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You wanna know what else makes billionaires billions of dollars? A strong middle class…the one with a lot of disposable income to, you guessed it, spend on goods and services!
Make enough affordable reliable cars then people with the disposable income will buy a new one every 5ish years and then the secondary used car market has good reliable cars to sell
But I don’t want money in 5 years, I want it now!
— A 300 lbs toddler with an inherited hedge fund.
Every dollar the “middle class” has in disposable income is a dollar the billionaires didn’t hold onto.
They don’t want less crime they want more so they can exert force over the population
Abolish laws. Then crime will instantly disappear. 🥴
what’s the reasoning ?
Can’t commit crime if nothing is a crime. 🙂↕️
ok
Legalize it! 🌿
Americans: look north you twits.
Yes, but no one can get fabulously rich off this.
I got a degree in criminology about 25 years ago and can confirm that there was no dispute in the science at that time that this was the way to reduce crime.
Everything else had been tried and tried again and proven not to work. It was around that time that my (then) field realized that the DARE program increased drug use.
It was almost 25 years after the St. Louis (maybe wrong city, it’s been a while) Crime and Control study proved that flooding the streets with more police officers only pushed crime into other neighborhoods.
When I studied, it was almost a joke to read new research coming out, because every serious study was just confirming what everyone knew. Guest lecturers would come in to talk about their latest theories in criminology. and, it was basically everyone just sitting around saying oh yeah that’s obvious. The field has peaked, and it was up to society then to catch up.
We looked at three strike’s laws, truth and sentencing laws, asset forfeiture laws, mandatory minimums, and every time we found that these policies increase violent crime. They further fracture communities and destroy families at the generational level.
It may not be intuitive to think that, but would a little thought, a little reflection, it is hard to say that this would not be the obvious result.
The methods to reducing and ending recidivism have been well known to science. People who talk about harsh law enforcement and punitive corrections are either ignorant, emotional blowhards, or not serious about reducing crime.
We have in America a well-established cat and mouse model of policing. And indeed it does Trace its history to slave patrols, a reactionary force of violence, dispatched into the community to capture offenders. The entire model does absolutely nothing to prevent future crimes from occurring.
Maybe they catch some guy who’s a serial offender, and get him off the streets. And they call that a win. But until the root causes of crime are addressed, all they’re doing is playing serial offender whack-a-mole; the next one is just going to pop right up. And maybe they’ll say, oh sure, that’s because we have a “catch and release” system.
Well, if we literally did nothing at all to stop crime, and totally abolished the concept of a police force, the science is absolutely clear that most people are going to age out of crime by the time they turn 25, and the rest, save for a few people who are likely mentally disabled, will age out by the time they hit 35. But instead, we’re kicking down doors and locking people out in cage for decades on end, making sure that their families are broken and locked in a cycle of poverty and trauma, and we end up sometimes with three generations of men sharing a prison together.
And while we’re on the subject of prison, the science is also absolutely clear that the way to reduce recidivism to almost nothing is to provide good health care, good mental health care, and to teach people marketable skills, all in a safe environment. When I got my degree, the field was shifting to a program evaluation approach, because we had figured out what programs we needed to have, and the only thing left to do was to fine-tune those programs to get the most out of them.
But then 4 years would go by, or 8 years would go by, and some new tough-on-crime politician would come and wonder why we’re spending so much money to hold people in a cage, and they’d start cutting the programs.
And despite that, and despite the emotional reactionaries who just want to see bad guys be treated badly to make themselves feel better about crime, virtually every type of crime is the lowest it’s ever been in my lifetime.
Do you have some beginner friendly references I could look at? I live in a MAGA heavy state and although logic doesn’t always work the more tools in my belt the better!
Thanks for sharing your experience
Trump mandated that lead piping won’t be replaced. That stuff correlates with crime rates, far as location goes. Brilliant. 🤦♂️
Thank you for this great insight and information.
First, thanks for taking the time to do that writeup!
