Meme - John Rain: "Poverty does not cause crime. You will find a correlation between neighborhood deprivation and violent crimes as a whole, but it disappears once you "adjust for genes', ie by comparing siblings for example."
"The Impact of Neighborhood Deprivation on Violent Crime: It Declines With Added Controls"
Childhood family income, adolescent violent criminality and substance misuse: quasi-experimental total population study - "There were no associations between childhood family income and subsequent violent criminality and substance misuse once we had adjusted for unobserved familial risk factors."
More proof that poverty causes crime
Does Poverty Cause Crime? - "the relationship between poverty and crime is inconsistent. If poverty causes crime, why don’t all similarly impoverished groups—by race, religion, ethnicity, age, gender, and so on—commit violent crimes at the same rate? The fact that they don’t suggests that other factors are at play. Consider some striking facts that illustrate the inconsistency between poverty and violent crime. Some cities and countries with high poverty rates have low murder rates, and vice versa. Calcutta, for example, one of the poorest cities in India—and, indeed, the world—recorded a murder rate of just 0.3 per 100,000 people in 2008. The rate in Delhi, by contrast, was 2.9 per 100,000. That same year, the rate in far wealthier New York City was 7 per 100,000—more than 23 times higher than Calcutta’s. Zimbabwe, among the poorest African countries, had a remarkably low murder rate of 0.5 per 100,000 in 2023. By contrast, Jamaica, with a relatively modest 16.7 percent of the population in poverty, had the world’s highest murder rate: 49.3 per 100,000. What explains the relative nonviolence of impoverished Zimbabweans? And why are Jamaicans so homicidal, despite their relative affluence? Clearly, poverty can’t be the answer to both questions. Turning to macro trends in the United States, we find similar anomalies. In the late 1930s, as the Great Depression worsened, homicide rates declined, as I note in my book The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America. Likewise, during the so-called Great Recession of 2007–09, murder rates, which had begun to sink in the early 1990s, kept falling. And in the late 1960s, when the American economy was booming, the great crime wave (more like a crime tsunami) was beginning its deadly multi-decadal surge—a pattern that I discuss in The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America. Criminological research has revealed similar surprises, with no consensus on the explanation. Over 40 years ago, criminologist Steven F. Messner, studying more than 200 metropolitan areas, was astonished to find that, after controlling for various demographic variables, poverty was inversely related to homicide. In other words, the more poor people there were in a metro area, the lower the murder rate was. As a follow-up, the same researcher studied Manhattan neighborhoods, this time finding that, while poverty was associated with homicide, economic inequality—the concentration of wealth in fewer hands—bore no connection to killing. In a 1996 study of extremely disadvantaged neighborhoods in Columbus, Ohio, which included poverty as part of its definition of disadvantage, Lauren J. Krivo and Ruth D. Peterson found that, even at comparable levels of hardship, black communities had higher rates of violent crime than white ones. In 2009, Krivo and Peterson and a third coauthor identified significant differences in violent crime levels between black and Latino neighborhoods, despite similar levels of disadvantage and segregation... I wrote for City Journal about a new study on Asian poverty in New York City. Columbia University researchers found that more Asians than African Americans were living below the poverty line, a surprising result. Curious about how this affected crime, I examined violent crime arrests. The data showed far more arrests of blacks than Asians... while more Asians live in poverty than blacks, African Americans are 16 times more likely to be arrested for murder. The disparities extend to other violent crimes. The black arrest rate is 4.5 times higher than the Asian rate for felony assault, 3.3 times higher for rape, and 11.4 times higher for robbery. Latino arrest rates are also higher than Asian rates, though generally lower than black rates. Clearly, poverty alone does not explain these disparities. But what does? Given that black violent crime rates have been elevated relative to other social groups since the late nineteenth century, it appears that something in the culture of poor blacks, especially young males, predisposes them to violence. The phenomenon is often described as a “subculture of violence,” marked by a heightened sensitivity to perceived slights and threats, along with a readiness to use violence in response. Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson, who spent four years immersed in Philadelphia’s inner cities, identified a “code of the street”—a set of unofficial rules for poor black neighborhoods. The essence of this code is to display violence, or a predisposition to violence, to ward off the all-too-common attacks and assaults in these communities... Lifting the poor into the middle class does reduce violent crime, as we saw with Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century and Italian immigrants in the early twentieth. But there is little agreement on how best to achieve this through government policy."
