Posted on 11/14/2010 4:27:00 AM PST by Kaslin
Once again, the conventional wisdom of the elites proves itself wrong.
Crime and unemployment: everyone knows that they go together. Right? Unemployed people, desperate for enough money to pay their bills, buy groceries, and get medical care (since those heartless Republicans think “don’t get sick” is a health care plan), must turn to crime. At the very least, disheartened men sitting at home are going to lose their tempers, get into fights, and shoot their spouses.
Like most conventional wisdom among the elites, it turns out not to be true. I grabbed the data from the FBI Crime in the United States, Table 1, which shows rates per 100,000 people from 1990 through 2009 for a variety of serious crimes. Then I grabbed the annual unemployment rate, civilian, non-institutional, for the same years. Here are the plots. (On all these plots, the unemployment rate is in orange, plotted against the numbers on the left.)
Well, violent crime fell all those years that unemployment was falling in the 1990s — but even as unemployment rose from 4% to 6% in the aftermath of 9/11, violent crime rates fell. When unemployment more than doubled from 2006 to 2009, violent crime rates continued falling.
Murder? Just about the same story. Murder rates held steady in the period 2001-2004 — and continued to fall in the period 2006-2009.
Rape rates are boringly similar.
Robbery? Okay, that has to be related to unemployment, doesn’t it? I mean, robbers aren’t sociopaths — they are people like you and me who just have had a run of bad luck, right?
Maybe robbers are not so different from murderers and rapists, after all. Robbery rates continued to decline while unemployment more than doubled these last three years. And ditto for aggravated assault.
Okay, what about purely economic crimes? Surely we’ll find evidence that evil Mr. Bush and the Wall Street crowd made a lot of people into criminals because of need. But curiously enough, the overall property crime rate is startlingly similar to the violent crime graphs.
And darn it, the graphs for burglary, larceny & thefts, and motor vehicle theft all tell pretty much the same story: dramatic increases in unemployment in the 2001-2004 period seem to have no effect on flat or even falling crime rates. And those rates continued to fall during the most dramatic increase in unemployment most of you reading this have ever experienced.
Let me emphasize: I am not claiming that unemployment causes crime rates to fall. Nor am I claiming that there is no connection between unemployment and crime rates. It is entirely possible that unemployment increases crime rates — but that other factors are vastly more important determinants of what crime rates will be. A multivariate correlation analysis (where a dozen or more variables are simultaneously correlated against each other) might tell us something. But if unemployment really causes crime to increase, the effect must be pretty darn subtle if an unemployment disaster like the one we are in now cannot stop the inexorable drop in crime rates.
The one fact that is clear is that unemployment, as dramatic and damaging as it is to our national economy — and the economy and mental well-being of individuals looking for work — does not turn Americans into criminals.
Have those unemployment benefits expired yet?
That was exactly my first thought!
I got into a discussion the other day with a young fool who tried to convince me that drug dealers were “only trying to feed their families.”
I bet he voted for 0bama
I wonder if this drop in crime is due to the fact that since 0bama was elected, people have literally been arming themselves to the teeth.
Think again. He doesn't vote because "all politicians are alike." Personally I think he doesn't vote because he's too damned lazy to register. But if he had voted, you can be sure it would have been for you-know-who.
The criminal class is outside the labor pool.
That was always propagated as a way of blaming the capitalist oppressors and making people think capitalism was a failure.
There’s been poverty for thousands of years. Crime goes up when the downside risk (i.e., jail, hanging, whatever), is decreased.
“only trying to feed their families.”
True statement actually, the drug dealer’s families are the once that do the drugs and they need to feed them whenever they can to make money.
You got to lower your standards and thought processes to have a discussion with a young fool...
I think there is probably a lag time between a rise in unemployment and a rise in crime. Nothing much happened during the Clinton and Bush years because jobs were relatively plentiful, and when unemployment insurance benefits ran out, there was the choice of accepting a job at a lower salary. Jobs are not plentiful now. The latest extension in unemployment benefits runs out at the end of November.
Bingo. We have a winner.
Depends who’s unemployed. Most people I know won’t be committing crimes even if obamanomics has denied them a job.
That's one of Rush's Undeniable Truths, iirc: "Poverty is not the root ('rut') cause of crime."
I forget who the "rut" gloss was supposed to be tweaking. Seems it was a member of the Clinton cabinet that used to pronounce it that way. Anybody remember?
I'm not too worried about my neighborhood, either. That's why I live in my neighborhood!
However, the NY Times recently pointed out that, "Together, blacks and Hispanics, who make up half of the city’s workforce, accounted for about three-fourths of the city’s unemployed." There are a lot of neighborhoods where economic conditions are far worse than in mine.
As safe as I feel in my own neighborhood, I will admit to having a dog, an alarm and a shotgun. I also have several fire extinguishers around the house and always wear my seatbelt.
Might have been Jim Sasser
I hate to point out the blindingly obvious, but these graphs are almost meaningless without one more factor added to them: race.
Taking just homicides, whites commit about 33%, blacks commit about 37%, and unknown races commit about 29%.
Since the majority of these that are known are committed by young men in either race, the first question is how has the unemployment rate changed for either groups from 2000-2010?
While white young men strongly outnumber young black men in the population, at the start of the decade, unemployment for young black men was already sky high. So while it has increased to a 25 year high, that is not tremendously more than it used to be.
But the unemployment rate for young white men, at the start of the decade, was not terribly bad, but has gotten much worse, an is likely responsible for the high unemployment rate.
Thus the conclusion should be that “unemployment does not make young white men more prone to commit violent crime.”
Your lowest crime areas are not those which are wealthy or have high employment rates so much as those which have older populations which are overwhelmingly pasty white and/or Asian. Why do you suppose that is?
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