From: mez (mez@mezziah.org)
Date: Wed Jan 03 2001 - 14:52:46 MST
Gosh. The notion that total crime rate (or other social indicators) in a
city is a zero-sum game seems quite contrary to the evidence.
Given that education, housing, income level disparity, presence of jobs,
environmental factors in rearing, etc... can all affect the propensity
towards crime, it would seem that this is far from a zero-sum system.
There are real benefits to be had, for example, by ensuring a higher
quality education for residents of an area.
>From a purely economic standpoint, I suspect that the US incurs a huge cost
in *not* devoting more resources to education, particularly in the most
economically depressed and crime-ridden areas.
mez
From: James Rogers
Of course, it seems that you are coming from the arguably absurd position
that "bad" areas don't need to exist. Unfortunately, as long as riff-raff
exist, you'll have bad areas because creating the "good" areas also tends
to create the "bad" ones. It is pretty close to a zero-sum game no matter
how you organize the bodies in a free society (in a non-free society, you
have "other" choices for dealing with the problem). Over the years, you
see these dynamics happen in any city; some formerly bad areas become
better, while formerly good areas become worse. But I've never seen
anything resembling a free society where all the neighborhoods became
"good" without any areas becoming bad. Riff-raff happen and they have to
live somewhere.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:04:29 MST