Comment by tech_ken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tech_ken | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> but that strong link starts to weaken when you look across different societies, especially in the same region

I'm not surprised by this, one would expect things like the ease of getting a weapon, cultural norms, and social welfare services to have big interactions with the poverty - crime relationships.

> And in a society as rich as the US, most are stealing because of a want, not stealing to fulfill a biological need like housing, medication, or food.

This is not as clear to me, though I imagine it also strongly depends on the type of theft under consideration. Certainly I concede that most theft in the US is probably not pure Jean Valjean-style "I just needed a loaf of bread", but in my experience the people committing like smash+grabs out of a parked car are not typically very affluent. Maybe they're doing this because they can't afford the iPhone they want since all their savings went to rent and food, but I don't think you can fully say that it's purely "desire" causing them to act criminally.

Re the poor impulse control side of things, I think it would be very hard to isolate the causal direction between it and poverty. I can imagine someone working multiple part time jobs to get by is going to have a harder time controlling their impulses purely out of fatigue and stress. Not sure if this is what you're thinking

I would bet money the correlation between number of hours worked and criminality is inverse. (Here's some evidence that increasing the minimum wage increases crimes https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...)

In terms of impulse control, here's a study that shows people commit less crimes on Adderall than off of it, which in addition to all the correlational studies is pretty strong evidence that improving impulse control reduces criminality. Also in my personal life I know people who are poor and rich and too a man everyone I know who's committed the types of crimes we care about had some combination of poor impulse control or psychopathy.

> I would bet money the correlation between number of hours worked and criminality is inverse.

So someone working more hours at a legit job is less likely to commit a crime? I think that's likely. For one, more hours worked probably means somewhat less need for money. But I would also imagine that it's indicative of some personal traits which correlate negatively with criminality.

> In terms of impulse control, here's a study that shows people commit less crimes on Adderall than off of it, which in addition to all the correlational studies is pretty strong evidence that improving impulse control reduces criminality.

I think you forgot to link the study, but I believe the results. I absolutely don't dispute that impulse control causally effects crime. I just think that impulse control may be impacted by environmental circumstances such as poverty and a lack of quality education. Someone in tons of debt who can't afford to pay for rent or food is probably not going to feel like they have much to lose, and therefore may not care too much about the consequences of their actions.

> So someone working more hours at a legit job is less likely to commit a crime? I think that's likely. For one, more hours worked probably means somewhat less need for money. But I would also imagine that it's indicative of some personal traits which correlate negatively with criminality.

Agreed

> I think you forgot to link the study, but I believe the results.

I definitely did forget to link the study. I'd try to find it again if it was a point of contention but it doesn't sound like it is.

> I just think that impulse control may be impacted by environmental circumstances such as poverty and a lack of quality education.

I think peer group and culture have a large impact. I'm not aware of any studies showing you can train self-control in any meaningful sense (if we could we wouldn't need to put so many people on adderall). And I'd be surprised if we can't train self-control when we try to train it, but are very successful at training it at school where we aren't specifically trying to train it.

Also just from personal experience I've seen a few poor->rich and rich->poor transitions and it didn't seem to meaningfully affect their personality. But if you have studies or anecdotes that tell a different story, I'd love to hear them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com