Second - do you happen to have links to any likely sources that would present that info in a digestible manner? I’m not asking this to challenge you, I’m asking so I have linkable references in future discussion.
Thanks!
Someone else asked for this too and I’m really having a hard time coming up with anything.
All good, no worries, still a great writeup!
What I keep getting held up on is that if the science keeps pointing toward the same conclusion, how do you actually apply those to society? How to you convince the voting masses to institute these changes? Because the average person won’t accept repealing things like three strikes and minimum sentencing, they just assume that a “tough on crime” attitude is the way to go. If a politician comes along offering justice system reform, he’d never make it into office because people would assume he’d be letting criminals run rampant unpunished.
Related, I’ve heard people argue against UBI by saying that it would just make people lazy and not want to work at all.
Related, I’ve heard people argue against UBI by saying that it would just make people lazy and not want to work at all.
I mean, it’s completely unrealistic to think that this would not be the case for some X% of the population. It’s already the case now, with the welfare programs we already have, after all. What number that X is, is what’s unclear. People saying “nobody will work” are definitely wrong, though, lol.
I think you could address that by using what I call “Universal Ranked Income”. The idea is that there are floors and ceilings on income, wealth, and so forth. The floor is basically a minimum wage, while the ceiling of the highest income bracket is absolute - people simply do not get any more income at that level, regardless of their job or investments.
In addition to this, job classes should be assigned a rank based on the effort, risk, and knowledge required to perform the task. The job class has a fixed income, that employers can’t alter. They cannot manipulate the number of workdays, the income of a job is fixed, with each month delivering a set wage. Workhours and days are also fixed, to prevent employer manipulation.
Next, is a small pool of income archetypes, from lowest to highest. By keeping the diversity in job ranks to a dozen at most, employees can say “My boss isn’t supposed to get that much money, they are only X. Something smells!”. By creating a framework of obvious rules, it would be easier for society to nip potential oligarchs in the bud.
Here are some ranks from my notes as a baseline sample:
Rank 0: $10,000 per year, 05% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$1,500. Has no work obligations.
Rank 1: $10,000-20,000 per year, 10% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in up to -$4,000. For students, who receive a level of income based on grades.
Rank 2: $40,000 per year, 15% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$10,000. Waiters, clerks, curbside hawkers, daycare staff.
Rank 3: $60,000 per year, 20% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$18,000. Crop pickers, athletes, sex workers, couriers, nurses, police, teachers, journalists, soldiers in cold zones.
Rank 4: $80,000 per year, 25% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$28,000. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, professors, researchers, hot zone troops.
Rank 5: $100,000 per year, 30% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$40,000. Astronauts, Firemen, ambulance staff, hot battlefield leaders, surgeons, diplomats, lumberjacks, lead researchers.
If you look at the example, notice that education has become a job. It delivers a variable income based on performance, but is still less valuable than being a waiter, who has a fixed $40k income. Education is a pathway to a career, and people can focus on the path, since education offers an income for being studious. The current method of education sucks, because a person has to balance their survival, wellbeing, and education against each other. This is extremely inefficient and punishes people.
Further, I think the URI can potentially negate inflation. This is because the value of money has to be judged against the fixed incomes of society. Remember, jobs lost value, largely because employers keep the fruits of productivity to themselves. By enforcing fixed incomes for everyone and placing heavy restrictions on organizations, we can mitigate that siphoning of wealth. Price controls are much easier when you don’t have a huge variety of income factors to confuse the calculation.
Honestly, I think it would require being raised in a society where social welfare is the norm before it can be considered ordinary.
It would take a revolution with people of vision in order to create a social welfare society. Similar to the Founding Fathers of America, where people of intelligence, character, and spine agreed that a change must be made. We will need people who can fight like hell to lead us into battle, and coolheaded types who will spend a great deal of midnight oil on drafting and workshopping a new way of living.
It won’t be easy nor intuitive, but the crisis caused by Yarvin’s Cabal might be the kindling we need for people to give up on the way we have lived. After all, the old ways are dying with the Constitution. When cowardice offers no shelter, all that is left is to fight.
