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Why did crime plummet in the US?
- emersonrsantos 11y agoThis reason could be interesting among others: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead[1] [1] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...
- archgoon 11y agoThat was number 17. I'd link to it, but individual cards don't seem to be real URIs. "The case against: The lead theory has the same problem as the abortion theory: in the 1990s, even people who had been exposed to lead as children started committing fewer crimes. That indicates that while lead exposure may well have been a factor, it isn't the "real answer" that it's often characterized as."
- tantalor 11y ago> individual cards don't seem to be real URIs Indeed! When you click on the target, you get this URL, http://www.vox.com/cards/crime-rate-dropcrime-rate-drop/lead-crime http://www.vox.com/cards/crime-rate-dropcrime-rate-drop/lead... But if you load that URL, either directly or by reloading, you get a 404.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- binarybits 11y agoThis is a bug. We're working on fixing it.
- tantalor 11y agoLooks good now! http://www.vox.com/cards/crime-rate-drop/lead-crime http://www.vox.com/cards/crime-rate-drop/lead-crime
- klipt 11y agoThey're missing some corroborative evidence though: several other countries removed lead in different years, and in almost all of them crime dropped around 20 years later. > in the 1990s, even people who had been exposed to lead as children started committing fewer crimes Maybe people also just commit less crime as they age?
- trafficlight 11y agoB&Es are a lot tougher when you've got a bum knee and arthritis in your hands.
- Symmetry 11y agoOr maybe it isn't just a matter of whether someone has been exposed to lead at all but a matter of how much and over what duration. Toxicology is all about the dose but the public (and apparently Vox writers) tend to think about chemicals in terms of exposed/not exposed. A big point of evidence that I didn't see in the Vox or Mother Jones piece is that crime rates seemed to decline in different areas corresponding to when they stopped using leaded gasoline.
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoThat was covered in the Mother Jones article: "Reyes discovered that this reduction wasn't uniform. In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found. Meanwhile, Nevin had kept busy as well, and in 2007 he published a new paper looking at crime trends around the world (PDF). This way, he could make sure the close match he'd found between the lead curve and the crime curve wasn't just a coincidence. Sure, maybe the real culprit in the United States was something else happening at the exact same time, but what are the odds of that same something happening at several different times in several different countries? 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.""
- emersonrsantos 11y agoI agree, but the card 17 doesn't cite exposure to other harmful and poisonous elements (mercury, aluminum, among others) and we have strong scientific evidence that these elements trigger psychiatric disorders. There are lots of studies on how environmental and chemicals causes these illness that criminals seems to share and they are related to undeveloped/malfunctioning control centres on the brain. Government policies to avoiding population exposure to poison and at the same time psychiatric/neurologic advances on treatment and drugs makes a stronger case for that theory. Update: missing 'c' in centres
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- vishaldpatel 11y agoI think it's because we are more connected than ever. It's easy to get caught up in your reality, but the internet makes it more possible than ever to see what's out there and how things could really be.
- jjrob13 11y agoThe freakonomics movie has a great study on crime. http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/ http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-sh...
- lugg 11y agoDid everyone just finish watching the latest season of "Orange is the new black" or something? (context: this freakonomics topic of the crime drop was referenced in the recently released season of the show, specifically relating to the increase in abortions idea)
- LordKano 11y agoThere's a Freakonomics documentary on Netflix as well.
- jweir 11y agoWhy did it go up to begin with?
- __z 11y agoIn the early 60s and crime kept increasing every year until it peaked in the early 90s. Its been on a steep decline ever since. There's some interesting graphs here - http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-crime-declines-in-america/ http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-... Murder rates are plotted with lead exposure here - http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/05/us-murder-rate-track-be-lowest-century http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/05/us-murder-rate...
- ExpiredLink 11y agoCorrelation is not causation.
- __z 11y agoWhat's the point of this comment? I wasn't trying to make a point I was answering the GP's question (which was a good question). The lead hypothesis is common and was examined in the article in more detail. The main reason I added the second link (which included the lead hypothesis) was because it contained the most data I could find - it went back to 1876. The fact it was graphed with lead exposure wasn't at all important, the murder rate data going back to the 1800s was the important part and it answered the question.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- popeshoe 11y agoIn The Better Angels of our Nature, Steven Pinker postulates that one likely reason for the increase in violent crime was the first set of baby boomers becoming teenagers, with rowdy young people outnumbering older ones who might control them by quite a large margin.
