Lower wealth disparity also results in lower crime, particularly lower violent crimes. Taiwan generally has a fairly “sleepy” government and penal system. And for many types of crimes, you can buy your sentence off for the equivalent of about $30 a day (1000 NTD). Not a lot of private gun ownership (non-zero, as aboriginals can hunt, and there are (very very few) skeet ranges, but even the president’s secret service got into trouble for having a handgun in an unauthorized way). I’ve found very stressed and deformed rimfire cartridges out in the woods, apparently from homemade hunting rifles. That’s about it.
The wealth distribution in Taiwan has been great though. Of course, Forumosa Plastics (Wang family), TSMC, Asus, and a few other giants have made bank, but what you find is a vast quantity of people got their “fair share” there. Education rates are high (According to Farid Zakharia, in our Legislative Yuan, nearly everyone has Masters or PhD degrees, highest education in any legislative body on the planet. I’ll also point to a decent gender split, not quite 50%). First Asian country to legalize gay marriage, and Taipei has been having a lot of any-gender restrooms since 10 years or more ago.
So, it’s basically a liberal society, educated to within an inch of their lives, with good wealth distribution and zero whatsoever personal handgun ownership (outside of mobsters, probably). If you get arrested for something like Pot, you can probably spend a few thousand bucks and not serve time, though if you’re a foreigner, you might need to leave the country. Enforcement of laws out in the country is.… like Mayberry. The cops will chat with you and explain they don’t want to clean your brain off the sidewalk if you’re doing something stupid while drunk. Drunk driving is penalized very very heavily, however, as it should be.
On the bad side, people do get away with domestic violence as the law is such (according to a social worker friend of mine), that the police nearly have to witness the crime themselves for you to get into trouble. If you get into a fight with someone, that’s kind of on you and them and the police may not want to be involved in any way (some of my drunken foreigner buddies have been in this situation—it’s good, bad. The legislative Yuan full of smart people also paradoxically sometimes comes to fistfights). If someone hits you with a car (happened to me), probably you won’t get much, if any compensation. Some situations people drive very recklessly. Be careful crossing the street in Taichung or driving on Hehuan mountain road. People need to show off that they “know the road” by passing on a blind mountain curve, likely while chewing binland and drinking Whisbey (sic, it’s an energy drink). Insurance payouts are very low. But then again, so are medical costs, even if you pay out of pocket without the social health system.
People also do all kinds of shady things with food, engine repairs, and other stuff. There’s a lot of “old Asia” mentality in there or Cha bu duo jiou hao le, which translates to “Don’t bother doing more than an approximate job with this.” You can get something like a shady brake job on a motorcycle if you’re not careful. And food quality violations are exposed all the time. People also abuse their Philippine or Southeast Asian household helpers, au pairs, and day laborers. Animal rights are nearly non-existent except for specific cases.
Like every place, there are contradictions. This is Earth and we have humans here. But in some ways, it is the balanced Libertarian Socialist Paradise we always dreamed America could be. Taxes 6% or 20%, and one of the best Healthcare systems on the planet (at about half the GDP rate of USA). Before implementing their socialized medicine system, they did an extensive 5+ year study on impact, usage patterns, etc, and just implemented a good program (which a legislature full of graduate-educated people passed after analysis, probably without fistfights).
Almost every Taiwanese will point out that cities in the USA are far more boring than cities in Taiwan (IMO, the negative comparison is due largely to the USA not at all doing well with 3rd spaces, and also USA sucks if you do not want to drive and cannot afford to just piss away money anytime you want recreation—maybe you just Netflix and chill, which is a lot less fun than using an award-winning public transportation system to visit a beach all day and a famous nightmarket, then home on a Saturday and you may have spent $5-$20).
Of course, with degrees in Sociology and Systems engineering, I would quickly point out it’s a lot more than an order of magnitude easier to administrate a landmass the size of Virginia with < 10% the population of the USA. Especially after a 30 year economic boom where most people got some piece of the pie.
Epistemic Status: I’ve left the safety of narrative reporting and its attendant subjective accuracy, and gotten into a lot of mixed editorial opinions and experiences. Take it all for what it’s worth. I could be factually wrong about almost any of this, due to bad memory, bad information, or things having changed. If you’d prefer to focus on a topic and dig, I am in. If you want to see and experience Taiwan, have some sort of adventure in the lands of snakes and butterflies and mountain rivers and secret shrines, and you’re the kind of person I would enjoy hanging out with, I might even be in.
