London Riots: We Tried To Warn You

There is no justifying these riots. These people have it better than most people in the world, and in the case of immigrants, far better than they'd have it in their homelands.

Wealth and equality is not guaranteed in life, it's not even realistic or possible, and acting like a primate (without real cause) certainly isn't going to help matters. Being an apologist for these anarchist and thugs is actually counter productive.

 

Actually, I'm suspicious that his facts are entirely off. Cities tend to be crime ridden...but they also tend to have income inequality by chance, and I think his data is just tracking that.

For example lets say that someone picked a spot in a country where there was massive income inequality, but it was because you had some people making one hundred thousand dollars a year mixed with people making ten million dollars a year.

Then compare that to an area where income is fairly equal...equally crappy.

Which one do you think is going to have a higher homicide rate?

I bet that holds out by countries as well in general. I.e. I suspect income inequality isn't as bad in the third world holes with massive homicide rates.

Now I'm not saying income inequality is a good thing. Maybe it even has some effect on homicide rates.

But saying that "homicide rates are most affected by income inequality"

Pure BS.

 

Well, there's a whole book on the subject if you want to read more:

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Level-Equality-Societies-Stronger/dp/1608190366"]Amazon.com: The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (9781608190362): Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett: Books[/ame]

 

he's not justifying anything. all the right seems to want to do is say, "these rioters suck! i hate them!" and then screaming at anyone who tries to delve deeper into the issue. well, guess what, i hate rioters too. that's kinda a no-brainer. the point is the right wants the conversation to stop there, and that's stupid. it still behooves us to try and think of ways we can prevent rioting, even if we happen to be among the 99.9% of the population that hates rioters.

 

There is nothing to delve into, it's clear cut and simple. These folks had no justifiable reason to riot like this. This was anarchy, greedy opportunistic criminals acting like uncivilized animals. "They" have no cause or purpose, and that which ails them is likely of their own doing. Even if they are not responsible for their situation, acting out like they did will do nothing to improve their situation. That's all there is to it.

 

Not to mention lack of desire, lack of need since they're on the dole, and the obvious option of stealing. If someone fights back, he'll be prosecuted viciously. A man was sentenced to five-months in jail for trying to gouge out a police officer's eye. I wonder how long he will actually have to stay in jail? In the U.S. it would be less than 10 weeks.

I think the two young ladies summed it up when they said, "It's the rich people's fault and we can do whatever we want." They're right on the second half, wrong on the first half.

 

The violence was not as inevitable as the OP suggests.

Had the government not embarked on a programme of withdrawing support for the poor and unemployed, it may never had happened. It is just the cost of Tory austerity measures that target the poor young and old disproportionately.

The Tea Party wants to do the same in America.

Enjoy your riots.

 

"Britain’s youth unemployment rate is currently over 20 percent. During the economic boom a decade ago, though, nearly as many were out of work, and they did not all turn to crime."

Wow, Awryly, the unemployment rate is nearly the same as during the economic boom. But, according to you, the riots are because of the unemployment rate which is, according to your post, operating independently of government policies. You should cite sources that are going to support your stupid conclusions assuming you can find one.

So, why is the high unemployment rate constant? How about, they don't need to work, they don't want to work, and they have no intention of working?

 

The young people who rioted are on the dole, and they can't survive without the dole. They have no skills, no education, no money, and no future, except watching the telly, eating and screwing. It's too bad the UK no longer produces the excess wealth needed to allow the idle and indolent the lifestyle they have developed.

 

They are directly correlated:

Sure, I'm climbing in your windows and snatching your people up.

It is the biggest factor in the First World. After a certain level of development (where food, housing, entertainment wants etc. are met) then relative income differences rather than absolute become increasingly important.

Income inequality is the biggest predictor:

http://psych.mcmaster.ca/dalywilson/iiahr2001.pdf

"Messner (1982) identified the rate of population growth and the Gini index as significant predictors of national homicide rates, while such candidate predictors as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, percent urban dwellers, and school participation had no discernible effects. Krahn, Hartnagel, and Gartrell (1986) used data from more (and more diverse) countries than prior studies and from several years, and found that Gini, population growth, GDP per capita, and the percent of 15-19 year-olds in school were the best predictors of homicide rates; ethnic diversity, divorce rate, young adults as percent of population, defense expenditures, percent urban, and percent literate were weaker predictors that were significant in some analyses. Gartner (1990), however, found the divorce rate to be the single best predictor in 18 developed nations, with Gini second best, and additional lesser impacts of welfare spending, ethnic heterogeneity, female workers per household, battle deaths, and use of the death penalty. Interaction effects have also been noted: Krahn et at. (1986) suggest that income inequality has a stronger effect on homicide rates in more democratic societies, while Avison and Loring (1986) found its impact to be greater where ethnic diversity is greater. Only Gartner's (1990) study distinguished among components of the overall homicide rate, and she found that Gini predicts the rates at which adults, but not children, are killed, and is a stronger predictor of men's than of women's rates of homicide victimization. In general, the results of these cross-national studies are highly compatible with the proposition that homicide rates "assay" the local intensity of competitive conflict, especially among men."


For anyone else who is saying thay I am 'justifying' the riots:

I do not care whether or not they should or should not have rioted. I am saying that condition X leads to result Y.

If you hate result Y but don't want to do anything about X then stop whinging (unless whinging helps).

One is faced with four choices:
A): Don't change anything and hope it can be contained.
B): Use some element of social and economic reform.
C): Use increased levels of authoritarianism.
D): Some other option or some mixture of the above.

Choose whichever but don't whinge about facts. Condition X (income inequality) leads to result Y (homicide rates and by proxy crime in general).