- mc32 11y agoThe best thing about this article is that it didn't try to push one reason over an other so it kind of gave you a run down of all the commonly cited factors which contribute to one degree or other to the reduction in crime. On the other hand it was pretty light. What I'd like to see is each of those factors studied in other countries and their impact or non factor there to see if there is some commonality. Now, I understand that some factors are irrelevant in some places, but they're all relevant somewhere else too.
- bsdetector 11y agoI'll say it: Parallel Construction. Take out the really bad apples at the bottom of the barrel that law enforcement normally can't reach because they are isolated by many layers or are hard to get warrants for and it has to have a magnified effect on crime in general. edit: to the 3 downvotes in 3 minutes, just because you don't like it doesn't make it not so. Since CompStat has a measurable effect you can be sure that something with way more targeted information will also have even more effect.
- JesperRavn 11y agoI'm only familiar with parallel construction being used in reference to very recent events, so it's not clear to me what you are referring to. Are you saying the evidence was there before, and they only started using parallel construction in the 90's? Or did new ways of getting evidence that required parallel construction appear?
- bsdetector 11y agoParallel construction is a recent term that describes the widespread use of unwarranted information. It seems reasonable to assume that beforehand there was less commonly used unwarranted information; in the 2000s they used it to arrest street gangs, in the 1990s they probably used it to arrest drug lords.
- andrewstuart 11y agoBecause everyone, even the potential criminals, are spending all their time peering into smartphones.
- dba7dba 11y agoI don't think there's any one big reason for decrease in crime. I think it's all of those factors in the article working up to a perfect storm. I do think young kids being inside home playing video games (hence less time out in the street, lowering chance of running into trouble) is another reason. Basically all those video games trapped potential criminals inside their home and they eventually 'matured' enough not to get into a life of crimes.
- darkmighty 11y agoIndeed 'one big reasons' seem very pathological for me in popular science and even some serious science. I believe we are attracted to a single fact explaining a lot: it gives some weird satisfaction, like seeing a puzzle come together; while this can work for creating a mathematical theory or explain some basic physical phenomena, it doesn't bode well when applied to complex systems or people. I get impression it happens all the time with cancer; I think the bee collapse saw some of this effect too. All this motivation for finding 'the explanation' does lead to discovering mechanisms though -- but I suppose we still need some more lucid 'integrators' to combine many effects into a strong enough causal system.
- decasteve 11y agoPlot crime rates and video game sales and there is a correlation between the decrease of crime and increase in games. (Though I am not implying a causal relationship in any way, just an observation)
- crimsonalucard 11y agoAlthough Crime plummets... the interesting thing is, our perception of danger and our general sense of fear has increased by significant margin. We're more scared of things that have have an even less chance of affecting us than ever before.
- pixelcort 11y agoAre there any other countries/cultures around the world that are as fearful as modern U.S.?
- crimsonalucard 11y agoThe fear is an illusion. Our perception of the world is largely shaped by the media. The media magnifies dangers that are otherwise relatively improbable. The logical conclusion from this fact is this: To find a culture that has no fear, look for cultures that are technologically backwards. Cultures that have very limited access to media and thus a more realistic perception of fear should be your chosen targets. In these settings, you will find entire societies where doors are left unlocked, children are allowed to roam the entire town unsupervised, and places where the concept of "abduction" is relatively unknown. Or go back to the US in the 1980s. You will find the exact same society. Listen to this podcast to learn more about the United States during this time and the nature of fear: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=377517810&m=377521165&live=1 http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&i...
- aswanson 11y agoYeah, sounds just like my old neighborhood, and I grew up in the 80s.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- saiya-jin 11y agomost probably and unfortunately, no. consequences can be felt in many places around the world. Yes, I mean those frikkin' wars they wage here & there. From what I see, correct me if I'm wrong, many people in US still believe those wars are justified, soldiers are defending their homeland (in foreign countries half across the globe that didn't attack US anyhow imaginable), killing just few bad guys (and not creating many more by behaving like that-heck, if they would be killing my family and friends back home because of nothing, it would be hard to resist temptation to strike back somehow). And I could go on and on, you know the drill. All this possible because of 9/11, relatively minor incident in terms of life loss/damage, but made look like Armageddon day by media. Not only, but mainly US residents scaremonged beyond belief my mass media (and I presume not many stood against it). Well, looking back, you were played damn well. Terrorist won by radicalizing you, all army-related companies won, and anybody who is on their payroll. It's so much easier to control somebody who has fear, since they are already in irrational place to begin with. I am 34, and I don't think I'll live long enough to see US to become again "land of the free". From west european perspective, it's a sad joke for a long time.