The cope is that blacks are wrongly arrested and convicted, inflating the arrest and conviction numbers
If the Scottish influence theory is right, Scots should be as prone to violence as African-Americans. But...
Poverty and Violent Crime Don’t Go Hand in Hand - "in New York City, Asians’ relatively high poverty rate is accompanied by exceptionally low crime rates. This undercuts the common belief that poverty and crime go hand in hand. Asians had consistently low arrest rates for violent crime—usually lower than their proportion of the population, lower than those of blacks and Hispanics, and in one category (assault), even lower than that of whites, who, as a group, are far less often impoverished... At 1.2 per 100,000, Asian murder arrest rates were nearly one-ninth of black rates. If poverty were the principal cause of crime, we would expect Asian rates to be as high, if not higher, than those of blacks. That the Asian rates are relatively low illustrates what I call the “crime/adversity mismatch,” a recurring phenomenon. As I observe in my history of crime: “Throughout American history, different social groups have engaged in different amounts of violent crime, and no consistent relationship between the extent of a group’s socioeconomic disadvantage and its level of violence is evident.” When it comes to violent crime—murder, assault, robbery, and the like—history tells a complicated story. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, impoverished Jewish, Polish, and German immigrants had relatively low crime rates, while disadvantaged Italian, Mexican, and Irish entrants committed violent crime at high rates. This crime/adversity mismatch also seems to be a global phenomenon. In Great Britain, for instance, a criminologist observed that “all of the minority groups with elevated rates of crime or incarceration are socially and economically disadvantaged, but some disadvantaged ethnic minority groups do not have elevated rates of offending.” There, too, it was the case that Asians were more disadvantaged than blacks, but the latter had much higher offending rates. Why is it that poverty is not consistently related to crime? A major reason is that crimes of violence are usually motivated by quarrels, personal grudges, perceived insults, and similar interpersonal conflicts, not by economic necessity. Consequently, a decline in one’s financial condition is not likely to cause violent criminal behavior. This explains why an economic recession or depression does not invariably produce a crime spike. In the second half of the 1930s, for instance, violent crime declined, even though the country experienced some of the worst years of the Great Depression. Likewise, during the Great Recession of 2007–2009, when the economy tanked, crime fell."
Clearly, white people are victims of racial profiling, which is why they are arrested more than Asians
Revisiting the Income Inequality-Crime Puzzle - "The economics literature generally supports a positive theoretical link between income inequality and crime. However, despite this consensus, empirical evidence has struggled to yield definitive conclusions. To address this puzzle, I conducted a meta-analysis based on 1,341 estimates drawn from 43 studies in economics journals. The findings indicate a statistically significant but economically insignificant true effect of inequality on crime, ranging between 0.007 and 0.123 using UWLS FAT-PET and advanced methods. In essence, if there is an impact of inequality on crime, it is, at best, minimal. Additionally, there is some limited evidence suggesting positive publication bias. Results from Bayesian model averaging reveal that inequality does not affect exclusively property crime, as predicted by the rational choice models. Moreover, this analysis shows that inequality measures which are sensitive to changes in income at the middle and top of the distribution are associated with higher coefficients. The study also underscores the biases arising from the exclusion of relevant variables. The implications of this research suggest that inequality may not be the primary motivator for criminal behaviour, with other factors potentially playing more significant roles. Lastly, if inequality does affect crime, it might do so in different ways than those discussed by the majority of the existing empirical studies."
Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 2014, David Graeber wrote an article for the Guardian in which he argued "Working-class people... care more about their friends, families, and communities. In aggregate... they're just fundamentally nicer." The Economist put up a similar article at the time. Were they right?
To make his case, Graeber wove a nice little narrative together about how the rich don't need to care, so they don't, and thus they're bad at empathy and they do things like hiring out the sons and daughters of the poor to do the job when empathy is needed. The meat of Graeber's case was a set of two social psychological papers. The first was a set of three studies in which the poor appeared to outclass the rich at tasks like the Mind in the Eyes, or figuring out the emotions of people they're talking to. The main effects from these studies had p-values of 0.02, 0.02, 0.04, 0.01, 0.04, 0.03, and 0.04. This first article was severely p-hacked. To make matters worse, one of the studies featured priming and two of them used "subjective" measures of social class. The second article was a series of seven studies that were, at times, just bizarre. In the first two studies, students watched cars at a four-way intersection and tallied up how often the "upper-class" and "lower-class" cars cut off other vehicles and pedestrians. What's an upper-class car? Beats me. It was based on student judgment. p's = 0.046 and 0.040. In the rest of the studies, things were similarly dodgy: almost all of the p-values were barely less than 0.05, the hypotheses were unbelievable, priming was featured, low power was abused, and liberties were taken in sampling and in defining key variables
So what happens next? Some researchers looked at these studies and the media coverage saying that the rich were bad at being empathetic, were selfish, etc. and thought Wait, why does every field but social psychology say the opposite? Social psychology, alongside nutrition, is a paragon of the replication crisis. Not in a good way, mind you, in the sense that remarkably many of its studies failed to replicate Studies from outside social psychology got less coverage, but indicated the rich were more prosocial. The researchers decided to use large, population-representative samples with objective measures of social class to figure out if the rich were more prosocial or antisocial than the poor To start, in these two studies from Germany (SOEP) and the U.S. (CEX) they donated more often This is key. The reason is, some studies had indicated that the poor donate relatively larger portions of their incomes. But, those studies all looked at donations among those who donated. In other words, they didn't account for differences in the likelihood of donating at all. Account for that difference, and a proposed curvilinear relationship between relative amounts of donations and poverty disappears. Now, the rich just donate more absolutely and relatively! In the GSS, measures of both objective and subjective social class were available, so they could be discriminated and... it appears subjective social class might be weaker than objective social class as a predictor of at least this prosocial behavior:
You could argue donations aren't a great metric. Fine. So look at volunteering, which the rich in the SOEP were more likely to do (and do more frequently—not shown here). In the GSS, the same result emerged: the objectively and subjectively rich volunteered more usually (and frequently—again, not shown here). This happens despite the poor having more free time and the rich spending more time each week gainfully employed on average. If you look in the ISSP—a large international survey covering more than 30 countries—the rich are more likely to volunteer at all in aggregate, and they volunteer more frequently, although there is some heterogeneity across countries in the frequency of volunteering relationship:
You could argue that the poor are more selfish because they're poor. And, OK! But even in the setting of the well-known trust game, the rich were more trusting and more trustworthy:
Since the poor commit more crime, are more likely to act indecent and loud, show less trusting and trustworthy behavior, and so on, we really have no reason to believe Graeber's article and so many others like it. They were, at best, a relic of the replication crisis. At worst—and this is likely what they really were—they were political wishcasting. So let's not denigrate the rich, because it's not true that they deserve it."
Kevin Bass on X - "At least 20% of healthcare spending is waste and fraud. That's $1,000,000,000,000 on waste and fraud in healthcare alone. Maybe as much as $2,500,000,000,000. The federal deficit is $2,000,000,000,000. America is being bankrupted by waste and fraud."
Anthony DiGiorgio, DO, MHA on X - "I believe this. Some of it is the obvious cartoon villain stuff. The outright fraud like the Minnesota autism scam. But a lot of it is softer fraud. When a hospital charges $18k for an MRI that can be done for $400, that is not technically fraud. It is still an extraction racket. When state Medicaid programs award massive contracts to politically connected nonprofits or vendors, they will insist it is not fraud. All of these revenue streams started with good intentions. Of course we want to support disabled children. Of course we want low income patients to have access to imaging and specialty care. Then people figured out how to enrich themselves inside those programs. What we now have is a massive wealth extraction industry hiding behind moral language and complexity. Audit everything."
