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).
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?