I think it's also due to having a population that has nothing to lose.
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.
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.
Also, never understatement status-seeking when it comes to motivations for crime, even if your current conditions would have been considered high status 100 years ago, if you are seeking social/sexual relationships you are only going to be judged by your relative status today.
This relative status-seeking is why even rich people will still risk their positions and jail over felonies that will only make them 5% richer.
Health outcomes, (obesity, nutrition, drug addiction ) could easily be worse.
Security outcomes, (violent crime, domestic violence, police violence) could easily be worse.
Economic outcomes (job security, lifetime earning expectations, minimum wage) could easily be worse.
Social outcomes ( close friends, community ties, connection to close family memebers) could easily be worse.
Remember that looking at averages is misleading if the distribution is changing around a constant mean.
Further, the idea that crime is an economic choice, and not a socially determined choice is highly suspect. For instance, street level drug dealers make very little money [1], the average US bank robber steals ~$4,000 [2]. Crime is rarely a "rational decision" it's made in a socially constructed context.
[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/sp/5049.pdf [2] https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/06/11/what-you-sho...
Do we have an obesity problem? Sure, that's kind of a self caused issue. You could blame our food being too cheap, but the alternative is starving to death which is far less in your realm of control.
Minimum wage is at its highest in direct value, luxury goods are at their cheapest. Now instead of writing a letter or traveling significant distances, you can chat with your friends all damned day.
Is life hard and imperfect? Of course it is, but to suggest that somehow life is harder now than in the past 25 or 50 or 500 years is absolutely foolish.
Life Expectancy in the US is going down [1]. That's happening as many people are living longer than ever. The difference comes from plummeting life expectancies at the bottom.
Real minimum wages peaked in the 1980's [2]
Calling obesity "self caused" is unreasonable. Access to food, particularly for poor people is very different today than at any time in the past, Malnutrition is totally possible alongside sufficient caloric intake.
Why is the cost of "luxury goods" relevant to anything?
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/21/health/us-life-expectancy...
[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-real-value-u-s-...
Remember that real wage is a deflection based on cost, but the cost of living is absolutely localized whereas the minimum wage is federal unless overridden by the state. Therefore as an average that might be true, but is generally incorrect for any given actual datapoint. Just because minimum wage is garbage in Mountain View doesn't mean it's not perfectly fine in Ohio. https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_microeconomics-theory-th... https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/index/north-americ...
Obesity is absolutely self caused unless you're on a feeding tube. You can get 2400 cals a day for about $4 from McDonalds - don't even need to cook. Yes, your fresh organic vegetables that had to be trucked in from halfway across the US costs more than a bag of processed corn chips that can sit on a shelf for 2 years. You can still eat very healthy for very little money.
The cost of luxury goods is relevant because things like laptop computers, the internet, cellphones, cars, and so on are considered luxury goods. And hey, it turns out it's pretty hard to get a job if you can't email, and it's hard to be connected if you don't have a phone. You can get a functional phone for $20 and a plan for about $15 or less a month - something mind boggling compared to a few decades ago, not to mention more portable than a telegraph or a landline.
CoL in NYC/SF has almost no effect on the overall price index, it's much more representative of middle america.
Completely missed my point about someone being malnourished because they get all of their calories from Mickey D's.
You'd be surprised how many poor people continue to have low access to email and find jobs by physically walking into retail stores to apply.
Are you making the claim the rich now live forever and the poor die much younger compared to previous years? They do still include the poor in the average.
CoL has everything to do with the poor and their quality of life. A $0.10 raise in the price of a gallon of milk has no effect on the middle class and a dramatic effect on those living in poverty.
While there are nutritional issues with McDonalds (far too much fat, not enough vegetables, too much sugar in many of their products), you probably aren't going to be malnourished if you eat their food. Chicken/Beef, bread, some starches and fats. That's not an altogether terrible diet, it certainly isn't unsalted rice for 3 meals a day.
Regarding cost of living, the question is whether minimum wages have gone down , and the answer is yes, because cost of living has increased, they have. It's isn't just mountain view CA.
It's common knowledge that mcdonaldds cannot provide a fully nutritious diet. Take a look at Super Size Me, the book or movie. It's pretty amazing.
[1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/9/16860994/lif...
In another Hacker News article, these would all be things we should be striving for
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/opinion/poverty-united-st...
Extreme poverty in the US is real: https://www.al.com/news/2017/12/un_poverty_official_touring_...
Neither are in deep poverty? I happen to live in Hungary, and well, see for yourself:
https://budapestbeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/one-qu...
https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/buffett/hungary/img/single/ma... (this is from Slovakia)
Your typical street criminal isn’t sad about student loans, nor are they stealing to buy medicine. They are victims of a culture, not circumstance.
> but sitting idly while people are starving is also a form of wrong
In the United States, find me one person that has starved to death in the past year. Not only are there food stamp programs, but many churches and charities all over the country have some sort of food program. You would have to be supremely incompetent if you are literally starving to death in the United States. It’s so extremely rare as to be a news story if it happens. Poor people in the US are more likely to be obese than starving.
That's why crime is usually modelled as an infection.
> starving
I haven't said 'to death'.
- '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.
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.
H. L. Mencken
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.
This is not a fact.
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.)