Crime falls when criminals don't reproduce, science says. It's genetic.
Money and crime: the relationship that wasn't
Poverty makes you… unable to afford expensive things
Emil O. W. Kirkegaard
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There must be 10,000s of studies and news articles reporting findings that wealth or income is negatively related to crime. In other words, poverty causes crime. The popular theory being that poor people simply can't afford food, so they steal to make ends meet (insert sob story here).
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Finally, it should be mentioned that there are quite a lot of studies of the heritability of criminal or antisocial behavior itself. It goes without saying that if criminal behavior is mainly due to genetics, then (childhood) family incomes, neighborhood disadvantage and whatever cannot be so important causal factors. Studying crime is, however, difficult due to measurement issues. If research relies on self-report, you have self-report bias, lying, and faulty memories. If you use court records, people will claim the courts and the police are biased against this or that demographic, and in any case, most crimes aren't caught or punished, so the data will be noisy in any case. There is only one really good study of the heritability of antisocial behavior more generally which is this one (see the 2019 post for details):
Baker, L. A., Jacobson, K. C., Raine, A., Lozano, D. I., & Bezdjian, S. (2007). Genetic and environmental bases of childhood antisocial behavior: a multi-informant twin study. Journal of abnormal psychology, 116(2), 219.
> Genetic and environmental influences on childhood antisocial and aggressive behavior (ASB) during childhood were examined in 9- to 10-year-old twins, using a multi-informant approach. The sample (605 families of twins or triplets) was socioeconomically and ethnically diverse, representative of the culturally diverse urban population in Southern California. Measures of ASB included symptom counts for conduct disorder, ratings of aggression, delinquency, and psychopathic traits obtained through child self-reports, teacher, and caregiver ratings. Multivariate analysis revealed a common ASB factor across informants that was strongly heritable (heritability was .96), highlighting the importance of a broad, general measure obtained from multiple sources as a plausible construct for future investigations of specific genetic mechanisms in ASB. The best fitting multivariate model required informant-specific genetic, environmental, and rater effects for variation in observed ASB measures. The results suggest that parent, children, and teachers have only a partly “shared view” and that the additional factors that influence the “rater-specific” view of the child’s antisocial behavior vary for different informants. This is the first study to demonstrate strong heritable effects on ASB in ethnically and economically diverse samples.
In other words, they relied on multiple observers for each child, and they modeled the overall view of a given child in a twin design. Doing this removes most of the measurement problems discussed above and gave a shocking value of 96% heritability. This is probably too high, but I would not be surprised if later sophisticated studies also found values above 60%.
Conclusions
All in all, we can be fairly confident that lack of money, broadly speaking, is not an important cause of crime. Whatever theories ascribe this power to money, need to look somewhere else. That somewhere else is mainly genetics. It is not only genetics, but genetics is the starting point of serious discussion. The various crime waves probably don't relate much to genetics (e.g. 1980s US crime wave and related drug abuse), but the long-term historical trend probably does (pacification by execution).
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https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/money-and-crime-the-relationship