- logn 11y agoSome potential reasons not mentioned in the article: Electronics have become cheaper. Cars are harder to steal. Criminals can commit crimes online instead. We possess less objects as more things become digitized. Improved welfare programs. Improved forensic investigations.
- jedmeyers 11y agoCameras everywhere. Improved abilities to track illegal gains. See, mass surveillance works!
- sjwright 11y agoYou're spot on — our valuable items are becoming harder to steal and cheaper to purchase legally. Criminals used to make off with your TV, whereas any TV worth stealing today is just too delicate to move in a hurry. We don't tend to have expensive VCRs either. Remember when car stereos were stolen? Most modern cars have fully integrated head units and aftermarket alternatives are now niche and often worth very little. After that it was GPS units, but even they are now dirt cheap and not much of a theft target. Mobile phones used to be an easy score. Today they're trackable and lockable, making the more desirable models — particularly iPhones — worth almost nothing. Criminals know this, which is why iPhone thefts have plummeted.
- toong 11y agoIf I would be a car burglar today, airbags would be my target. A pricy item, easy to (re)sell (= DIY looking for replacement parts), not trackable (serial numbers?), probably easy/quick to strip from a car if you know what your doing ... Ebay even has a "Replacement Air Bag Buying Guide": http://www.ebay.com/gds/Replacement-Air-Bag-Buying-Guide-/10000000177633575/g.html http://www.ebay.com/gds/Replacement-Air-Bag-Buying-Guide-/10...
- raisedbyninjas 11y agoAccording to the recent bank thief AMA, robbing bank tellers is even faster and easier.
- smrtinsert 11y agoWhy not DNA testing?
- weeksie 11y agoSteven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature goes over all of the probably reasons for this in its general survey of the correlation between violence and civilization. And he's mentioned for the Leviathan theory, but that is only one of the areas he touches on. It's the most credible explanatory frameworks for violence that I've come across.
- anthony_romeo 11y agoOne thing to note is that crime in pretty much all of the all of the wealthier countries have decreased in the last few decades, and this this is not a specifically American phenomenon: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21582041-rich-world-seeing-less-and-less-crime-even-face-high-unemployment-and-economic http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21582041-rich-world-s...
- jug 11y agoYes, and the disconnect here as for what people believe, I think largely due to scaremongering to sell newspapers and ad time on TV, is interesting. Over here, I think we've never been as worried about pedophiles and rapists than now. It's rare to even see kids out and playing alone compared to when I was young, and the stories on America's Worst Mind comes to mind: http://theweek.com/articles/505724/last-word-advice-from-americas-worst-mom http://theweek.com/articles/505724/last-word-advice-from-ame...
- Kurtz79 11y agoRelated: http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/1491518243 http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151... Recommended read by Gates and Zuckerberg.
- tdaltonc 11y agoI'm partial to #9, but it's great that they review so many in one piece.
- skbohra123 11y agoI am getting a 404 as soon as I click on any of the links
- visarga 11y agoMe too. Bad web page.
- JesperRavn 11y agoGreat summary of the theories, with impressive breadth and depth of scholarship. This sort of article goes to show how complex the world is, and how hard it is to definitively prove sociological/economic theories. Even when one study seems to give very good evidence, another might come along and cast doubt on it.
- ronnier 11y agoAnother idea to add to the list: There are often a dozen murders a week in places like Chicago. How long is that sustainable? Maybe the gangs have killed their selves off?
- VLM 11y agoA historical analogy is the decline of gunslinger/cowboy culture out west a bit more than a century ago. Something to consider is 1000 equal competing gangs each fighting 999 equal competitors means quite an impressive body count, but once MS-13 or "whoever" takes over and there's only one operational gang, the body count will naturally implode. Note that you don't necessarily need only one gang, in fact you can operate quite well with the original 1000, what is necessary is a stable and predictable hierarchy. Without a stable hierarchy every competitor you shoot increases your overall systemic stability and finances. With a stable semi-formal hierarchy every competitor you shoot pisses off someone at a high level who used to have two workers and now has one dead worker and one malfunctioning worker, and thats not likely to turn out very well for the shooter. A cultural drift from equality to hierarchy needs to be considered along with the obvious economy of scale argument.
