The Collapsing Crime Rates of the ’90s Might Have Been Driven by Cellphones
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
It probably also explains the "weird spike" in violence from the 60's to the 80's mentioned at the end of the article, as more and more people started driving and cities converted to car-centric.
Crime is primarily carried out by young men 16-25. They now have a very interesting activity that many of them engage in. There is far less 'hanging around' with dodgy mates on streets with little to do.
The crime decline also didn't occur just in the US but all across the developed world which suggests that Roe vs Wade had less impact than Levitt and other suggest.
By the 1990s consoles had become cheap enough that many more people could afford them.
That and as someone else has said, cheap and available porn. Cheap porn was available by the 1990s in magazines and videos. Online it's now much cheaper and prevalent, but it's been there for quite a while.
And I never said Internet porn. While not free, porn was still cheap and easy to get on cable or satellite, or at video rental stores.
I doubt it was just porn though. I believe that simply getting teenagers / young adults inside for long periods of time (and not just for the purpose of abusing drugs / alcohol) is a big victory (for crime stats, not society in general).
I think there were articles in the year following, at least in scandinavia, about it.
Also note: Prison provides free housing, free meals, free gym, and free healthcare.
For more, see http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations where you will find that, for example, the number of people who drowned by falling into a pool correlates with the number of films that Nicholas Cage appeared in that year.
The University of Leeds criminologist Graham Farrell, who is closely associated with the hypothesis that better security technology is the primary cause of the crime decline, also took issue with some of the paper’s data analysis. “At first glance, it seems to be that antenna [density] increased mostly after homicide already declined,” he wrote to me in an email.
The data that the economists presented don’t match the chronology of the decline of homicides, especially considering that their proxy variable—how many antennas were up—would almost certainly precede cellphone usage by some period of time. The timing, he said, is “not even close.”
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but no one said it did.
I find this assumption VERY suspect.
Cell tower density is going to increase in the most profitable areas first--and those are not necessarily going to be correlated with high-crime areas (in fact--probably anti-correlated).
Cell phones are useful even if just a small number of drug dealers have them (remember when drug dealers used to have pagers?). You would probably have to correlate cell phones with pagers in some way in order to make a valid correlation.
Exhibit A - Murders by sharp object correlates with visitors to SeaWorld - http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=41291
I wonder if it would be possible to create an app where people could (with consent) register people they really don't like. The exact locations and identities wouldn't be displayed, but venues might glow red as if they're radioactive. Couples who have broken up might want to use this, for example. It would be like an anti-Foursquare. (Just spitballing a silly idea.)
I don't have a strong opinion on whether cell phones or abortion or anything else caused the collapse in crime, but do feel like the theories you'll read about the most (assuming you're not an academic in the social sciences) are the ones that make for the most interesting headlines.
Are people only responding to headlines, anymore?
The Internet, wireless communication, video games, cheap cable TV. Even Internet porn.
I don't really see cellphones as being the defining factor here. They were relatively rare during the 90s. Even by the early 00s, only rich folks owned them.
It makes the 1984 Lifeline (more commonly yet erroneously known as ObamaPhones) project to get phones to impoverished people have larger network effects.
It also points to the faults of the 'War on Drugs', as very little of this territory would be needed without black markets.
For a brief history of the racial motives behind the war on drugs, check out this episode of On The Media:
https://www.wbez.org/shows/on-the-media/this-american-war-on...
The bit about Billie Holiday is particularly heartbreaking and infuriating.
Even if we agree that tough-on-crime works (I do not agree, but say I did), the way the war on drugs applied tough on crime was predominately on people of color. If you were white and sold weed you were MUCH less likely to go to jail than if you were black or latino. We could have locked up all those white weed dealers and driven the crime rate down even lower. So at very very very best the war on drugs was the right policy applied in a racist way. At very best.
So the response to the post title is "No, not really"?
America is different, but in the pre-cellphone UK there were pubs to meet dealers in. After a beer and a walk to the car the transaction could be made. A fully legit landline call could be made to arrange meeting up for a beer, no code words needed. With cell phones and messaging there is invariably some discussion on quantity required, hence evidence one would think would be good for court.
Coupled with this change there has been woeful cutbacks to policing in the UK so there are no resources for clearing drugs out of a community. It sort of suits the government to have people stoned rather than demanding social change, people with drugs or related paraphernalia are not wanting to get in trouble with the authorities.