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The drop in violence is enormous and visible in crime rates across basically any age demographic you look at. It’s not just a function of an aging society. It a

The drop in violence is enormous and visible in crime rates across basically any age demographic you look at. It’s not just a function of an aging society. It also doesn’t seem obviously correlated with policing, since it exists across cities with radically different policing regimes. A lot of people think it has to do with environmental factors, and specifically lead.

yourapostasy 6y ago
> A lot of people think it has to do with environmental factors, and specifically lead. Ironically, we are studying whether lead caused cohesion problems for the Roman Empire [1] [2], so it isn't as if we didn't suspect lead before to cause civilization-scale problems. And while the modern drop in blood lead levels is big in the developed world [3], it is still orders of magnitude greater than pre-industrial levels. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2019/11/29/archaeological-skeletons-from-london-prove-some-romans-were-lead-poisoned/?sh=7d09a64c48cc https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2019/11/29/ar... [2] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wi... [3] https://www.who.int/docstore/bulletin/pdf/2000/issue9/bu0686.pdf https://www.who.int/docstore/bulletin/pdf/2000/issue9/bu0686...