Re:Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
by matthewdgreen on Sunday January 10, 2021 @01:41PM
(#25717917)
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.
Re:Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
by yourapostasy on Sunday January 10, 2021 @03:53PM
(#25719665)
> 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/ar...
[2] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wi...
[3] https://www.who.int/docstore/bulletin/pdf/2000/issue9/bu0686...
Re:Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
by watwut on Sunday January 10, 2021 @06:04AM
(#25713431)
Young people are less violent then they used to be. It is not just about their share in population, they behave less violently then young people 50 years ago.
Re:Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
by flybrand on Sunday January 10, 2021 @06:19AM
(#25713534)
People who are less violent can easily become violent because they don’t understand the cost and destruction of force escalation.
Re:Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
by watwut on Sunday January 10, 2021 @07:34AM
(#25714077)
Afaik, generations that grew up in violent times are more violent then those who grew up in peaceful times. Being used to violence, seeing it and/or being traumatized by it offsets whatever lack seeing the cost does.
Re:Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)
by vladTheInhaler on Sunday January 10, 2021 @03:42PM
(#25719508)
Really the violent people are the actual pacifists, and the peaceful ones are secretly capable of great violence? [CITATION NEEDED]
I would say that the population is, on average, much older and has more to lose. Fortysomethings do not regularly engage in street chaos. This is even more visible in Europe, even in formerly violent places like the Balkans or Northern Ireland.
Once the share of the young hotheads in the population drops, you have much smaller probability of really serious riots.