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hiddencosttoday at 5:15 AM2 repliesview on HN

There's another theory which says that if people have health care, food, shelter, education, and liberty, they won't commit crimes like this. Just a thought.


Replies

alexgiegtoday at 10:19 AM

Those are pre-requisites, but not enough.

You also need society to have local cultures, as well as the culture at large, that actively oppose such behavior as immoral and/or shameful, with enforcement by peers. This I say based on two well-proven models, the sociological typology of societies as guilt, shame, or fear-based, and the psychological model of the six stages (level of complexity) of moral reasoning, that shows that up to 85% of the adult population worldwide derive their values from group-affiliation.

Atop that, individuals themselves need hope in the future, meaning the perspective of improving upon the baseline that those pre-requisites provide, since a baseline is emotionally neutral. The perspective of remaining at exactly that same baseline year after year after decade isn't sufficient.

With all of the above provided, petty crime is minimized to the point only people with severe personality disorders commit them. There's no way to fix this, but it becomes so low we're now talking of Japan levels of per-capita crimes, if not less.

jeffrallentoday at 6:07 AM

It's not a theory. It's socialism and it works fine in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and a bunch of other places.

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