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Freakonomics talked about the decline of crime in the 90s as being directly attributed to rise of abortion. Basically, offsprings from poverty or low socio eco

Freakonomics talked about the decline of crime in the 90s as being directly attributed to rise of abortion. Basically, offsprings from poverty or low socio economic statuses tend to grow up without education and exposed to violence and dysfunctional families with parents who are likely uneducated and addicted to substances. Growing up without fathers, young men adopt gang culture as a surrogate for the lack of positive role models. It makes perfect sense that in the 90s there were lot less would be criminals (not by choice but genetic, environmental and socioeconomic factors) being born. The financial burden on divorced men with children is far too skewed in benefiting divorced women in North America. My fear is children being born from this generation of turbulent and unstable familial organization as the middle class slowly erodes and job security disappears due to automation.

macintux 10y ago
I suspect the elimination of leaded gasoline plays a role in the decline of crime as well.
- shams93 10y ago
  Yeah it seems to have had actually a shockingly large impact. As much as people love to morally judge the poor the environment has much more of an impact on human behavior than we would even like to admit.
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
    I don't see the connection. You can see parts of the world that had leaded gasoline but no increase in crime. It's highly likely that the lack of education exposes them to such risks but it's not enough to explain the wide spread fall in crime. For me personally, the would be criminals never being born makes more sense. If we just have less population being born from the low end of socioeconomic spectrum, there is simply less crimes being committed from this demographic.
    - macintux 10y ago
      I don't know that anyone is asserting lead is the only culprit; socioeconomic trends are complex beasts. To reject it entirely however flies in the face of a significant body of evidence: http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-g...
      - brilliantcode 10y ago
        This is insane. It's like saying Roman soldiers fought well because they drank wine out of lead flasks.. I'd be extremely careful not to conflate the two because there's no causation explained by simply showing a graph. Crime is a very complicated human behavior that arises from multitude of socioeconomic reasons: no money, no education, no opportunity, crime happens.
        macintux 10y ago
        I find your emotional reactions to this puzzling. Is your last name perchance Midgley?
        brilliantcode 10y ago
        no but I spent a lot of time studying this research when I was getting my econ degree and it made perfect sense to me. That might explain my emotional attachment to this theory, coupled with my sympathy towards African Americans downtrodden by institutional racism hidden in plain sight.
    - MaysonL 10y ago
      From the article cited by tjalfi[0]: Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia and found a close match. Ditto for Canada. And Great Britain and Finland and France and Italy and New Zealand and West Germany. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn't fit the theory. "No," he replied. "Not one." The correlation even goes down to the neighborhood level: In fact, Mielke has even studied lead concentrations at the neighborhood level in New Orleans and shared his maps with the local police. "When they overlay them with crime maps," he told me, "they realize they match up." [0]http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure...
siidooloo 10y ago
The problem with this theory is that crime rate went down across the Western world at the same time. Whatever explaination you come up with has to work for the U.S. and Japan, and France, etc. Maybe changing abortion laws are part of it, but it must be some confluence of things combined.
- mabbo 10y ago
  Yes, but it went down sooner in places that legalized abortion sooner (or so Freakonomics said, by my memory). In all likelihood, both played roles, along with five things no one has realized.
chiph 10y ago
One of the theories (which I think has a lot of merit) is the elimination of leaded gasoline, and the subsequent reductions in environmental lead contamination.
- tjalfi 10y ago
  http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure... is an interesting article about this topic.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  How do you explain countries with environmental contamination but low crime rates?
InclinedPlane 10y ago
Absolutely not supported by any evidence whatsoever. The crime epidemic of the late '80s and early '90s was associated most predominantly with a major spike in crime rates among 14-24 year olds. Rates of homicide among that group went up by 3x between 1984 and 1992 and went down by a factor of 3x between 1992 and 1998. That alone proves that the problem had little to do with abortion or any long-term demographic factors, in fact, but with specific circumstances that caused some people to commit violent crimes during a certain period and then stop doing so shortly later.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  I'd say that's actually a good evidence that shows the age range where criminals are most active. As they get older, they mostly burn out. The fact that crime rate began falling in the 90s overall is directly attributed to babies that never grew up to be criminals, because they simply did not exist. Please read the original paper, it makes a very good case for linking less babies being born into troubled demographics and growing up to commit crimes. There's strong evidence that suggests that babies born into poverty stricken demographics overwhelmingly commit more crimes than babies brought up in safe environment. The fall of African American birth during the early 80s as a result of crack cocaine epidemic gripping the African American demographic, purposefully and full wittingly sanctioned and distributed by the world's favorite 3 letter agency and the Reagan administration. It's widely known that the war on drugs and marijuana was to crack down on the black community to target their leaders. Don't forget that the State directly played a hand in oppressing Blacks. This is indisputable evidence. In contrast, the USSR, did not have systematic racism towards blacks. In fact, the oppression of African Americans is well documented in USSR media. Obviously, for their own propaganda reasons, but the USSR at the core imposed socialist ideas of racial equality and the KGB made sure it was followed. Part of why the study was so controversial was attributing the fall of crime to less African American babies being born. Considering that 1 out of 3 African American male will be in jail (regardless of actual crime or institutional racism), it makes perfect sense to see less babies being born from this demographic caught in a inter-generational poverty cycle under the backdrop of racist and non inclusive white population.
  - 10y ago

macintux 10y ago

I suspect the elimination of leaded gasoline plays a role in the decline of crime as well.

