But according to Gary Becker, poverty does cause crime! : )

I would be interested in knowing what makes you think it doesn't.

Your last paragraph both amuses me and gives me hope for the future. Where do I cast my ballot for you as dictator?

Point 4 is unquestionably true!...

Does anyone else agree with my theory that the decrease in risky sexual behavior since the early 1990's might be due mostly to the rise of internet porn? I mean... if all the teenage boys are at home wacking off at the computer, who is there for the girls to get pregnant by?

That's my theory anyways, that the downward trend in teenage pregnancy has little to do with improving sexual education or a less sexualized society, but to less games of spin-the-bottle among the Ipod generation.

Poverty cases crime...

Hmmm, got a link to a study or even a good argument that suggests otherwise?

I would be interested in knowing what makes you think it doesn't.

It's only correlated with crime here and now. Look at Ashkenazi Jews and Northeast Asian immigrants anywhere they went in the late 19th and early 20th C -- no crime waves. Low IQ, impulsiveness / high time preference, and lack of empathy / psychoticism is what causes crime.

Does anyone else agree with my theory that the decrease in risky sexual behavior since the early 1990's might be due mostly to the rise of internet porn? I mean... if all the teenage boys are at home wacking off at the computer, who is there for the girls to get pregnant by?

No one had access to the internet in 1991, let alone tons of free porn to download. Internet porn did not become widespread among adolescent boys until the very late '90s for middle / upper-middle class, maybe early 2000s for others.

Same pattern for downloading free mp3s -- that was a turn-of-the-millennium thing.

if all the teenage boys are at home wacking off at the computer, who is there for the girls to get pregnant by?

You make it sound like there was a large enough supply of willing females that the guys were ignoring. If you think a teenage boy would prefer jerking off to doing the real thing with one of his estrogen-dripping schoolmates, you're insane.

Here's a post of mine that has a nice table on crime rates by type of crime and social class in 14th C Venice, from an article by criminologist Manuel Eisner:

http://akinokure.blogspot.com/20...ll-us- much.html

Back then, the nobility was far more violent and criminal than other classes, even what we'd call working-class. And I doubt this was atypical of life in the late Middle Ages (more digging around would probably confirm this).

This all changed when the mercantile classes genetically replaced the aristocracy and poor. The new merchants were smarter, more future-oriented, and had what we'd call "more socialized" personalities. All are heritable, so genetic change led to cultural and social change -- a far less criminal society than before.

Same is true among the Yanamamo tribes in the Amazon. An anthropologist relayed to them the fashionable Romantic theory that they were raiding and killing other tribes because they were poor and desperate. The men guffawed and responded that, "We like meat -- but we like women even more." They were high-status men raiding down-and-out tribes to rape and abduct their women.

Anyway, the point is that poverty doesn't cause crime -- never has.

You make it sound like there was a large enough supply of willing females that the guys were ignoring. If you think a teenage boy would prefer jerking off to doing the real thing with one of his estrogen-dripping schoolmates, you're insane.

I'm not saying they're ignoring them, but guys who didn't have much of a chance with girls in middleschool/high school might have been less likely to make passes. Their horniness had been somewhat sated by the increase in available porn.

If you look at some of graphs, the dropoff starts between 1990 and 1995, and continues after that. Maybe the initial drop was due to improving social conditions, but by the late 90's/early 2000's it continues to drop below the 80's numbers due to the effect of internet porn.

It would be interesting to get some numbers from porn viewing habits, and correlate them with the trend of decreased adolescent sexual activity. Maybe the same thing happened for rape, stds, etc. Who said porn can't be a good thing for society :P

Turns out there is some support for my hypothesis, take a look at the section "Effect on sex crimes" on the Wikipedia page for pornography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography

There are several studies cited there finding an inverse relationship between the availability of pornography and sex crimes. The paper in citation 12 shows that there is -0.307 correlation between state-wide percent households accessing the internet and teen birth rates (for females 15 to 19) (see table 7).

