What an idiot, part two!

[Loren Pechtel]

My position would be that poverty does not cause crime. You’ve not refuted that.

Poverty within segregation and widespread racism with a near history of slavery is something different from the poverty of immigrants without that history.

In other words, poverty isn't the cause.

 

[bilby]

The reason Wilson was talking about this was that it was surprising.

His experience as a political scientist led him to expect that crime rates would be high, and to seek other factors that might explain this anomaly.

This quote doesn't support Trausti's position at all - it undermines it. But he's either ignorant of its context, or is hoping that his audience is.

You misunderstand--I wasn't being surprised at the low crime rate. Crime is a social issue far, far more than it is a poverty issue. I was being surprised at the high unemployment--in my experience the Chinese are very resourceful at finding jobs.

You misunderstand--I wasn't talking about your post at all. This is what happens when posts are only visible in other user's replies to them.

 

[laughing dog]

The reason Wilson was talking about this was that it was surprising.

His experience as a political scientist led him to expect that crime rates would be high, and to seek other factors that might explain this anomaly.

This quote doesn't support Trausti's position at all - it undermines it. But he's either ignorant of its context, or is hoping that his audience is.

My position would be that poverty does not cause crime.

You have not made a coherent argument that poverty does not cause crime. Hell, you have not even defined your terms.
There are many factors contributing to crime. If you are saying that poverty is not one of those factors, then your claim is ridiculous. If you are saying that poverty is not the primary driver or cause of crime, you need to be more specific - do you mean crime in a general sense or at the individual level. If the latter, your claim is silly because there are people who are driven by poverty to commit crime.

 

[Jarhyn]

The reason Wilson was talking about this was that it was surprising.

His experience as a political scientist led him to expect that crime rates would be high, and to seek other factors that might explain this anomaly.

This quote doesn't support Trausti's position at all - it undermines it. But he's either ignorant of its context, or is hoping that his audience is.

My position would be that poverty does not cause crime.

You have not made a coherent argument that poverty does not cause crime. Hell, you have not even defined your terms.
There are many factors contributing to crime. If you are saying that poverty is not one of those factors, then your claim is ridiculous. If you are saying that poverty is not the primary driver or cause of crime, you need to be more specific - do you mean crime in a general sense or at the individual level. If the latter, your claim is silly because there are people who are driven by poverty to commit crime.

I'll do it because Trausti never will. Trausti's public position is that Trausti isn't going to ever clearly explain their public opinion.

It's much harder to nail an amorphous, non-Newtonian fluid to a wall than a board after all.

Poverty does not by itself or directly cause crime. Poverty, in the presence of ethically unfraught black market goods can cause crime (essentially, driven via desire for economic leverage). Poverty, in the presence of a lack of social infrastructure, contributed to lead poisoning at early ages and thusly to criminal ideation. Crime happens in orbit around poverty, certainly. In many cases crime is the attempt to escape from poverty. In fact almost always, crime of the sort being discussed here at least by you and I, "preventable crime" we may call it, inexactly, happens in an attempt to move towards "wealth". It goes to reason then that if poverty sucks, and moving away from it is moving towards wealth, it increases global incentives to engage in attempts to move towards wealth.

Trausti will most certainly, however, refuse to talk about that.

They want to bang such pots and pans with not-even-wrong replies. "Poverty does not cause crime" because the relationship is much more complicated than a simple and direct causation, and is not so formable in that statement. It's a badly thought out position, indeed. Well, I suppose well thought out if you wish to derail things into semantics.

Honestly, this reminds me of a lesson from physics class (not even my physics class. Just one a physicist I talked to mentioned):

everything you learn in this level of physics will be a lie. It will be a disgusting, gross simplification and in your next semester you will be told how all of this that I am about to teach you was shamefully wrong. And so it starts, as everything you have learned up to this point is shamefully wrong...

I would, were I younger, fight with them on their language, with the language that "poverty does cause* crime" with some definition of causation. That's in the weeds though. Today, I can admit that it's a lot more complicated than "causes" or "doesn't cause". There's a whole Bayesian graph of priors and they all have to work together. Of course, it happens that "poverty" is way-overrepresented as a high-probability prior to involvement with criminal justice.