Tinark
Active member
Moral progress and how things are becoming better and better in the world and in the US in particular:
The article posits the lead exposure in childhood leads to violence hypothesis to explain the trend:
The US Murder Rate Is on Track to Be Lowest in a Century
This is fairly preliminary data, but Rick Nevin reports that if current trends keep up, we'll end 2013 with the murder rate in America at its lowest rate in over a century.
Analytically speaking, murder is an especially interesting crime because we have pretty good homicide statistics going all the way back to 1900. Most other crimes have only been tracked since about 1960. And if you look at the murder rate in the chart below (the red line), you see that it follows an odd double-hump pattern: rising in the first third of the century, reaching a peak around 1930; then declining until about 1960; then rising again, reaching a second peak around 1990. It's been dropping ever since then.
The article posits the lead exposure in childhood leads to violence hypothesis to explain the trend: