A New Study Challenges the Link Between Crime and the Minimum Wage

If you go back and look at statements and editorials supporting New Jersey's recently passed minimum wage hike, you won't find a single one arguing that raising the hourly wage would reduce crime. There's nothing surprising about that - most minimum wage campaigns focus on increasing the purchasing power of the working poor, while opponents argue that raising wages will displace low-skilled and teenage workers.

Academics, however, are far less skittish about discussing the relationship between wages and criminality. The first person to raise the possibility that the two were connected was sociologist Robert K. Merton. He argued in 1938's "Social Structure and Anomie" that certain types of crime resulted from the inability to achieve "culturally defined goals"—namely, the acquisition of material goods—by socially acceptable means. Pointing to a group of Irish-American bootleggers on Chicago's North Side, Merton argued that the "limitation of opportunity to unskilled labor and the resultant low income can not compete in terms of conventional standards of achievement with the high income from organized vice."