Chicago’s homicide rate for the year-to-date is running higher than last year’s, probably facilitated by the warmer than usual weather in February. Last year’s homicide rate here was nearing the highest on record, the previous record having been set 25 years ago.
For those of you who envision a future world without work, these homicides are taking place in a handful of neighborhoods where the unemployment rate for young men in the target demographic for gangs is running upwards of 50%. Income isn’t the only factor. If work did not exist, we would be forced to invent it.
I suspect that’s right. As I mentioned the other day, we replaced physical labor with gyms. We replaced hunting and war with sports and games. And to a surprising extent we’ve gotten vast amounts of free labor out of people with things like YouTube.
But lack of jobs is not why people commit crimes. Illinois minimum wage is $8.25 an hour. Large numbers of young men are not giddy at the prospect of cleaning toilets and stocking shelves in a dead-end job for barely enough to survive. I wouldn’t do it, there’s no upside. You want to spend 30 years doing a lousy job with no status and no real prospect of advancement? 30 years of demoralizing work just to cling to life?
Crime is fun and exciting. There’s a potential upside – a very few can become rich and run away to Belize. There’s a big downside, too, of course, but the gap between working poverty and prison isn’t so great as to seal the deal. When the only choice is between being a drone and being a gangster, frankly anyone with spirit chooses crime. You don’t see a lot of movies or TV shows about guys who are 40 years old and flipping burgers, but I’ve noticed not a few exciting stories about gangsters.
One of the many things that’s frequently overlooked in the neat, pat divisions of history into the Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc. or Hunter-Gatherer, Agricultural, Industrial, etc. is that the previous “ages” never go away. I don’t have the figures to support it under my fingertips but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there weren’t more people in absolute count supporting themselves by hunting and gathering than there was five millennia ago. Similarly with agriculture. As a percentage it may have decreased but lots and lots of people still support themselves by farming.
The neat, pat divisions encourage us to think in terms of Whig history and reality may not be quite as simple.
My intuition is that we’ve got to maintain room in human society for something more than a monoculture.
Which is why I don’t watch gangster movies. I believe that they inherently glorify crime.
“Illinois minimum wage is $8.25 an hour. Large numbers of young men are not giddy at the prospect of cleaning toilets and stocking shelves in a dead-end job for barely enough to survive. I wouldn’t do it, there’s no upside. You want to spend 30 years doing a lousy job with no status and no real prospect of advancement? 30 years of demoralizing work just to cling to life?”
Starting off stocking shelves and cleaning toilets is not a problem. Any young man or woman should be willing to do that if they want some money and the opportunity to build some work experience. I did exactly that (stocking shelves and cleaning bathrooms) for three years in my youth.
Those kind of jobs aren’t meant to be careers and we should stop treating them as if they are when talking about wages. When it comes to inner cities there are much more fundamental problems that need addressing.