Thank you for typing that out!
Thanks for the thoughtful comment
Fantastic reply. Thanks for taking the time to write it out and thanks again for the insight into the very important work you do.
It was almost 25 years after the St. Louis (maybe wrong city, it’s been a while) Crime and Control study proved that flooding the streets with more police officers only pushed crime into other neighborhoods.
Small point about this in particular, but isn’t the above evidence that this is effective at removing crime from an area? Why not do the same in the “other neighborhoods”, too, then?
Especially if you combine the above with what you described later to reduce recidivism:
the way to reduce recidivism to almost nothing is to provide good health care, good mental health care, and to teach people marketable skills, all in a safe environment.
Seems like a solid plan to me, and police forces would naturally/gradually shrink over time, to suit the overall crime rate as it goes down.
I can almost picture the classroom I was sitting when I first learned about the study and having the exact same reaction you did.
Part of the study controlled for that, in the context of practical limitations. They divided the city into sectors and absolutely flooded certain sectors with cops while doing minimal patrols in the others, or in some cases none at all. The crime just moved in the opposite way. When the police presence increased in one sector, the crime rate went down there, but went up in the others. And then when they switch the sectors, the crime switched back. So practically speaking, cities and towns would have to be able to sustain that high level of policing, which hardly anyone wants. I see towns get into it over a budget allocation to hire one additional officer, let alone the number they would need to sustain to keep up the sort of levels needed to push crime out everywhere. And maybe some places would be able to do it, but the crime would just push to other areas, foisting the problem onto other communities. Further, I think there’s very little appetite in America to actually put a police officer on every corner. Nobody would like living in that world.
practically speaking, cities and towns would have to be able to sustain that high level of policing, which hardly anyone wants.
But it’d be temporary for it to be that high, no? Am I misremembering, or is this basically the way that NYC stopped being so infamously crime-ridden? I was under the impression that it’s not as aggressive now as it was then.
Hastily-googled, but this seems to confirm at least some of what I remember reading a while back: https://www.nber.org/digest/jan03/what-reduced-crime-new-york-city
I think there’s very little appetite in America to actually put a police officer on every corner. Nobody would like living in that world.
Yeah, probably. Was just wondering about it hypothetically.
After all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right?
Here’s some further reading in the problem I was describing.
yeah. i thought this was common knowledge myself (as a layman) but then i realized i lived in an intellectual bubble, and that most conservatives would reject the idea even when presented with evidence because cruelty is the point.
that’s when i realized that the only solution was to get rid of conservatives.
seriously. none of this will ever change until the vast majority of abrahamic religious minded, protestant work ethic devoted people are gone.
and for those that say, “if you just educate them”, well… they stand in the way of education reforms, so…
the answer remains: [redacted]
Yeah. There was a time that I wanted to believe conservatives were merely misguided. Now I know: they are straight up evil. As dehumanizing and unkind as it is, I have started to mentally replacing them with orcs, goblins, and dragons.
A small part of me is sad about the death of my naivety. Then my brain reminds me what price society has paid for hosting these malicious turds. If there is a Reconstruction 2.0, these words must be followed: “Rip and tear, until it is done.”
This is a spectacular post
This is why we say “the cruelty is the point”. As you note, these are not serious people trying to reduce crime. They are straight up lying about their goals, possibly even to themselves. The whole mindset is against the idea that crime is something that even can be reduced; rather, “bad people” will always do “bad things”, and it’s up to “powerful men” to protect the rest of society from them. It is rooted in a deeply authoritarian mindset that puts them as one of the “powerful men”. If you were to reduce crime, how can they prove that they’re one of the “powerful men”?
well, the powerful man probably think that covering people’s basic necessities wouldn’t reduce crime. After all, they have those covered in spades, and yet steal billions of dollars each year
To add to that, it’s the same with homelessness. Every 1-4 years, architecture students and urban planning students are asked to do projects on helping to house the homeless or something similar. Every time, they come up with innovative and unique ways to handle it. People forget about and/or realize that no one will try any of them. Repeat.
