Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem. There has to be a better way when both sides would be better off by just paying the theif double. Some kind of proof of work system to show that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
The person needs to have a stake in the infrastructure OR there needs to be a high chance of them getting caught and losing something. People with little stake in a community will strip infrastructure bare. Inequality is a significant root cause here.
These copper thieves are almost always hardcore drug addicts. The “inequality” explanation is incorrect. A failure to recognize that has grave consequences for everyone.
> Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem.
Because the only solutions that work are social.
> There has to be a better way when both sides would be better off by just paying the theif double. Some kind of proof of work system to show that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
Kipling has a poem about that one, it doesn't work out.
This kind of talk from leftist politicians translates to me as : "We will use the criminally insane, and drug addicted against you in a campaign of terror until you vote in Communists. We will do everything in our power to prevent you from imprisoning these people or the people who poison them with drugs to maintain our leverage over you and increase our political power. We will only offer you one solution, vote for us, the high priests who will bring you the promised land of fixed social problems through some process we won't implement until we're totally in control and that we won't tell you about. All out solutions before then will be used to increase the problem to increase our leverage and bring about the revolution while blaming you for not giving us enough power."
I mean if any of the leftists "solutions" actually worked instead of making things worse and wasting insane amounts of money, time, property and victims lives I'd have a different view of this. El Salvador is the counter example to all the leftists blather. Most violent country in the world fixed in 3 years with 90% approval of the government by just calling b.s on all the leftists propaganda about "social causes."
Prison is expensive and has downstream costs as well--it should be a last resort.
There's definitely times where it absolutely is the right thing but it should not be default mode.
Note that these crimes are almost always done by drug addicts. We have the War on Drugs that was supposed to make this never happen and yet it's a fucking epidemic. So how's that war working for you, eh?
It's cheaper to get these people off drugs and redirected to being "good citizens" again, or even just give them their drugs in a controlled medical setting (like is done with methadone).
The thing about drugs is they are actually insanely cheap. You could make a few million doses of meth for a few thousand dollars at the industrial scale. It's the black market and war on drugs that raise the cost, which in turn lead people to steal.
And as others have mentioned, jails are extremely expensive and breeding grounds for more crime in the future.
The economics solution is to legalize drugs and give addicts an unlimited supply.
Addicts do not want money, they are doing this because they have a near-perfectly inelastic demand for drugs. Satisfy the demand and they'll will get high all day + opt out of society.
I thought about this when my catalytic converter was stolen. Part of me was like "maybe I should just strap a two $100 bills onto it with a note pleading them not to take it. But then, of course, the type of person to steal a converter is also the type of person that would take the $200 AND steal the converter
The solution is inexpensive drugs for addicts, minimum standard of living, programs for getting off drugs. But there’s an incentive to make drugs expensive and people desperate, and to punish people for their “failures” rather than forgiving and helping.
It is cheaper to avoid the situation by structuring society in a way that people aren’t willing to steal copper for quick money.
The US imprisons more people per capita than any other democratic country, and than most non-democratic countries (only North Korea and arguably China really come close). Unaccountably, it is not a crime-free utopia (it's actually fairly crime-y by rich developed standards).
In my country it was eventually accepted that some people are too far gone. The junkies got their daily ration of drugs until they died of natural causes.
I don't think America is culturally capable of doing that though.
Isn’t the most obvious response from economics that the crime needs to be made more expensive? In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher.
If a quarter of the people who tried a comparable theft got thrown in jail for 2 years and another quarter got shot by a security guard, I suspect attempts would be rare.
The financial damage done by the thief is presumably irrelevant to the thief, beyond the fact that sentencing is probably stricter for bigger thefts.
I highly doubt the people doing this look at crime and punishment stats before they do this. More punishment often just ends up costing society because courts and incarceration aren't cheap and no real rehabilitation so it often just makes the person do more bad things when they get out. I'm not saying 'no jail', but we do need evidence based criminal justice.
I don’t think potential criminals need to research statistics to have a general sense of the ROI of attempting the crime. They probably have a ballpark sense of both the cash value of the stolen property and the likelihood of getting caught.