- nostromo 11y agoWhy is cultural evolution never discussed as a possible reason? We know cultures change. When we note that acceptance of gays has become mainstream or that smoking has decreased or that people get married later, we don't presume that it has to do with abortion rates or leaded gasoline -- we just understand that cultural shifts happen. But when it's crime, we rack our brains looking for the one single physical reason crime dropped.
- golergka 11y ago> smoking Tobacco.
- chrisdbaldwin 11y agoThis is an important distinction. Tobacco usage has gone down. Electronic cigarettes, however, are booming among former tobacco users. Americans are also opening up to marijuana legalization.
- randallsquared 11y ago> When we note that acceptance of gays has become mainstream or that smoking has decreased or that people get married later, we don't presume that it has to do with abortion rates or leaded gasoline -- we just understand that cultural shifts happen. We absolutely try to discover the causes of those shifts. There are similar articles about why those things are happening, too, in each case!
- slipjack 11y agoSo, not necessarily this article, but I haven't seen much in sociological or economics literature that's put forth one single reason crime dropped. There's argument over primary causes, or how much each cause contributes to the drop, but not much about single unifying theories.
- a3voices 11y agoBecause most types of crime won't make you financially or socially successful.
- chlodwig 11y agoThey missed a theory: fudging the stats and failing to report crimes. Excerpt from an interview with David Simon: ----- They [the police department in Baltimore] cooked their own books in remarkable ways. Guns disappeared from reports and armed robberies became larcenies. Deadly weapons were omitted from reports and aggravated assaults became common assaults. The Baltimore Sun did a fine job looking into the dramatic drop in rapes in the city. Turned out that regardless of how insistent the victims were that they had been raped, the incidents were being quietly unfounded. That tip of the iceberg was reported, but the rest of it, no. And yet there were many veteran commanders and supervisors who were disgusted, who would privately complain about what was happening. If you weren’t a journalist obliged to quote sources and instead, say, someone writing a fictional television drama, they’d share a beer and let you fill cocktail napkins with all the ways in which felonies disappeared in those years. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on-baltimore-s-anguish https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on... ---
- __z 11y agohttp://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/upshot/perceptions-havent-caught-up-to-decline-in-crime.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/upshot/perceptions-havent-... "These trends aren’t caused by changes in our willingness to report crime to the police. We see an even more significant decline in violent crime in data derived from surveys asking people whether they’ve been the victims of certain crimes over the past year. The National Crime Victimization Survey reports that the rate of violent victimizations has declined by 67 percent since 1993. This reflects a 70 percent decline in rape and sexual assault; a 66 percent decline in robbery; a 77 percent decline in aggravated assault; and a 64 percent decline in simple assault. This survey has nothing to say about the decline in homicide, for obvious reasons."
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoDavid Simon says that homicide is the hardest crime stat to fudge, since there's a body and the different rate changes between homicide and other crimes is actually used to try to measure how much the stats are being fudged.
- delbel 11y agoI think its due to the rise of endocrine disruptors in our food chain. That should definitely be looked into.
- danans 11y agoNice article, but they got one fact wrong. On card 3 they state that robbery is a property crime. Per the FBI's uniform crime reporting standards, it's a violent crime: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/violent-crime/violent-crime https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/... The logic is that, from the perspective of the law, the threat of violence is close enough to an act of violence to be considered violent.
- visarga 11y agoI get error 404 when browsing the article.
- coldtea 11y ago- Because the US is all for individualism, so not enough protection nets. - Because the US had tens of millions of black slaves it fred, people starting out from absolute poverty and had to face discrimination, Jim Crow laws, reduced opportunities and seggregation until the seventies (legally - in practice until today). Even poor white immigrants didn't have it bad like that. - Because prisons create criminals, and the US prison system is the worst in the West.
- gjm11 11y agoYou appear to be answering the question "Why is there a lot of crime in the US?". But the actual question is "Why did crime plummet -- I.e., rapidly decrease -- in the US?".
