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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

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Assuming it is just poverty and not other factors as well, including cultural issues in some communities, feels naive to me. For example in the US, crime is not evenly distributed across races even if you adjust for poverty rates. There are other factors involved.

I also simply don’t understand what you’re implying from your comment - that being poor explains attempts at murder? I don’t believe that. I think it’s not having the right morals and culture, and those root causes should be discussed honestly even if it is uncomfortable.

I did not say that being poor explains attempts at murder, or anything of the sort. If you’re going to engage in that sort of discussion where you straw man, I’m not going to engage with it

> I did not say that being poor explains attempts at murder, or anything of the sort.

How else is a person supposed to interpret these words of yours? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41076775

>>> You’re talking about poverty, right? Because that’s what the driver in knife crime is in the UK.

What is the other interpretation you had in mind? Why not simply say it?

I've been poor, flat broke for years in fact, but I've never felt any compulsion to stab some stranger on the street. Can you explain the mechanism linking poverty to murderous impulse?

The other replies have an excellent example in Poland. To respond to your anecdote - that’s not how statistics works. It doesn’t mean that everyone under a certain criteria will immediately stab someone. You can have privileged women [0] perform these acts too.

[0] https://amp.theguardian.com/law/2017/sep/25/oxford-student-l...

The best you might have is a correlation between poverty and being homicidal, but you don't have any causal mechanism from poverty to homicidal because there isn't one.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7234816/

Also, private observation : Poland was relatively safe country during communist rule, although everyone was very poor. Then '90s happened, income disparity went through the roof, unemployment skyrocketed, and you could be greeted on the street by a group of young gentlemen asking you for your possessions, not to mention extreme gang violence and fights between hooligans.

How does housing availability compare to the Soviet era?

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