Why have we got more yobs than ever?

[Loosehead]

http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?th readID=4452&&&edition=1&ttl=20061025154626

Why are more and more young people choosing the path of anti social behaviour and crime? Have 40 years of liberal thinking finally been exposed as folly? I know that even the wettest liberal would prefer it wasn't this way so what went wrong?

[admarlow]

I see it like this...go soft on drugs = more drugs..go soft on criminals = more crime.

[Backdrifter]

By the way, "record numbers" of youths in custody doesn't necessarily mean there are more yobs than ever - it could just be that there are more of them in custody.

It's convenient (and in a way comforting) to want to pin it on one thing, e.g. to take your suggestion, 40 years of liberal thinking. And I'm not even entirely sure what that means anyway. And if it counts as one thing. But the phenomenon of yobs and "anti-social" youths is never going to be neatly ascribed to one cause. There are all sorts of possible factors, such as: no sense of community therefore no sense of belonging, respect or responsibility (and if so, what are the causes of that?), progressive stunting of basic social skills, bad parenting, progressively greater emphasis on material gain and therefore higher expectations, lack of discipline at school, genetics... etc etc etc - the list could continue with dozens more possibilities, each with its own set of possible causes.

Bear in mind, some of these yobs were born and raised during the Thatcher years - not exactly a period of wet liberalism, in terms of the tone of government, were they? It's complex, and if it's due to anything that "went wrong" it might be a lot of things.... or maybe even due to stuff we thought was right.

[Doggy2]

This isn't a crisis in UK but a world wide phenomenon and it's getting worse each year. I don't think it has much to do with liberal thinking though.

But I do think it has a lot to do with parents and their way of upbringing. Lack of discipline combined with technological advances has brought along with itself other stress/ decease that wasn't there 40 years ago.

[admarlow]

The book ''Freakonomics'' puts up some interesting (and controversial) reasons for patterns in crime waves.
The author looked at America and about 17/18 years after abortion was leagalised the crime rate dropped dramatically. The reason were for this were
1)people from lower social groups tend to commit more crimes
2)people from lower social groups tend to have more kids and at a younger age
3)legalised abortion ment that less people statistically likley to commit the most crime were simply not born.

Not bring this theory over to the UK - since the 80 and maybe even before than, there has been an increce in teenage pregnancy, and the majority of teenage pregnancies come from groups of society more likley to commit more crime....

[jake-the-peg]

and of course the fact that lower socio-economic groups represent more of the population was adequately accounted for?

[admarlow]

of course it was done on a per 1000 ratio, this guy is a very well know economist and had VERY sound methodology
http://www.freakonomics.com/

[jake-the-peg]

No actually he counted arrests on an overall basis and not a per capita one and got slammed for it by ex Harvard professor and ecconomist at the Federal Reserve Christopher Foote.


http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB1133142 61192407815-7O0CuSR0RArhWpc9pxaKd_paZU0_200512 28.html?mod=tff_article

Foote says the effect vanishes when you measure it on that basis

[admarlow]

I still dont think anybody would dissagree with the statement that poorer people have more kids and commit more crime though?

[admarlow]

Edward Glaeser, a Harvard professor who helped referee Mr. Levitt's original abortion submission to the Quarterly Journal of Economics, said the Foote critique isn't damning, though it does suggest the impact of abortion on crime has not been as strong as Mr. Levitt has argued. "These guys have put the [data] through the wringer," Mr. Glaeser says of Mr. Foote and his research assistant. "There is no question that the results get smaller and weaker, but there still seems to be something there."


It looks as if the figures were exagerated but still valid.

[Lonnie]

its down to two things, the PC brigade, and legalising certain drugs.

[Backdrifter]

No thanks to Lonnie for that gross oversimplification. It's a popular knee-jerk reaction to blame pretty much everything on political correctness. But, as with most knee-jerk reactions, completely misleading. And if you think about it for more than a second, it's clear it doesn't make any sense.