"About noon on Christmas Day in
London, I became the victim of a crime. Somebody smashed in the rear window of our family car; nothing serious, fortunately.
Nonetheless, it led me to the inevitable questions: Who did it and why? Was this an impersonal act driven purely by cold calculation? Or did the perpetrator harbor malice or resentment?
I’ll probably never know. But on the causes of crime more generally, we do know a few things. First, seemingly trivial factors -- the location of street lights, road layouts, housing designs and so on -- often have a decisive influence on whether crime hits one place rather than another. Second, and more important, a sure recipe for more frequent crime is rising socioeconomic inequality.
This ought to be especially worrying in the U.S. and U.K., where, over the past two decades, inequality has increased tremendously. "
CONT'D
HERE
Mark Buchanan
Mark Buchanan, a theoretical physicist, is the author of "The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You" and two other science books. A former editor of Nature and now a columnist for Nature Physics, Buchanan writes about efforts to use physics concepts to understand dynamics of biology and the social sciences. His forthcoming book "Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics" will be published by Bloomsbury Press in March 2013. He has a doctorate from the University of Virginia and a bachelor's in physics and electrical engineering from Lehigh University. He lives in Notre-Dame-de-Courson, France.
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