why inequality leads to crime and violence

In a rational choice model, cheating and stealing can become rational when people have less to lose from not cheating and stealing than they risk by cheating and stealing. And if they don’t trust one another, they are even more likely to cheat and steal. The more unequal a society is, the more likely people will fall below the threshold where they judge they have nothing to lose, and the less trust there will be between and within social classes.

 If your current resources are above the threshold, then, under the assumptions we make, it is not worth stealing. Instead, you should cooperate as long as you judge that the others around you are likely to do so too, and just work alone otherwise. If your resources are around or below the threshold, however, then, under our assumptions, you should pretty much always steal. Even if it makes you worse off on average.

This is a pretty remarkable result: why would it be so? The important thing to appreciate is that with our threshold, we have introduced a sharp non-linearity in the fitness function, or utility function, that is assumed to be driving decisions. Once you fall down below that threshold, your prospects are really dramatically worse, and you need to get back up immediately. This makes stealing a worthwhile risk. If it happens to succeed, it’s the only action with a big enough quick win to leap you back over the threshold in one bound. If, as is likely, it fails, you are scarcely worse off in the long run: your prospects were dire anyway, and they can’t get much direr. So the riskiness of stealing – it sometimes you gives you a big positive outcome and sometimes a big negative one – becomes a thing you should seek rather than avoid…

So if making sentences tougher does not solve the problems of crime in high-inequality populations, according to the model, is there anything that does? Well, yes: and readers of this blog may not be surprised to hear me mention it. Redistribution. If people who are facing desperation can expect their fortunes to improve by other means, such as redistributive action, then they don’t need to employ such desperate means as stealing. They will get back up there anyway. Our model shows that a shuffling of resources so that the worst off are lifted up and the top end is brought down can dramatically reduce stealing, and hence increase trust. (In an early version of this work, we simulated the effects of a scenario we named ‘Corbyn victory’: remember then?).

Daniel Nettle

Well, you can redistribute, or there are other options. The highest social classes could maintain the social order through sheer force. Or they could try to achieve the same ends through ideology and propaganda that convince the lower classes the social order is natural or desirable, or they can try to use ideology and propaganda to divide the lower classes and turn them on each other. The guy on the second rung from the bottom may very well be willing to kick the guy on the bottom rung in the teeth to keep him from climbing, and thank the people higher up for the opportunity even while they are shitting on his head. Which of these options sounds good to you probably depends on which rung of the ladder you happen to be standing on, and the rung you happen to be standing on is probably within a couple rungs of the one you were born on, in most cases.

more on mRNA technology for vaccines and beyond

There are several interesting nuggets in this MIT Technology Review article:

  • A lot of the technology was developed by the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (which I have mixed feelings about – it’s essentially a giant evil greedy corporation in most ways, but it does provide a lot of jobs locally – much like any giant inefficient Soviety industry, and obviously it created this technology for greedy purposes which now has the potential to save hundreds of millions of lives while making a few greedy people extraordinarily rich.)
  • The technology essentially gets your body to make its own medicine, “turning a human body into a bioreactor”. However, doesn’t work well (so far) for medicines that need to be taken repeatedly, which is most medicines except vaccines. So vaccines are the most obvious candidate for now. Combining it with gene editing technology holds the promise of permanent protection against disease, even handed down the generations, but there are also some scary risks here.
  • It may work for herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer and HIV. For flu and coronavirus, there is a possibility of “universal vaccines” that would protect against thousands of strains with a single shot.
  • The vaccine was designed within 48 hours of the scientists receiving its DNA sequence, and ready for animal trials in less than six weeks. (This is exciting, because it suggests the possibility of responding to new threats quickly in the future, whether natural or manmade.)
  • “vaccine programs for emerging threats like Zika or Ebola, where outbreaks come and go, would deliver a -66% return on average.” (sounds like an obvious, clear textbook market failure to me and an obvious moral requirement for government to step in)
  • The researchers are advocating for the government to create “megafactories” for producing mRNA that could be leased to companies in normal times, but taken over by the government to pump out vaccines quickly in times of crisis. They liken this to how governments “governments spend billions on nuclear weapons they hope to never use”. (They have this one wrong – it’s trillions! And if we need a military reason to do this, we need this to protect against biowarfare and bioterrorism in addition to naturally arising pandemics. It’s an existential threat and like I said, an absolute moral imperative for government to make this happen.)
  • The article also mentions an experimental gene therapy cure for blindness. Exciting but costs about a million dollars right now for two eyes.

