From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, the proportion of Americans in prison each year never exceeded 120 per 100,000
I guess if you're considering a sufficiently small population you could go from ~600,000 people in Vermont * 120/100,000 -> ~720 imprisoned people in Vermont trivially, but we're the second smallest state. This certainly doesn't scale to cities over a million. At least I'd start having to think harder about it.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...
i fear the new avenues of business sought by companies that operate for-profit prisons - i don't expect they'll just eat the losses of declining populations in their main moneymakers, and we're already starting to see them work on detention facilities for DHS etc.
In short, no, they won't stop locking it up. They wouldn't even if there was a decline in petty crime... those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5.
Lets see if cutting education has any impact over the next 20 years.
Another factor which will soon impact this, if it isn't already, is the rapidly changing nature of youth. Fertility rates have been dropping since 2009 or so. Average age of parents is increasing. Teen pregnancy on a long and rapid decline.
All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.
Crime statistics (e.g. homicides) are often quoted as 'n per 100,000 population'.
It's probably also easier for mental math, e.g. here's a city with 1 million population, that's 10 100Ks, so 1200 people in prison.
Quotes from the article:
> As of 2016—the most recent year for which data are available—the average man in state prison had been arrested nine times, was currently incarcerated for his sixth time, and was serving a 16-year sentence.
> But starting in the late 1960s, a multidecade crime wave swelled in America, and an unprecedented number of adolescents and young adults were criminally active. In response, the anti-crime policies of most local, state, and federal governments became more and more draconian.
> Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated.Maybe in some cases that's true, but it's definitely not true for the few big box stores I frequent in SF where this practice occurs. The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise. I'm not sure who pays for the tactical gear wearing security guards at the entrance looking ready for Iraq, but it can't be cheap.
Most of them (probably all) have contracts that stipulate they get paid per bed they provide, whether or not it's occupied.
Worse would be 1,000 per 100,000, which is 1% but there's no way to tell that it's not rounded or truncated.
If it is not, crime rates are up, and by a lot.
If it is, crime rates are down.
When you flip from one to the other, takes about 15/20 years for the effect to show up.
Rationale is that forcing parents to have their kids when they're not ready for them significantly increases delinquency in young adults.
This is apparently the only possible theory at the moment. It's not proven, of course, but the other theories which were given have been found lacking. This is the only theory which has some evidence, and hasn't been found to be wrong.
Crime used to pay. Your expected return on a crime was pretty good for the risk involved. Nowadays though, because of technology, risk has increased while the returns have also decreased. Barriers to entry for crimes worth committing are now way higher. Robbing a gas station decades ago could yield a nice chunk of cash that could probably pay bills for a month. But now with less people using cash and cost of living increasing, there’s no point. Most registers have pitiful amount of cash. And mugging strangers on the street is likely even worse. No one carries wads of cash anymore.
The hot industry to be in is ransomware. The sums are vast and the risk is low if you do it right. But it’s very white collar, it requires skills that your typical low level criminal won’t have.
Overall, it means there’s a lot of crimes that are done not for any financial reason, just for personal satisfaction.
2014 seemed like the big year where smartphone ubiquity changed US teen culture. Less boredom, dumb adventure, drinking, etc. (For better or worse but in this case better.)
When you don't give a human resources, they will find a way to take it. When you force humans with no resources to have kids, well...
> But a prison is a portrait of what happened five, 10, and 20 years ago.
Is this just a result of the dropping crime rates since the mid 90s, but on a 20ish year lag?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime...
Unleaded gasoline could also be a factor. Every country has shown drops in crime rates when leaded gasoline was phased out.
If I recall, leaded gasoline was phased out in the 80ies, which fits a drop in crime rates in the 90ies.
About 7 years ago a former schoolmate of mine shot a man 6 times over a bad drug deal, fled the state to California. He was captured by the US Marshal and brought back to the county jail where he bonded out after 3 month.
After his bonding out, he drove over to the victim’s parent’s house and performed a drive-by shooting, injuring none but did kill livestock.
He was arrested again, taken to the county jail, and bonded out after several months.
The issue finally reached a plea bargain, they dropped all charges related to both shooting, had him plead guilty to felony firearms charge, and gave him time served and 5 years probation.
This man is a grown adult with felony priors, and got a proverbial slap on the wrist. Never saw a day of state prison, likely never will.
If this is how we treat serious violent crime, I’m not surprised in TFA at all.
May be the result of a rapidly declining birth rate.
If most prisoners are younger, starting their incarceration incidents in their teens or twenties, then basically the fewer young people you have, the less people in prison:
https://populationeducation.org/u-s-population-pyramids-over...
Compare 1960 to 2020.
Condoms are their own bag of worms. I think there are cultural differences in condom use here, as well as the same problem with them being a cost. This doesn't even touch on men being shady with stealthing and pressure.
On the other hand, the abortion clinic requires only an appointment and a way to get there.
A shopkeeper friend of mine closed his business in Seattle after multiple lootings of his place and the police never showing up. He relocated to a bedroom community.
Crime statistics are not necessarily accurate, and politicians have an interest in minimizing those statistics one way or another.
