For years it’s been known that Jews have some of the lowest crime rates of any ethnic or racial group. Jewishvirtuallibrary.org reports:

However it’s well known that crime decreases as a function of socio-economic status and IQ (especially verbal IQ) and given that Jews in Western countries rank high on both of these variables, it might be argued that their apparent law abidingness is just a function of these other traits.

Thus when I stumbled upon a list of extremely rich Americans who had trouble with the law, I was intrigued because such a list, by definition, largely controls for economic variation. In their book ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, Peter Bernstein and Annalyn Swan studied everyone who has ever appeared on Forbes magazine’s authoritative list of the 400 richest Americans from 1982 to 2007 and find at least 16 got in trouble with the law. Upon reading the list of names, what jumped out at me was that just over half of the 16, (56%) were Jewish.

Of course this doesn’t prove all that much because it’s long been known that Jews are hugely overrepresented among the Forbes 400, with some sources claiming they’re about a third of the list, however it’s interesting that among the tiny subset who had trouble with the law, their percentage increases from a third to over half. Of course given the small sample size, this result is probably not statistically significant.

Nonetheless if merely controlling for wealth can cause their crime rate to go from low to not low, I wonder what controlling for both wealth and verbal IQ would do.