Flashy purchases are associated with higher levels of violent crime in the U.S.

From the Occupy Wall Street movement, to Thomas Piketty’s more recent Capital in the Twenty-first Century, the notion of inequality has become increasingly prescient to politicians and the public in general. In new research, Daniel L. Hicks and Joan Hamory Hicks find that one very visible aspect of that inequality, conspicuous consumption by the rich, is associated with higher levels of violent crime. They write that one potential explanation for their findings is that rising inequality could then increase feelings of relative deprivation among those who are unable to succeed legally, and lead them to commit crimes against their neighbors.