Now, most of those laws have been rolled back. In the past 10-15 years the number of people locked up at the state level for drug crimes is down 30% even though drug arrests remain high. And those still getting locked up are getting shorter sentences. (though over 40% of inmates at the federal level are still there for drugs)
I'm not sure why they failed to mention such a key issues related to incarceration. They repeatedly refer to the surge in crime in the drug war era as a "crime wave". And they link to 3 other pro-drug war articles by the same author. Maybe Keith Humphreys had a bad trip in his youth and now he's making it everyone's problem.
- While the Freakanomics citation of widespread access to abortion has been debunked as a sole cause, I think it remains credible for at least a contributing factor. Fewer young people born to folks who are too poor/busy/not wanting to raise them is doubtlessly going to reduce the number of young offenders who become the prison system's regular customers their whole lives.
- Beyond just abortion, contraceptives and contraceptive education have gotten much more accessible. For all the endless whining from the right about putting condoms on cucumbers poisoning children's minds with vegetable-based erotica, as it turns out, teens have sex, as they probably have since time immemorial, and if you teach them how to do it safely and don't threaten their safety if they do, they generally will do it safely.
- Additionally, there has been a gradual ramp-up in how badly negative outcomes stack in life, and "messing up" on your path to adulthood carries higher costs than it ever has. Possibly contradicting myself, teens are having less sex than ever, as all broad forms of socializing have decreased apart from social media, which is exploding but doesn't really present opportunities to bone down. Add to it, young people are more monitored than they've ever been. When I was coming up, I had hours alone to myself to do whatever I wanted, largely wherever I wanted as long as I could get there and my parents knew (though they couldn't verify where I was). Now we have a variety of apps for digitally stalking your kids, and that's not even going into the mess of extracurricular activities, after school events, classes, study sessions, sports, etc. that modern kids get. They barely have any unmonitored time anymore.
- Another point: alternative sexuality (or the lack thereof) is more accepted than it's ever been by mainstream society, and anything that isn't man + woman is virtually guaranteed to not create unwanted pregnancy unless something truly interesting happens.
- Lastly, I would cite that even if you have a heterosexual couple who is interested in having kids, that's harder than ever. A ton of folks my age can't even afford a home, let alone one suitable for starting a family. The ones that do start families live either in or uncomfortably close to poverty, and usually in one or another variety of insecurity. The ones that can afford it often choose not to for... I mean there's so many reasons bringing kids into the world right now feels unappealing. It's a ton of work that's saddled onto 2 people in a categorically a-historic way, in an economy where two full time salaries is basically mandatory if you want to have a halfway decent standard of living, and double that for one that includes children. That's not even going into the broader state of the world, how awful the dating market is especially for women, so many reasons and factors.
Any stressed animal population stops reproduction first. I don't see why we'd think people would be any different.
Well also, the number one crime these youths were getting arrested for was drug possession. With drug trafficking being second. 15 years ago the vast majority of people in prison in texas were there for drug possession or trafficking. If all of a sudden everyone's drug of choice is marijuana, and it's being decriminalized everywhere, I have to think that makes it hard to get the numbers you used to get in terms of arrests.
Not that this is a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that while arrests did go down, I don't necessarily believe that the prevalence of pot smoking decreased.
One benefit is that this new environment should help them to have better futures than the youths that came before them.
This is both good and bad. Having a child is very difficult, but it gets harder as you get older. You lack a lot of monitory resources as a teen or the early 20s, but you have a lot more energy, as you get older your body starts decaying you will lack energy. A kid had at 40 will still be depending on your when you are 55 (kids is only 15), and if the kids goes to college may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring. Plus if your kids have kids young as well as you, you be around and have some energy for grandkids.
Don't read the above as advocating having kids too young, it is not. However don't wait until you think it is the perfect time. If you are 25 you should be seriously thinking in the next 2 years, and by 30 have them (if of course kids are right for you - that is a complex consideration I'm not going to get into). Do not let fear of how much it will cost or desire for more resources first stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.
I’ve never seen a period used like that in census data. It seems like a conscious choice because the period is confusing when used in the middle of a phrase. 12E1 makes more sense but is abnormal notation for many people.
Are you certain, or were they running 3 people ragged who will burn out in a month and quit? Constant motion can make it seem like there are more people, but I also remember the 1990s and seeing at least one person per department in a Kmart, some just monitoring their area. A bigbox store like Target would've had 2 people for the cash registers up front, at least one in customer service, and one per department during off-peak hours. If you're telling me you're seeing a dozen people for certain, I'll believe you, but I am wondering if it wasn't actually fewer.
And besides all that, I was thinking more along the lines of CVS and Walgreens, which are the stores I know of locking everything behind glass.
"World Ends, Women Most Affected."
> Trailing zeros in an integer may or may not be significant, depending on the measurement or reporting resolution.
120 is either two or three significant figures, and you can't know which without knowing how the number was arrived at.
This would cut down on alot of the bullshit (and not just for cases like the one you describe, but where plea bargaining is used to bully people into pleading guilty where they are not).
More staff won't solve theft significantly because thieves carry the target merchandise to a less securely monitored area of the store. If they see an employee in an aisle, they'll move down another aisle where there isn't. And you can't have a person everywhere.
If anything, putting something behind glass increases staff because we have to keep that area covered as much as possible so we get those sales.
That's a frequent racist dog-whistle to justify systemically unjust (read: racist) policing; I'm surprised to see it on HN.
It's no wonder we had so many teen pregnancies.
"Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States."
https://legalknowledgebase.com/what-percentage-of-criminal-c...
