What Caused the 2020 Homicide Spike?

The authors present many potential explanations that were put forward at that time to explain the phenomena. These included, more cops on the ground, stringent sentences, broken-window policy and so on. In the author's assessment all these hypotheses turned out to be wrong.

According to the author's analysis the likely cause was the ratification of the Roe-Wade judgement.

The causal chain is as follows, legalized abortion resulted in the reduction of the number of people who were likely to get very little parental support and social support while growing up. Arguably, this population is more predisposed towards crime and its relative reduction led to a fall that aligned with the timeline -- around the time the newborns would have hit the late teens.

Attributing an irrefutable cause is hard.

Borrowing costs for business owners through PPP, and the Federal Reserve buying assets; juiced consumption so high we even ran out of spare change. All goods were inflated; this includes drug markets.

If you use a proxy for drug use as fatal drug overdoes, drug overdoses increased thirty percent between 2019 to 2020 (71K to 91K), an unprecedented jump.

I suspect that over the short term drug market supply is inelastic, and the people that sell drugs simply kill each other for market share, increasing the murder rate.

This also may explain the precipitous drop in crime in the mid-1990s; the federal government largely stopped mailing people welfare checks, and people didn't have excess money for vice, subsequently fueling the drug trade and its associated gang conflict.

https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...