 

Sorry, poster, but correlation does not equal causation. For example, most pedophiles are Democrats. That doesn't mean being a Democrat means you're a pedophile, does it? So your chart is, I'm sure, very influential with someoine who doesn't know their facts.

Go and read the article Awryly graciously, is mistakenly, provided for a fact.

 

facile response, you should know better.

 

The riots in London are just further proof that the government cannot protect you.

Arm yourself.

 

Consistent and international correlation on such a scale suggests that there is an element of causation or a third element that affects both. Furthermore there are theories suggesting causation that have yet to be tested. They mainly revolve around social status and the pyschology thereof. It is possible that the causation is reversed (high homicide rates cause inequality). However the lag factor is in favour of the income inequality being the cause.

The cuts were obviously the last nail in the coffin but it doesn't explain the events. People do not immediately riot after cuts, it requires pent-up anger.

Of course you simply find these correlations to be uncomfortable. You think they 'justify' the riots and so you bury your head in the sand.

A paper from the World Bank:

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Resources/Crime&Inequality.pdf

Conclusions:
"The main conclusion of this paper is that income inequality, measured by the Gini index, has a significant and positive effect on the incidence of crime. This result is robust to changes in the crime rate when it is used as the dependent variable (whether homicide or robbery), the sample of countries and periods, alternative measures of income inequality, the set of additional variables explaining crime rates (control variables), and the method of econometric estimation. In particular, this result persists when using instrumental variable methods that take advantage of the dynamic properties of our crosscountry and time-series data to control for both measurement error in crime data and the joint endogeneity of the explanatory variables. In the process of arriving at this conclusion, we found some interesting results; the following are among them: First, the incidence of violent crime has a high degree of inertia, which justifies early intervention to prevent 26 the journal of law and economics crime waves. Second, violent crime rates decrease when economic growth improves. Since violent crime is jointly determined by the pattern of income distribution and by the rate of change of national income, we can conclude that faster poverty reduction leads to a decline in national crime rates. And third, the mean level of income, the average educational attainment of the adult population, and the degree of urbanization in a country are not related to crime rates in a significant, robust, or consistent way. The main objective of this paper has been to characterize the relationship between inequality and crime from an empirical perspective. We have attempted to provide a set of stylized facts on this relationship. Crime rates and inequality are positively correlated (within each country and, particularly, between countries), and it appears that this correlation reflects causation from inequality to crime rates, even controlling for other crime determinants. If anything, the contribution of this paper is empirical. Analytically, however, this paper has two important shortcomings. First, we have not provided a way to test or distinguish between various theories on the incidence of crime. In particular, our results are consistent with both economic and sociological paradigms. Although our results for robbery (a typical property crime) confirm those for homicide (a personal crime with a variety of motivations), this cannot be used to reject the sociological paradigm in favor of the economic one. The reason is that the satisfaction that the “relatively deprived” people in sociological models seek can lead to both pure manifestations of violence and illicit appropriation of material goods. A more nuanced econometric exercise than what we offer here is required to shed light on the relative validity of various theories on the inequality-crime link. The first shortcoming of the paper leads to the second, which is that we have not identified the mechanisms through which more pronounced inequality leads to more crime. Uncertainty about these mechanisms raises a variety of questions with important policy implications. For instance, should police and justice protection be redirected to the poorest segments of society? How important for crime prevention are income-transfer programs in times of economic recession? To what extent should public authorities be concerned with income and ethnic polarization? Do policies that promote the participation in communal organizations and help develop “social capital” among the poor also reduce crime? Hopefully, this paper will help stir an interest in these and related questions on the prevention of crime and violence."

The evidence is mounting despite further investigation being required (as noted by this paper).

 

London Riots....Goverments will learn the hard way.

They have not seen the very worst of it yet.​

 

Britain really is but a shadow of itself. The country is controlled by fanatical Muslims who ignore British law and apply their crazy Shria law. What do you expect? what we see in the UK now is how the middle-east is all the time. Now that the UK is controlled by Muslims it is not too surprising - The country should be re-named Great Britstan. Soon the Prohet's head will be on their money and the words "In Allah We Trust" will appear on coinage.

 

I see fact is an unfamiliar word for you, too. Of course the response was facil because I was responding to an obviously flawed argument. Those to tend do be facil.

You know, I'm old. I have arthritis, don't see so well, am mostly deaf, and I have been warned so often that I've quit listening. I'm sure saccharine was a horrible thing, even if the FDA did retract it's status as a cancer agent after they'd destroyed the industry. I'm sure that Rachel Carson was right even if nothing in her book was. I survivied, and really didn't notice, the killer bees and killer ants. By the time the pandemic of Swine Flu arrived I'd gotten immune to folks who don't want to let a good crisis go to waste. The overpopulation bomb what was to have the world destroyed in the 1980's came and went as did the famous Y2K.

Liberals would be well advised to quite making up problems to fit their ideology and start thinking about problems that actually exist.

 

Great response, PatrickT!

Your remarks are always directly to the point and well crafted!

By the way, the liberals in this group can make all the silly and unreasonable excuses they want. However, if you want the real truth about the root cause of this violent civil disobedience, here are some excellent observations on this very subject.

"By the age of 12, an ordinary slum-dweller has learned he has nothing to fear from the law and the only people to fear are those who are stronger or more ruthless than he."

 

What are you all gonna do about it? And when???

 

The first highlighted sentence, being incorrect, renders the remainder as generalisations and is mostly rubbish.

 

I dont care if anybody does anything. The UK can rot in hell for all I care (my ancestors are from Ireland).

 

Not very charitable for a man of your character.
You're not going to pray for England then?

 

actually, i think you're witnessing the limits of his ability, there.

 

You are most likely correct.

 

Britain isn't the most generous welfare state and yet it suffers most from these problems. Your 'welfare done it' rant doesn't get any more accurate with repetition.