7 ms·

I think it's also due to having a population that has nothing to lose.

klyrs 7y ago
People downvoting parent probably don't understand cost-benefit analysis outside of their caste
graeme 7y ago
....criminals are not a large percentage of the population. Especially when you exclude people convicted on harmless offences such as drug possession. It takes more than being poor and downtrodden to turn to well planned theft. (I mean harmless in the sense that only the person using drugs has potential harm.)
toasterlovin 7y ago
FWIW, there has never been an easier time to be alive. When you frame things like that, it really drives home how utterly unfit for modern life a person has to be to justify a life of crime in 2019. Life is always a struggle, but we’re not exactly living in a Dickens novel.
- mlevental 7y ago
  I'm quite sure the Aristocrats, Nobles, Dukes of the Victorian era said the exact same things (and the monarchs before them)
- nerdponx 7y ago
  I suspect your "modern life" has been quite different from other peoples'.
- cjslep 7y ago
  Perhaps it's time to repurpose all that time set aside for classical fiction literature to pick up some contemporary non-fiction.
  - rimliu 7y ago
    Something from Steven Pinker maybe?
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      'Things are getting better' != 'things are already great'.
      - toasterlovin 7y ago
        But if things have been getting better for 200 years non-stop, then that supports my point (life is the easiest it's ever been, even if it's still difficult).
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        It sort of supports your point about life getting better, on average. It doesn't support your other point, "it really drives home how utterly unfit for modern life a person has to be to justify a life of crime in 2019". We're nowhere near the point where choosing the criminal life means one is unfit for modern society. Not only some people are still forced into it by circumstances, a lot of crime thrives in the conditions of modern society.
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        I'm not saying that choosing a life of criminality is evidence that someone is unfit for modern life. Instead, I'm saying that someone would have to be incredibly unfit for modern life to justify criminality by pointing to modern life being difficult (which is what the person I was responding to was saying). Those are two different arguments. I actually mostly agree with you.
- pas 7y ago
  Yes and no. After all, there are millions of people in deep poverty in the US. And at least a fraction of them has serious constraints on what they can do to get out of there (for example they have family, so they can't just pack up and go to a different state to start a new life). Student loan cannot be written down in a personal bankruptcy process. Many people have insufficient money for medication. ... and so on, so they dip their toes into crime, just selling weed at first, or laundering money, and then naturally they either get greedy, or get pressured into taking more risk, or simply get caught. (or maybe some successfully get out.) and then there are people fleeing from very rough places (drug cartel warzones, etc.) and they usually don't have much more than their name, so they can try to do whatever makes some money. Do circumstances make theft right? No. Of course not. But sitting idly while people are starving is also a form of wrong, which quickly turns this into a hard pragmatic question with only grey answers.
  - MagnumOpus 7y ago
    > there are millions of people in deep poverty in the US. Sure, but "deep poverty" today is what "middle class" life used to be for their grandparents or great-grandparents and normal student life is like for most college students. Having to cook from scratch rather than eating out every day, or maybe even only having meat a few times a week. Having to go to a laundromat rather than having your own washing machine, and riding public transit or a bike/motorbike with rudimentary knowledge on how to fix it. These are hardships only when compared to extremely lofty standards of living - and if that makes you become a career criminal, it is hard to have sympathy.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      Unfortunately humans care more about their relative wealth than their absolute wealth. So telling them that objectively their life isn't all that bad is not very effective when they see their neighbors having a lot more wealth.
      - habnds 7y ago
        Scarcity means that relative wealth _is_ absolute wealth because we need to compete for resources. Falling too far behind other members of society means not being able to compete for resources successfully. Focusing on relative wealth is perfectly rational.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  The view you presented here is deeply, if unintentionally, flawed; it'd take a small essay to unpack and elaborate all the points in detail. But to sketch a tl;dr of a part of such essay: - 'pas touched upon the amount of people in poverty; add to that mental problems, losing the IQ lottery, being born into a pathological family and a host of other concerns, and you'll see you're severely underestimating the amount of people who are forced into crime through circumstances. - There's lots of people who for some reason don't care about such ideals as niceness, community and civilization. For those, committing a crime isn't meaningfully different than any legal activity - it just have a slightly different risk/payoff profile. If you look around carefully, get to know more people, you'll discover plenty of crime happening around you - not murder and robbery, but tax evasion, skirting environmental laws, health&safety laws, etc. It may seem that in 2019, life of crime shouldn't be rewarded, and yet 2019 brought us a multi-billion-dollar IPO of a company whose primary business model is law-breaking at multinational scale.
  - cellis 7y ago
    It’s one of those things that you shouldn’t “say”, but everyone knows: victors write the history , then yesteryears lawbreakers become todays lawmakers. But only for the victors does this work. Everyone else rots in prison.
- mensetmanusman 7y ago
  Subjective well being is a function of how well your neighbors are doing. Most millionaires in the U.S. report that they don’t feel wealthy. What you may be suggesting is that our policy should care less about subjective well being and more about objective well being, but this goes against the progressive milieu.
  - matt-attack 7y ago
    > Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband. H. L. Mencken
- AngryData 7y ago
  Maybe if you live in a prosperous area, but there are plenty of shitholes throughout the US where everybody is struggling and people are considered well off if they make over $30K a year.
- ip26 7y ago
  But wouldn't one major driver of theft be opportunity? Essentially, the relative wealth disparity between yourself and your targets, rather than your or their absolute wealth. I would think the incentive to steal could be thought of as something like (relative reward) * (social modifier) / (probability of failure) * (consequences) or something like that.
- qwsxyh 7y ago
  An easier time than before doesn't mean a good time.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  > there has never been an easier time to be alive This is not a fact.