Lower wealth disparity also results in lower crime, particularly lower violent crimes.
Is your claim that reducing wealth disparity causes violent crime reduction, or just that smaller wealth disparity is correlated with lower violent crime rates? If the former, then I’m quite interested in reading your epistemic justification for it.
“Violent crimes of desperation increase because of greater wealth disparity” seems sensible. The greater wealth disparity being the cause of the desperation that instigates the crimes. The OP here is about vast wealth disparity causing social deviance, in some sense.
However, “In a situation where wealth is more equitably distributed, there are fewer crimes of desperation” seems like they could both be coming from the same font of “Our society is good and cares about its people and takes good care of them.” The OP of this thread is also about this.
“Violent crime is causing greater wealth disparity” makes sense only in places where warlords, drug kingpins, or oligarchic criminals are building empires.
I think East Asian islands have a combination of 1 and 2. In Taiwan, the 30-40 year boom saw most people getting a piece of the pie. Few are desperate enough to resort to violent crimes. Does this seem reasonable? Perhaps especially compared to places like the USA or increasingly Europe where you have a sizable portion of people who do not get their fair share of the pie in exchange for their life’s time, with resulting despair, desperation, and etc...
I think East Asian islands have a combination of 1 and 2. In Taiwan, the 30-40 year boom saw most people getting a piece of the pie. Few are desperate enough to resort to violent crimes. Does this seem reasonable?
It looks to me like here you are saying “Reducing the number of impoverished people causes a reduction in violent crime.” I believe this proposition is at least plausible. But isn’t it a quite different claim from “Reducing the amount of wealth disparity causes a reduction in violent crime.”?
Specifically, the number of impoverished people and the amount of wealth disparity are not the same thing (although empirically they may have some common relationship in the contemporary world). Consider two possible societies of 100 people:
(A) Each person has a net worth of $500.
(B) Half the people have a net worth of $75,000 and the other half have a net worth of $3,000,000.
Notice, (B) has more wealth disparity than (A), but it also has fewer impoverished people than (A). And I would expect (B) to have less violent crime than (A).
Lower wealth disparity also results in lower crime, particularly lower violent crimes. Taiwan generally has a fairly “sleepy” government and penal system. And for many types of crimes, you can buy your sentence off for the equivalent of about $30 a day (1000 NTD). Not a lot of private gun ownership (non-zero, as aboriginals can hunt, and there are (very very few) skeet ranges, but even the president’s secret service got into trouble for having a handgun in an unauthorized way). I’ve found very stressed and deformed rimfire cartridges out in the woods, apparently from homemade hunting rifles. That’s about it.
The wealth distribution in Taiwan has been great though. Of course, Forumosa Plastics (Wang family), TSMC, Asus, and a few other giants have made bank, but what you find is a vast quantity of people got their “fair share” there. Education rates are high (According to Farid Zakharia, in our Legislative Yuan, nearly everyone has Masters or PhD degrees, highest education in any legislative body on the planet. I’ll also point to a decent gender split, not quite 50%). First Asian country to legalize gay marriage, and Taipei has been having a lot of any-gender restrooms since 10 years or more ago.
So, it’s basically a liberal society, educated to within an inch of their lives, with good wealth distribution and zero whatsoever personal handgun ownership (outside of mobsters, probably). If you get arrested for something like Pot, you can probably spend a few thousand bucks and not serve time, though if you’re a foreigner, you might need to leave the country. Enforcement of laws out in the country is.… like Mayberry. The cops will chat with you and explain they don’t want to clean your brain off the sidewalk if you’re doing something stupid while drunk. Drunk driving is penalized very very heavily, however, as it should be.
On the bad side, people do get away with domestic violence as the law is such (according to a social worker friend of mine), that the police nearly have to witness the crime themselves for you to get into trouble. If you get into a fight with someone, that’s kind of on you and them and the police may not want to be involved in any way (some of my drunken foreigner buddies have been in this situation—it’s good, bad. The legislative Yuan full of smart people also paradoxically sometimes comes to fistfights). If someone hits you with a car (happened to me), probably you won’t get much, if any compensation. Some situations people drive very recklessly. Be careful crossing the street in Taichung or driving on Hehuan mountain road. People need to show off that they “know the road” by passing on a blind mountain curve, likely while chewing binland and drinking Whisbey (sic, it’s an energy drink). Insurance payouts are very low. But then again, so are medical costs, even if you pay out of pocket without the social health system.