- NietTim 11y agoDoesn't he? He lists pasts problems which have been mostly fixed now, causing the crime rates to drop
- pizza234 11y agoAt least mass-incarceration hasn't, since USA has the second highest rate in the world.
- gjm11 11y agoHe describes them mostly in present-tense terms, and my reading of the point about slavery is that it's a past problem with effects persisting into the present. And FWIW I wouldn't say that they have mostly been fixed now. It's true that racism's got a lot better, but the US is still very individualistic (for good and/or ill), there are still big racial differences in prosperity (whatever the causes), and the US still puts an awful lot of people in prison.
- sitkack 11y agoCrime just moved up the value chain, Too Big To Jail, Too Big To Remove from Office. Goldman Sachs is doing very well.
- BuckRogers 11y agoWhile I'm against jailing for non-violent drug offenders, the first thing that came to mind was what is the 2nd reason listed. That all the worst criminals are locked up due to mandatory minimum sentences, and the most violent criminals just aren't born at a fast enough rate everyday to replace them. I wasn't too far off, the article states ~25% reduction can came from locking up more. It says possibly less, but honestly I'd assume more than 25% till you reach diminishing returns. Egregious criminals usually get caught at some point, sentenced harshly with less false convictions thanks to modern technology and it makes sense. I think we could reduce violence even further by having a mandatory minimum sentence of 50 years hard labor for anyone caught with a gun outside their house. Or using any knife or object to injure someone. This includes the cops and gov't figures. Start to ratchet up the sentence to that and publicize it, even the craziest might decide to find another hobby. Crime has gone down but police abuse has gone up. Time to take away their tools to abuse, and make prison less attractive for everyone.
- nl 11y agoTaking that to the logical conclusion, if everyone spent 50 years doing hard labor in jail I'm pretty sure the rate of violence outside jail would decrease even more. I'm not sure that putting more people in jail for longer is a great solution.
- ams6110 11y agoI think putting demonstrably violent people in jail is a fine idea. Cleary GP's ideas are too extreme, simply having a gun or knife doesn't harm anyone, but if you use a weapon to commit a crime and injure/kill someone (as distinct from doing that out of self-defense) yeah, in general you need to be taken out of society.
- BuckRogers 11y agoIt sounds extreme, but it works in the UK and other societies. Why wait till someone uses a weapon or harms someone? What other purpose is a weapon used for? It's for offense, or "offense is the best defense", which I disagree with. Disarm everyone, civilize this place a bit. We should be following Europe's lead here.
- fit2rule 11y agoI'm not seeing much accommodation for the Flynn effect in these findings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect .. although I may have missed it.
- awjr 11y agoIt would have been interesting to look at the world in general and common factors between countries with drops in crime. The UK has had a similar drop in crime, that many attributed to lead being removed from petrol. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27067615 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27067615 Car crime reduction is definitely a technology issue. Basically a car below a certain age is impossible to jack. It would be interesting to see how much electronic fraud has gone up. With the population living longer and dementia on the rise, lottery fraud is an easy way to relieve vulnerable old people of their money. With the operations working out of different countries, prosecution is so much harder.
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoI don't get this sentence: "And in the 2000s, when everyone under 30 had grown up exposed to less lead, the lead theory helps even less." Did crime go back up in the 2000s? I thought it was still declining? Also I'm sure I've seen reports that looked at exactly when the decline happened between states and countries that removed lead from their cars at different times, and it supported there being some effect. In general I find many sociological studies seem a bit ridiculous when they don't bother to compare across countries, e.g. this survey indicates that mass incarceration probably helped, yet no other nation followed the US lead, and saw a similar fall in crime.
- lucozade 11y agoI think the point they're making is that, once everyone is exposed to less lead, the crime rate should flatten out. If the crime rate continues to decrease even though the relative number of young people with high lead intake doesn't change (because there aren't many of them) then there is likely to be an alternative explanation.