Yes but those are very different time scales of consequence. Definite immediate reward or possible long term consequence. People with active drug addictions are known to vastly overprioritize the former to the detriment of the latter. I mean, they also know the risks of overdose but they’re not all getting testing kits for their drugs.
They probably didn't independently come up with the idea to steal cables or catalytic converters either.
It's all word of mouth. But if half your buddies get shot [1] or jailed when they steal cables for drugs, it probably doesn't seem like such a good idea.
Same thing when your buddy finally fills their trailer full of cats and brings them to the scrap yard to find out they can't get anything from that anymore. Unfortunately, there's a lag, but afaik, cat thefts drop pretty reliably after they become economically useless... not all the way to zero, some people don't get the news very fast.
[1] this is not an endorsement of lethal force to deter cable theft
> In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher
Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating probabilities. They'll buy lottery tickets at 1:300,000,000 odds, and are upset when an 85% shot in XCOM misses...
The likelihood of being harmed would need to be basically 100% before folks would stop taking the risk.
That just leads either to disproportionate or cruel and unusual punishment (not every object has the inherent level of danger so your $200 property must be rigged to kill or severely injure on attempted theft), or to raising stakes where the criminal is willing to do much worse since the outcome could anyway be death or severely body harm.
If getting shot for $1000 is on the table, might as well come with a gun and shoot first, and topple the whole tower while at it.
When you punish a baggie of drugs with 20 years in prison or potentially getting shot dead in the street, drug dealers escalate to containers of drugs. Where are you going to escalate the punishment? For those who feel like they get nothing from society no punishment works effectively, they are already in a prison with no future.
There's another theory which says that if people have health care, food, shelter, education, and liberty, they won't commit crimes like this. Just a thought.
You also need society to have local cultures, as well as the culture at large, that actively oppose such behavior as immoral and/or shameful, with enforcement by peers. This I say based on two well-proven models, the sociological typology of societies as guilt, shame, or fear-based, and the psychological model of the six stages (level of complexity) of moral reasoning, that shows that up to 85% of the adult population worldwide derive their values from group-affiliation.
Atop that, individuals themselves need hope in the future, meaning the perspective of improving upon the baseline that those pre-requisites provide, since a baseline is emotionally neutral. The perspective of remaining at exactly that same baseline year after year after decade isn't sufficient.
With all of the above provided, petty crime is minimized to the point only people with severe personality disorders commit them. There's no way to fix this, but it becomes so low we're now talking of Japan levels of per-capita crimes, if not less.
Japan, the society with such a corrupt criminal justice system that being arrested for anything regardless of guilt is generally considered the end of your prospects in life?
Both things can be true, that Japan's criminal justice system is awful, and that Japanese people have a strong culture of respect for the commons and community.
The answer is, you still do socialism, and you also pay someone to go around busting scrap yards that buy obviously-stolen material.
Just focusing on the demand-side dramatically reduced incidences of catalytic converter theft in the US. You still get the occasional attempt, but basically no scrap yard will take catalytic converters without a title to the vehicle with matching VIN, and most will want to see the vehicle.
Yes, requiring paperwork to scrap wiring is bureaucracy manifest. But legitimate people just do not roll up to scrap yards with a van full of tangled 4/0.
The big catalytic converter buyer was so brazen, he had a mobile app. Free markets for stolen scrap is just beyond tolerable at this point.
Scandinavian scrap metal thieves organize trucks and cranes to steal copper roofs from old churches and rip down railroad overhead lines all the time.
Free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing and social safety nets make little difference.
Some people will stop at nothing to get more, no matter how much they already have. (Applies to billionaires and paupers alike). I guess you could call it having an entrepreneurial spirit.
No one steals car stereos anymore though, because you can't sell them to anyone. That mechanism could be put to more work. Heavy, EU-wide supervision and enforcement against scrap metal dealers would probably make a difference.
Economics is a bad place to look for a fix for social problems.