shams93 10y ago
Yeah it seems to have had actually a shockingly large impact. As much as people love to morally judge the poor the environment has much more of an impact on human behavior than we would even like to admit.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  I don't see the connection. You can see parts of the world that had leaded gasoline but no increase in crime. It's highly likely that the lack of education exposes them to such risks but it's not enough to explain the wide spread fall in crime. For me personally, the would be criminals never being born makes more sense. If we just have less population being born from the low end of socioeconomic spectrum, there is simply less crimes being committed from this demographic.
  - macintux 10y ago
    I don't know that anyone is asserting lead is the only culprit; socioeconomic trends are complex beasts. To reject it entirely however flies in the face of a significant body of evidence: http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-g...
    - brilliantcode 10y ago
      This is insane. It's like saying Roman soldiers fought well because they drank wine out of lead flasks.. I'd be extremely careful not to conflate the two because there's no causation explained by simply showing a graph. Crime is a very complicated human behavior that arises from multitude of socioeconomic reasons: no money, no education, no opportunity, crime happens.
      - macintux 10y ago
        I find your emotional reactions to this puzzling. Is your last name perchance Midgley?
        brilliantcode 10y ago
        no but I spent a lot of time studying this research when I was getting my econ degree and it made perfect sense to me. That might explain my emotional attachment to this theory, coupled with my sympathy towards African Americans downtrodden by institutional racism hidden in plain sight.
  - MaysonL 10y ago
    From the article cited by tjalfi[0]: Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia and found a close match. Ditto for Canada. And Great Britain and Finland and France and Italy and New Zealand and West Germany. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn't fit the theory. "No," he replied. "Not one." The correlation even goes down to the neighborhood level: In fact, Mielke has even studied lead concentrations at the neighborhood level in New Orleans and shared his maps with the local police. "When they overlay them with crime maps," he told me, "they realize they match up." [0]http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure...

siidooloo 10y ago

The problem with this theory is that crime rate went down across the Western world at the same time. Whatever explaination you come up with has to work for the U.S. and Japan, and France, etc. Maybe changing abortion laws are part of it, but it must be some confluence of things combined.

mabbo 10y ago
Yes, but it went down sooner in places that legalized abortion sooner (or so Freakonomics said, by my memory). In all likelihood, both played roles, along with five things no one has realized.

chiph 10y ago

One of the theories (which I think has a lot of merit) is the elimination of leaded gasoline, and the subsequent reductions in environmental lead contamination.

tjalfi 10y ago
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure... is an interesting article about this topic.
brilliantcode 10y ago
How do you explain countries with environmental contamination but low crime rates?

InclinedPlane 10y ago

Absolutely not supported by any evidence whatsoever. The crime epidemic of the late '80s and early '90s was associated most predominantly with a major spike in crime rates among 14-24 year olds. Rates of homicide among that group went up by 3x between 1984 and 1992 and went down by a factor of 3x between 1992 and 1998. That alone proves that the problem had little to do with abortion or any long-term demographic factors, in fact, but with specific circumstances that caused some people to commit violent crimes during a certain period and then stop doing so shortly later.

brilliantcode 10y ago
I'd say that's actually a good evidence that shows the age range where criminals are most active. As they get older, they mostly burn out. The fact that crime rate began falling in the 90s overall is directly attributed to babies that never grew up to be criminals, because they simply did not exist. Please read the original paper, it makes a very good case for linking less babies being born into troubled demographics and growing up to commit crimes. There's strong evidence that suggests that babies born into poverty stricken demographics overwhelmingly commit more crimes than babies brought up in safe environment. The fall of African American birth during the early 80s as a result of crack cocaine epidemic gripping the African American demographic, purposefully and full wittingly sanctioned and distributed by the world's favorite 3 letter agency and the Reagan administration. It's widely known that the war on drugs and marijuana was to crack down on the black community to target their leaders. Don't forget that the State directly played a hand in oppressing Blacks. This is indisputable evidence. In contrast, the USSR, did not have systematic racism towards blacks. In fact, the oppression of African Americans is well documented in USSR media. Obviously, for their own propaganda reasons, but the USSR at the core imposed socialist ideas of racial equality and the KGB made sure it was followed. Part of why the study was so controversial was attributing the fall of crime to less African American babies being born. Considering that 1 out of 3 African American male will be in jail (regardless of actual crime or institutional racism), it makes perfect sense to see less babies being born from this demographic caught in a inter-generational poverty cycle under the backdrop of racist and non inclusive white population.
- 10y ago