People downvoting parent probably don't understand cost-benefit analysis outside of their caste

....criminals are not a large percentage of the population. Especially when you exclude people convicted on harmless offences such as drug possession. It takes more than being poor and downtrodden to turn to well planned theft. (I mean harmless in the sense that only the person using drugs has potential harm.)

toasterlovin 7y ago

FWIW, there has never been an easier time to be alive. When you frame things like that, it really drives home how utterly unfit for modern life a person has to be to justify a life of crime in 2019. Life is always a struggle, but we’re not exactly living in a Dickens novel.

mlevental 7y ago
I'm quite sure the Aristocrats, Nobles, Dukes of the Victorian era said the exact same things (and the monarchs before them)
nerdponx 7y ago
I suspect your "modern life" has been quite different from other peoples'.
cjslep 7y ago
Perhaps it's time to repurpose all that time set aside for classical fiction literature to pick up some contemporary non-fiction.
- rimliu 7y ago
  Something from Steven Pinker maybe?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    'Things are getting better' != 'things are already great'.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      But if things have been getting better for 200 years non-stop, then that supports my point (life is the easiest it's ever been, even if it's still difficult).
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        It sort of supports your point about life getting better, on average. It doesn't support your other point, "it really drives home how utterly unfit for modern life a person has to be to justify a life of crime in 2019". We're nowhere near the point where choosing the criminal life means one is unfit for modern society. Not only some people are still forced into it by circumstances, a lot of crime thrives in the conditions of modern society.
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        I'm not saying that choosing a life of criminality is evidence that someone is unfit for modern life. Instead, I'm saying that someone would have to be incredibly unfit for modern life to justify criminality by pointing to modern life being difficult (which is what the person I was responding to was saying). Those are two different arguments. I actually mostly agree with you.
pas 7y ago
Yes and no. After all, there are millions of people in deep poverty in the US. And at least a fraction of them has serious constraints on what they can do to get out of there (for example they have family, so they can't just pack up and go to a different state to start a new life). Student loan cannot be written down in a personal bankruptcy process. Many people have insufficient money for medication. ... and so on, so they dip their toes into crime, just selling weed at first, or laundering money, and then naturally they either get greedy, or get pressured into taking more risk, or simply get caught. (or maybe some successfully get out.) and then there are people fleeing from very rough places (drug cartel warzones, etc.) and they usually don't have much more than their name, so they can try to do whatever makes some money. Do circumstances make theft right? No. Of course not. But sitting idly while people are starving is also a form of wrong, which quickly turns this into a hard pragmatic question with only grey answers.
- MagnumOpus 7y ago
  > there are millions of people in deep poverty in the US. Sure, but "deep poverty" today is what "middle class" life used to be for their grandparents or great-grandparents and normal student life is like for most college students. Having to cook from scratch rather than eating out every day, or maybe even only having meat a few times a week. Having to go to a laundromat rather than having your own washing machine, and riding public transit or a bike/motorbike with rudimentary knowledge on how to fix it. These are hardships only when compared to extremely lofty standards of living - and if that makes you become a career criminal, it is hard to have sympathy.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Unfortunately humans care more about their relative wealth than their absolute wealth. So telling them that objectively their life isn't all that bad is not very effective when they see their neighbors having a lot more wealth.
    - habnds 7y ago
      Scarcity means that relative wealth _is_ absolute wealth because we need to compete for resources. Falling too far behind other members of society means not being able to compete for resources successfully. Focusing on relative wealth is perfectly rational.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
The view you presented here is deeply, if unintentionally, flawed; it'd take a small essay to unpack and elaborate all the points in detail. But to sketch a tl;dr of a part of such essay: - 'pas touched upon the amount of people in poverty; add to that mental problems, losing the IQ lottery, being born into a pathological family and a host of other concerns, and you'll see you're severely underestimating the amount of people who are forced into crime through circumstances. - There's lots of people who for some reason don't care about such ideals as niceness, community and civilization. For those, committing a crime isn't meaningfully different than any legal activity - it just have a slightly different risk/payoff profile. If you look around carefully, get to know more people, you'll discover plenty of crime happening around you - not murder and robbery, but tax evasion, skirting environmental laws, health&safety laws, etc. It may seem that in 2019, life of crime shouldn't be rewarded, and yet 2019 brought us a multi-billion-dollar IPO of a company whose primary business model is law-breaking at multinational scale.
- cellis 7y ago
  It’s one of those things that you shouldn’t “say”, but everyone knows: victors write the history , then yesteryears lawbreakers become todays lawmakers. But only for the victors does this work. Everyone else rots in prison.
mensetmanusman 7y ago
Subjective well being is a function of how well your neighbors are doing. Most millionaires in the U.S. report that they don’t feel wealthy. What you may be suggesting is that our policy should care less about subjective well being and more about objective well being, but this goes against the progressive milieu.
- matt-attack 7y ago
  > Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband. H. L. Mencken
AngryData 7y ago
Maybe if you live in a prosperous area, but there are plenty of shitholes throughout the US where everybody is struggling and people are considered well off if they make over $30K a year.
ip26 7y ago
But wouldn't one major driver of theft be opportunity? Essentially, the relative wealth disparity between yourself and your targets, rather than your or their absolute wealth. I would think the incentive to steal could be thought of as something like (relative reward) * (social modifier) / (probability of failure) * (consequences) or something like that.
qwsxyh 7y ago
An easier time than before doesn't mean a good time.
erikpukinskis 7y ago
> there has never been an easier time to be alive This is not a fact.