I got my son at almost 40, and I’m positive I’m a much better parent because of that. Sure, kids cost energy, but at 40 and 50 you’re not geriatric. I often get the opportunity to compare our parenting style to younger parents, and it’s clear that they often have some emotional growing up to do themselves. They complain about normal parenting things that we just shrug about, they are torn between their career and raising a kid, and most importantly they often lack patience, where to us it just comes natural.
That particular book was criticized by historians a lot.
Cook County Jail (Chicago and close-in suburbs) population is higher than it has been in over a decade. They had to reopen a section of the jail to deal with it. Because people who do what that guy did no longer get to bond out. If someone fled to California and got brought back by the Marshal’s service, he’s sitting in jail until trial. And he is the one that needs to negotiate and offer concessions.
Note: crime is now dropping a lot [1]. Trying setting the date range to “last 28 days”
I'm not suggesting it's better. But people seem to automatically assume that being older when having kids as better. I know some much older parents who were not good parents. I know I would not make a good parent to a younger child now that I'm in my 40s.
I don’t deny that your way can work out as well. But OPs advice was “get children before you are 30, don’t wait until after”. Whereas my honest advice, based on my experience, is “wait until you are 35, you’ll be much more stable life in several regards”.
Which approach is best for you depends on a lot of things. For me, I can honestly say, there is no way I would be where I am if I had had kids in my 20s or even early 30s, and I also wouldn’t have been as good a father as I am right now based on how I’ve grown since then. Both things that my child directly benefits from.
It was really nice that I had time to establish my career and figure things out before having kids.
Lead concentration in America "rapidly increased in the 1950s and then declined in the 1980s" [1]. There is a non-linear discontinuity among kids born in the mid 80s, with linear improvements through to those born in the late 2000s [2].
Arrest rates for violent crimes are highest from 15 to 29 years old (particularly 17 to 23-year olds) [3]. They're particularly low for adults after 50 years old.
We're around 40 years from the last of the high-lead children. 17 years ago is the late 2000s.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10406...
[2] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP7932
[3] https://kagi.com/assistant/d2c6fdd5-73dd-4952-ae40-1f36aef1e...
From 1950-1970, America introduced new mandatory minimums for possession of marijuana. First-time offenses carried a minimum of 2-10 yrs in prison and a fine of up to $20,000. They repealed these minimums in 1970 because it did jack shit to stop people smoking. The govt even recommended decriminalizing marijuana in 1970, but Nixon rejected it.
But then came The Parents. As fucking usual, parents "concerned for their children" began a years-long lobbying and marketing effort to convince the public any kind of drug was evil and harming kids. Through the 1980s their lobbying spread to all corners of the government, influencing messaging and policy. So finally in 1986, Reagan introduced new mandatory minimums for marijuana, based on amount. Having 100 marijuana plants was the same crime as 100 grams of heroin. And then they went further; if you we caught with marijuana three times, you got a life sentence. Life. For pot. In 1989, Bush Sr. officially declared the "new" War on Drugs. And we've all been paying for it ever since.
I feel like I do have the unique perspective having actually done both. I don't need to assume what kind of parent I was in my 20s because I was that parent. And I'm a different parent now. But being a younger parent was a great experience despite any other consequences.
More of a pet theory, but voters born between 1950 and 1980, boomers and Gen X, have had a well-documented set of policy preferences.
E.g. Boston had 1,575 reports of auto theft in 2012, compared with 28,000 in 1975; Massachusetts had 242 murders in 1975, and 121 in 2012. (a 56% drop in homicide rate, as population went up 14%)
Social media and modern games are keeping them occupied.
And the life I have would just not have been possible if I had a child back then. Not even if I completely sacrificed family time and attention back then, which I never would have wanted.
But I guess we have to agree to disagree. For you, being a younger parent worked out better. For me, I’m certain I got my child at the right time. In any case, I find OPs general recommendation that if you want children, you should have them by 30, to be ill-advised to the point of being harmful. Many people would benefit from waiting until later.
San Francisco has the highest rate of geriatric pregnancies in USA. We are in a statistical bubble where having kids late is normal (because careers and hcol).
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/mother-birth-age...
If your point is that the benefits of crime reduction due to smartphones are outweighed by harms to mental health, then I think most people would disagree.
But this is also probably painting far too rosy a picture of what Meta is doing.
One thing I've learned in my decades on this planet is that just about never is one explanation for a human condition mostly correct. Lead is a convenient technical explanation that underestimates the impact of upbringing and community.
It doesn't explain a lot of factors of juvenile delinquency that existed for generations before lead service lines or leaded gasoline.
My experience also seems to match statistics. So, it would seem that your friend's experience might be the outlier -- I'm not saying they are wrong, I'm saying their experience doesn't match the data and there's at least one anecdote (mine) that runs counter to their anecdote. Seems like a good opportunity to try and find data that supports your hypothesis?
Locking up people for petty theft is almost certainly FAR more expensive than the cost of the materials being stolen. It costs tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to house an inmate every year, to say nothing of the damage it causes that inmate. Prisons make criminals more likely to commit crime in the future.
A person would have to be stealing like 40 bottles of mouthwash every single day for it to be cheaper to jail an inmate rather than just replace the mouthwash for the business. Cases like that also clog the justice system and prevent solving more serious crimes, deplete shared resources like police and public defenders, and overcrowd prisons.