The Minnesota fraud scandal is just the tip of the iceberg - "Minnesota is not the exception but rather the example Americans finally noticed. Medicaid fraud has been endemic at the state and federal levels for decades. Politicians haven't done much, even with scholars and journalists raising the alarm. Medicaid reports $543 billion in "improper payments" over the past decade, though that figure omits one of the largest sources of error: whether states correctly determined the eligibility of the individuals they enrolled and paid providers on behalf of. According to Paragon Institute calculations, this brings improper payments to $1.1 trillion over those 10 years. Improper payments are not identical to fraud; many involve missing documentation or administrative errors. But that distinction offers little comfort considering how little money is recovered. They are also an open invitation for more abuse. Actual fraud, meanwhile, is widespread and persistent. In 2024 alone, state Medicaid Fraud Control Units reported more than 1,151 convictions and more than $1.4 billion in civil and criminal recoveries. Federal enforcement recovers a tiny share of what is stolen. Fraud that goes undetected never appears in the data. That's only the tip of the iceberg. Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and many other welfare programs also suffer from massive fraud. The Affordable Care Act's (ACA) exchange subsidies provide another cautionary example. A recent Government Accountability Office report shows that the fraud risks in the ACA's advanced premium tax credit remain severe a decade after they were first identified. The ability to gain subsidized coverage for fictitious applicants without providing required documentation, tens of thousands of Social Security numbers used for overlapping coverage, and more than $21 billion in subsidies never reconciled with tax filings are among the findings. Nonetheless, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has not updated its fraud risk assessment since 2018 and still lacks a comprehensive anti-fraud strategy. It's tempting to treat the Minnesota scandal as a morality play about managerial incompetence. And yes, Gov. Tim Walz deserves some blame. When red flags persist for years across multiple programs, failure of leadership is part of the story. But focusing on a single official or state misses the deeper lesson. The problem is not administrative capacity; it's incentives. Spending other people's money with little personal consequence for failure leads to a collapse of accountability, regardless of who's in charge. In addition, voters have limited incentives to monitor complex programs. Interest groups, by contrast, have strong incentives to organize around government spending. None of this requires bad intentions—it's predictable human behavior flowing from predictable incentives—but it creates an environment for waste and fraud to take root."
If you don't want to relentlessly expand government programmes, you're a terrible person who has no "empathy" and if you're a Christian you're a hypocrite. If you want a pause while programmes are audited, you just want people to die
Big Labor's child care racket - "in the last 12 years, the number of child care workers has increased by about 33%, while the number of children ages 5 and under fell by 8.8%. The explosion of the child care industry has persisted even while the number of stay-at-home mothers has risen in recent years. The story here is not just a matter of Somali fraudsters. It’s a much bigger story about special-interest politics boosted by ideology and masquerading as family policy. For the past two decades, Democrats have been pumping billions of dollars into the child care industry at the behest of labor unions, who then use the state funding as a lever by which to unionize all child-care workers, including the unwilling. These same unions, in turn, funnel this taxpayer money back to the Democratic politicians. When you hear a Democratic politician say they want “universal child care,” or campaign on expanding “affordable, high-quality child care,” you should suspect that they are playing patronage politics with the labor union allies. Minnesota’s raft of child care subsidies is just one example, but it’s a telling example. Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) was reelected in 2022, and his party took control of both legislative chambers — its first “trifecta” in a decade. The margins were thin, but the party’s ambitions were great. It accomplished almost everything it set out to do. Liberals celebrated this as “the Minnesota Miracle.” The biggest thing they did was expand all sorts of subsidies for child care. Politicians such as Walz painted this as a win for parents, but it wasn’t parents who crafted these policies and pushed them across the finish line. Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Jamie Long explained the progressive approach: “You need good ideas. … You need elected politicians who are going to be supporting those ideas, and then you need outside organizing for elections and to support those votes.” The Washington Post’s EJ Dionne elaborated: “All three are key to getting things done. In Minnesota, key players included unions, environmental groups and faith-based organizers in the appropriately named Isaiah organization. In the run-up to the session, the outside groups were brought into the task of crafting an agenda.” That is, Democrats let the outside groups, including the unions, craft their child care policies. It was telling that Democrats did this with a razor-thin majority. Their aggressive actions in 2023 should be understood in part as a strategic effort to build political strength: funnel more money to their political allies, which will help them win in two, four, and eight years. Building their political power is explicitly the goal of these outside groups. Isaiah, one of the groups Dionne cited, has “Build Power” in its motto. Isaiah’s biggest project is a program called “Kids Count on Us,” which is a lobby effort to boost state subsidies for child care. This is explicitly a supply-side project more than a demand-side one. As Kids Count on Us describes itself, “Providers, teachers, and parents organizing together.” This is an industry lobby looking for more federal funds. The organization brags, “We won over $1 Billion in childcare funding in Minnesota.” One item the industry won: increasing the amount the Child Care Assistance Program will pay to child care providers. Under the new law, the taxpayer would pay these subsidized child care providers well above the average going rate — specifically, equal to the 75th percentile. In that 2023 session, the groups also lobbied successfully to extend special COVID-19-era direct payments to child care providers. Called the “Great Start Compensation Support Payment Program,” it is “designed to support the child care and early learning industry and workforce,” according to the legislature. It’s a $100-million-a-year subsidy directly to the industry. This money never goes to parents. It just goes to the businesses, and thus to the unions. In that 2022 cycle, government unions, such as AFSCME and SEIU, spent more than $13 million on Minnesota politics, with almost all of the money going to Democrats. A similar story has played out in other states. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) in 2019 signed AB 387, which effectively transformed tens of thousands of child care workers into state employees for the purposes of union organizing... This bill was crafted and pushed by a child care lobby called Child Care Providers United, a coalition formed by SEIU and AFSCME. So, taxpayer subsidies were the mechanism by which day care workers became members of SEIU and AFSCME. These unions, which are very liberal and 100% aligned with Democrats, then tapped into these 40,000 workers as an organizing army and a source of funds — both of which were put to work for the Left. As an added bonus, the unions often pocket money from unwilling child care workers. “In several states, governments are automatically deducting a portion of Medicaid or other government aid from home healthcare and family childcare (day care) providers’ assistance checks and giving that money to government unions,” the State Policy Network reported. “Many providers are unaware this money is even being taken; others are aware but struggle to stop their state and union from skimming money from their checks; and some caregivers allege the unions and governments are fraudulently skimming the money.” In Washington state, this little racket started much earlier. Since 2004, SEIU has been the bargaining representative for any licensed childcare provider that receives state money through the “Working Connections Child Care” subsidy. Of course, SEIU is “bargaining” with liberal state politicians who are spending other people’s money, and so it gets a lot of what it wants.
In short, Democratic politicians create subsidies for day care for poor parents, the subsidies effectively turn day care providers into members of Democrat-aligned unions, those unions then lobby to expand these subsidies to pay above market rate, and to cover more families. Meanwhile, most parents do not want formal child care. The Bipartisan Policy Center published a paper in 2022 asking “What Keeps Employed Parents Out of the Childcare System?” The answer: parents don’t want to be in the “childcare system.” “More than half of parents would still prefer informal child care, even if formal care was free and convenient,” BPC found. This is the consistent finding of polls and studies in the United States. Most parents would like to simply work less and thus take care of their children, and to the extent they need or want outside help, they would prefer informal, often unpaid child care, such as neighborhood babysitting co-ops or help from grandma. But stay-at-home mothers and informal networks do not pump money into the system that allows the unions to grow and kick money back to politicians. So if you wonder why Democrats’ only answer, when asked about family policy, is day care subsidies, just follow the money."
Strawberries and Balsamic - "Sorry, I could never be a capitalist, I suffer from “wanting humans to have their basic needs met” disorder, where I care about people who aren’t me."
"Someone once asked me if, assuming we got universal healthcare, I would be okay with the rise in “healthcare tourism” where people who are sick come to our country to get their medical bills taken care of and life-saving medical treatment cheaper than in their home countries. I was just like, yeah thats fine, I’d actually prefer it if 0 people died from preventable causes kept behind a paywall for no reason."
