poor are not committing crime to escape poverty.

Intelligent people are very bad at modeling the minds of people like this. It's a blind spot I see fairly often.



Both can be true. Ostensibly, reducing poverty-related crime would allow resources to be effectively deployed against the remainder.


There’s no such thing as “poverty related crime.” My dad’s village in Bangladesh is dirt poor, but has very little crime.


You keep making the weirdest comparisons. What does your dad's village in Bangladesh have to do with crime rates in DC or any other city in the United States? This is just absurd, you're pulling in utterly unrelated factoids - which are anecdata at best and which we are going to have to believe at face value - to supposedly support your point, which if we generously assume that they are true still would not do so.


I assumed the person asserting that poverty causes crime was generally familiar with the crime statistics for poor countries in asia and africa (Bangladesh being an archetypal poor country in Asia). Specifically, the homicide statistics, which are the most reliable proxy for crime because homicides are well reported even in developing countries.

And if you aren’t familiar with the homicide statistics in asia and africa, how can you have an opinion on poverty and crime?


Wealth disparity drives crime


No, that’s absurd. When poor people kill other poor people, this is not a fault of rich people who happen to live nearby.


They didn't say that at all. They didn't say killing, they didn't say fault and they didn't say anything about people "nearby".

Statistically they are right, inequality correlates heavily with crime.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-star...


No, the claim was that inequality drives crime, and all you’re showing is correlation. As I’m sure you’re aware, correlation is not causation.


That's fine to say when there is another cause you can identify. For social statistics, most of the time it's people attributing two things together when the underlying cause is money.

In this case that's just a rationalization for what you want to be true.


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


This paper is literally just authors coming up with some model and simulating it, without any real world evidence whatsoever. It’s an argument from fictional evidence. Is this the best you can do?


Ha, they're creating an explanatory model for why income inequality drives crimes.

That was literally the first article that came up on Google, and you clearly did not read it or go through its references, so here is the second article that came up: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/073401689301800...

There is a huge wealth of research on this topic, even if you want to reject it. Do you need a third, fourth, hundredth paper? Try reading past the abstract (and comprehending it)


Again, this paper just looks at the correlations, and does not touch causation at all. You can run a hundred studies, each of them finding high correlation between wet streets and having rained recently, but you cannot conclude from that that the wet streets caused the rain to fall.


Hi, all causation can be doubted- that's a key aspect of skepticism, and in general, is important for philosophical development. In this case, it's clear that it is not a substantive objection to these papers or others. It is clear that you have set out this discussion with prior belief and are trying to reject that wealth disparity drives crime. You're not acting in the spirit of skepticism (and only are applying skepticism selectively here, because you think it sounds smart).

Read the papers. Apply your logic evenhandedly. Follow the leads and research on your own. It may be scary- you may discover things that force you to change your life (or you may learn something about yourself you dislike).




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