The Evidence is Clear: Poverty Does Not Cause Criminality

We all know why certain areas have high crime rates, right? It’s because the people who live there are poor and they’re either forced to commit crime to make ends mean or their poverty makes them so unhappy that they start taking drugs and this induces them to commit crime. Alternatively, being poor causes a kind of psychological strain which makes such people angry and resentful and, hence, more likely to be criminals. If you ask, “What has made them impoverished in the first place?” then the answer is that “It’s bad luck.”

Even though twin studies have shown that the genetic component for criminality is about 50%, the key personality traits that predict criminality – low impulse control, low empathy and altruism, high mental instability – are around 50% genetic, and even though the other key predictor, low intelligence, is around 80% genetic, falling into criminality is, essentially, a matter of bad luck. Even though some people, raised in the same environment as a criminal is raised do not fall into criminality, it’s just bad luck, okay? All you have to do to get rid of criminality is to get rid of poverty . . . so runs the leftist argument. Well, there’s great news for all of us. A study in Sweden has finally put this argument to the test.

The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is entitled “Does Wealth Inhibit Criminal Behavior? Evidence from Swedish Lottery Winners and Their Children.” The players used information on the winners of four Swedish national lotteries and matched them to data on criminal convictions and child delinquency among the offspring of lottery winners in order to discern what effect, if any, an increase in wealth had. This is a particularly useful sample because poorer people are more likely to gamble via mechanisms such as the National Lottery.

You say, “That’s because they have nothing to lose” (they can lose their stake) or “That’s because they’re desperate.” However, according to the study “The relationship of pathological gambling to criminality behavior in a sample of Polish male offenders,” gambling is associated with psychopathy – poor impulse control, the need for immediate thrills – which is, in turn, associated with poverty. Further, the study “Estimated verbal IQ and the odds of problem gambling,” finds that gambling is associated with low intelligence, which also predicts poverty. Low IQ people cannot comprehend how unlikely it is that they will ever win. They also tend to “live in the now;” enjoying the thrill in the moment.

The authors had access to a national database which included all criminal convictions on those aged 15 or over between years 1975 and 2017. Each Swede has a unique identity number and this could be matched to the identity number that appeared in the lottery data. The result is a large and highly representative national sample. Their definition of juvenile delinquency was whether a child accrued a criminal conviction within 10 years of the lottery event or within 10 years of turning 15. For adults, they focused on whether there was a criminal conviction up to 7 years after the lottery event.

All this being so, what do they find? Fascinatingly, they find that winning the lottery actually very slightly increases the likelihood that a person will obtain a criminal conviction, although this misses statistical significance. They certainly did not find that winning the lottery reduces the likelihood that you will receive a criminal conviction. Put simply, if you give someone money, it will have no impact whatsoever on whether they will commit a crime. Similarly, parental wealth, obtained via a lottery win, has zero impact on delinquency among their children.

This finding, interestingly, is consistent with evidence presented in Gregory Clark’s book A Farewell to Alms, that sudden increases in wealth in a family, such as winning the lottery, wash out within a few generations. He observes that across many generations the heritability of socioeconomic status (SES) is about 0.75 if not higher. The reason is that SES is predicted by personality and intelligence, these traits are strongly genetic, people marry assortatively for these highly genetic traits in order to maximise the extent to which their genes are passed on and, so, social classes are, to some extent, genetic castes. If a low-IQ person wins the lottery, he is likely to make very poor decisions with that money, as are children, meaning that his family will return to their original status within a few generations.

The Swedish study completely refutes the idea that poverty causes crime. If you give people a large amount of money it has absolutely zero impact on whether or not they will receive a criminal conviction. The obvious explanation is that such a big part of criminal behaviour is genetic. A lottery win may possibly make a person less likely to steal or embezzle, though even that is open to question, but will make them no less criminal in any other respect. Moreover, there are very poor people who do not steal or embezzle, which raises the question of why some very poor people do.

Thanks to this study, we can now put to bed the idea that poverty causes crime. It does not. There are certain strongly genetic psychological traits which cause, independently, both criminality and poverty.