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The following article
is reprinted courtesy of the Hamilton Spectator, McMaster University’s
partner in the Science in the City Lecture Series.
News,
Saturday, February 8, 2003, p. A08
Homicide reconsidered; Murders go up when rich-poor gap grows: expert
Steve Buist
The Hamilton Spectator
Capitalism is great for
business, especially if you're a homicide detective.
That's a conclusion that
can be drawn from the research of Martin Daly, a professor of psychology
at McMaster University who has looked at the connection between
homicide rates and income distribution in Canada and the United
States.
Daly will be delivering
a lecture called "Competition, Inequity and Homicide"
on Tuesday night in The Spectator auditorium as part of the Science
in the City lecture series sponsored jointly by McMaster and The
Spectator.
What Daly has discovered
is that when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the morgues
get busier.
He used an economic indicator
that measures income distribution and compared it to homicide rates
for different populations, including the 10 Canadian provinces and
50 states in the U.S.
At one end of the scale
would be a society where everyone's income is identical, while at
the other end of the scale would be a society where one person earned
all of the wealth and everyone else earned nothing.
Daly found that the greater
the inequality in the distribution of income between rich and poor,
the higher the homicide rate. "The more inequitable the rewards,
the higher the rates of violence," said Daly, "presumably
because it's more desperately competitive at the bottom."
The reasons behind this
connection are intriguing.
In places that have high
homicide rates, what increases most is the proportion of men killing
unrelated men in some type of social dispute.
"(It's) poor, unemployed
guys in a macho dispute in a bar, something like that," Daly
explained.
"Most often, somebody
has disrespected somebody publicly or somebody chats up somebody
else's girlfriend, that kind of stuff.
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"It's a huge proportion where the homicide rate is high,"
he said. "Where the homicide rate is really low like
in Scandinavia, there's almost none of these cases."
The American criminal
justice system calls these "trivial altercations"
-- disputes that don't seem important enough for anyone to
risk their life over, yet someone ends up dead. Most of them
attract little attention from the media.
"In a city
like Detroit or Chicago or Washington, on an average Friday
night, there's one or two of these," said Daly, "and
on an average Saturday night, there's two or three.
"Mostly, they're
poor black guys that nobody gives much of a damn about."
It's an evolutionary
spin on socio-economics that suggests the same type of survival
of the fittest strategies that play out in the jungles and
the forests are playing out on the streets of North America.
"Why are guys
so competitive that they take their life in their hands over
disputes about space and status?" Daly wonders.
"Clearly they
live in what they perceive as a very competitive milieu and
where this kind of stuff is worst, a huge proportion of guys
are unemployed, their life prospects suck, and they don't
have recourse to the law to defend them."
One possible explanation
is that the people stuck in this competitive underclass may
decide that riskier behaviour may be worth the potential rewards
-- greater status, more money, perhaps a woman's attention.
"The fact that
there's enormous wealth trickles down through North American
society as a kind of perception that we live in a winner-take-all
society," said Daly.
"The idea (is)
that somebody's making out like a bandit and it ain't me,
so if I escalate my tactics and I'm more ruthless, then I
can make out better."
What's also interesting
is that the index is an accurate predictor of homicide rates
regardless of whether it measures American states or Canadian
provinces.
New England states
with the same measure of income distribution as Canadian provinces
also have the same murder rates.
It suggests that
Canada's lower rate of homicide compared to the U.S. is a
function of a more equitable distribution of wealth than anything
else.
"I think this
is an important arrow in the quiver of social democrats and
people on the left to argue that apart from just the plain
justice of income-levelling policies, they actually reduce
the levels of violence," said Daly.
Tuesday's lecture
is free and open to the public.
To register for
a spot, call 905-525-9140 ext. 24934 or e-mail
at sciencecity@mcmaster.ca.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m.; the session starts at 7 p.m.
sbuist@thespec.com
or 905-526-3226.
© 2003 The Hamilton Spectator. All rights
reserved.
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