Hacker News Reader

Comment by leokun | Hacker News Reader

This lady:

> Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney, who represents West Oakland, said joblessness is a big factor in the city's robbery rate.

I'm not going to turn to robbery if I lose my job.

> "We have a lot fewer jobs for adults so kids experience a lot more lack, so they are not able to get things," she said, noting that some turn to robbery to get money. "Really what they are after is really basic things - shoes, jackets. The things these kids are buying with money from stolen things are not flashy things.

She goes on like this, defending criminals and criminal activity and blaming the system. The system may suck, but resorting to guns, scaring people out of their lives and taking things from them that belong to them is not excusable. It's criminal, and she's a terrible person for commenting this way, and a terrible official.

View on HN

> I'm not going to turn to robbery if I lose my job.

Of course not, neither am I. Of course, I'm a white-collar professional, in an in-demand industry, with savings, and consequently, even if I had to really scale down my career level to make ends meet, I could definitely find a job.

On the flip side, if I was largely unemployable aside from menial jobs with long hours, low pay, and lousy job security, and then I lost my job, I'd have a lot fewer options. I would seriously consider doing robberies where I can make more money with less effort, assuming that the risk was fairly low.

Why is it so crazy to think that some people who steal would do something else if they were given the opportunity for real advancement?

I would seriously consider doing robberies where I can make more money with less effort, assuming that the risk was fairly low.

You would? Do you think of respecting others, their property and the law as some kind of luxury you could do without if you were sufficiently needy?

We could have a philosophical discussion about free will and the irresistible forces of circumstance, but in order to have a civil society we have to at least pretend that people are responsible for their own actions and will respect the law even if they might not get caught breaking it. And indeed, most poor people aren't thieves.

> Do you think of respecting others, their property and the law as some kind of luxury you could do without if you were sufficiently needy?

In the abstract, no, of course not. I think I do a fairly decent job of living a moral life, and I'd like to think that I would never be forced to consider such a thing.

In practicality, I can empathize with feeling unable to move the needle on the economic ladder, and seeing crime as a mechanism available to me when other mechanisms of earning money have been refused or strongly restricted.

My point is not that crime is acceptable, or moral, or excusable, aside from extreme edge cases - just that the OP presupposes that crime is purely a rational choice all people make when alternatives exist.

Also, I'll note that elsewhere you talk about access to food charity - I'll throw out there that 14.5% of the US population had food insecurity during 2012 - http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r...

That's hardly a ringing endorsement for people having access to food.

So would you seriously consider doing robbery or not? I'm not sure if you're standing by your original claim. If you are, I still don't understand why you think you would. If you're not, what makes you different than the people you assume will?

As for "steal or starve", the USDA threshold for "food insecurity" starts at "reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet. Little or no indication of reduced food intake."[1] That is a long, long way from starvation.

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/foo...

>So would you seriously consider doing robbery or not?

You seem to think our behavior is entirely rational. Even aside from the free will debate, this is completely untrue. Our behavior is motivated by a combination of unconscious impulses and consciously directed goals. If the unconscious impulses to steal became great enough it would override any rational ideals about property rights and such.

Of course you'll retort that there are millions of poor folks that don't steal so I couldn't possibly be right. Well that's true, but how many of them are kept in line by external factors such as potential jail time, shame, embarrassment, fear, etc? This is the point of society after all--create external motivations for behaviors that are beneficial to the group. All those that don't steal is not an indication that they do it for purely rational reasons.

The point is that asking "would you seriously consider robbery" to someone who is relatively well off is not a meaningful question, just like you saying (from your place of privilege) that you would never consider violating someone else's property rights no matter how destitute you became is a meaningless declaration.

You seem to think our behavior is entirely rational.

Of course not. What I do think is that poverty in the U.S. is not a sufficiently de-rationalizing force to make it likely I would commit violent crimes. Do you think it would have that effect on you?

As I've said, its a matter of degrees. It is meaningless to pretend like there is a hard line of despair that only then would violence be justified.

Yes, I can envision a possible world where I would be prone to steal for food/shelter/etc. I would go out of my way to avoid causing harm as much as possible, but I don't pretend like I'm somehow physically incapable of these things. But no, that world doesn't currently exist in the US: luckily for me I am intelligent enough and educated enough that I would be able to find other avenues for money. Others aren't so lucky.

Also, you seem to think that violence is never the rational choice (assuming you mean stealing as a form of violence). I don't agree with that either.

I can sort of understand people turning to non-violent crime in extreme circumstances. I don't agree with it, and don't think it's the best choice for them, but if someone is poor and is a thief (vs. armed robber), economic circumstance could be a factor in his decision, and maybe better economic opportunities would deter him.

Armed robbery and violent assault are in a different class, and the solution is better enforcement. If someone pulls a gun on you in a robbery, it's not a property crime -- it's a violent crime against your life, and you're in immediate and reasonable fear for your life. The property is at that point not even secondary in concern. Similar to how rape isn't really about sex.

>I'm not going to turn to robbery if I lose my job.