It also has some interesting quotes like this: "Statistics from Ropelato (2006) find that the 12-17 age group is the largest demographic consumer of internet pornography, and that 80% of 15-17 year olds admit to multiple exposures to hard-core pornography on the internet."

Thanks for the data and analysis. Stuff like this is why I check out GNXP every day.

Orion42:

"decrease in risky sexual behavior since the early
1990s"

Well, I can't give you stats but in my case I'm sure its the difference between being 54 and 72 years old.

agnostic: "Look at Ashkenazi Jews and Northeast Asian immigrants anywhere they went in the late 19th and early 20th C -- no crime waves."

Actually, there was quite a bit of crime amongst the Ashkenazim, just not as much violent crime...much of it tended toward the petty or white-collar sort, insurance fraud, tax evasion, illegal gambling rackets, and so on.

But there were many Jewish criminals too who caused a lot of mayhem and violence, Jews who were involved in ethnic gangs; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Cat...erican_mobsters

"No one had access to the internet in 1991, let alone tons of free porn to download. Internet porn did not become widespread among adolescent boys until the very late '90s for middle / upper-middle class, maybe early 2000s for others. "

Wrong. Porn is what drove the adoption of the internet at least in my house. My younger brother learned from his friends how to get porn from bulletin board-like sites in 1990. We were just normal, average teenagers in the suburbs. And there was plenty of porn to get too, so we weren't the only ones.

If you want a cultural time marker, go watch Wargames (1983) and you will see Matthew Broderick using a modem to log onto the internet. People were definitely logging on before browsers came around in the early 90's.

No, you're wrong. I was born in 1980, as were all my peers (or '81 / '82), and no one downloaded porn from the internet until about '95 - '96. (We knew how to pilfer our parents' Playboys as early as 3rd or 4th grade.) Even then, it was a small offering of crappy still pictures, worse than you could find in Playboy or something. Video clips weren't until about 1999.

In the 1990s, you were still looking at a Playboy-type magazine or VHS tapes, whether you got them yourself, stole one from your dad, or got one from a friend.

Bulletin-board sites -- your brother was a raging geek, then. A normal person didn't do anything with the internet until AOL in about 1993.

Here's a better movie thought-experiment -- when did the theme of internet porn show up in teen movies? That's suggestive of when it was at all common among adolescents. There is no lag in adoption of technology and when it shows up in movies -- you can trace the rise of cell phones in society by seeing when they show up in movies, for instance.

On Venice, its nobility was mercantile. While it may have somewhat aped the manners and outlook of other aristocracies in Latin Christendom, they were in no sense a feudal protect/predate-peasants warrior-landholder group. Their income mostly came from trade and commerce. Venice is just not typical of Latin Christendom at the time in any sense. It never had a popular revolt, for example but did have equality before the law and a highly democratic system amongst its citizens. (The nobles: only nobles were citizens of Venice, most of the population were technically subjects, but the law did not grant any special status to citizens beyond the constitutional differences.)

It also gave us words such as ghetto, arsenal, the first quarantine rules (after they lost 50% of their population to the black death) and deficit financing. It was also an important example for Madison when he was doing his failure analysis of republics (1,000 years old and still going at the time, though Napoleon was about to end its independence.)

Agnostic, in 1990 when my brother and I were on the internet, you were 10 years old, of course you weren't downloading porn. My friends and I were though. Seriously, I have no reason to make this up. We weren't raging geeks either, just normal teenagers with raging hormones. This kind of information travels fast in high school; a lot of teen boys were doing this in my very typical suburb.

This is an awesome blog. Everyone else acts like they never took a math class. All this hype about people needing college and then you see the idiocy of comments (from alegedly educated people) about a 1% change in teen pregnancy when the overwhelming majority of "teen" pregnancies are among adult women. The ridiculous headline of pregnancy increase in 26 states. Well duh, that is about half the states. The other 24 went down. With the overall average of practically no change. Do people really expect no variation in incidence of any quantifiable human behavior? Keep up the good work. I vote for no college degrees for anyone who doesn't pass calculus and statistics.

