"Crime is often approached as if it were an unchanging phenomenon-as if the reason why a person would commit crime in one time period or context carry over to very different or distant times, cultures, and situations. Perhaps this is because scientific paradigms do not shift fast enough to keep up with the many social and cultural forces at the heart of definitions of crime and individual-level criminal behavior. Politics influence what behaviors are legally defined as criminal. Economics shape individual choices, who has power to make and enforce the law, who will be targeted, and what items in society are valuable targets for crime. Technological advances, which have far surpassed any gains the social sciences have been able to make in the study of criminal behavior, have had an enormous impact on methods of committing and detecting certain types of crime and mass communication, though which people learn about are influenced by crime in society."