A quick glance at the video you posted is utterly unpersuasive. I've never heard of the talking head in the video, and he says some things which seem blatantly incorrect. For example (from memory, I'm not going back and forth) he says that we can look at GINI coefficients for ANY given area (country, neighborhood, street) and the correlation between violent crime and economic inequality is strong. What about domestic violence? Is there economic inequality within a family, and is this correlated to the likelihood of domestic violence? If families share money, shouldn't domestic violence be non-existent?Burning ghost wrote: ↑December 21st, 2017, 1:12 am
Ecurb -
I don't assert it. I merely provided links which support what pretty much ALL social scientists know about. They talk about the correlation and how it can be measured over any population size and give the same results. The higher the rate of male homicides the greater the level of economic inequality (meaning the distribution of wealth between rich and poor is skewed - which I highlighted in the links I provided in previous post and asked people to look at the differences where they take the top and bottom 10% and 20% of the population into account.)
If you won't take my word (which I am happy you are questioning, as you bloody well should if you've never heard about this before!) have a looksee here (I think the first 3-4 mins covers it well enough) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE
In addition, without knowing the methods of the social scientists who ALL know about this correlation, a quick glance at the stats does not bear out the correlation (much less the causation, which the video blathers on about). Sweden has the highest GINI coefficient in Western Europe, and its murder rate is 50% lower than that of France, which has a lower GINI. The U.S. has the highest GINI of any large, rich country in the world, but Russia has more than twice as many murders per capita. I don't think social scientists are stupid (I have M.A. in Cultural Anthropology, and I'm pretty stupid, but I may be an outlier). So (assuming you are right and they ALL agree) there are probably explanations for my objections. Nonetheless, the recent popularity of seeing economic inequality as one of the horrors of modern capitalism leads me to believe in the possibility that the facts are fitted to the theory, and not vice versa.
A quick glance at GINI stats (by country) and murder stats (by country) does seem to show that there is some correlation -- but it hardly appears as strong as you suggest. (I haven't done any formal analysis of the stats -- but its clear there is NOT a 1:1 correlation between GINI and murder rates, or even close to it.)