Poverty does not cause crime. The latest "mismanagement" for personal gain on Wall should give you at least some evidence of that. Check out the Amish; dirt poor and low crime. Low crime is the result of indoctrination and social structure.

Agnostic, in 1990 when my brother and I were on the internet, you were 10 years old, of course you weren't downloading porn.

When I was 10, my friends and I stole or otherwise collected pages from our parents' dirty magazines, or however we got them, and even had a good hiding system (in board games that we never played, or even buried in a nearby area that no one went to). And we had computers with modems. And we had older siblings who knew how to use them. If it were common, we would've known about it.

This kind of information travels fast in high school; a lot of teen boys were doing this in my very typical suburb.

Your suburb was atypical -- everyone would have been doing it by the mid-'90s. And they weren't -- I would have noticed. Just like I would've noticed if cell phones were common in 1995 or before (they weren't -- cell phone ownership reached 40% in 2000).

Show me a graph of the percent of homes in the US that had a modem, as a function of time. They weren't common then, let alone being used to access the internet. Mainstreaming of internet use is AOL and early web browsers, beginning around 1993 but not being very popular until 1996 or so.

Or again, show me a pop culture reference to the commonness or ubiquity of internet porn from the early or mid '90s. It's trivial to do so for things that were common, like dirty magazines, VHS tapes, etc.

Actually, there was quite a bit of crime amongst the Ashkenazim, just not as much violent crime

But the context here is whether or not "poverty causes crime," and no one argues that jaywalking or embezzlement is caused by poverty. No violent crime is clearly what I meant.

OK, forget the prevalence of modems. Just look at rates of computer ownership:

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ils/pdf/...df/ opbils31.pdf

In 1990, 15% of households had a computer -- obviously those with a modem were even fewer. Just under 1/4 of college graduate households had a computer.

The US Census didn't even track computer usage until 1994, and didn't track internet usage until 1997 -- reflecting that reality that neither was very common before those dates.

http://www.nchs.census.gov/cps/c...puter/ sdata.htm

Or again, show me a pop culture reference to the commonness or ubiquity of internet porn from the early or mid '90s. It's trivial to do so for things that were common, like dirty magazines, VHS tapes, etc.

Okay maybe you're right about internet porn not really being common until the mid/late 1990's, but maybe the rise in pornography was through those other things you mention: increase in VHS, magazines, etc. This trend may still be partly responsible for the decrease in teen birth rates.

I still agree with Keith in a sense though, I think you are underestimating the resourcefulness of the horny teenage boy. It wouldn't surprise me if they were already sneaking onto adult bulletin boards and newsgroups in the early 1990's. If it was there, they would have found it; porn is reputed to be ones of main drivers of the growth of the internet. Just because your social group wasn't clued in, doesn't mean it wasn't common.

And you really think this sort of activity would emerge into pop culture that quickly? Personal porn habits aren't as innocuous as cell phones. I don't think internet porn gets the treatment in pop culture even today that it could given its ubiquity. It's still a somewhat taboo topic, except in R-rated comedies.

I tried to write a response before you most recent one agnostic, but for some reason it never got through. Anyway, I'll address your latest argument.

15% of households had a computer in 1990, overall, but the numbers were significantly higher for households with some college education (19.4%) and college degrees (23.7%). If we're talking about upper middle-class, which I'm assuming more readers of GNPX are, then the numbers were probably closer to 20% or 1/5 of families owning computers in 1990. For the sake of argument, say half had the traditional modem connection to the internet.

If only 10% of households had internet access, would this have made the viewing of internet pornography by teenagers uncommon? I don't think so. The first kid in class that figured out how to get access to porn would probably share valuable secret this with his friends. From the comments above, and from experience, this kind of sharing seems to be quite common among adolescent boys. Even with only 1 out of every 10 kids with direct access to internet porn, easily 30-40% of kids could have been viewing it in 1990, making it fairly common. Of course, that number would have increased rapidly to the 80-90% we have now. Anyway, this is just to say that your argument based on 15% of households having a computer doesn't amount to much, although I don't have any counter-data.

