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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...