Even if you aren't a prison abolitionist like me, surely the rational approach here isn't "Pay more and increase the likelyhood the petty criminal becomes a serious criminal". It just makes zero rational sense to try and solve the issue that way.
Very rough midpoint years; Baby Boomers 1949, Gen X 1979, Millennial 2009.
We recently saw this play out in the Queensland, Australia, state election where the opposition party, which was pretty much out of ideas, ran a scare campaign about youth crime in regional areas. Neighbourhood Facebook Groups where CCTV footage of "suspicious youth" are a mainstay and an aging population did the rest of the job and they won the election and passed "adult time for adult crime" laws: whether you agree with these or not, "adult time" in Australia means that the youth incarcerated will be adults in their 20s and 30s when they get out.
The Australian state of New South Wales routinely strip-searches young children, but again, there isn't much outcry.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out elsewhere. The worst case scenario is that kids will be politically scapegoated ("why should childless and aging taxpayers fund education?"), and it leads to a further decline in fertility rates.
I think it absolutely affects the quality of politicians we get though. The best that a given generation can offer is probably lower if that generation huffed a lot of lead gas. So as they age out and younger people hit peak career and fill those roles things will probably improve a bit.
My hot take is that previous generations weren't better prepared for the adult world than today's kids. They were more "mature" (sex, violence, abuse resistance) in some respects, but not specially ready for caring about society.
I'm 32, and I think I currently have much less patience and understanding than I did at say 22. Life has basically broken me to the point that I simply don't have the capacity for these things that I used to.
And the ones who didn't get sent to prison, stunt their career by being useless hippies or drive their muscle cars drunk so habitually that laws got passed are the current heads of most public and private institutions.
So things will likely improve a bit when those people age out as their replacements will likely be picked from an unleaded pool.
Small example (multiply all numbers by 1M), average birth rate of 1.5 can be a group of 4 people where one had 0 children, one had 1, one had 2, one had 3. If each child has as many children as its parents, next generation, 0 have 0 children, 1 has 1, 2 have 2, 3 have 3, for a new average of 2.33.
If you take a higher starting average but a tight spread [2, 2, 2, 2], the next average is only 2. Or if you have [0, 1, 2, 3] but kids model society instead of parents, you get 1.5 again.
Of course children didn't model their parents the past couple of generations, but times may be changing.
Be it as it may, I conclude that there is an elevated risk for problems the older you get (although for some issues, cause and effect may be reversed, which is hard to resolve), but that that risk may not be so significant as to outweigh other advantages.
> A simulation study concluded that reported paternal age effects on psychiatric disorders in the epidemiological literature are too large to be explained only by mutations. They conclude that a model in which parents with a genetic liability to psychiatric illness tend to reproduce later better explains the literature.[9]
> Later age at parenthood is also associated with a more stable family environment, with older parents being less likely to divorce or change partners.[43] Older parents also tend to occupy a higher socio-economic position and report feeling more devoted to their children and satisfied with their family.[43] On the other hand, the risk of the father dying before the child becomes an adult increases with paternal age.[43]
> According to a 2006 review, any adverse effects of advanced paternal age "should be weighed up against potential social advantages for children born to older fathers who are more likely to have progressed in their career and to have achieved financial security."[63]
Instead the Flynn Effect seems to have been strongest during the era of high lead, and it's tailing-off now.
"ADHD medication still reduces risks, but benefits have weakened over time"
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
I was talking to a nice girl up until she mentioned still wanting kids in her late 40s. Maybe I’m old school, but telling someone you froze your eggs the same day you meet them is weird.
Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle.
This rapidly transformed into no, get your masters, get 8 years of experience. Earn at least 300k as a couple. Then and only then should you consider a family. Childcare is 3k plus a month in many places.
For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it.
In my 30s I’ve let go of expecting anything. This world has already given me so much.
In NYC the black community has a majority of pregnancies not end with the birth of a child. This is where abortion policy is focused.
In my 20s, it felt indeed weird to bring that up early for me, because I wasn’t ready yet and didn’t even really know what I wanted yet. Later in life, when dating we always talked about potential family planning and general outlook on life early. (Unless it was never meant to be a serious relationship to begin with.)
Police reports aren't the only source of data. If this was a widespread impact then there would be other sources of data that could be used to build this case.
Additionally, we cannot make policy decisions on "just trust me, my friend said...". Maybe we can't get a perfect signal, but if you are going to challenge the prevailing data, I expect you to bring something novel beyond vibes. It doesn't have to be perfect, but a single anecdote plus "I believe it" is not sufficient to oppose what the data we do have is consistently saying -- crime is lower in Seattle, and has been consistently lowering over time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop#Decline_since_the_e...
Maybe they were doing similar things with lead or something else is a big factor. Perhaps the rise of ever more cheap entertainment for young males who are most likely to commit crime. That's a global thing.
The 1st recorded cases of fatty liver disease and T2D in children were in the 1980’s are have continued growing since - lead must have been protecting children’s health.
Testosterone has been on a sharp decline during this same time period - lead must promote healthy testosterone production.
Debt of all kinds, from the national debt, to household debt, to student loans debt has increased exponentially and consistently with lead removal - lead must promote financial literacy.
Felt really awkward for small talk.
My point was the economy should support having a family in your 20s if that’s what you want to do. You shouldn’t need a well paid career, a quality lifestyle that supports a family should be available for everyone.
I imagine universal health care, paid family leave ( for months not weeks) and affirmative (free?) childcare could bring that gap.