I remember reading that a study showed that giving homeless people (without drug problems) a steady source of money, and not even that much money, helped almost all of them get back on their feet.
Wow, all very insightful, thanks for taking the time write this!
Do you have any recommended sources to read more about this topic / research? I’d love to learn more!
emotional reactionaries who just want to see bad guys be treated badly to make themselves feel better about crime
I keep thinking about Dukakis. They asked if he would change his mind/support the death penalty if his wife was murdered. He said no - and folks flipped their shit.
The “left” as it exists in the US is so cowed by the idea of a Willie Horton scenario that it has to lean into that same evil vindictiveness. The 1994 Clinton crime bill which devastated Black communities was Dems trying to show off how “tough on crime” they could be.
Criminals are a safe “other” to hate.
“Those who make peaceful reform impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Basically what the Venus Project wants to do, except no artificial currency
My two thoughts on this:
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If I ask people for a million dollars to higher cops they’ll give it to me easy, if I ask for 100k to reduce crime through community outreach - it’s a huge fight
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That experiment where a class needs to unanimously agree to all recieve 98% final grade but 30% of them absolutely refuse to give themselves a leg up if that also means someone else gets it and they didn’t work as hard.
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If people have nothing to lose, they’re gonna act like they have nothing to lose…
Like, it’s basic psychology. Resource scarcity changes how our brains work, it’s literally Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
A person can do anything when they lost everything.
I hit rock bottom. Was broke.
My thoughts on stealing changed entirely. I couldn’t care less. I had bigger concerns than other people’s property. Most people steal out of desperation and when you’re desperate, your moral compass disappears.
Society is perpetually 9 missed meals away from collapse.
The Nordic countries.
we’re going through a massive organised crime wave at the moment.
coincidentally we’ve also been dismantling our social systems since the 90s and put a shitload of immigrants in the same poor neighbourhoods away from everyone else.
i’m sure it’s unrelated.
In Australia we created ghettos in the 80s and 90s. It wasn’t great.
I’m sure someone will be along in a moment to remind us that these ghettos were just one link in the chain of shit things Europeans did to first Australians.
coincidentally we’ve also been dismantling our social systems since the 90s
80’s. Like, 1980.
I think that he’s saying that the Nordic countries have been dismantling their social systems. 1980 was when it really picked steam in the US. But conservative politicians had been trying to dismantle them even before FDR was dead.
Good point, sorry, just knee-jerk hating on Reagan. :)
As one should. Carry on.
The only reason some people don’t like the Nordic model is because it has the word Nordic in it. If instead it was the Marxist model, I am sure they’d say it sprung forth from gods own asshole
Edit again, downvote brigade of Marxists butthurt on being called out, lol
One reason to downvote is actually that Marxism doesn’t have huge marketing buzz in favour of it. It’s not a label that would increase popularity.
Look, on the one hand I know they don’t have popular support. To me it’s less about supporting some hipster culture simply because it’s small, but more about getting annoyed by an idea being posited as inherently correct or morally superior
well and they also don’t like that the nordic countries are profiteers of neocolonialism. but still worlds better than the Anglophone model of profiteering from neocolonialism and the home country gets no benefit, just a small handful of rich people.
Countries have been dicks to each other for fucking ever. Get over it. Many other counties did and are now doing just fine. Look at India or China or Brazil. The fact is that many countries which cry about colonialism still use it to distract their poor people from the corruption of their governments and leaders. There’s near overlap between being most corrupt on a corruption index and receiving the most aid from other countries
you need to read some history books about how those corrupt governments got into place. what you are describing is the shift in overt fuckery (Leopold chopping off hands) to covert fuckery (interfering in foreign elections to get favorable corrupt officials installed) associated with neocolonialism. the solution isn’t to “get over it” which… wow what a fuckin’ insensitive thing to say about slavery and the deaths of thousands or millions. it’s to pay reparations and build a workable future instead of burning the world to the ground
I am not being insensitive, I am saying that there are nations who suffered and are doing well now because their leaders know how to govern.
