The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,73

U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2010b, 2011; Fox & Zawitz, 2007. Data for Canada, 1961–2007: Statistics Canada, 2008. Data for Canada, 2008: Statistics Canada, 2010. Data for Canada, 2009: K. Harris, “Canada’s crime rate falls,” Toronto Sun, Jul. 20, 2010.

Not only did people cut down on killing, but they refrained from inflicting other kinds of harm. In the United States the rates of every category of major crime dropped by about half, including rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and even auto theft.134 The effects were visible not just in the statistics but in the fabric of everyday life. Tourists and young urban professionals recolonized American downtowns, and crime receded as a major issue from presidential campaigns.

None of the experts had predicted it. Even as the decline was under way, the standard opinion was that the rise in crime that had begun in the 1960s would even get worse. In a 1995 essay James Q. Wilson wrote:Just beyond the horizon, there lurks a cloud that the winds will soon bring over us. The population will start getting younger again. By the end of this decade there will be a million more people between the ages of fourteen and seventeen than there are now. This extra million will be half male. Six percent of them will become high-rate, repeat offenders—30,000 more young muggers, killers, and thieves than we have now. Get ready.135

FIGURE 3–19. Homicide rates in five Western European countries, 1900–2009

Sources: Data from Eisner, 2008, except England, 2009, which is from Walker et al., 2009; population estimate from U.K. Office for National Statistics, 2009.

The cloud beyond the horizon was joined by purple prose from other talking heads on crime. James Alan Fox predicted a “blood bath” by 2005, a crime wave that would “get so bad that it [would] make 1995 look like the good old days.”136 John DiIulio warned of more than a quarter of a million new “super-predators on the streets” by 2010 who would make “the Bloods and the Crips look tame by comparison.”137 In 1991 the former editor of the Times of London predicted that “by the year 2000, New York could be a Gotham City without Batman.”138

As legendary New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia might have said, “When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut!” (Wilson was a good sport about it, remarking, “Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past.”) The mistake of the murder mavens was to have put too much faith in the most recent demographic trends. The crack-fueled violence bubble of the late 1980s involved large numbers of teenagers, and the population of teenagers was set to grow in the 1990s as an echo of the baby boom. But the overall crime-prone cohort, which includes twenty-somethings as well as teenagers, actually fell in the 1990s.139 Even this corrected statistic, though, cannot explain the decline of crime in that decade. The age distribution of a population changes slowly, as each demographic pig makes its way through the population python. But in the 1990s the crime rate lurched downward for seven straight years and promptly parked itself at its new bottom for another nine. As with the takeoff of crime in the 1960s, changes in the rate of violence for each age cohort swamped the effect of the size of those cohorts.

The other usual suspect in explaining crime trends, the economy, did little better in explaining this one. Though unemployment went down in the United States in the 1990s, it went up in Canada, yet violent crime decreased in Canada as well.140 France and Germany also saw unemployment go up while violence went down, whereas Ireland and the U.K. saw unemployment go down while violence went up.141 This is not as surprising as it first appears, since criminologists have long known that unemployment rates don’t correlate well with rates of violent crime.142 (They do correlate somewhat with rates of property crime.) Indeed, in the three years after the financial meltdown of 2008, which caused the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the American homicide rate fell by another 14 percent, leading the criminologist David Kennedy to explain to a reporter, “The idea that everyone has ingrained into them—that as the economy goes south, crime has to get worse—is wrong. It was never right to begin with.”143

Among economic measures, inequality is generally a better predictor of violence than unemployment.144 But the Gini coefficient, the standard index of income inequality, actually rose in the United States from