Crime, Money, Relationship

Addis Ababa a poor and densely populated city. It suffers from the ills of all modern capital cities, traffic jams, pollution, pick pockets, noise, begging, prostitution.... Did you notice something missing from this list of modern ills? There is one element that would have drastically and irrevocably affected my stay there, violent street crime. This is not to say that violent crime is non existent, but by comparison to the other capital cities in Africa, Addis Ababa is a Garden of Eden.
I have been in much wealthier countries including my own where I feared for my personal safety much more than I did while in Addis. This is not just my own perception either, friends and acquaintances, locals and tourists I had spoken to all agreed that Addis Ababa is unique in its safety for both tourists and Ethiopians. That got me to thinking...
The typical liberal ideology with which I was raised held that poverty causes crime. If people had more opportunity they would commit less street crime. The dangerous neighborhoods were those without jobs, money or opportunity.
By extension one would think that a city where people are sleeping in shacks or under boxes on the street would be very dangerous. But it is not.
So what is happening? One ideas is that absolute poverty is not the cause in crime, but relative poverty is the problem. So, if everybody else is poor, one doesn't feel compelled to perpetrate crimes to make the overall relative wealth more even. However, this did not seem to be the case as there were plenty of rich folks in Addis who were driving Range Rovers and eating large carnivorousness meals on cafe tables for all to see.
Another ideas is that they lack weaponry to make crimes. However, one only needs a kitchen knife for a personal robbery and Ethiopia has plenty of wicked traditional weapons that would also do the job. Moreover, it boarders Somalia which is a virtual America personal firearms with AK-47s going for about $5.
Another idea I still hear pushed around by people trying to explain violent crime is this idea of homogeneity. For example, Japan and Scandanavia don't have street crime because they are homogeneous societies. Ethiopia has a wealth of ethnic and tribal diversity, there are around 80 spoken languages. Plus the country has serious Balkanization pressures with various groups that have struggled and succeeded and others currently struggling for independence from Ethiopia.
Another ideas is that it is a peaceful country, but with a vicious war with Eritrea ending in 1991 and the invasion of Mogadishu in 2006, the state has plenty of blood on its hands. But none the less this political violence does not trickle down to one on one street violence that can be felt and seen on the street.
So what could it be?
Could it be that the people are less materialistic? Kids kill for flashy sneakers in the L.A. Is the commercial pressure less intense in Ethiopia so that people identify more as a member of their family, community and tribe and less as a wearer of clothes,flashers of bling, consumers of consumables?
Could it be that since opportunities for creating material wealth are so limited, that people focus on other forms of wealth. Such as being a wealth of stories in their community, or making a wealth of traditional baskets, or being a wealth of compassion for those needing it.
Maybe the entire idea of human relationship is different. Efficient economic systems are able to reduce individuals to their productive and consumptive behaviors. With this reduction of people, it is easier to see a person walking down the street as a carrier of money to be beaten out of. Perhaps in inefficient economic systems, people are hold a richer notions of human relationship.