My missing comments were to the effect that internet porn has always been somewhat of a taboo topic, and is certainly not as innocuous as something like cellphone use, which may explain it's lack of representation in the popular culture (something which continues today except in R-rated movies).

Looking at the numbers on the Y-axes on your graphs for whites/Asians and NAMs, I'd say there's plenty to worry about. Teen pregnancy is the least of it.

As for teen pregnancy, it seems that it should go up eventually because the quickest way a woman can reproduce her genes is to get pregnant as a teen. If you were a woman who wanted to reproduce your genes, what would you do? Crank out as many babies as possible with the highest quality men you could find (in practice this would probably mean alphas). The state will take care of them if you can't, and if you are going to do it yourself, better you should do it when your mom is still young enough to help (also better that you should be 30 and not 50 when your little treasure starts cranking out her own bastards).

I don't have time to try to confirm or refute this right now - if I did I would try to find out if women who start young have above-average reproduction rates. Maybe tomorrow. But I strongly suspect that they do, that not all of them are going to be susceptible to the harmful (from an evolutionary point of view) trend against teen pregnancy, and that those who aren't susceptible will tend to increase as long as the strategy is viable.

It's only correlated with crime here and now. Look at Ashkenazi Jews and Northeast Asian immigrants anywhere they went in the late 19th and early 20th C -- no crime waves.

In parts of the US organized crime was controlled by Ashkenazi Jews. The Purple Gang in Detroit is the most famous group. Some of the Jewish neighborhoods were very tough. There's a memoir called "Jews WIthout Money" and several books about the Jewish mobs.

Teen pregnancy was highest around 1950-1960. It's not really a problem if a 16 year old teenager can get an OK job and if the father marries the mother. There are people around here now in their late sixties and early seventies who dropped out of tenth grade to start families.

The worse the job market is and the higher the training requirements, the worse the effect of teen pregnancy are -- including 19 year old pregnancy, and even if the couple marries. The people I know got jobs as laborers or truck drivers and worked their way up, but that life plan is less and less practical. And even so, the successful ones only worked their way up to the lower middle class. Even auto mechanics need schooling now.

Agnostic:
No violent crime is clearly what I meant.

That actually wasn't very clear. But now that it is clear, I feel better about not taking the time to debate this with you. : ) We're not disagreeing as much as I originally thought.

alt.sex was created on April 3, 1988. By 1990, that cat was way out of the bag.

alt.sex was created on April 3, 1988. By 1990, that cat was way out of the bag.

That cat was way out of the bag, but hardly anyone was playing with it.

We're talking about social history -- how the percent of people downloading internet porn has changed over time, or where they got it from if not the internet, etc.

So when something was created is irrelevant, except to establish a lower-bound for when something was common. I could make a similar autistic argument that the cell phone was "way out of the bag" in 1980.

Only if we're talking about some technology that has a huge impact when even a few people own it -- nuclear weapons, bulletproof vests, etc. -- does its existence matter, rather than the percent of everyone who use it.

Internet porn does not belong there. We are talking about mass consumption of it, and how that might affect the way people live.

Dude- alt.sex wasn't spontaneously generated and simply let loose. There was a pre-existing demand of internet users that called for its creation. [So what? It's obvious that we're talking about how typical or common something was at some time, not whether 0 or greater than 0 people were using it.]

When something transitions to "common" I neither know nor care, [Then butt out of the conversation, which IS about this] but the proposition that by 1990 internet porn was not available to anyone with the minimum know-how and desire is incorrect. [The entire thread has been about whether or not the percent of people downloading internet porn was sufficient to cause a decrease in the teen pregnancy rate. It's also clear that "no one" means hardly anyone, as in "no one had a cell phone in 1980," even though greater than 0 did. Natural language is not logical language.]

