Is it possible that hod carriers, street Arabs and gong farmers weren't arrested for crimes in Venice because nobody bothered to report the sorts of crimes that they committed or suffered?
Or as one modern-day American prosecutor told me off the record "I don't want to get involved in brown people problems."
Interesting! However, I take the assertion that "aristocratic families today are not known for their criminality" with some doubt. Yes, conviction rates, or even just prosecutions, are low, but that is no evidence that their criminality is lower than it has ever been. There may have been a change in the type of criminality from violent to financial, for example. There may have been a societal change towards not investigating/prosecuting aristocratic crimes - many lawyers come from, or aspire to, the upper classes for example. I admit that this is immeasurable, but I don't see that it can be excluded.
Excellent article! Today, we associate violence with low SES, but that association can be explained by the geographic origins of low SES groups. For the most part, they have come to industrial Western societies from peripheral non-Western regions where men have to use violence on a regular basis because the State is weak or nonexistent.
We see this in groups that are recruited for military service: the Gurkhas of the Himalayas, the Pashtuns of the Northwest Frontier, the Chechens of the Caucasus, the Berbers of the Atlas, the Highland Scots, and so on. These are mountain-dwelling peoples who, until recently, have never been conquered and pacified by a State. Moreover, such conquest largely remained superficial with a high reliance on indirect rule.
Conversely, we see the opposite with groups that have long lived under States that monopolize the use of violence.
Really interesting. I'm practically illiterate when it comes to statistics and graphs but the way the conclusions were put into words (for dummies like me) allowed me to follow the logic. Great stuff.
For much of human history, being an "elite" means you or your ancestors violently took wealth from others. A major moral defense of capitalism and the modern economic world is that we provide people with avenues for wealth accumulation that do not involve zero sum actions of violence.
But... What if we got it all backwards? What if violence was both a marker of physiological deficiency as you said (eg. mental illness) but also a marker of... high status ?
This came to me because I am french and there is a group of people who don't fear to be violent with you: drug dealers. These people have easy money and a lot of time, hence they have a lot less to lose than the average folk. Sometimes they even live in practically lawless territories. Having money and some local power, they can exert a lot of influence and, while the State remains dutifully blind to their doings, allow themselves to be violent.
Likewise, we today have no reason to believe our "elites" aren't violent. Leaks of private bits from the french political class tells me, if anything, that they seem more prone to violence than the average guy.
So maybe culture plays a major role, where it essentially unteach violence and discourage from violent behaviors (e.g. public behavior), but power can be thought as having a self-reinforcing effect also, where relative lawlessness and lack of punishment encourages one to resort to violence as a radical and effective way of solving certain problems. Hence violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by the powerful and becomes a high-status marker.
Nobility in those time periods was compelled toward violence. At least that's what all history I've read tells me. The unwritten social contract in multiple ways would seem to have encouraged nobility to be involved in violence, both legitimatized and as a corollary, un-legitimized.
In light of that concluding "ultimately concede that a nontrivial part of the relationship between deprivation and crime in the present day is due to selection", from the initial data you provide does not appear warranted.
To talk about this more in-depth, in terms of deaths in battles, military actions of the time disproportionately involved nobility. They may have led groups of soldiers that could have come from any class, but a much smaller proportion of the overall population was expected to participate in this, and for nobility it was considered an obligation. More than just a unwritten social contract, it was also inherent in them maintaining their positions. If all nobility had stopped participating, they would risk being overthrown by the military leaders who took their place.
The end to this cycle comes from the rise of the merchant class. Such a merchant class existed before the change in violence your data supports, but the nobility still existed, was still more wealthy, and still depended upon their role in the use of violence to maintain their position. Why would the merchant class (citizen in Venetian terms), have been more bookish? Investing in martial pursuits was not particularly valuable to them. They would only need that if they wanted to enter the nobility, and there were ample barriers so as to make that not a common strategy to better one's position.
Training an individual for violence, even legitimized violence, has an inherent risk of weakening any prohibitions or inclinations against violence. There is this notion of the "noble" warrior, but it takes a lot of effort, and is still a gamble, to train someone to commit violence, and also try to influence them to use it only conditionally. That training might be skipped, ignored, delivered incompetently, or any number of other failures that should lead to little surprise that the group most universally trained for it also used it most often.
So, coming back to what changed? The merchant class became more dominant, and nation states became more centralized. Nobility removed themselves from martial pursuits, as there was less license to use them, and less requirement that they should.
One of the major problems with the selection theory you propose is that there isn't anywhere enough time for it to take effect. It might seem as if you can make a group less violent by eliminating all the violent individuals and not letting them reproduce, but genetics is far more complicated than that. Propensity to violence would be encoded in many genes, many recessive. Removing a selection of individuals committing 50% of violence from the next generations gene pool will not reduce the propensity to violence by 50% in the next generation.. nothing close to it. The things that brought them to represent 50% of violence are far more encoded in chance and confounding of different influences to be subject to change over a few generations.
“Yet this conceals something important: Venetian nobles were less concerned with literacy or the arts. One can see this by looking at the proportions of probates containing books”
Forgive my lack of statistical analysis but this looks like a huge assumption to me, could their wealth mean that their descendants already had all the books they needed and therefore would not need to be mentioned in probates?
Is it possible that hod carriers, street Arabs and gong farmers weren't arrested for crimes in Venice because nobody bothered to report the sorts of crimes that they committed or suffered?
