Headlines often blame Millennials and Gen Z for "killing" traditional industries and social norms so why not this one too.
Besides, GP is flat out wrong - not prosecuting crime does not result in reduced crime stats. The crime decline is led be a relatively huge 15% reduction in homicides. Even if those homicides remain unsolved or are not prosecuted, they still end up in crime stats. And unlike other crimes where you may argue they go unreported, when someone ends up dead (by usually violent means in a homicide) it rarely goes unnoticed.
Homicides are the one thing that are hard to fudge the numbers with, although I am sure there are a number of deaths reported where there is not a homicide charge and there could of been, that is not the point.
I've seen the result of a city deciding to report less crime, it works. The stats go down, people from out of town find the place more attractive, real estate goes up. They argue nothing reduces crime like cranes gentrifying.
There is much more to the cycle of crimes not reported and/or not being prosecuted. It definitely works to bring down the numbers and exponentially.
Of course the long term thing of cranes coming in and pushing out the poor may be the lasting change. Although I believe the criminal element adapts as well and chooses things based upon repercussions, so the amount of petty crimes can go up while the cranes stamp out the larger noticeable ones.
Which city?
In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards, because the tribe and the individual are coextensive. One can't hurt the tribe without also hurting yourself, so while individual interests may not coalign, the overall goals do: the health of the people and therefore the self.
As population increases, that coalignment becomes more nebulous, and the individual can more easily gain while hurting the other. This is partly why crime increased as the species civilized, created cities, and exploded the population. This, as an isolated factor, might've increased forever, and most dystopian fiction from the 20th century assumed it would.
However, alienation then largely became complete, thanks to technology. This had the contrary effect, because the public surface became a smooth wall, removing much of the opportunity for anti-social behavior. The alienated man now lives in his bubble, without connectivity to the outside world of other individuals. Human emotion, as a pre-req for the anti-social behavior we classify most crime as, required an other, someone to direct it against. It's harder (though not impossible) to get angry at abstract social megastructures like corporations and governments, and even when you do, what are you going to do about it? You can't stab Google, you can at best post something unkind about them (on your Android phone) and the algorithm (your actual interface to the entity you may despise) ignores it. Most of us realize this and don't even bother getting angry. Thankfully, these same non-human entities provide the products we need for emotional regulation. Feeling lonely, bored, understimulated, sexually frustrated? There's a product that will safely mediate those desires and get you back into a metastable, yet ever more alienated, state.
So great, we have less crime, sure, but it required the social neutering of the species.
Source? Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature had lots of issues. But its core observation that one’s homicide hazard rate has almost monotonically fallen across human history would imply that small, ancient group were way more violent than our modern societies are.
This is relevant because the metric we're measuring now is exactly that: crime, not violence. WWIII could break out tomorrow, billions could die, and crime could still go down.
Lots of the deaths appear to be separate from war [1]. We have lots of evidence of violent crime in non-state socieities [2].
Where you might have a point is in the reduction of anonymous property crime. But that's just because small societies don't tend to have privacy. The property crime may still happen, it will just be resolved comunally or bilaterally using violence.
[1] https://historyandarchaeologyonline.com/bog-people-criminals...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279610323_Violence_...
So for instance a big one is interpersonal 'justifiable' crime, versus random crime. There are places where if you insult somebody's integrity, they will kill you. Add some alcohol into the mix and these sort of places can have some rather high homicide/assault/etc rates. But on the other hand in these very same places, your chances of falling victim to random crime is basically zero, so they feel extremely safe in spite of having many crime rates comparable to places that feel extremely unsafe.
And data about the nature of crime in the past is strongly suggestive that it also had a similar character. People would not hesitate to use violence in the case of interpersonal conflicts, but the chances of falling victim to random crime was likely significantly lower than it is today. And I think these are the sort of crimes that people mostly care about, and it being a result of social alienation does seem like a perfectly valid hypothesis, though I'm not sure if in present times South America and others would falsify it. From an outsider's perspective, they seem quite socially cohesive, yet have exceptionally high rates of criminality.
Where are you thinking of? What I've seen, more commonly, is societies with lots of crime having ways for the wealthy to insulate themselves for it and then, acting against a background that has normalised high crime, feeling very safe. Versus societies where everyone is more mixed together where folks are constantly paranoid about vanishingly-infrequent crimes.
Dude, tight-knit societies produce crime, it is just that everyone ends up enabling the biggest abuser, rapist and what not there. So it ends up tolerated. We know, because those things come out after decades when people eventually feel safe to speak.
On the other hand, you have the Dunedin study, where lead exposure was uncorrelated with measured socioeconomic status, which found weak links with offending overall and no significant link to violent crime.[2]
In any case, people talk about this like lead was the dominant factor in the violent crime decline, when these results don’t establish that. Even the meta-analysis leaves most of the homicide decline unexplained by lead.
[1] https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/332830/1/332830.pdf
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
Do you have any evidence for this assertion, or are you relying on intuition here? A cursory search yields a number of references similar to this one---https://reno.nyloffices.com/resources/articles/starting-a-fa..., which indicate that the cost of raising a child has gone up significantly, at least in the last 40 years. And many of these references do not include the cost of college, which has skyrocketed. I'm not sure what you mean by "bringing up kids the way they were brought up in the 50s and 60s." They certainly had housing in the 50s and 60s, and that single expense alone is probably enough to make today's kids more expensive.
I don’t have any intuition or stats either way but that’s a bad and biased citation.
Which is not surprising giving it’s selling something.
The inflation adjustment includes everything: housing, education, and their proportion in the average US family's bucket, so calling out a specific item like education or housing doesn't change that data.
~Half the murder rate now vs. 1990. Worrisome COVID murder increase is returning to average for the past 20 years.