As George Leef noted, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson recently implied that reparations for slavery could help address the city’s crime problem. The mayor’s argument is presumably that since richer people are generally more law-abiding, a cash transfer would make poorer people more law-abiding as well. Is that really true?

While not specifically addressing the reparations issue, new evidence suggests that unearned financial windfalls have little or no effect on the criminality of recipients and their children.

That’s the conclusion of a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that tracked lottery winners in Sweden over time. The authors found that lottery winnings were actually associated with more subsequent criminal convictions, although the size of the effect was negligible. For every $150,000 they won through a lottery, adult recipients saw a statistically insignificant 0.3 percentage-point increase in their likelihood of being convicted of any crime within seven years.

Similarly, the minor children of lottery winners increased their conviction risk by an insignificant 0.09 percentage points. Even allowing for the uncertainty associated with sampling, it’s not plausible that the true effect of lottery winnings is a large reduction in crime.

Swedish lottery winners are obviously different from black reparations recipients, but the NBER paper does undermine the poverty-causes-crime theory on which Mayor Johnson’s reparations case is based. He has likely mistaken correlation for causation. In fact, I would argue that the mayor has the causation mostly backward. Poverty doesn’t cause crime so much as crime causes poverty. Businesses are not eager to set up shop in crime-prone neighborhoods, nor are they keen on hiring workers who have criminal records. Chicago should consider stricter criminal-justice laws before implementing any new plan for cash transfers.