At a point it isn’t even an age issue. A lot of people will never earn enough to really support a family, and that’s a failure of the social contract.
You should be able to get a job as a Walmart clerk, have your partner work part time and still afford to have a family.
I think I’ve muddled my own point here, but it should be easier. Maybe that Walmart clerk could own a house ?!
You'd have more success blaming COVID inflation and the general public's poor education in economics and lack of understanding why eggs were $3.50/dozen. (Today they are $6.00/dozen)
Or the less popular more controversial hypothesis: the steepest decline in births is among the poor, a population with, on average, worse impulse control and more issues with mental health, and since all qualities are at least partly heritable...
Surprisingly, the fertility rate among the affluent does not appear to be nearly as impacted.
https://www.findlaw.com/state/criminal-laws/marijuana-posses...
"While crime rates in Seattle have recently shown a decrease, some reports suggest this may be partially attributed to a decline in reporting rather than a genuine reduction in criminal activity. Specifically, some authorities have noted that crimes against businesses, in particular, are frequently not reported."
"The police chief specifically mentioned that a 10% drop in property crime might not be entirely accurate because many business-related crimes go unreported."
plenty of criminals are intelligent.
I had my kids 25-35; all 5 are adults. We live together as is befitting a 4 income economy.
> and if the kids goes to college
Do you mean go away to college? Yeah. No.
> may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring.
Me and peers are all working grey. End of career happens with first major illness intersects with the lack of health insurance and we die.
> Plus if your kids have kids
If one of my a sons pairs off with someone and they both work, they'll still be 2 typical incomes short of self sustenance.
BUT, if they got married and then married another couple, the 4 of them only have to find one more adult - the one who will parent during the work day. After the last child enters school, the core 4 can kick parent 5 to the curb.
> Do not let fear of how much it will cost
No fear. Just math.
> or desire for more resources first
But if they had more resources they might only need 3 or even 2 adults working full time to afford basic bills.
> Do not let ... it ... stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.
Parents can (and do) parent while living in their car...
Are there any aspects of the crime that make it less appealing? Electronic counter measures too good? Price of replacement parts no longer carry a premium? Too easy to get caught?
...about putting condoms on cucumbers poisoning children's minds with vegetable-based erotica
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
It has been a common refrain that someone has an AirTag or other electronic surveillance they used to identify a thief, for which the police do nothing.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-sta...
I hear ya. My spouse developed mental illness after sons 4,5 were born. A spouse can sabotage a lot of things when they set their mind to it - and their mind never stops. Not even at 3am. The first year was hard. The second was harder. After 5ys we run out of adjectives. After 15y we're using Dr.Seuss letters to spell out how things are.
There are many factors that correlate and potentially contribute to a reduction in incarceration rates.
There are estimated 1.8-1.9M incarcerated. Since 1980 to the present there are well over 1M violent crimes (rape, murder, aggregated assault, robbery) per year. Let’s look at another factor that might contribute to falling incarceration rates that tend to explain this discrepancy in incarceration vs total crimes…conviction rates:
Murder: ~57.4% in 1950 vs. ~27.2% in 2023—a ~2.1x difference.
Rape: ~17.3% in 1950 vs. ~2.3% in 2023—a ~7.5x difference.
Aggravated Assualt: ~19.7% in 1950 vs. ~15.9% in 2023—a ~1.2x difference.
The neurological effects of lead don’t tend to explain away falling police clearances nor convictions.
Seems to be this weird reasoning (and I know it has cropped up in the US too) that - if they did an 'adult' crime they should be tried as an adult. It totally ignores what we know about developing brains - they are not fully developed, they don't consider consequences the same way as older people.
That's not to say they should be allowed to 'get away with it', but we need to take into account that it's not really the same thing as adults doing it.
Let's say that there is a correlation between the number of flights between London and New York, and the prices of sulfur. The correlation is near perfect.
When your neocortex is working, you ignore it. You can't create any plausible scenario how this could work (it doesn't exist within your latent space) so you don't learn anything from it, it doesn't even register in your brain as anything worthy of notice.
But everybody with the cerebellum only absolutely does learn it. And completely for real, not just as some fun factoid, but as a fact that they know the same way you know that airplanes have wings, and everybody knows it, only you don't.
Then, one day out of nowhere people start buying sulfur. Your questions are met with laughter and mockery "dude, everybody's buying sulfur, are you autistic?". And you don't know, because you haven't even learned the pseudo facts that everybody else bases their reasoning on.
This is only a made up example, but this is exactly how it works.
This even if their was a gain from watching others suffer, the lack of discipline, guidance, sternness, is way more detrimental than the positives of fearing the consequences
That's wrong, actually what's happening is police have just given up on arresting kids who will be released.
People keep poking at the wrong reasons, but in some societies it is quite dire. South Korea with this year of 1, when 2.1 means 'static', means more than halving the population every 30 years or so.
For a reverse comparison, if you take a penny and double it every day, you end up with > $5M in 30 days. And yet this birthrate issue doesn't take into account plague, war, natural disasters, and potential issues with lack of food(starvation). And the worst of it?
Is that I believe it is 100% environmental.
People think "having children" is a conscious choice. And sure, there is some of that. But at the same time, it is the very point of existence for an organism. Actually producing children (not just performing the sex act) is an evolutionary requirement. It is literally the primary drive of existence. Risky behaviour is ingrained into us, if it enables the possibility of reproduction. The drives and energy we place into everything we do, has a background drive that is sexual in nature. We seek to excel, to impress the opposite sex.
