With a lot more unemployed people, a lot more people are staying home, and they see more in their neighborhood," said Sgt. Thomas Lasater, who supervises the burglary unit of the police department in St. Louis County, Mo., where authorities recorded a whopping 35 percent drop in burglaries during the first six months of 2009.
The falling price of raw materials — which had been producing copper and other thefts — may be another reason for the change in trend. Here is the story and I thank Daniel Lippman for the pointer.
That isn’t counter-cyclical, but cyclical.
Counter-cyclical would be if it went up when the economy got worse.
Funny how several years ago, a 5% unemployment rate was an ungodly disaster, spawning daily news stories of the impending end-times, all due to government malpractice.
But now, a 10% unemployment rate yields tales of unexpected goodness — more time with the family, fewer burglaries, eco-friendly conservation, and so forth.
I wonder what changed?
Bill,
I guess we could never see eye-to-eye on things such as this. In my experience, retirement-age people are a bargain. To shuffle them off to retirement may let everyone up a rung in the ladder, opening a slot at the bottom, but so much expertise is lost with a retirement that I’d bet it’s a net destruction of value.
This leads to something I’ve been pondering lately. All the hand-wringing over current employment and the tools the government wields to “fix” it amount to robbing from past labor (inflation) and future labor (debt) to prop up present labor. I don’t doubt that it garners votes, but that’s making a virtue of necessity.
Hey Bill,
Let me explain how this works. It’s my job to worry about how much something costs the taxpayers. Your job is to say something like “we should pay these retirees to teach career classes to low-income groups of people.” Then I say something like “fine, then let’s give them tax credits to do so.”
Capiche?
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