Chris Simms tells the story of how a plant louse nearly wiped out the French wine – and affected levels of crime – in NewScientist (23 December 2017, paywall). This was back in the late 19th century. Because of meticulous French record-keeping, this little bit of surprise popped up:
But when poverty and crime rise in lockstep, is poverty causing crime or crime poverty? “When there is a lot of crime, businesses can suffer, influencing income,” says Bignon. Disentangling what is cause and what is effect can often be difficult. …
As expected, as the blight spread to new areas, instances of property crimes such as theft, counterfeiting and pillaging rose. On average, these crimes were 22 per cent higher in districts affected by the bugs. The rise couldn’t be explained by other factors such as demographic changes caused by patterns of migration.
But there was a twist. While property crime ballooned, violent crime in the worst affected areas slumped, by about 13 per cent on average.
This doesn’t surprise Christian Traxler, an economist at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. In 2010, he showed a similar relationship between a decreased supply of rye and crime in Prussia between 1882 and 1912. “Bad weather increased rye prices, which induced more property crime and fewer violent crimes,” he says.
Rye was used to make bread, but bad weather for rye also meant bad weather for barley, which is used to make beer. In both the French and the Prussian instances, Traxler thinks lack of booze explains the drop in violent crime. “Shock to wine production isn’t just a shock to income, but also to wine consumption,” he says. With less alcohol to drink, people are less inclined to fight. In England and Wales today, for instance, alcohol consumptionis thought to contribute to 1.2 million violent incidents a year. “Alcohol consumption makes people more impulsive, less restrained,” says Bignon.
An interesting natural experiment, once again raising the question of just what are we to do about alcohol. Just put up with the accompanying violence?
Perhaps so.