Like it or not (I'm not like that, I decide, not my hormones!), this is effectively an accepted fact of animal psychology. It's a part of who we are, our culture is designed around it, and every aspect of our lives is ruled by it.
Why am I on about this??
Well, my point is that this is a primary drive, interlaced so deeply that it affects every aspect of who we are. Reproduction, the production and raising of offspring is an act we are, naturally, compelled to. Forced to. Need to do.
Unless of course specific chemicals, maybe microplastics or all of the "forever chemicals" in our blood, are blocking that process.
Again, people will chime in with the popular "But it's expensive". No. Just no. Nope! My point above is that this is primal drive. People have had children in the depression, on purpose. Historically people, even with contraceptives, have had children regardless.
If it's about money, why is the birth rate declining in countries with free daycare, universal health care, and immensely strong support for parents post birth? Mandated career protection for mothers, months and months of time off after birth all paid. Immense tax breaks making children almost a profitable enterprise. In fact, in some European countries, it is more affordable to have kids than at any time in human history... and the birth rate still declines. It's just not about money. It just is not.
Why I think this is immensely important, is because we aren't seeing a rate, but an ongoing declining rate. The rate isn't just the lowest in human history, but the rate continues to decline. It's not '1' for South Korea, it's 1 right now, and will be 0.5 eventually.
What happens when no one can have children?
I further ask this, because the entire future of the species is at risk. People get all "who cares about going on", but wars do happen, plagues do happen, and I assure you I'm happy to be here, regardless of what the survivors of the bubonic plague thought at the time. Yet if we see a plague that kills 1/2 the population, where does that leave this equation? And what happens if we see a war that kills mostly those of child bearing age? What then?
My secondary concern in all of this is, we have very specialized roles these days. There was a time where a person could be a "a physicist", yet now there are 1000s of sub-specialties in such fields. And not everyone in the population is capable of expanding science. Of discovering 'new'.
My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress. There simply will not be enough people intelligent in a way functional to, say, physics, to expand that field.
So if our population decreases too far, we may not be able to resolve issues with, say, forever chemicals. Or with microplastics. Our capacity to do research and resolve such issues may vanish.
Couple that with a graph that is constantly declining, and a simple 50% death rate in a plague, could mean the extinction of the human race.
So my real concern here is, we aren't swinging the pendulum on purpose. It's happening to us. We're in the middle of an extinction event.
And it's only going to get far, far worse.
You don't just shrug that off and say "oh well, it'll probably be just fine."
More people are alive today than have ever lived.
And you are concerned that the population will drop by a half?
Everyone will be richer and better off. The amount of pollution and resource use will be solved too. The underlying input to that is the number of people.
One third of arable land is undergoing desertification
Insects and other species are dying off precipitously
Corals and kelp forests too, entire ecosystems. Overfishing etc.
My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress.
That’s silly when AI can already make 1 person do the job of 100, and soon will be doing most of the science — it has already done this for protein folding etc. And it will happen sooner than in 30 years.
This argument you and Musk make about needing more humans for science is super strange. Because you know the AI will make everything 100x anyway. And anyway, I would rather have the current level of science than ecosystem collapse across the board.
Also appeals to evolution are extremely weak and lazy and unproven.
This has literally only been true for about 30 years out of the sum total of human history, would you like to guess when those 30 years happened to be?
Obviously the answer is "1950s america".
For the rest of human history, you needed something beyond the education you received until the age of 18 in order to support a family.
If you read more carefully, I am concerned by two things. A reduction to 0, and the lack of control over this. I think you don't get how the rate is continuing to decline, and further, that knowing why is important.
And I have not said we need "more humans". Instead, I said we need a base number of humans.
Kevin drum and Rick Bevin both did a ton to lay this out systematically.
As leaving drum has noted, Lead is NOT the only contributor to crime, but it was the cause of the largest variations for most of the 20th century.
Were the older people who grew up with lead exposure also experiencing higher rates of impulsive crime in the late >1990s relative to the new and prior generations? That would help eliminate the major differences in economics/culture/politics of their upbringing (for ex: mass flight of families moving to the suburbs to raise their young kids after the 1970s crime wave scared them away).
Yet the first is aggression often born from, again, reproductive drive. You don't see moose smashing the horns together for fun, they do it to exhibit dominance. All creatures strive to say "I'm the best!", in hundreds of subtle and overt ways. "Success" at any act means "I'm a better mate!".
All of human culture, all of human drive, all of our existence is laced, entwined, and coupled with this drive. You may think your fancy pants brain is the ruler of all, but it's not, for the very way you think, is predicated by an enormous amount of physiological drives, the primary being "reproduce".
Saying that "citing concepts from entire branch of science" is weak, is a very weird thing to do.
Aside from the peer comment pointing out the bleedingly obvious, there's also a bit of history here:
In 1907 Justice Henry Bourne Higgins, President of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court, set the first federally arbitrated wages standard in Australia.
Using the Sunshine Harvester Factory as a test case, Justice Higgins took the pioneering approach of hearing evidence from not only male workers but also their wives to determine what was a fair and reasonable wage for a working man to support a family of five.
Higgins’s ruling became the basis for setting Australia’s minimum wage standard for the next 70 years.
* https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/harvester-...