- yason 11y agoI suppose one correlation is missing: the price of a number of goods generally considered valuable has gone down and the quantity and availability has gone up since the 80's. Think TVs, car radios, stereo systems, computers. If you really think you want one, you can buy it second-hand for so cheap that crime doesn't pay off. And if you steal one, you'd have a much harder time finding a place where you can sell it for some reasonable amount of money. Because crime involves a risk, it also requires proportionally a bigger payoff. Regular households don't provide that so easily anymore. Another thing is that the illegal nature of a crime is a deterrent for most people but not so if you grow up in a culture where casual crime is no big deal. But cultures change: maybe there's less people exposed to that than earlier. Or because of the first point, casual crime has gone down because the payoffs aren't high enough, and this has been shrinking the relevant subcultures that earlier favoured committing petty crimes, thus reducing the number of people used to do crimes and therefore, eventually, full-time criminals. Generally, a crime nearly always happens for a reason: a crime can happen only if someone wants something and there's no other way as easy to get it than to commit a crime. To summarise, a crime happens because someone wants to achieve a goal. In a crime there's always a risk involved: you might get into a fight, you might get caught, or you might get shot. Thus, nearly nobody does crimes routinely just for the fun of it: the payoff must be good enough, and the payoff generally correlates with the risk.
- VLM 11y agoCould combine permanent long term decline in standard of living with the decline in physical consumer goods. So my high school educated grandfather bought my grandmother a mink coat way back in the 50s. Now a days an average middle class college educated guy couldn't afford to give his wife a consumer good like that (aside from "fur is murder", just simply couldn't afford it). On the other hand I gift my wife an evernote subscription and an amazon prime subscription fee. Its easy for an unskilled criminal to figure out how to successfully steal a $3000 coat, but really hard for an unskilled criminal to steal an evernote subscription. You can't steal my wife's mink coat; she doesn't have one. On an enormously smaller scale, before 1962 every middle/upper class white male wore an expensive formal hat with his suit, after '62 statistically no one wears them; you could steal my grandfather's fedora, but you'll never steal mine because I don't own one and likely never will. You could steal joe average's fishing boat in 1970 because joe average could afford a boat. In 2015 joe average cannot and will never afford a boat, with the side effect of no one will steal it. Likewise every dollar I spend on medical, which only goes up 10%/yr or whatever it is, is money I'll permanently never be able to spend on something physical, small, stealable. If you steal my kindle I'll merely download my books again. You could steal my dad's 1980s laserdiscs (remember those?) but you can't steal my streamed movies, well, maybe you can "steal" as in piss off the copyright holders, but you can't take the experience of having watched them in the past away from me.
- dragonwriter 11y agoThe answer seems most likely to be number 15; crime isn't constant by age group, true, but it is driven by it; both the crime wave and the subsequent fall track well with population and are consistent with the overall crime rate (and even the rates within each age group) being driven by the proportion of the population that is young adult males. The article treats the evidence of the influence of demographics on the by-age-range rate as of it was evidence against this effect in order to have a for and against argument, but that's actually not counter-evidence of any kind.
- michaelfeathers 11y agoIt's amazing how many people want to believe in single causes.
- tempodox 11y agoNever trust a statistic you didn't forge yourself. First of all, I would have to be convinced that the phenomena compared are actually commensurate. This topic has just too many agendas attached to it to make it credible that any two observers would actually apply the same metric, let alone over 25 years.
- FooBarWidget 11y ago> Never trust a statistic you didn't forge yourself. I would go further and say that you shouldn't even trust a statistic forged by yourself. Statistics & probability is hard. If you don't regularly practice your statistics & probability calculation skills, you will probably get it wrong.
- steego 11y agoI've been following the trend for the last 15 years and there have literally been hundreds of articles, papers and a few dozen books that touch on the this phenomenon. It's a popular topic in the world of criminal justice and most people tend to have their pet theories that match their agendas. What people don't debate is whether the rates actually dropped.
- suprgeek 11y agoNote that this article talks about Violent Crime & its reduction. One theory to add to the mix of all others (one that is somewhat touched upon in the article) - We are moving to more digitized, less physical (things) economy. If what you think of as being "Valuable" is not physical but digitized, it is harder for violent criminals to deprive you of it. However if we consider all crime - violent (physical) & non-violent (hacking, White-collar problems, Scams frauds etc) there will be a more interesting & perhaps less dramatic result than "Plummets". Obviously Murders (& certain other baser crimes) cannot be digitized away.
- kazinator 11y agoAs far as property crimes go, there are probably fewer because if you break into a random home, all you likely find is cheap stuff that you would have to be paid to take away. Nobody wants your TV, stereo, computer, made-in-China furniture, etc. A new 40" TV can be had for under 300. How much will someone pay for a three-year-old stolen one?
