Crime, race & incentives

There’s a paradox raised by the reaction to “Rod” Liddle’s mostly incorrect claim that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community.”
The paradox is this. When it comes to tax, the right are keen to stress that people respond to incentives. And yet when it comes to crime they seem coy about incentives, and prefer to talk about “multiculturalism“ or genes.
The paradox is especially strong because economic theory is much clearer on the link between poverty and crime than between tax rates and tax revenue.
This is because in the case of taxes, the income and substitution effects work in opposite ways. The substitution effect causes people to prefer leisure over work when taxes rise, whilst the income effect causes them to want to work more to recoup lost income. However, with crime the two work in the same direction. The income effect causes a poor person to turn to crime to raise money, whilst the substitution effect means the unemployed have more time with which to commit crime, and lower penalties - no danger of losing one‘s job - for doing so.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the empirical evidence is much stronger for a link between relative poverty or inequality (pdf) and crime than it is for a link between tax rates and revenues.
All this suggests an obvious reason why blacks seem to be over-represented among criminals*. Blacks are disproportionately likely to be poor, and the poor are disproportionately likely to commit crime. We’d expect, therefore, blacks to be over-represented in crime even if there were no causal link from race to crime.
From this perspective, what’s remarkable is how few blacks commit crime. There are over 800,000 blacks living in London, but in 2007 only 4435 - less than 1 in 180 - were found guilty in a crown court (table 6.4 of this pdf).
Now, I don’t say this to dismiss a role for race of culture in crime - though, remember, culture often has economic roots. For me, the claim that blacks are more likely to commit crime than others, after controlling for economic factors (and peer effects?), is a hypothesis just like any other. It’s something to be tested against evidence, not to be spouted willy-nillly.
Instead, I do so to point out that there does seem to be a blind spot on the right as well as the left. If the left is loath to accept that there are racial differences in criminal behaviour, the right seem loath to accept that poverty and inequality are causes of crime, even though the Econ 101 of which they are usually so fond predicts just this.
* I say “seem” because the data cited by Charlotte and Antonia Senior - which is taken from table 5.4a of that MoJ report - refer to arrests. But these data might tell us no more than that Constable Savage is still a serving officer.

Comments

[Scott]

FBI studies show that blacks in the USA are committing fully 50% of violent crime...Significant when you consider that they make up just 12% of the population...Save your liberal excuses about economic disparity. Being poor doesn't make you commit rape, robbery and murder.

[ortega]

Prejudice cuts both ways.
When an asian student fails, he is lazy. When an african, it is the system.

[Tode]

So "FBI studies show that blacks in the USA are committing fully 50% of violent crime."
Please give the source for this, I can't find it. The source must show convictions, not arrests.

[Winstanley]

Before suggesting a genetic predisposition for crime in blacks one has to come up with some very very good evidence. Until then, let's take it for what it is: metaphysical essentialism, rationalization of tribalistic superstition, and pure intelectual laziness.

Of course, our congnitive bias makes us assume that behaving decently is our own merit, not the cultural enviroment and the historical time in which we happen to be born (which determines incentives). We wouldn't accept that our ancestor were bloodthirst barbarians or that we are genetically indistinguishable from cavemen. >

So much for the IQ of those idioticly mesmerized by vulgar versions of today's genetic revolution. They hope geneticists may be able one day to explain the fall of the Roman Empire by the emergence of certain genetic mutation; so they can save themselves the trouble of studying their school history.

"Prejudice cuts both ways." says Ortega. Well, yes, prejudice and the self-fulfiled prophecy-myth regarding so called "black culture".

[Winstanley]

Scott, you save your paranoid excuses about genetic disparity. Being of the nordic race doesn't make you commit rape, robbery and murder (as you seem to suggest without any evidence). No, being an immigrant of the nordic race in 9th c. Scotland doesn't makes you do so. It's a shame you don't live in those good old days when no rule of law was needed because all men were virtuous and of noble stock like yourself.

[Bruce]

It's odd that the right underplay the link between poverty and crime because surely this goes to the very heart of the social contract. It is the most basic reason why the right grundingly pay their taxes - it makes it less they'll be coshed on the back of their well-groomed heads.

[botogol]

What is involved in adjustig for 'peer effects' and what it tell us?

[ad]

"And yet when it comes to crime [the right] seem coy about incentives"

Must be the Left that wants to harshly punish criminals then.

[Sam]

Lots of people are basically scumbags. Well-off scumbags won't go round mugging people or burgling houses - the risk/reward isn't worth it - but they'll fiddle taxes, sleep with the secretary and cheat on expenses claims (cf. a significant number of MPs). Poor scumbags have less to lose.

[Schwartz]

There is no reason to expect groups to have equal propensities to criminality though. Testosterone, often linked with violent crime, differs between racial groups.

"Mean testosterone levels in blacks were 19% higher than in whites, and free testosterone levels were 21% higher. Both these differences were statistically significant."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3455741

Also, are readily identifiable clusters of genes corresponding to traditional continental ethnic groups. Two groups that form distinct clusters are likely to exhibit different frequency distributions over various genes, leading to group differences.

MAO-A variants which place people at greater risk of aggressive behaviour (in combination with childhood maltreatment) also show different frequency distributions across groups.

http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal/120-1250/2441/

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/01/metric-on-space-of-genomes-and.html

Also, note global crime rates are consistent with the rates observed by Liddle.

Rushton, J.P., & Whitney, G. (2002). Cross-national variation in violent crime rates: Race, r-K theory, and income. Population and Environment, 23, 501-511

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/P&E%20Crime.pdf

[replica Tag Heuer]

And a lot of it reflects a switch from bank deposits to securities; foreigners “other investments” in the UK, http://www.watchgy.com/ mostly bank deposits, fell by £143.2bn in Q1. And of course there’s no guarantee such buying will continue.
http://www.watchgy.com/tag-heuer-c-24.html
http://www.watchgy.com/rolex-submariner-c-8.html