Economist Says P2P Lowers Crime

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Argues that when people have “economically priced entertainment” – i.e. social networking and file-sharing – they commit less crime.

I’m not sure how much I agree with it, but economist Tom Koltaie wrote an article recently in which he makes the case that since 1992 social networks and file-sharing are partly responsible for decreasing crime rates in this country.

“1992 was the year that competition hit the USA with tremendous growth in pay-based online services, like Prodigy, GEnie. AOL and Compuserve,” he writes. “Compuserve introduced the first known WYSIWYG e-mail content and forum posts, with forums growing rapidly to allow individuals to post opinions and commentary on a wide variety of subjects.”

It’s this capacity for free speech and the unfettered ability to share ideas and information with one another that Koltai says is what “would appear to be assisting in lowering the crime rate.”

“The CompuServe (and other competitive offerings) forums evolved into the present day Blogshere and social networking that has taken the Internet by storm and gave the people of the world a non edited conduit to their peers,” he adds. “1992, was curiously also the year that crime rates started to drop in the USA; and 1998 was the year that another noticeable dip occurred. The year that Napster was born.”

He admits that he’s not a social-behavioral Psychologist, but he thinks the data suggests that when people have “economically priced entertainment” they commit less crime.

On this basis he then estimates the govt has saved some $58,151,289,000 (Calc @$50 p/day) on prisoner "accommodation costs" alone, with “obvious additional monies saved in transportation, arraignment, trial and public attorney fees. This does not include the insurance moneys saved, the decreased crime rate effect on consumer psychological well being and the lives and property saved,” he says.

Mainstream opinion is that crime rates are decreasing due to harsher penalties via “three-strikes” and mandatory sentencing laws, that people are simply being locked away so they can’t commit further crimes. However, certainly there is no single reason for decreasing crime rates so perhaps it’s fair to argue that social networking and P2P are indeed part of the reason. People who are busy chatting with friends and family or downloading content to entertain themselves with are probably not going to be the ones going out to rob a liquor store or steal a car.

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