I honestly don't buy this, but even if you would personally starve to death rather than steal to obtain food, the vast majority of people would not. Crime rates increase as legitimate ways to make money dry up; the statistical trend is real and the implications for human nature cannot be ignored. Wishful thinking about human nature and just teaching people not to be bad will get you nowhere.

It is a politicians job to see things at an aggregate level and address public health issues at that level. Discussing the lack of jobs and legitimate avenues for making money is exactly the appropriate response that a politician should have. If people need a moral kick-in-the-pants, perhaps their pastor should provide it.

Crime shouldn't be justified due to poverty.

And explanation for X is not a justification of X, it is simply pointing out a cause.

I honestly don't buy this, but even if you would personally starve to death rather than steal to obtain food, the vast majority of people would not.

Nobody in Oakland, or the U.S. generally, needs to steal to obtain food. This is not Dickensian England. Government social programs and private charities may not be perfect, but they are more than enough to be sure anyone capable exercising a minimum amount of effort and self-control will not be in danger of starving to death. Obviously there are continuing problems with the mentally ill, but those are not particularly relevant unless you think they're disproportionally committing crimes.

Of course, my point was that he is not different from those in Oakland perpetrating these crimes in kind, but only a matter of degrees; there is a point where he too would commit unethical acts if he became desperate enough.

And that is the ultimate point here, we are all capable of committing crimes if we became desperate enough. This is a property of humanity, not just of a group of morally depraved oaklanders. Thus it makes sense to address the issue in a systemic fashion, i.e. jobs and opportunity.

And that is the ultimate point here, we are all capable of committing crimes if we became desperate enough.

We are? I can imagine committing a violent crime if I were not in control of my faculties, or if I were being blackmailed in some horrible (and manifestly illegal) way. But there are many, many poor people who do not commit crime when sound of mind and body, and it's rather disrespectful to the important notions of free will and human dignity to assume that they just haven't been ground down to their limit yet.

Well I'm not a big believer of the layman's usage of "free will" to begin with (in fact I believe it to be self-contradictory), so I'm sure we could have a long discussion on the subject.

But from a different perspective, I always find it laughable when people like to claim that they or us in modern times are (or should be) so far above certain types of behavior, violent or otherwise. Human history is a trail of tragedy perpetrated by regular people no different from you and me. To think that you are somehow different than all those that came before is pure egoism.

Human history is a trail of tragedy perpetrated by regular people no different from you and me. To think that you are somehow different than all those that came before is pure egoism.

This is sophistry. Of course some people are different from others. Only a tiny minority of people living in the U.S. will commit violent crimes over the course of their lives, despite a much larger minority living in poverty or facing other hardships. Those who commit violent crimes are different by choice. If you don't think those of sound mind are responsible for their own actions, it's hard to see how you can think of democratic society as anything but a doomed experiment.

>Only a tiny minority of people living in the U.S. will commit violent crimes over the course of their lives

And this is a result of the society we live in (welfare state, etc), not a fundamental property of us as a people. Take all those things away and you will see a very large increase in violent crime. My point is that the difference between those who commit crimes now and those that don't is simply a matter of degrees. Nothing you've said contradicts that.

Of course people are responsible for their own actions; what people are not are analytical machines that consider all possible scenarios independent of emotions and drives. It is the drives and emotions that strongly bias our internal scoring system for various decisions. So in this sense we are prone to acting irrational when it is in our best interest (from the perspective of our primitive brain). Society is constructed to allow us to provide for our basic needs so that we can suppress our basic instincts and make the best rational decisions collectively. Democracy does not crumble in the face of partially irrational actors.

If you don't think those of sound mind are responsible for their own actions,

Pretty big assumption here, don't you think? Poverty can drive a person crazy, and when national economic policies proscribe mandatory unemployment so that oligarchs will stop crying about wage prices, bad things can be seen as being designed into the system. There are no rational actors, just self-interested ones.

In my seventeen years living in Oakland, I've grown exasperated with the Sixties-leftover, anti-cop rhetoric that has left us with a disproportionately small police force. We voted in a measure to hire more officers, but lose some every year to retirement and attrition.

I really doubt mere straight employment would turn around the robbing creeps who gang up (usually three to a car--one to drive, the others to mug) on their victims. Thousands of other Oaklanders contend with desperate poverty without resorting to felonies. Until we have a fully staffed police force, though, we're all on our own.

Highly tone-deaf. Why don't they just learn Rails, right? Growth-hacking knows no race nor economic strata!

Shameful guerilla marketing... or real-life 'Trading Places'?

>"Option #1: I will give you $100 in cash.

Option #2: I will return tomorrow with a basic laptop and three books to learn to code. I will then come an hour early before work and teach you to become a software engineer."

https://medium.com/architecting-a-life/ae059ddffd2e

>How I taught a homeless man to build an app in a week

Software developer takes on vagrant and helps him develop his own business.

Patrick McConlogue came up with the idea after passing the homeless man every day on his way to work.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2436371/Homeless-man...

So that takes care of an n=1 case, what about areas of the country/world where e.g. the unemployed aren't passed by software developers?

> I'm not going to turn to robbery if I lose my job.

You need to walk a mile in someone else's shoes before you judge.

Did you come from the ghetto? If so, I might believe you. If not, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com