“New Urbanism”: Letting The Gini Out Of The Bottle

Everyone else is posting Jordan Peterson videos. Why not me?

With Saint Paul experiencing a three-digit jump in homicides, and Minneapolis tripling down on pumping up high-density, high-income housing (with token “affordable” housing sprinkled hither and yon), I think this one is well worth a thoughtful couple of minutes:

If you don’t have ten free minutes, I’ll help out:

  • Poverty doesn’t cause crime. It’s not even up for rational debate.
  • Income disparity causes crime – it can be measured via a “Gini Coefficient” calculated for any given area and group of people. The Coefficient is, by social sciences standards, apparently incredibly robust, and gives you a pretty solid correlation between income disparity and crime.
  • The reason income disparity causes crime: when young men have no way to try to exert social dominance (i.e. make themselves more attractive to young women) because the social hierarchy is solidly established, they turn to less socially-acceptable forms of aggression – which, from a standpoint of evolutionary psychology, work. The capos of a New York mafia family may not have fit in with Upper-West-Side Manhattan society, but they were at the peak of their own societies – which led to them actually finding women who’d help them propagate their species.

Now – I’m not saying that the “New Urbanism” that afflicts urban planning authorities in places like Portland, San Francisco, and the Twin Cities’ Met Council is intended to create a social Petri dish designed to cultivate a more virulent criminal underclass.

But given what we know about evolutionary psychology, if they were trying to create a permanent criminal mindset, what would they do differently?

5 thoughts on ““New Urbanism”: Letting The Gini Out Of The Bottle

  1. Income disparity may be a symptom but I suspect that the real cause is social ossification. Certain social groups are attempting to lock themselves and their descendants into certain social strata.AND to deny entry to anyone the group does not approve.

  2. As to the last point, Europe is non-breeding themselves into extinction. In 20 years or less it will be the United Isalmic Republic of Europe and really the only people in the West that are having babies are either the religious people who can afford it or the really low income people that can’t afford the kids and dont even know who their fathers are. And have 7 or 8 half siblings because their Mom cant keep their legs closed.

  3. As to my last post, I’d argue lack of fathers in their lives is a much greater factor in predicting crime. Take a survey of those incarcerated, men, women, and all races it doesnt matter. Id argue AT LEAST 75% of them come from single mother households, Im not saying that coming from a single mother household votes dooms you to a life of crime but criminals overwhlemingly come from single mother households.

  4. Say, what’s the difference between “evolutionary psychology” and a “just-so story”?
    The important part of the phrase “biological determinism” is noun “determinism.” You can fit just about any adjective to it & you end up with the same thing: people becoming the object, People not doing, but being done to.
    That’s a shitty way to look at humanity.

  5. I’m, with Jay Dee I believe, torn on the issue of the Gini coefficient. It strikes me that while I cannot deny the correlation, we might suggest that the ultimate cause is that people are (a) poorer than their neighbors and (b) have no realistic means of closing the gap.

    For example, I’ve got no problem with Bill Gates having ten thousand times more money than I ever hope to have. What I would have a problem with would be Gates rigging the system so that (a) he stays at the top of the heap and (b) I stay where I am.

    And that’s where the difficulty is with the left–they love the Gini coefficient (e.g. Tide Pod Barbie) as much as anyone, but they can not see, or refuse to see, how their policies actually calcify wealth differences. Keep kids in failing government schools while yours go to private schools? It’s no surprise when your kids go to elite schools and theirs go to community college, if at all. Keep ’em in public housing? Yup, you’ve just prevented them from building wealth by buying their own home, and also from developing homeowners’ habits.

    That’s where the argument is won, in my view.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.