Look at incentives, instead: housed, well-fed people with financial security and a feeling of purpose in life tend to commit fewer crimes, so let's fix wealth/income inequality, as well as our pathetic social safety net.
Not saying that will fix everything. People still commit crimes, both rich and poor alike, because they want a shortcut to having more than they have. But eliminating desperation would certainly help.
It's not an economy problem, it's a policy problem. We can choose to treat drug addiction like a disease. We can choose to give people health care. We can choose to give people money to keep their lives together. Law makers would rather this happen though.
That is one point made in the essay *Million Dollar Murray". This Malcolm Gladwell essay is nominally about power law distributions, but also makes the point about homelessness, drug abuse and car emissions/pollutions. Denver is one domestic city that has a small program that hands apartment keys to homeless people. "Murray" cost the public health system at least one million dollars during his lifetime.
There's the criminal guilds approach from Discworld, I suppose (in which thieves, assassins etc are regulated and given quotas). May be some practical problems.
Meth is already incredibly cheap. Meth addicts would definitely still engage in this behavior even if meth were free, because they still need money for rent, gas, food, whatever.
Or pay a guard a fair wage and comp them the $0.20 or whatever for each bullet..
EDIT: to be clear I'm not saying it should be that way, but there was a time not long ago when this was the normal way to handle the situation. I'd argue the present arrangement is more civilized.
> Or pay a guard a fair wage and comp them the $0.20 or whatever for each bullet.
I think $0.20 per bullet is far too little, considering the medical expenses the guard will face when getting the bullets removed after they are shot for copper.
Those +P 185gr .45ACP hollow points with the nickel plated cases are pretty sweet. But it's a hell of a lot better to not have to do some kind of Old West standoff shootout shit whenever someone wants to rob something. That was my point. It's so much better instead of hiring a posse of gunfighters, to just trust that the system will (barring anomalies like this one) unfuck itself.
> Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem.
They have. It's called insurance. The problem here might be the change in copper prices which possibly increased the value of the line and which were never properly reassessed for coverage.
> better off by just paying the theif double.
You could also just require a license to scrap copper. That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.
> that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.
We shouldn't motivate people to extremes. We should probably just punish drug dealers far more harshly in this country.
Same in the USA. I had to show my drivers license to sell a couple of old lawn mowers at a scrap yard. The thieves don't sell directly to the scrap dealers. If there's money to be made, there will always be a way to work around regulations.
I'm sure different jurisdictions are different, but many places don't allow random people to show up with a suspicious pile of metal. They have to file photo ids and sign a document. Sometimes there is a waiting period for payment. A 24-hour waiting period is amazingly effective at dissuading bad actors.
>You could also just require a license to scrap copper. That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.
So then they'll just sell to middle men.
And worse, in typical "what we need is a new law" fashion, you've taken a situation where one-ish person (the thief) has a financial incentive to see that the bad thing persists you now have two (the thief and the fence)
Also, electricians (the primary group who'd hold the licenses because they're scrapping a bunch of copper legitimately that stuff could be mixed into) already get enough undeserved make-work at society's expense as a result of their licenses. They don't need another side gig.
In other words, economists haven't solved the problem. Insurance just kicks the can down the road.
> You could also just require a license to scrap copper.
That doesn't work. The UK and US already have laws to make it hard to sell illegally-gotten scrap metal. But black markets and "laundering" will always exist as a workaround. These things are riskier, and result in lower returns for the thief, but it doesn't stamp out the problem.
I dont see how insurance solves it. The station had insurance and the crime still happened. Insurance doesn’t seem to take the thieves motives in to consideration at all, works the same for theft and earthquakes.
Historically, the insurer would provide or contract out loss prevention, or require the insured to do so, e.g. security guards to prevent theft, fire fighters to prevent fire damage, bounty hunters to prevent loss of bail bonds, etc.
In many ports of of the world, governments now have a monopoly on several of those services, and it's illegal for insurance to play a part in them. When such governments don't then provide those services, the insurance market collapses. Either the prices rise substantially, or especially in areas where rate changes are prohibited, insurers stop providing services.