A lot of the cry bully stuff Marxists do is to create guilt and make people in democratic nations hate their governments. They know that their corrupt leaders are not going to fix anything. If the leaders cared about their people, they’d figure out a way to work with the rest of the world, like the leaders in China, India, Brazil etc
praising india? wildly corrupt government and worse monpolys than anywhere else
i noticed that too. none of those three countries have a good long standing record for doing right by their citizens or the earth at large
Why you are coming at Marxists and praising China in the same breath? You know Marxists want what China has? A government that responds to the interests of the working class instead of the capitalists, where rent can be as low as 300/mo for a 2bd, and new homes averaging ~50K/2bd in cities the size of NYC? And occasionally jails or executes a few of them just to keep them on their toes?
I am intellectually honest about what China has achieved
wait, _neo_colonialism? we did do some minor superpower stuff in the 1700s together with the rest of europe, but what have we been doing recently?
The “Global North” is largely de-industrialized and mainly functions by exporting industrial Capital to the “Global South.” The US is chief among these Global North countries as world Hegemon, but the Nordics do it too, especially with regards to predatory debt traps through IMF loans. Hudson’s Super-Imperialism goes over this, but is US-focused.
the nordics are heavily industrialized though. our economies are mostly based on exporting metals, minerals and wood, as well as products made thereof, including heavy machinery, medical-grade steel, oil, and so on. yes the IMF sucks for having a destabilizing effect but that’s not really something an area with half the population of canada can do much about. we don’t have that much influence on the global stage.
I think you should read these articles by The Guardian and Al Jazeera respectively. Norway, for example, has one of the largest Sovereign Wealth Funds. At a country-level, the Nordics heavily financially invest in and profit off of countries in the Global South, like investment bankers. This in turn expropriates large amounts of money, which are used to fund safety nets. The welfare in the Nordics is funded by the Global South.
yes, norway is an insanely rich oil nation. the fund is called “oljefondet”. it comes from oil sales.
as for SDI, since it’s normalised and based on development, the nordic countries falling is only natural, since emerging economies are doing the stuff we did in the 70s. it doesn’t mean we’re getting worse, it means they’re rapidly getting better. ideally, SDI regresses to the mean.
also none of those articles mention that third point?
There’s a reason that Toronto is labelled one of the top safest cities in the world as well.
Toronto is becoming unaffordable for the working class. High cost of living is what is breaking the US too. I don’t really know why people want to seek asylum in the west. I guess if you’re okay sharing the floor of a room with a few other people on sleeping pads then the rest of the world must be an event worse shithole. You have to work two hours just to afford lunch.
My daughter has a boyfriend who lives on the outskirts of London. He was shocked at the cost of things in fucking Cincinnati. Ohio is in the cheaper half of US states.
For people seeking asylum, the choices are usually “kinda shitty conditions in a nice city” vs “abject poverty and life threatening conditions back home”. It’s not really a question which one is better. Toronto has issues, but the tap water won’t give you cholera, nobody is going to stab you for your bag of rice, and that room you are sharing is not going to be bombed.
There’s a lot of work to be done to make it a city that’s livable for everyone, but please don’t fall for bullshit narratives.
I get it. I grew up with a best friend who lived with 9 people in a one bedroom apartment, I played marbles with him and his brothers so many times in the early '80s. It was better than their homeland.
The US is predatory in the healthcare industry, the housing industry, the food industry and the education industry, but that is a generalization. If there’s a narrative, it’s that the American dream is anything but a lottery at this point. At least it is safer than much of the world, for now. Outside of a dozen or so gang riddled cities, the murder rates are pretty low.
Iceland be much like this…
Man can be free only when and if he’s able to rise above his insecurities
Yeah, but by doing all that you are oppressing the oppression which the lack of those very things makes so much easier, do you ever think about that??
No, you don’t, because you only think of your face and never how the boot on it feels./s