Microsoft’s Cylon chat bot

Microsoft has filed a patent for code that can suck in a (living or dead I suppose) person’s online history and configure a chatbot to act something like them. Of course, just because they filed a patent doesn’t mean they plan widespread commercialization of the idea, just that they had an idea and don’t want others to be able to profit from the idea (which I would bet somebody else had first but didn’t file the patent…) At its most innocuous, this would not be too much different than looking up famous quotes of a famous person (let’s say Abraham Lincoln) on a particular topic, except it could apply to anyone.

This, of course, is the exact plot of Battlestar Gallactica, at least the 2004-2008 series I am most familiar with. And that was an awesome series that won over many people (my significant other included) who did not consider themselves fans of science fiction. Somewhat similar to the way Game of Thrones won over people who considered themselves too serious for fantasy. So check it out if you haven’t.

New Start extended for five years

Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin have just done a very good thing in extending the New Start treaty for five years.

The treaty, signed in 2010 by the US president Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, who was president of Russia at the time, limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers, and envisages sweeping on-site inspections to verify compliance.

The Guardian

The numbers seem somewhat underwhelming to me (as in, a modest reduction in an enormous nuclear arsenal), but the important thing is the willingness to cooperate to reduce risk, and the message that sends to the rest of the world. The world has gone from believing a nuclear free world might be possible, to trying to avoid proliferation while modestly reducing what nuclear-armed countries already have, to trying to slow the rate of proliferation while “modernizing” or increasing what nuclear-armed countries already have, to teetering on the brink of an all-out arms race. Now we have gone back to the “maintain what we have”, which is still incredibly cynical, but the trend has turned back in the right direction. Accidents, proliferation, unstable nuclear-armed states (I’m talking to you Pakistan), and terrorism are all still very frightening, and there is no margin for error even with one relatively small event one time. The ocean liner captain has seen the iceberg, let up on the steam, and turned the wheel an inch to the left. Is it in time to avoid collision?

dogs domesticated themselves

I had heard that dogs may have been domesticated as a food animal at some point, which is a somewhat dark tale for the modern dog lover. This Independent article says new evidence tells a different story. First, Siberian wolves started sniffing around garbage in human settlements during the ice age. Then, they settled in. Although it might seem like humans would feel threatened by wolves in their midst, they may actually have helped defend the human settlements against other animals, including other wolves. (You can imagine there might have been a few misunderstandings early on where hungry wolves ate people and vice versa.) And then, because they are so smart, a specific pack of wolves would pass behaviors down from generation to generation, and in just a few generations you would have a population with distinct behavior and over time even a distinct appearance. At some point, humans did start training and breeding them to perform specific tasks, like pulling sleds.

GPS vulnerable

In the category of things I didn’t know I was supposed to be worried about, the New York Times says GPS satellites are vulnerable, and they are being messed with by state and non-state actors.

More than 10,000 incidents of GPS interference have been linked to China and Russia in the past five years. Ship captains have reported GPS errors showing them 20-120 miles inland when they were actually sailing off the coast of Russia in the Black Sea. Also well documented are ships suddenly disappearing from navigation screens while maneuvering in the Port of Shanghai. After GPS disruptions at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport in 2019, Israeli officials pointed to Syria, where Russia has been involved in the nation’s long-running civil war. And last summer, the United States Space Command accused Russia of testing antisatellite weaponry.

New York Times

GPS is an example of a military technology that has spilled over to enormous worldwide civilian benefit. But it is fragile apparently. The U.S. is actively working (but behind schedule) on a backup system, and this article says many other countries have already implemented backup systems working on towers located on the ground rather than satellites.

more on Oumuamua

The media and mainstream scientific consensus seem to have dismissed the extraterrestrial object Oumuamua that passed the Earth last year as a natural object. (But according to this article, we should think of it more as our solar system passing the object. It turns out we are not the center of the universe!) Not so fast, says Avi Loeb, “one of the world’s foremost astronomers“. He says “the most rational, conservative explanation is that ‘Oumuamua was produced by an alien civilisation.”