* https://www.fwc.gov.au/about-us/history/waltzing-matilda-and...
There's a tendency for people in developed (particularly western) countries to feel entitled to immigrants. It's weird to think you'll not only have people changing your diapers when you're 90, but that your country should actively bring in people and deprive poorer countries of similar care, then leave those poor working class immigrants to fend for themselves once they're old.
It's the same mindset that drove society since the 1950s: it makes my life convenient, who cares if it makes life harder for people far from me or after I'm dead? And now we're all living with the accumulated consequences of all that (depleted ozone, climate change, ocean acidification, microplastics, oceans stripped of life, teflon pollution, deforestation, CO2 rising rapidly).
The world needs better solutions.
That's basically the same solution as dumping toxic waste overseas: you're just shifting the problem (depopulation) to someplace poorer and probably less able to deal with it.
Birthrates are declining everywhere, and the current global fertility rate is at replacement (so don't expect it to stay that high). In the future, there's going to be no magical place from which you can "import" all the people you need, because you chose not to make them yourself.
That's not a fantasy, it's the inevitable outcome of sub-replacement fertility, which is the state we find ourselves in (though my intuition says it will take longer than "a couple of centuries" to get to zero).
Why? Why are we sure that the population will not settle? Or that our increased productivity won't offset a change in labor?
I do worry societies will fail to handle side effects like the temporary increased demand for elder care, but no real fear of total societal collapse.
The US is unique (or maybe there are a handful of others, I don't know) in its ability to welcome immigrants who, within two generations, largely see themselves as Americans first and not as the identity of their grandparents. American identity politics has eroded this somewhat but it is still largely true, for example, that grandchildren of immigrants will usually have a very poor grasp of their grandparents' native languages.
The US alone doubled it's population since the 1950s. Enough scaremongering.
My coffee grinder may have been on my list, but I moved countries and the power is incompatible hah.
In 30 years time, people might be uploading their consciousness to computers, or colonising the moon. Making dire warnings about a concept like breeding that we might just get rid of seems foolish at best.
>We're in the middle of an extinction event.
No we are not. Lmao. Same way Horse Manure didnt snuff out life in London.
I think you need to drop back to reality to reassess your concerns. Barring a major disaster, there is no risk of extinction. Population decline is a factor only in economic terms, as demographics alone will require a significant chunk of a nation's productivity potential to sustain people who left the workforce. However, countries like the US saw it's population double in only two or three generations, and people in the 50s weren't exactly fending off extinction.
e.g., an incarcerated parent before the age of 12 increases the chances of being in jail after 18 by 230%
I genuinely don’t recall anything to support the idea that incarceration decreases crime, in general, at all…
Generally, fertility rates are higher among poorer populations compared to wealthier populations. This pattern is observed both at the national level, with poorer countries generally having higher fertility rates than wealthier ones, and at the individual level, with poorer families tending to have more children than wealthier families.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link...
Depending on the circumstances in a persons country, maybe getting children at a young age isn't that dumb. I'd argue that the best time to get kids is as a university student. You get free daycare, the government doubles your stipend (and it's extended), your housing subsidy increases, you generally have more free time as a student, grandparents are younger and able to help more and you have more energy and can more easily deal with lose of sleep.
As a bonus, when your kids move out, you're not even 40 year olds.
The only real issue is: Have you meet the right partner yet?
Where... where do you live? I'm all for having kids as soon as possible, but I was barely able to provide for just myself during university.
Having kids fast-tracked me to a critical increase in patience. I've grown so much in less than three years because of my kids. I'm not sure this growth would have ever happened so quickly through other means.
And I'll always have a special, particular respect especially towards my firstborn for causing that in me, and for enduring my shortcomings in the meantime.
My ex-wife was 37, and I was an year older, when our younger one was born and energy was not the problem so I agree with you that 35+ should not be a problem.
However, a lot of people are having kids significantly older than that.
I not know whether I could cope with a baby 20 years later. Contrary to stereotypes I used to get up faster and more fully if a baby cried in the night. On the other hand, having a baby might energise and motivate me! Not planning to try it out though!
I also have plenty of energy, the only real change I’ve noticed getting older is I’m in bed a bit earlier than I was in my 20s.
I don’t understand why people think midlife is some kind of drained, lifeless decrepitude
There are lot of alternatives. Men can be primary parents (I was, once the kids got to about the age of eight or so, and was an equal parent before that) and they could stay at home (I continued working, but I was already self-employed and working from home, and my ex never worked after having children).
I think the ideal set up (it would have been so for me) would have been for both parents to work part time.
Of course it still comes back to, you should be able to raise a family on the equivalent of one full time income.
Of course, if the leisured society predicted a few decades ago had come to pass it would be one part time salary.
However, they -clearly- do get away with it, continually the current method of punishment is not deterring them from crime. These are not 'oh he made poor decisions style crimes', you're not paying attention or are not living in this area if you think so.
I wish i could dig up the study from Townsville crime statistics (this is the closest i could find https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/101697 )
The key takeway is:
“The residents living in these areas have been let down for too long under the former Government who allowed serious repeat youth offenders to avoid adequate punishment and let them continue to terrorise these communities,”
Current deterrents clearly are not working. There are only so many levers the government can pull. Children learn poor lessons and inadequate supervision from their families, but if they are taken from their home the media screams 'stolen generation' so in the end individuals terrorised by them have to deal with the burden of their continued long term criminal behavior.