Or as one modern-day American prosecutor told me off the record "I don't want to get involved in brown people problems."
Interesting! However, I take the assertion that "aristocratic families today are not known for their criminality" with some doubt. Yes, conviction rates, or even just prosecutions, are low, but that is no evidence that their criminality is lower than it has ever been. There may have been a change in the type of criminality from violent to financial, for example. There may have been a societal change towards not investigating/prosecuting aristocratic crimes - many lawyers come from, or aspire to, the upper classes for example. I admit that this is immeasurable, but I don't see that it can be excluded.
Excellent article! Today, we associate violence with low SES, but that association can be explained by the geographic origins of low SES groups. For the most part, they have come to industrial Western societies from peripheral non-Western regions where men have to use violence on a regular basis because the State is weak or nonexistent.
We see this in groups that are recruited for military service: the Gurkhas of the Himalayas, the Pashtuns of the Northwest Frontier, the Chechens of the Caucasus, the Berbers of the Atlas, the Highland Scots, and so on. These are mountain-dwelling peoples who, until recently, have never been conquered and pacified by a State. Moreover, such conquest largely remained superficial with a high reliance on indirect rule.
Conversely, we see the opposite with groups that have long lived under States that monopolize the use of violence.
Really interesting. I'm practically illiterate when it comes to statistics and graphs but the way the conclusions were put into words (for dummies like me) allowed me to follow the logic. Great stuff.
Well in the absence of strong law and order, violence is a good way to acquire high SES.
So what are the causal explanations? Thanks!
This was my initial take away as well.
For much of human history, being an "elite" means you or your ancestors violently took wealth from others. A major moral defense of capitalism and the modern economic world is that we provide people with avenues for wealth accumulation that do not involve zero sum actions of violence.
Fascinating stuff, thank you !
But... What if we got it all backwards? What if violence was both a marker of physiological deficiency as you said (eg. mental illness) but also a marker of... high status ?
This came to me because I am french and there is a group of people who don't fear to be violent with you: drug dealers. These people have easy money and a lot of time, hence they have a lot less to lose than the average folk. Sometimes they even live in practically lawless territories. Having money and some local power, they can exert a lot of influence and, while the State remains dutifully blind to their doings, allow themselves to be violent.
Likewise, we today have no reason to believe our "elites" aren't violent. Leaks of private bits from the french political class tells me, if anything, that they seem more prone to violence than the average guy.
So maybe culture plays a major role, where it essentially unteach violence and discourage from violent behaviors (e.g. public behavior), but power can be thought as having a self-reinforcing effect also, where relative lawlessness and lack of punishment encourages one to resort to violence as a radical and effective way of solving certain problems. Hence violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by the powerful and becomes a high-status marker.
I think it's an idea which has some merit.
Nobility in those time periods was compelled toward violence. At least that's what all history I've read tells me. The unwritten social contract in multiple ways would seem to have encouraged nobility to be involved in violence, both legitimatized and as a corollary, un-legitimized.
In light of that concluding "ultimately concede that a nontrivial part of the relationship between deprivation and crime in the present day is due to selection", from the initial data you provide does not appear warranted.
To talk about this more in-depth, in terms of deaths in battles, military actions of the time disproportionately involved nobility. They may have led groups of soldiers that could have come from any class, but a much smaller proportion of the overall population was expected to participate in this, and for nobility it was considered an obligation. More than just a unwritten social contract, it was also inherent in them maintaining their positions. If all nobility had stopped participating, they would risk being overthrown by the military leaders who took their place.
The end to this cycle comes from the rise of the merchant class. Such a merchant class existed before the change in violence your data supports, but the nobility still existed, was still more wealthy, and still depended upon their role in the use of violence to maintain their position. Why would the merchant class (citizen in Venetian terms), have been more bookish? Investing in martial pursuits was not particularly valuable to them. They would only need that if they wanted to enter the nobility, and there were ample barriers so as to make that not a common strategy to better one's position.
Training an individual for violence, even legitimized violence, has an inherent risk of weakening any prohibitions or inclinations against violence. There is this notion of the "noble" warrior, but it takes a lot of effort, and is still a gamble, to train someone to commit violence, and also try to influence them to use it only conditionally. That training might be skipped, ignored, delivered incompetently, or any number of other failures that should lead to little surprise that the group most universally trained for it also used it most often.
So, coming back to what changed? The merchant class became more dominant, and nation states became more centralized. Nobility removed themselves from martial pursuits, as there was less license to use them, and less requirement that they should.
One of the major problems with the selection theory you propose is that there isn't anywhere enough time for it to take effect. It might seem as if you can make a group less violent by eliminating all the violent individuals and not letting them reproduce, but genetics is far more complicated than that. Propensity to violence would be encoded in many genes, many recessive. Removing a selection of individuals committing 50% of violence from the next generations gene pool will not reduce the propensity to violence by 50% in the next generation.. nothing close to it. The things that brought them to represent 50% of violence are far more encoded in chance and confounding of different influences to be subject to change over a few generations.
“Yet this conceals something important: Venetian nobles were less concerned with literacy or the arts. One can see this by looking at the proportions of probates containing books”
Forgive my lack of statistical analysis but this looks like a huge assumption to me, could their wealth mean that their descendants already had all the books they needed and therefore would not need to be mentioned in probates?