So, your answer to cherry picking - by your claim - is more cherry picking?
> El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.
Right, and Washington DC is just like El Salvador? You've got to be joking.
> That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.
Puerto Rico, in spite of the name, is poor and has a huge divide between poor and rich. It's not quite Johannesburg but - and I've been there - the divide is massive and in places like that you get a lot of crime, and some of those crimes will involve homicide. The way to address this is to reduce that gap.
Incidentally, the United States also has a massive wealth gap and this is set to further increase. Of course, as an affluent person you'd end up being scared of the unwashed homeless masses so the solution is to put the blame on them, forcibly incarcerate them (and never mind due process) or to simply get rid of them.
'Putting a small fraction of the population in prison' -> that, historically speaking never ended the way it was intended, unless it was done with all of the rules of due process in place. If you propose to abolish those think about how bizarre it is what you are suggesting here. We can solve all homicides (except the ones in prison, I guess) by putting everybody in lockup. So all we have to do is find the line between 'good' and 'bad' people so that there never will be any more first offenders. Problem solved!
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.
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?
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.
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?
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).
> Finding the line between “good” and “bad” people is pretty easy
Who is going to draw that line? You? Should we just divide the population up now and make the bad people wear a little badge? People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Just the idea that there are wholly good people and wholly bad people is kind of disgusting, and I would not want someone in charge who believed in this wild oversimplification. There are good people who commit crimes, and bad people who don't. Let's not be so quick to "easily" judge and label them.
> Should we just divide the population up now and make the bad people wear a little badge? People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad.
That was tried at some point, but it didn't quite have the effect that the proponents of that scheme hoped for. Unfortunately we didn't learn a thing, or so it seems.
> People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Just the idea that there are wholly good people and wholly bad people is kind of disgusting
This seems like a religious belief. I’m not going to argue religion with you, but the data shows that 2/3 of all crime is committed by just 1% of people: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807 (“The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality.”).
El Salvador dropped the homicide rate by a factor of 50 in a decade by imprisoning just 2% of the population. Let’s say we can’t go that fast because we have due process and whatnot. But once someone is convicted of a violent crime, why can’t we just double the sentences to keep them off the streets longer?
I’d even be willing to make the prisons nice, like in Norway. The point is to get them off the streets.
> El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.
Right, and Washington DC is just like El Salvador? You've got to be joking.
> That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.
Puerto Rico, in spite of the name, is poor and has a huge divide between poor and rich. It's not quite Johannesburg but - and I've been there - the divide is massive and in places like that you get a lot of crime, and some of those crimes will involve homicide. The way to address this is to reduce that gap.
Incidentally, the United States also has a massive wealth gap and this is set to further increase. Of course, as an affluent person you'd end up being scared of the unwashed homeless masses so the solution is to put the blame on them, forcibly incarcerate them (and never mind due process) or to simply get rid of them.
'Putting a small fraction of the population in prison' -> that, historically speaking never ended the way it was intended, unless it was done with all of the rules of due process in place. If you propose to abolish those think about how bizarre it is what you are suggesting here. We can solve all homicides (except the ones in prison, I guess) by putting everybody in lockup. So all we have to do is find the line between 'good' and 'bad' people so that there never will be any more first offenders. Problem solved!