“do what they are doing, Lower crime by lowering inequality”
Is there some evidence that this is what they’re doing and if so can we tease out the effects of confounding factors such as homogeneity, race and other explanatory factors that inform reactionary thought?
Well one thing you could look at is the level of criminality in the homogenous but poor European societies—most Eastern European countries fit that description.
Assuming it’s accurate, that at least provides a prima-facie case that inequality does cause crime. I suspect however the existence of a ceiling past which reducing inequality no longer depresses crime rates. And ofcourse criminality and inequality could have a common cause, such as lower IQ. If we look at a world IQ map:
That particular idea has been widely explored in the literature. E.g. Fajnzylber does it in Inequality and violent crime, finding a significant correlation of 0.54 between income inequality and log of homicide rate. This is pretty strong by social science standards. The correlation with other types of crime is much lower.
Curiously, If you restrict to Europe, the correlation is negative, but it is positive if you restrict to East and South Asia, which has Gini coefficients and murder rates comparable to European countries.
IMHO murder rates are incredibly gun-dependent, and I don’t meant it as a gun-control argument, because politics is downstream from culture, so they are gun-culture dependent, not gun-law dependent. (Pro-gun culture with restrictive laws just means a huge black market, like drugs.)
Anecdotally, it is not easy to find black market guns in Eastern Europe. The supply of the ex-Yugo civil wars and drunk Soviet soldiers dried up, the international dealers and organized crime simply do not care about the minimal profits they could make on retail, they want it wholesale into conflict zones and whatnot. It is not a good black market retail business, unlike drugs, customers won’t return every day or week. Retail black market could be based people owning 10-20 guns, private collectors, and occasionally sell one, there are a lot of people in the US who are like that but almost none in EE.
Things like not having a lot of game around to hunt play a role. But more likely, there are only two stable equilibria, everybody or nobody having guns, EE is tending towards nobody, the US has so many already that the only possible equilibrium state is everybody.
I think that is not true at all. That is, there is no significant dependency between availability of firearms and murder rate. Where aren’t many guns, most common murder weapon is knife, it is the only difference.
“do what they are doing, Lower crime by lowering inequality” Is there some evidence that this is what they’re doing and if so can we tease out the effects of confounding factors such as homogeneity, race and other explanatory factors that inform reactionary thought?
Once you tease out these factors, does Europe actually end up being better at all?
Well one thing you could look at is the level of criminality in the homogenous but poor European societies—most Eastern European countries fit that description.
I haven’t investigated this map, though google images turn up several which show a similar pattern so I’m guessing it’s not nonsense: http://www.geocurrents.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-Murder-Rate-map.png
Assuming it’s accurate, that at least provides a prima-facie case that inequality does cause crime. I suspect however the existence of a ceiling past which reducing inequality no longer depresses crime rates. And ofcourse criminality and inequality could have a common cause, such as lower IQ. If we look at a world IQ map:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-v0ofzbpEfd8/VOyorckWQvI/AAAAAAAAFFM/6H0UFN5tFKY/s1600/world_average_iq_2000.png
IQ does seem to interact with criminality.
That particular idea has been widely explored in the literature. E.g. Fajnzylber does it in Inequality and violent crime, finding a significant correlation of 0.54 between income inequality and log of homicide rate. This is pretty strong by social science standards. The correlation with other types of crime is much lower.
Curiously, If you restrict to Europe, the correlation is negative, but it is positive if you restrict to East and South Asia, which has Gini coefficients and murder rates comparable to European countries.
IMHO murder rates are incredibly gun-dependent, and I don’t meant it as a gun-control argument, because politics is downstream from culture, so they are gun-culture dependent, not gun-law dependent. (Pro-gun culture with restrictive laws just means a huge black market, like drugs.)
Anecdotally, it is not easy to find black market guns in Eastern Europe. The supply of the ex-Yugo civil wars and drunk Soviet soldiers dried up, the international dealers and organized crime simply do not care about the minimal profits they could make on retail, they want it wholesale into conflict zones and whatnot. It is not a good black market retail business, unlike drugs, customers won’t return every day or week. Retail black market could be based people owning 10-20 guns, private collectors, and occasionally sell one, there are a lot of people in the US who are like that but almost none in EE.
Things like not having a lot of game around to hunt play a role. But more likely, there are only two stable equilibria, everybody or nobody having guns, EE is tending towards nobody, the US has so many already that the only possible equilibrium state is everybody.
I think that is not true at all. That is, there is no significant dependency between availability of firearms and murder rate. Where aren’t many guns, most common murder weapon is knife, it is the only difference.
Availability or widespread ownership?