Edited By Siteowner

I remember upgrading my modem in late 1990 - going from a 2400 to a 9600 IIRC - with the intention of using it for dialup SLIP connection, and also for downloading software updates and patches from Bulletin Boards. When I asked the store owner if he knew of any "good Bulletin boards", he gave me a knowing smile and said he would be willing to trade numbers - i.e. for porn BB's - I had no idea what he was talking about, and he abruptly changed the topic and walked off.
A few months later I was on the Internet and discover alt.sex.* and other sites, but it could take 2 to 20 minutes to download an image of a bikini clad girl - so wasn't really worth the hassle, and could barely be called porn by today's standards. I had better luck downloading from alt.sex.stories

So I think there was some real online porn, known to a very small percentage of people, but it mostly wasn't on the Internet per se, but on discreet Bulletin Boards.

Agnostic, post my follow-up comment with whatever dumbass editorializing you want. I'll post what I please.

Or just acknowledge you are, and always will be, a pussy.. The final desperate words of a total loser. Don't try to blame others for your lack of social skills and reading comprehension ability. If you can't figure out what people are talking about, just ask. As of now, you bore me, therefore further retarded comments will be deleted.

Edited By Siteowner

"It's only correlated with crime here and now. Look at Ashkenazi Jews and Northeast Asian immigrants anywhere they went in the late 19th and early 20th C -- no crime waves. Low IQ, impulsiveness / high time preference, and lack of empathy / psychoticism is what causes crime."

um, ashkenazis were at least popularly blamed for crimes waves in the 20s and 30s when they started muscling into organize crime. and the explanation for why jews got into the racket is, predictably enough, "dislocation and poverty." http://query.nytimes.com/gst/ ful...75BC0A962948260

and of course, the chinese had their tong battles in SF and NYC -- there is even a street in NYC's chinatown that was called "bloody angle" because so many tong killings took place there. http://www.sfmuseum.org/sfpd/sfpd4.html

that said, my lazy-ass googling of the subject didn't turn up any hard data (all the evidence i could find is pretty anecdotal), though i'd be curious to know if ashkenaz and chinese actually had comparable, or lower, violent crime rates than gentile whites of the same class at the time.

Again anecdotal, but loads of fun if you're interested in accounts of late 19th early 20th c. Jewish thugs and gang-bangers - try googling "Monk Eastman."

"Check out the Amish; dirt poor and low crime."

Dangerously inexact. Let us say instead that the Amish have few crimes that come to the attention of, or are reported to, outsiders.

Comparing the law of general society with the law of theirs is of course apples and oranges in any case.

Oh Ok. I apologize to you. I was in a foul mood yesterday.

I really do enjoy your posts.

I still think you're a pussy, however. We understand: you can't help being a loser.

Edited By Siteowner

The Amish have _very_ low crime rates.

On the Amish:

Poverty is a factor in the crime rate, but only because crime looks better relative to legal options when you're poor. In an Amish society, this link is missing-- what are you going to steal, a cow?

Also, smaller communities tend to have lower crime rates if only because it's much harder to commit a crime and get away with it. Let's say you steal a cow-- don't you think your neighbors will notice?


So Amish communities aren't the best for comparisons.

The Amish have _very_ low crime rates.

But high IQs!

Some people who have left the Amish faith or might otherwise be in the know contend that sexual abuse of minors is rampant in Amish communities.

I understand your point about the Amish perhaps stealing a cow. However my point was that indoctrination and social structure (which yur example illustrates) are key to low crime. Also, I believe the topic was really violent crime and the Amish have low incidence of murder as well. As for sexual abuse of minors, I haven't heard of that, but I am not an expert on the Amish. That also may be how you define it. A woman marrying at age 14 might be considered by some to be abuse, but in human history, well, rather ordinary. I have no idea if Amish marry young, perhaps they don't. Certainly no group of humans can boast perfection, nor its approximation. Any comparison of crime is, of course, relative.

Mark,

I read that story about the Amish girl who had been molested. The story itself does not address the prevalence of sexual abuse of minors. To expect zero incidence would be naive.

I did once read an analysis of mental health services for the Amish wherein the Amish surveyed felt that therapy for mental illness obtained outside of their communities was more effective than the help they could get within their community.