Interesting piece here by James Wilson about falling crime rates during the current recession and attempts to explain it. Criminologists look even to such exotic factors as lead paint consumption and abortion rates to explain why crime rates go down when overall economic activity goes down.
It is almost always presented as some sort of paradox that crime rates go down during recessions or depressions. I don't get why this should be considered such a paradox. Crime is after all economic activity. It's not some sort of anti-economic activity. Gangs are firms, robbery takes resources and murder is probably some sort of consumption or alternatively a cost of doing business.
I am sure plenty of criminologists have taken this perspective, but nearly all the discussions I have seen have a deeply embedded assumption that crime is somehow a substitute for lawful economic activity, as if people choose crime if and only if legitimate opportunities are not available. But why should this be the case? In times of vibrant economic activity, high economic growth, the opportunities for crime will be greater. People will have more money to buy drugs, just as they do to buy cars. There will probably be more violent crime among drug dealers competing for markets. The opportunity costs of crime will be greater, but so will the opportunities. You certainly shouldn't expect crime to be perfectly inversely related to employment levels and other measures of economic activity, should you?
It hardly needs mentioning that a motivation for seeing crime as caused by poverty rather than the incentives to commit crime (to make money, exercise power, make new friends, etc. etc.) is to set up the argument that crime should be addressed by reducing poverty. Maybe that's a good idea, but if the idea is to explain crime with economics, then crime should be viewed as just a particular sort of economic activity with its own risks and costs and benefits. Like most of my good ideas, I'm sure this one has been thought of dozens of people starting in the 1950s if not before. Still, it seems to need some repeating now.
This relates to another of my hobby horses. Most crime, or what we think of as crime as opposed to perfectly innocent and productive activity that happens to be illegal, such as digging a ditch on your back 40 which you didn't know is a protected wetland, is predatory. But then, I think a lot of legal economic activity is predatory. Yet most economic models picture economic activity as consisting of voluntary mutually beneficial transactions. There is a lot of voluntary exchange in the animal world but also obviously a lot of predation, especially if you roughly include parasitism as a sort of predation. Why should humans be any different? If we thought of legal economic activity as including a fair amount of predation and parasitism, we might be more willing to see crime as a sort of economic activity, different in degree but not in kind from legal economic activity.
Recent Comments
Tom Smith