MikkW's Shortform

MikkW

This is a special post for quick takes by MikkW. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

A: Reading about r/K reproductive strategies in humans, and slow/fast life histories.

B: It's been a belief of mine, that I have yet to fully gather evidence on / have a compelling case that it should be true/false, that areas with people in poverty leads to increased crime, including in neighboring areas, which would imply that to increase public safety, we should support people in poverty to help them live a comfortable life.

Synthesis:

In niches with high background risk, having many children, who each attempt to reproduce as quickly as possible, is a dominant strategy. In niches where life expectancy is long, strategies which invest heavily in a few children, and reproduce at later ages are dominant.

Fast life histories incentivize cheating and criminal behaviour, slow life histories incentivize cooperating and investing in a good reputation. Some effects mediating this may be genetic / cultural, but I suspect that there's a lot of flexibility in each individual - if one grows up in an environment where background risk is high, one is likely to be more reckless, if one grows up in an environment with long life expectancy, the same person will likely be more cooperative and law-abiding

2Viliam6y

So what you're saying is that by helping people, we might also improve their lives as a side effect? Awesome! :P More seriously, on individual level, I agree; whatever fraction of one's behavior is determined by their environment, by improving the environment we likely make the person's behavior that much better. But on a group level, the environment mostly consists of the individuals, which makes this strategy much more complicated. And which creates the concentrated dysfunction in the bad places. Suppose you want to take people out of the crime-heave places: do you also move the criminals? or only the selected nice people who have a hope to adapt to the new place? Because if you do the latter, you have increased the density of criminals at the old place. And if you do the former, their new neighbors are going to hate you. I don't know what is best; just saying that there seems to be a trade-off. If you leave the best people in the bad places, you waste their potential. But if you help the best people leave the bad places, there will be no one left with the desire and skills to improve those places a little. On the national scale, this is called "brain drain", and has some good and some bad effects; the good effects mostly consist of emigrants sending money home (reducing local poverty), and sometimes returning home and improving the local culture. I worry that on a smaller scale the good effects would be smaller: unlike a person moving to another part of the world with different culture and different language, an "emigrant" to the opposite side of the city would not feel a strong desire to return to their original place.

I wasn't mainly thinking of helping people move from one environment to another when I wrote this, but generally improving the environments where people already are (by means of e.g. UBI). I share many of your concerns about moving people between environments, although I suspect that done properly, doing so could be more beneficial than harmful