It's pretty hard to protect outside plant with security guards. Burying the outside plant helps, but only until those who would steal cables figure out how to operate a backhoe.
It's also pretty hard to bury cables that lead to the top of an antenna.
In the Russian far east, where it's not practical to bury cables, many roadside bars have small signs showing a piece of fibre cable and how it's worthless for scrap.
Considering that stolen wire carries a lot of risk, the market value is considerably less than normal scrap prices. I've seen thefts that required special equipment like cranes and probably 10 man hours to recon, plan, and execute. All for probably less than $200 net when it was all done. But the repairs cost tens of thousands.
So some places put up Flock cameras... only to get them vandalized.
Some theft is efficient. If a hypothetical thief grabs a few bills from an unattended wallet, and the wallet's owner wasn't counting on having a specific amount of money available soon after, the amount lost by the victim is roughly equal to the amount gained by the thief.
Stealing copper from power lines and transformers is among the least-efficient kinds theft; it's hard to do worse without shooting a wealthy philanthropist couple to steal a wallet and a pearl necklace. I have seen a term suggested--the "rapacity index"--for the ratio of value gained by the thief, to value lost by the victim. I think it makes sense to take a crime's rapacity index into consideration during sentencing.
That ignores higher order effects--how theft changes primary behavior. In your example, fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors. Your rapacity index makes little sense: by your logic, corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction. And given the deterrent function of sentencing, the more relevant figure is the aggregate effect of a particular class of theft, not an individual instance of theft.
> fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors.
Yes, that's why I specified an unattended wallet. I agree that direct monetary loss is not the total harm to the victim.
> corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction.
That's not the calculation I suggested. Corruption isn't always the same as theft--and, if it were decided so, the calculation for corruption would be the money absconded with by the taker, divided by the money lost by the victim. In many cases of corruption, as in power line theft, the victim is diffuse; it's usually harder to calculate exact numbers, but this kind of calculation is done in court all the time.
Other than those who commit grave offenses of bodily harm, I reserve my greatest disgust for the type of dirtbag who imposes these orders-of-magnitude greater costs on other innocent people for such a relatively low "reward." They'd burn the Mona Lisa for fuel, melt down the Statue of Liberty for scrap, anything if you let them.
I agree with another commenter here, the overlap of this mindset with tweakers is large.
In general I agree with you, but it also makes me wonder how these people got to this point. I think most people would burn the Mona Lisa if it meant surviving through a cold night.
Our society has failed these people in many ways.
Local copper thieves that were busted stealing telco lines... they were just looking to make a quick buck regardless of legality or care for the impact it had on other people. They're more like tech company CEOs, really.
And these thieves were already well cared for in a healthy society with all sorts of opportunities available to them regardless of social status, skin color, and mental heath?
Crime goes down when the gap between the rich and the poor goes down.
Right, why didn't everyone just get good education, dental care, and healthcare, get a car when they're 16, have their parents help them go to college and work for a VC and get rich. Just can't understand it. Truly, an enigma.
This is what nobody wants to admit, whether it's nature or nurture doesn't matter because you're not in control of either of them. You were born into so and so of a family, and they brought you up with such and such care and values.
The idea that you've been "force of willing" it through your whole life since infancy and are therefore solely accountable for your outcome is absurd. We know that at some level and yet still can't help taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others for their failings.
This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.
> taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others
Do you think it's more Fundamental Attribution Error [0] (not exercising empathy or an incomplete view of others' problems) or more Just World Fallacy [1] (believing the universe works a certain way)?
Realistically, if these are the minimum conditions to reduce this kind of low-gain amplified damage, then I suspect that most people will rapidly conclude that the cost-benefit leans in the direction of immediately severing these people from the rest of society. Since the cost to deliver a sequence of events like you describe to everyone is extraordinary (and realistically unavailable even to the richest nations today) a more feasible solution is incarceration of people for a first offense for a sufficiently long time that they are simply not present to commit the crime again.