Warning: This is a potential brain-exploding article if you choose to take it seriously and think about it too hard. He says the reason this is the first time we have seen an object of this type might be that we didn’t have the technology to look. Now we have the technology, we are actively looking, and the technology is continuing to improve quickly. He says we “we should assume that we will see another object once every three or four years” with existing technology, and possibly once a month with near-future (a few months or years from now) technology. This would imply “that there are plenty of them, a quadrillion of them, inside the Oort cloud. Inside the solar system.”

He has been talking about the likelihood of alien life for awhile:

In a 2014 paper, he described the likelihood that rocky planets with liquid water provided the chemistry to support life when the universe was as little as ten million years old. In the 13.8 billion years since that time, billions of galaxies – each home to billions of Earth-like planets – have formed. To say that life, intelligence and civilisation have emerged only once in such an expanse of time and space is, he argues, a radical view.

New Statesman

He has a new book on this subject called Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

And I can’t help saying it: The Truth is Out There, my friends. (Remember when a TV show about a simple vaccine distribution conspiracy linked to aliens was considered quaint entertainment? That ancient civilization and culture was called 1990s USA and will no doubt be the subject of many anthropological studies when the alien scientists land.)

Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed Senate, this is Chewbacca…

Donald Trump’s lawyers do not make sense. Could this be a strategy?

Why would a Wookiee, an 8-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of 2-foot-tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I’m a lawyer defending a [former President of the United States], and I’m talkin’ about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you’re in that [smoky back room in the Capitol] deliberatin’ and conjugatin’ the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed [Senate], it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.

Wikipedia, and obviously South Park

What’s the investment return on political contributions?

According to some sources I’ve looked at, a rule of thumb is 1000 to 1. So it is entirely rational for amoral rich and powerful entities (be they human, corporate, or non-profit entities) to invest their money and effort in buying politicians rather than competing or innovating. This blog post has some numbers:

Consider: The return on industry lobbying — let’s round up and call it $10 million across several Senate terms — is $124 billion in protected profit per year. Looking at the drug price mark-up in the Taibbi article — from $4 to $1000 — gives a profit increase of 250 times the original (and still profitable) $4 price in India. Let’s lower that increase, since I’m sure Taibbi picked an extreme example. Let’s say that, on average, the protected U.S. profit is “just” a 100-times increase over what’s profitable overseas…

So what’s the ROI to the drug companies on its $10 million in bribes (sorry, entirely legal campaign contributions)? If it’s $100 billion … again, per year … the ROI on campaign contributions is at least $10,000 in profit for each $1 spent to protect it, or more than 10,000 to 1.

If I’m off by a factor of 10, the ROI is … 1,000 to 1.

From a blog called Down with Tyranny

So doing away with this should boost the competitiveness and innovation of our economy quite a bit, allow small and medium business to compete on an equal playing field with big business, and allow less wealthy and powerful parties to have a voice in policy choices (“democracy” is one word I’ve heard used in this context). But who would have to make this change? The politicians being bribed, of course. There was one politician who might have tried to do something, but we didn’t vote for him. The administration we did vote for has not mentioned corruption as a priority lately, although to be fair they do have other urgent priorities.

January 2021 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: A China-Taiwan military conflict is a potential start-of-World-War-III scenario. This could happen today, or this year, or never. Let’s hope for the latter. This is a near-term existential risk, but I have to break my own “rule of one” and give honorable mention to two longer-term scary things: crashing sperm counts and the climate change/fascism/genocide nexus.

Most hopeful story: Computer modeling, done well, can inform decisions better than data analysis alone. An obvious statement? Well, maybe to some but it is disputed every day by others, especially staff at some government regulatory agencies I interact with.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There have been fabulous advances in note taking techniques! Well, not really, but there are some time honored techniques out there that could be new and beneficial for many people to learn, and I think this is an underappreciated productivity and innovation skill that could benefit people in a lot of areas, not just students.