But... Europe

Arguments about urban crime tend to involve the following somewhat-stale exchange (which I realize I am oversimplifying in a variety of ways):

Conservative: Law and Order!  Law and Order! Put the bad guys away!

Liberal: We don’t need to put the bad guys away!  All we need to do is strike at the root causes of crime by spending even more money on social welfare programs so we can reduce poverty, which in turn will reduce crime.  

Conservative: Let’s look at the facts. In the 1960s, we had an explosion of social spending, a massive reduction in poverty, and a reduction of incarceration.  And yet crime exploded!  And as incarceration rates rose in the conservative 1980s and 1990s, crime went down. And then in the 2010s, poverty and unemployment exploded due to the Great Recession, and yet crime kept going down.  And then in 2020 and 2021, social spending exploded so government could mitigate the effects of COVID, and crime exploded.  It might be an exaggeration to say that social spending causes crime, but there’s either no correlation of a negative correlation.

Liberal: But… Europe! Or to be more precise: western European countries have bigger welfare states and less inequality than the U.S. And they have less crime.  Even big cities such as Paris and London have homicide rates far lower than those of most American cities. Therefore, if the U.S. had European-size welfare states we’d have less crime too.

To me the most interesting part of this argument is the “But Europe” part. It seems to me that if the argument was persuasive, European crime rates would have been higher when their welfare states were smaller, and lower when their welfare states grew. And if the argument was persuasive, the European states with the largest welfare states would be the safest, while the ones with the smallest welfare states would have U.S.-level crime (for more, see my Red Cities, Blue Cities, and Crime blog post).

Regarding the latter, I looked at data for the twelve largest Western European countries (UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Portugal, Austria, and Switzerland).  Within this group, social spending as a percentage of GNP covers a pretty wide range: from 31 percent of gross national product in France to 19 percent in Switzerland (only slightly more than the U.S.). ** As of 2019 (the last year I have international data for) Switzerland actually has the lowest homicide rate of any of these nations, at 0.38 per 100,000 residents. So the country with the smallest welfare state appears to have the fewest homicides. Of the five countries in this group with the largest welfare states (France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, Sweden) three were in the top half for homicide rates (France, Belgium, Sweden) while Italy and Austria were in the bottom half. Admittedly, all of these countries were so peaceful by international standards that maybe the differences between them don’t matter much- in 2019, Sweden had 1 homicide per 100,000 residents, about one-sixth the U.S. rate.  So it appears that western European nations are all pretty safe, but within this very safe group there wasn’t much difference between the most generous nations and the stingiest.

What about welfare state growth? In 1930, none of the nations discussed above spent over 5 percent of GNP on social welfare. Then spending began to grow: by 1960, six countries had broken the 10 percent barrier. By 1970, all but two had (though none were spending over 20 percent). By 1980, six countries were spending over 20 percent of GNP on social spending, and only two were spending less than ten percent.  By 1990, seven were spending over 20 percent and none were spending under 10 percent. And by 2015, all but one were spending over 20 percent.

In 1953, at the start of the great welfare-spending boom, western European homicide rates were roughly comparable to their current rates. Only three of the twelve European countries mentioned above had over 1 homicide per 100,000 residents, and none had over 1.5. In other words, the reason western Europe is safer than the U.S. is not because of the great welfare state expansion; the reason is that Western Europe has always (at least after World War II) been safer. 

But in the 1970s, crime started to rise. The number of countries with homicide rates over 1/100,000 rose from two in 1970 to six in 1980 to nine in 1990. Then in Europe, as in the U.S., crime rates started to fall: the number of countries with homicide rates at this level declined to six in 2000, three in 2010, and one in 2019 and 2020. In sum, increased spending coincided with rising crime in the 1970s and 1980s, and then coincided with declining crime. This absence of correlation suggests that social spending is not really a major factor governing rising or declining crime.

*Poverty data by year is at https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-people.html

U.S. crime data by year is at https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

Incarceration data by year is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png

**Spending data is at  https://ourworldindata.org/government-spending#public-spending-growth-in-early-industrialised-countries-was-largely-driven-by-social-spending

International homicide data is at https://ourworldindata.org/homicides