Escalation Theory: Compliance, Violence, and Overachievement In Society

Some people think crime is caused by poverty. Some think crime is caused by criminals. Some even think crime is caused by the climate. Don’t swallow these easy-to-digest popular narratives — society is shaped by its elite, always has been, always will be. It all comes back to the marshmallows. A brief summary of what’s to come in this essay: Online science analyst Crémieux wrote a provocative piece recently exploring why poverty alone is insufficient to explain variation in crime rates and showing how the Venetian upper class was massively overrepresented in violent crime until warfare reduced their numbers to near-zero. But as a firm believer in the idea that everything is downstream of economics, I want to present an alternate causal hypothesis that inverts the usual narrative: poverty doesn’t cause societal violence — how you become an elite does. The selection process of each city’s elite members differs according to that city’s dominant economic industry. I suggest that the eventu

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• Jorge Fuentes