You may believe that children can be rehabilitated, I'd dearly love this to be the truth, however my observations show that its not a reflection of reality.
These conversations should not need to happen but they do because of the current inequality that exists. A couple can't change the world so they talk about these things since it's their best option
In fact I’m not expressing any beliefs other than the (very well supported) notion that children’s brains are not fully developed and therefore they shouldn’t be dealt with in the same way as adults because that’s just dumb and is likely not to help.
And it's easy for someone to just give in and go back to prison. Prison is only scary the first time. After that you walk back in and meet people you know who don't judge you. You know the staff. You know the routines. Do a few more years for the parole violation and see if things have changed next time around. If not, repeat ad infinitum.
And for those who cannot function in the real world (i.e. serious untreatable mental problems resulting in constant criminality) we need to find a softer way to keep them separated from being able to harm the public.
Various governments have also attempted to boost birth rates, but unsuccessfully.
Wouldn't wish my worst enemy to be held in the CCJ, though. Easily one of the worst detention facilities in the USA.
This is the list of awards: https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/awards/lis... it's pretty extensive
Each award is also complex, and covers a range of issues in the employment. For example, this is the Professional Employee award: https://awards.fairwork.gov.au/MA000065.html just working out what the minimum wage would be for a graduate engineer with 2 years experience is a complex, detailed matter.
But yes, probably, for most professions you could reasonably expect to support a family of 5 on the award, depending on location and definition of "support". Affording a house would largely depend on an additional inheritance, though.
Assuming you meant died instead of lived to avoid a potentially nonsensical reading, this is not true.
It seems this factoid[0] has been around since the 1970s, and at least in 2007 it was estimated to be 6% of people who'd ever lived being currently alive [1]
[0] In the original sense of factoid - being fact-like, but not a fact (i.e. not true). C.f. android, like a man
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
Kids at 27 would have been a bad bad idea. Kids at 32 as well (wrong partner). I’m even older now but I am with the right partner and naturally want kids now. Before her, the topic wouldn’t even cross my mind.
I think it’s really hard to give general advice if one doesn’t mention how their advice interacts with other variables
Beautifully said, very progressive also!
I am a big fan of the 4-day work week (for the same amount of money as 5 days), it's been transformative for my life. The extra energy and focus you get from that 1 day translates to higher productivity in the 4 days where you do work. Sadly, the current "squeeze em', bleed em' dry, and drop em'" brand of capitalism is incompatible with the majority of the people to experience how good life can be like that.
I certainly ain't looking forward to them raising the retirement age to 1337 by the time I get to retire.
It's like a race where they repeatedly move the finishing line because the organizers took the medals and sold them, while waiting for you to drop dead so they don't have to give you what you are due.
Industrialization has pushed inequality to extremes while raising hours worked - even as productivity keeps shooting up. There's no good reason for people to tolerate this; it's just exploitation.
I was more patient as a teen than I am now in my 40s. Now I am tired. All the time. I fear I would literally die of exhaustion if I had to maintain more irregular hours than I already do due to insomnia that I have developed over the last half decade.
Each of these videos puts most film car chases to shame. There must be 20 channels dedicated to this. Participating states I've seen are mostly Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, and California. But any agency can publish a video, particularly if there is a shooting death and an official investigation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47
Incarcerating people likely to commit crimes will mean their future crimes are much less likely to be reported.
This does not mean less crime, it means crime just isn’t being recorded.
Even the most rigorous studies account for crimes committed in prisons.
having energy is subjective and does not really depend on being young or old. some old folks are full of energy and live really active lives. It depends on your state of mind and lifestyle more than age.
A few years in and I feel "back on my feet", but it was harder for being older.
today men have the ability to watch kids thanks to formula (though it is better for the kids to eat from mom - this is rarely talked about because it is easy to go too far and starve a baby to death in the exceptions).
All people have different brains; some are very low-intelligence and impulsive by nature and training, and this can apply at any age. The point of this punishment is not to apply a sort of cosmic morality according to the true culpability of a soul. Abstract principles about whether the person 'deserves' a punishment aren't actually relevant regardless of what shape their brain is. The point is the real-life consequence of their criminality on others, and how to stop them hurting people. We must stop them hurting people; let's figure out how.
This dedication to abstracted principles and cosmic morality over fixing the actual issue is really problematic; I see this more and more these days.
Seattle had the highest burglary rate in the nation of any large city as recently as 2023 (1201 per 100k residents!). https://www.safehome.org/resources/crime-statistics-by-state...
from 1999-2018 (most recent I can find a chart for), Violent crime ebbed and flowed but ended essentially where it started: 680/100k residents, almost double the US average. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/us/wa/seat.... I believe this uses FBI numbers.
Seattle Police report 5394 violent crimes in 2024, with 755k residents that's ~700 violent crimes per 100k, or roughly where it was in both 1999 and in 2018. https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2025/04/28/crime-drops-2...
I note that the Axios article says 2025 is on track to be a big drop; I have no idea what crime seasonality is, so I'd take that news story with a grain of salt until the year is out. Either way I just don't think Seattle's crime rates are "way less of a concern" over the last 40 years. Well, people may have become acclimated or stopped caring. But the rates are high, and don't look to have changed that much.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/freakonomics-what-...
A society that is producing children will not die off. The U.S. saw over 3.6 millions births in 2024.
Who pays matters.