"“even the addicts?” yeah dude did i fucking stutter"
Of course, all this is paid for by "taxing the 'rich'"
And then left wingers keep claiming healthcare is "underfunded", when they want to treat the whole world for free
It’s Not Just Minnesota—Fraud Is Everywhere - "If you tried to steal a billion dollars from a bank, you would probably fail. You might even get shot for your trouble. But if you tried to steal the same amount from Medicaid, Medicare, or other federal safety-net programs, your odds of success are much better. Just submit phony bills, and the government will pay you. That’s what Somali fraudsters did in Minnesota. They netted more than $9 billion, according to a top prosecutor. It’s an old trick that has worked thousands of times... frauds against government health-care programs are both common and costly. Fraudsters routinely scam CMS for billions of dollars. States themselves run schemes of their own. Covid-related frauds, for example, exceeded $280 billion, with another $123 billion wasted or misspent. Obamacare enrollment fraud is pervasive, likely costing taxpayers $27 billion in 2025 and $21 billion in 2024. Fraudsters in Russia and other East European nations scammed Medicare for $1 billion over three years by submitting phony bills for durable medical equipment. Companies operating out of Connecticut, Florida, Kentucky, New York, and Texas pilfered about $2 billion by submitting phony bills for products like wigs for cancer patients and urinary catheters. Fraudsters who submitted bogus bills for orthotic braces, pain creams, and other items took federal health programs for more than $1 billion. CMS’s own estimate—“comfortingly low,” in the words of one professor—is that it made $87 billion in “improper payments” to fraudsters and people who provided insufficient documentation in 2024. The real number is likely double the official estimate; over the past decade, it totals more than $1 trillion in Medicaid losses. State officials also engage in behavior that, while not technically fraudulent, is at least sketchy. Every year, 49 states (all but Alaska) use “provider taxes” to tap CMS for about $160 billion. Federal law says states should be raising this money themselves, but states use the “provider tax” loophole to evade this restriction. That’s one-sixth of total Medicaid spending. States can even divert some of the money to non-Medicaid purposes. Either way, each state that participates is effectively (if legally) stealing from taxpayers in other states. Further, when the federal government has repeatedly tried to constrain the provider-tax provision, states have created new workarounds and loopholes to keep the money flowing from the U.S. Treasury... It’s politically risky to confront fraud, given how dependent states are on the dollars. Financial controls would also imperil payments to doctors, hospitals, and other health-care businesses, all of which together make a powerful lobby. Public officials have had six decades to impose needed financial controls on Medicaid and Medicare. It seems unlikely they ever will. If we can’t fix them, we should remake these programs on the model of Social Security, a program harder for fraudsters to raid because it makes direct payments to beneficiaries. Giving money directly to consumers could also make health care better and more affordable by allowing market forces to work."
World Food Programme on X - "Enough food is produced to feed everyone on the planet. Yet millions of people struggle to feed themselves and their families. Learn why it's time to transform our #FoodSystems - for people, for the planet, and for our future."
ⓘ Dogs don't have thumbs on X - ""Is produced", passive voice The food just falls from the sky, and all we need is some super smart people at an NGO to tell us what to do with it"
Incidence, allocation, and efficiency costs of tenancy rent control - "Tenancy rent control limits rent increases for sitting tenants while allowing market resets at vacancy. When demand grows or household composition differs across segments, spillovers raise rents in the unregulated market. We study its general equilibrium effects in Switzerland, where a nationwide regime meets large spatial variation. Linking administrative records on all households from 2010-2022 to detailed unit data and market rents, we estimate a structural sorting model with heterogeneous preferences, correcting for selection and price endogeneity. Counterfactual simulations show unregulated rents would be 8-21 percent lower, with the largest drops in supply-inelastic cities. Older, lower-income, and less educated households gain most, while newcomers face higher entry rents. The policy reduces mobility and induces space overconsumption, generating efficiency losses."
I was told that rent control works in Switzerland
Rent Control - Clark Center Forum
Only 2% of economists agreed that rent control "had a positive impact over the past three decades on the amount and quality of broadly affordable rental housing in cities that have used them" (and none strongly agreed). When weighted by confidence, only 1% agreed. In contrast, we are told that 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agreeing that "humans are causing global warming and climate change" is a scientific consensus and that if you disagree, you are a "climate change denier".
