Pretty interesting suggestion:
Lena Edlund, a Columbia University economist, and Cecilia Machado, of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, lay out the data in
a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. They estimate that the diffusion of phones could explain 19 to 29 percent of the decline in homicides seen from 1990 to 2000.
“The
cellphones changed how drugs were dealt,” Edlund told me. In the ’80s,
turf-based drug sales generated violence as gangs attacked and defended
territory, and also allowed those who controlled the block to keep
profits high.
The cellphone broke the link, the paper
claims, between turf and selling drugs. “It’s not that people don’t sell
or do drugs anymore,” Edlund explained to me, “but the relationship
between that and violence is different.”
The rest of the article goes on to note how this is just one of many theories about the crime reduction in that period:
The University of New Haven criminologist Maria Tcherni-Buzzeo published a review of the contending theories in 2018
that found no fewer than 24 different explanations for why crime began a
multi-decade decline in the early 1990s, through economic times good
and bad, in different countries and cities, under draconian policing regimes and more progressive ones.
Go read
the whole article, at The Atlantic.
2 comments:
From the link you provided ...
Eric Baumer and his colleagues (2018) lament that most of the explanations include single
variables rather than complete theories,
--
We can disregard those explanations.
Long-term ‘civilizing process’. The idea of a ‘civilizing process’ driving down the longterm trends in violence has been developed by Norbert Elias(1978), and popularized (while
also being criticized for its vagueness) by Eisner (2003, 2008). It is hard not to agree with
Eisner in this criticism because the ‘civilizing process’ is the type of cultural explanation
that is essentially impossible to test since Elias (1978) has not specified its mechanisms or
causes.
Criminals use to escape punishment much more easily in previous times. Move to another town, wash the money at the track, buy a car licence. Now with cash being used less often, with so many transactions digitally tracked, with personal identification documents being so difficult to create, it takes some smarts to be a successful criminal. Historically criminals were not the sharpest tools in the shed. Today that has changed, successful criminals need to be savvy with modern technology. To be a criminal now requires much more smarts than just being a thug. A thug will be quickly identified and hauled away.
The civilizing process is that education to higher levels is now mandatory making more people undergo a longer socialisation process and have more opportunities to make a living than turning to crime. Those lacking smarts cannot turn to crime because criminality now requires smarts. It's the dumb ones that get caught.
I had another idea and searched the document for "parenting". Not one single reference to parenting. Parenting has undergone a revolution in the last 50 years. Strange that no-one thought improved parenting may have played an important role in crime reduction.
It wasn't new to me. I theorised that mobile phones would bring the crime rate down a long time ago. Mobile phones are a menace to drama. Movies don't really like them because most of the tension is in the communication problem and time constraints. Drama is the opposite of good civic management. You cannot have the great Drama of Hamlet unless something is rotten in the state of Denmark. The Flash was one of my favourite comic characters as a kid, but he struggles on the television since sheer speed solves a lot of the same problems that the ubiquity of mobile phones also solves.
When people act in completely anti-social ways in front of the crowd most people are stunned into cowardice through lack of options to respond. Now they are likely to walk in the other direction as they call crimestoppers on their mobile. The feedback to that is that the bad guys are dissuaded from acting up in the first place. We would be in a lot of trouble now if mobile phones hadn't infiltrated when they did.
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