Actually, not really. New York on Track for Fewest Homicides on Record. I assume that those who project long term fiscal problems due to a contraction in the financial sector in New York City are probably correct (assuming that the financial sector actually doesn’t expand back to its pre-2009 size). But the assumption that the economic fallout would lead to 1970s levels of anomie doesn’t seem to be panning out. As I indicated earlier I found suggestions of such a reversion plausible at the time because I had a rather economistic mental model of the “root causes” of crime. But that seems less plausible when you look over the arc of the past century. Another model of course is that in fact it was financial sector workers who were driving much of the crime directly by subsidizing illicit activity through their enormous incomes generated by the efficiencies of capital allocation which they drove (I’m not being serious here).