If it isn't, your solution is interesting because it's already been tried. The United States has one of (maybe actually?) the highest incarceration rates on Earth. We've spent decades locking up enormous numbers of people, often for nonviolent offenses, tearing parents away from their kids, destroying employment prospects, and creating exactly the kind of instability that feeds more crime. There's people in prison serving decades for fuckin weed. Yet somehow your conclusion is that we haven't imprisoned enough people for long enough.
What jumps out is how quickly you write people off. You look at poverty, addiction, untreated mental illness, failing schools, broken communities, and a criminal justice system with a well-documented history of racial disparities, and your answer is basically: "Sounds expensive. Put them in a cage."
The really wild part is calling that the practical option. Education costs money, healthcare costs money, treatment costs money, rehabilitation costs money. But decades of policing, courts, prisons, lost productivity, broken families, and repeat incarceration are apparently the cheap, sensible alternative.
If this isn't sarcasm, you are a disgusting ghoul. There's a name for people like this that we hung in the 40s. Sorry HN, but I just can't with this shit anymore.
These people who steal copper and whatnot used to be day laborer ditch digger types but "certain people" decided that the sorts of businesses that employ that kind of labor need to jump through hoops (for various reasons with various degrees of legitimacy) that make it not worth it.
A topic I'm interested in that is upstream of what you're saying is the propagation of meaning. If somebody has no idea what the Mona Lisa or the Statue of Liberty are, then we can't really bemoan that they would not ascribe any value to it beyond its raw material.
I could understand looking at the Mona Lisa and not being impressed that it's something considered of great value. On the other hand, the sheer size of the Statue of Liberty makes that impossible to misconstrue.
Sure, it’s impossible to misconstrue that the statue of that size has or had value to someone. But that still doesn’t mean it will have value to you.
Someone who’s never seen it before, who has no exposure to the cultures that produced it or the discourse around it, can be impressed by the size, but otherwise not care.
Worse, if such a person is actively hostile to the cultures that produce it, then learning that it is valuable to that culture will lead them to assign negative value to it.
This could be made a serious felony. If the thief doesn't plan for or attempt to get say, 25% of fair market value or replacement cost (whichever is higher), multiply the penalty by 5 years, no chance of parole.
Though I don't know if there are enough prisons for all those stealing catalytic converters.
They didn't ask to be born and have never been given an opportunity to approve the society they're born into. The price of non-conformance is deprivation, punishment and incarceration. We should rethink this.
No, the price of the specific kind of non-conformance where you vandalize radio stations to sell the copper cables for scrap is deprivation, punishment, and incarceration. Non-conformance is not problematic in and of itself, but copper theft and vandalism absolutely are.
That's a rather narrow analysis. The larger point is that perhaps I don't want to negotiate a government currency and social structure in order to have shelter or to feed myself or to provide comfort. The people who attempt this often suffer those negative consequences precisely because the means to do so are often made illegal or difficult without large amounts of resources.
Am I making an excuse for _this_ individual? No. Am I making a broader point about the sources of "crime" overall? Yes.
The lack of caution in creating the current status quo has some obvious negative outcomes that could easily be legislated around. The impetus to do this is strangely missing.
I’d suggest considering empathy once you get past the anger, their former selves would be equally repulsed by their behavior, and for many I expect their current selves feel similarly despite their lack of control. The villains here aren’t the broken people.
The villains are the people who let these people continue to commit crimes and make life worse for others in the name of empathy instead of quickly and forcefully moving them into compassionate care where they have any chance of recovering and joining the vast majority as contributors to society.
Right, like I said don't tolerate the behavior, but that doesn't mean every thief is an irredeemable piece of shit who doesn't deserve help or empathy.
There should be something in the middle, I hope we can agree on that. We're talking about addiction and property damage here, not a homicidal psychopath.
It was gas-filled presumably ultra low loss RF cable, but the thief cut it into small sections so that they could take it away. You might be right about the 50% number of they had somehow managed to steal it as a single intact spool. As-is, the station even said that they wouldn’t be able to use it even now that it’s been recovered because of fears of gas leaks.