: : Don: Certainly where I live, the economic situation seems great. What data do you have for US wages, etc.? I believe that wages continue to go up, and that employment is low.: No, I've heard relative to the 1970's they're down, I've lost the doc. so I can't substantiate.
One place to look is http://www.wws.princeton.edu/events/krueger.html
here Alan B. Krueger,(dept. of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, and former chief economist at the Labor Department) discusses (in a 1997 NY Times article) the relation between real (cost of living adjusted) wages and the economy. Krueger divides the population by income bracket, and notes that while the few very wealthy have continued to increase their effective income, and the absolute decline in real wages among the lowest-income segment has slowed to a near standstill, effective income for the "middle classes" is still falling.
In the 1970s and 1980s, real wages for the lowest income segments of the population suffered a very steep decline. This was exacerbated bu the Reagan/Bush policies that eliminated much of the "safety net" of social programs designed to protect the economic viability of the middle class, and redirected that money into defense-related spending. (In fact, the greatest tax increase in U.S. history came from a self-proclaimed "fiscally conservative" Republican administration.) The loss of the safety net had the net effect of increasing the size of the lowest-income segment of the population, while simultaneously shifting the burden of taxation from large corporations to people, with the median and low income people bearing a disproportionate share of that burden.
In short, we can't say that "wages continue to go up" without placing this in a context of the cost of living (which also "continues to go up") and differentiating metween the varous economic brackets. If you get a raise of $150 a month, but your rent goes up $250 a month, you may be earning more than before, but your effective income is $100 less.
There is a lot more to this issue than this, of course, but I think I should add that none of us have suggested that there is a simple correlation between economy and crime.
Both economics and crime are multifarious phenomena. "Crime" is not a single thing-clearly there is a difference between weekend beer drinking before legal age and serial murder, for instance. Nor is "the economy" a single entity- there is a big difference between a multi-billion dollar a year industry like Boeing or Lockheed and Joe's Hardware down the block. There is also a difference between macroeconomic trends that affect all the G7 economies (as well as those of integrated, but less powerful nations) and whether or not you or I can get that fifty cent raise we want. These are related issues, naturally, but the way they play out "on the ground" is complex.
I think we've all been quite explicit that the relationship between crime and economics is a complex one, and therefore, Don, you can stop telling us that there is no "simple" relationship.
: : Don: We didn't have full recovery until after the war. It is my impression we didn't start to recover until '41 or so. I'll ask my dad about this, he lived through it.
: Living through it is no necessary proof of being able to see it, since most effects were invisible. I think it was a weak recovery in 41, which fell off, and which revovered fully after the war...
Much of the U.S. post-WWII economic boom was fueled by the reconstruction loans we made to both our allies and our former enemies. (Check out any info on the Marshall Plan you can find)Basically, because the war never hit U.S. soil (with the exception of some of our Pacific colonies), and so didn't affect our industrial or agricultural productivity, our infrastructure was much stronger than those of most European nations. "In the interest of stability" the U.S. loaned huge sums of money to European nations, and the interest on those loans was a substantial part of the 1950s economic upturn.
: : Don: People were poorer and more desperate in the '30s and in the early 1900s. Yet crime was higher in the '20s. There was greater economic inequality in the early 1900s than in the '20s. Yet crime was higher in the '20s. There was greater urbanization in the '30s, yet crime was higher in the '20s.
: Erm, no, the chart shows the murder peak at '35, so the highest crime rate is in the thirties. The twenties saw aweful poverty as well, and increasing displacement of people (displacement can be a causative factor, note the mini-spike after '45 with all them thar demobbed soldiers coming back). I'll go look for some text-books....
In addition, the passage of the Volstead Act (instituted 16 January, 1920) criminalized a behavior that had previously been legal (alcohol). Any new prohibition is going to artificially inflate crime statistics anyway. In addition, criminalizing alcohol production resulted in a new "niche" for criminals. Many entered the illegal distilling profession, but were quickly "swallowed up" by larger, often "organized" crime syndicates. The rapid boom in number of criminals would tend to flatten out as the less successful competitors are removed or subsumed. Again, this is a complicated and indirect correlation between the large-scale trends and the actions of individuals, but a connection nevertheless.
However, looking at a single crime is not necessarily going to give us the kind of information we need. Murder, for example, is a very different type of crime than burgling, which is itself different from armed robbery even though these last two are both property crimes. It seems to me that diferent types of crimes are likely to have different motivations, and economic, social, and other factors are going to influence them in different ways. A "total crimes reported" index would probably be much more useful in investigating these issues than an index of a single type of crime which may not be a valid indicator of criminality in general. (i.e. hypothetically, if murder goes way up, but all other types of crime cease entirely, do we have more crime or less, overall?) Maybe I can find some of those statistics. I'll get back to you on that.
-Floyd