People also do all kinds of shady things with food, engine repairs, and other stuff. There’s a lot of “old Asia” mentality in there or Cha bu duo jiou hao le, which translates to “Don’t bother doing more than an approximate job with this.” You can get something like a shady brake job on a motorcycle if you’re not careful. And food quality violations are exposed all the time. People also abuse their Philippine or Southeast Asian household helpers, au pairs, and day laborers. Animal rights are nearly non-existent except for specific cases.
Like every place, there are contradictions. This is Earth and we have humans here. But in some ways, it is the balanced Libertarian Socialist Paradise we always dreamed America could be. Taxes 6% or 20%, and one of the best Healthcare systems on the planet (at about half the GDP rate of USA). Before implementing their socialized medicine system, they did an extensive 5+ year study on impact, usage patterns, etc, and just implemented a good program (which a legislature full of graduate-educated people passed after analysis, probably without fistfights).
Almost every Taiwanese will point out that cities in the USA are far more boring than cities in Taiwan (IMO, the negative comparison is due largely to the USA not at all doing well with 3rd spaces, and also USA sucks if you do not want to drive and cannot afford to just piss away money anytime you want recreation—maybe you just Netflix and chill, which is a lot less fun than using an award-winning public transportation system to visit a beach all day and a famous nightmarket, then home on a Saturday and you may have spent $5-$20).
Of course, with degrees in Sociology and Systems engineering, I would quickly point out it’s a lot more than an order of magnitude easier to administrate a landmass the size of Virginia with < 10% the population of the USA. Especially after a 30 year economic boom where most people got some piece of the pie.
Epistemic Status: I’ve left the safety of narrative reporting and its attendant subjective accuracy, and gotten into a lot of mixed editorial opinions and experiences. Take it all for what it’s worth. I could be factually wrong about almost any of this, due to bad memory, bad information, or things having changed. If you’d prefer to focus on a topic and dig, I am in. If you want to see and experience Taiwan, have some sort of adventure in the lands of snakes and butterflies and mountain rivers and secret shrines, and you’re the kind of person I would enjoy hanging out with, I might even be in.
Is your claim that reducing wealth disparity causes violent crime reduction, or just that smaller wealth disparity is correlated with lower violent crime rates? If the former, then I’m quite interested in reading your epistemic justification for it.
“Violent crimes of desperation increase because of greater wealth disparity” seems sensible. The greater wealth disparity being the cause of the desperation that instigates the crimes. The OP here is about vast wealth disparity causing social deviance, in some sense.
However, “In a situation where wealth is more equitably distributed, there are fewer crimes of desperation” seems like they could both be coming from the same font of “Our society is good and cares about its people and takes good care of them.” The OP of this thread is also about this.
“Violent crime is causing greater wealth disparity” makes sense only in places where warlords, drug kingpins, or oligarchic criminals are building empires.
I think East Asian islands have a combination of 1 and 2. In Taiwan, the 30-40 year boom saw most people getting a piece of the pie. Few are desperate enough to resort to violent crimes. Does this seem reasonable? Perhaps especially compared to places like the USA or increasingly Europe where you have a sizable portion of people who do not get their fair share of the pie in exchange for their life’s time, with resulting despair, desperation, and etc...
It looks to me like here you are saying “Reducing the number of impoverished people causes a reduction in violent crime.” I believe this proposition is at least plausible. But isn’t it a quite different claim from “Reducing the amount of wealth disparity causes a reduction in violent crime.”?
Specifically, the number of impoverished people and the amount of wealth disparity are not the same thing (although empirically they may have some common relationship in the contemporary world). Consider two possible societies of 100 people:
(A) Each person has a net worth of $500.
(B) Half the people have a net worth of $75,000 and the other half have a net worth of $3,000,000.
Notice, (B) has more wealth disparity than (A), but it also has fewer impoverished people than (A). And I would expect (B) to have less violent crime than (A).
Does this seem correct to you?