- london888 11y agoI didn't appreciate having to do all those mouse clicks, to learn not very much.
- Downvotaggedon 11y agoIn America, 25% of all black males are in prison. Are you people seriously going to ignore this factor because it runs counter to DNC mass media narratives? Haha, the question is rhetorical. I already know the answer. Downvotaggedon incoming!! - A black male has an order of magnitude higher chance to rape a woman than the average male from all other races combined. - There is -no- coorelation between material access and reducing rape. (Despite widespread access to free porn, white males raped 37k white females last year, white males raped ---ZERO--- black females over the last 5 years COMBINED) - Middle class white people hate uncomfortable statistics that hurt their political fantasy lands Combine these three things and watch the mental gynmastics begin!
- joosebox 11y agoUgh. Socioeconomic conditions, not race, drive people to commit violent crime (for the vast majority of cases). Critical thinking may be hard, but it's rewarding. Try it.
- Downvotaggedon 11y agoAll those rapes poor Latino, Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese men are doing... no wait... combine them, and they aren't anywhere NEAR blacks in terms of perecentage of race OR overall volume. (bjs.gov stats, not mine) I get it. You've been Pavlovian trained to "not see race". It would be cute if it wasn't so anti-reality on this particular topic.
- GVIrish 11y ago"In America, 25% of all black males are in prison." There are over 40 million black people in the United States. There are 2 million people in jail in the United states. Even if every single person in jail was a black male, there's still no way to get to '25% of black males are in prison'. There are plenty of erroneous "facts" flying around on the internet but at least apply some cursory scrutiny to them.
- Downvotaggedon 11y ago
- peter303 11y agoA similar treatment was comedy-documentary Bowling for Columbine in 2002. Moore explores a half dozen reasons why the US seems to have more mass shootings than other countries. He doesnt choose one main answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_for_Columbine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_for_Columbine I'd probably add that 13 years and a hundred more shootings later there could additional theories like the ubiquity of violent video games and the heroic portrayal of previous mass shootings.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- fartbrain 11y agoThat theory is mentioned in the article.
- tyomero 11y agoRead Steven Pinker's The better angels of our nature. He has some ideas why.
- jilted 11y agoAnother explanation could be attributed to the food supply: in America, the lower standard of living you have, the more likely you consume a nutritionally poor diet and consume water from the tap which in some areas has been shown to contain trace amounts of medications, spores, lead, fluoride, etc. In other words, medical conditioning.
- adibchoudhury 11y agoStill a bit skeptical of the abortion theory from Freakonomics. Correlation does not imply causation.
- LordKano 11y agoThe reduction in environmental lead exposure makes much more sense than Roe v Wade. State by state, country by country, it matches up to a crime reduction more than abortion.
- transfire 11y agoThey forgot to count the rise of online scams. Bet that will offset those stats a plenty.
- Shivetya 11y agoNot on the list. The government has institutionalize being poor to the point they likely have reached the point for many where the benefits are sufficient. From food stamps, living assistance, child care, and more, there are thousands of assistance programs. Give the sense of security and most won't do anything wrong.
- mch82 11y agoIt is interesting, and possibly enlightening, that mass surveillance is not listed as a contributing factor to the reduction in violent crime.
- Downvotaggedon 11y agoOr race-based criminalization. People hate reality, they take moments like this to demonstrate how clever they are under the guise that they might get a book deal for writing the Twitter version of Freakonomics.
- nate_meurer 11y agoI'm sorry, the downvote was mine by accident. Pushed the wrong button cause they're too fucking small and I'm a dunce. What you say is indeed interesting.
- jhonovich 11y agoIt's harder to get away with crimes today than it was 20 years. Advances in fingerprints, surveillance cameras, DNA, electronic records, etc. all make it much harder for criminals to repeat and much riskier for those who start. A perfect example is the decline in serial killers. Even if people are as bad or crazy as they were in the past, getting away with killing 5, 10, 15, 20 people is incredibly more difficult now than it was years ago.
- arthernan 11y agoWhat about the effect of the Internet on crime? Is the internet giving access to information and a different way of life to a lot more people? Maybe in the 50's a kid with an interest on say skydiving would feel like that would never be possible. But today the same kid contacts skydivers. And even if the kid did not actually skydive, some how being closer to it means something. Maybe skydiving is idealist. But really, could the Internet be a big factor?