The most recent Economist has this figure representing homicide rates around the world.
The fact that certain nations have such high homicide rates is very unfortunate. Are these rates correlated with anything? The Economist suggests that lower levels of economic performance are correlated with higher homicide rates. This is partially true, but it does not tell the whole story. Basic regressions looking at income and homicide are missing an important variable, namely the effect of government.
My coauthor John Levendis and I investigated the data for 63 countries and consistently found that higher homicide rates are correlated with more government (as measured by lower levels of economic freedom). Maybe people should start questioning the assumption that government is created to reduce crime.
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This seems like a strange (though perhaps far more appropriate) way of looking at size of government. When people talk about big government they usually seem (to me) to be talking about the trappings of the welfare state: socialized medicine, unemployment insurance, and government funded retirement plans. At a glance, it looks like reduced crime has a strong correlation to increased size of government, with USA’s more socialist hat and the European welfare states coming out with the lowest crime rates.
I’m not sure what to conclude from that, exactly, but it doesn’t seem to naturally lead to “big government creates crime” in the intuitive sense of big government.
The U.S.A. has one of the most overreaching government yet has a relatively homicide rate = little correlation let alone causation to E.P.S.’s hypothesis.
Read the article, Captain Oblivious. It’s a free download.
Try biological determinism and serum testosterone for starters. Oh dear, I should have realized, we’re all cultural marxists these days.
This map is a warning on the perils of aggregation. I bet if they’d broken the crime-stats down to state and county level, much of the US would be the same colour as Canada. There would be plenty of hand wringing and teeth gnashing, however, over the red-spots that disaggregation would throw out in the US profile.
We are so involved in our own work (to earn our bread and run our families) that we don’t have any time to think about others.
française:
Nous sommes tellement impliqués dans notre propre travail (pour gagner notre pain et exécuter nos familles) que nous n’avons pas eu le temps de penser aux autres.
It could also be that poverty tends to cause crime, but that larger governments tend to cause poverty….
Nope, can’t see the correlation with that. Note how pale Europe is.
None so blind that as those who will not see.
I don’t recall where I read it, as it was actually in the pre-internet days or the early parts and the ubiquity of online information not present, but several studies showed a very positive crime/poverty link. However, what the studies showed was that the link was actually backwards from standard leftist agitprop assumptions. What was the case was that crime creates poverty, not the other way around. Instead of ending poverty and thus seeing a reduction in crime, first reduce crime which leads to economic growth.
Now, it is fairly obvious that there exist many places of poverty, even in the US, many abroad, where crime is minimal. One need only think of Appalachia for example. I’ve been in Mexico on several fishing trips and never experienced a problem. (Recent problems are directly related to the drug war which of course is directly related to our war on drugs. Isn’t war wonderful !! )
So what makes certain (dare I say) urban areas such criminal nightmares? And here it is of course government. But again, what type of government? The problem I believe is the ethos, which is purely one of theft/redistribution via force. What people see they will emulate. Parents who drink and smoke will probably have children that do the same. And the government has treated so many millions of people like children, and shown them nothing but the lesson of violence and theft. So they emulate what they are taught. And coupled with the horrendous economic policies that stifle wealth creation, and destroy what is barely existing, I am not surprised.
Of course the greatest criminal is the government itself. Perhaps all those millions in jail are there for violating the government’s patent on violence.
Surely it is in the interest of the monopolist police and judges to keep crime rate higher as that means more taxpayer money. The worse they perform, the more they get. If they were effective in combating crime, they might lose income and influence.
I say it rather correlates with excess population in the country. Of course excess population is caused in a roundabout way by government action, although often by the actions of foreign governments, mostly in the form of foreign aid and immigration quotas.
Yep. That must be it. How else can we explain the veritable war zones that are Hong Kong and Singapore?
The above was sarcasm.
Not too many surprises (other than the fact that the US is treated as one large area, which fails to account for places like New Orleans, Detroit, Miami, Memphis, Houston, etc.).
In any event, what the hell is going on in Greenland?
Skycrime
Dis-aggregate Canada and you would see the same red all across the North there too… Inuit communities have a much higher crime rate then do similarly sized non-native communities.
Cigar for the man!
You’re looking at things like big government and socialism too simplistically and statically. In reality, Western countries have lower homicide rates DESPITE big government, and this must be understood in a wider, temporal context. These are countries that have had a chance to develop economic and legal institutions before the government grew on them like a cancer. What we’re seeing is the effects of vestigial freedom and prosperity in those countries.
The high homicide rate countries are experiencing oppressive government too, except they never had a chance to develop prosperity in the first place.
What I find interesting is Somalia on that map, which has much lower rates than the nearby countries.
There may be no way to measure this, but culture and custom must have something to do with it as well.
There are other crimes besides Homicide. Most of the incarceration around the world is non-homicidal. As the US Government has grown so has the number of people it has incarcerated.
The more laws a country passes the more the government grows.
Since governments have exclusive rights to enact and enforce those laws they need to get bigger to ensure that they can cope with all the laws they pass.
But more laws also means more people will be violating them,since not everyone can be aware of all laws and an activity that was not previously prohibited would now be.
Hence the number of law breakers increase as the number of laws,and government increases.
So yes,more government does indeed lead to more crime.
As an example.Previously it was not a crime for an American to smoke pot in Amsterdam, so long as he did not do that in the US.But now a law is being passed that makes this illegal too.So now there will be more govt people hired to specialize in this prosecution,and there are instantly more criminals were there were none before.
What the relation? Netherlands has more economic freedom than Portugal, but Portugal has less Crime than Netherlands.
Portugal has taken greater steps towards drug decriminalization, which reduces all categories of crime.