The Tipping Point + Freakonomics re: crime

[suzzer99]

Basically the theory is that with a new drug as powerful as crack - you had 2 major new crime contributors. 1) a giant batch of brand new crackheads running around hopped up trying to get money for more crack and just generally being out of their minds. 2) New channels for distribution, new reasons to fight over turf, lots of new money to be made for gangs to fight over basically.

So the natural solutions that happened:

1) Full time crackheads don't stay active crackheads for more than a year or two. They either wind up dead, in jail, or get clean. So once you have that initial surge of males and females age 16-xx, new crackheads coming on line will be a trickle compared to it.

2) Lots of kids saw their parents or older siblings lose everything to crack. Those kids tend to shy away from trying it themselves.

3) Once the distribution channels have been fairly well established, AND demand recedes, there's a lot less chance for skirmishes.

[NT!]

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It was dumb for me to say "borderline retard" and it appears like I was clearly wrong. However, at first glance I didn't, and still don't, see how there was any possible way that a single drug could be such a major factor in crime. What sort of numbers are we attributing to being related to crack? I'm assuming there were large distribution battles? What was done to fix the problem?

[/ QUOTE ]

no offense, but we don't really need posters running around calling people 'borderline retards' for talking about well-known and accepted information concerning recent crime phenomena, especially when they turn out to know nothing about it.

[suzzer99]

I respected him for coming back on and giving a mea culpa. That doesn't happen often in OOT.

[SGspecial]

[ QUOTE ]
i'm not an expert on economics, so i won't dispute this claim... but when you exit the realm of economics and start looking at human behavior and psychology, assuming rationality is a serious error at times.

where crime falls on that spectrum is debatable.

[/ QUOTE ]
The entire point of the book is that these human factors are not outside the realm of economics, but in fact the heart of that social science.

[coxquinn]

tipping point best explains the drop in crime rate IMO