Title: What Caused Crime to Decline in the U.S.? - The Atlantic
Headings: What Caused the Great Crime Decline in the U.S.?
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What Caused the Great Crime Decline in the U.S.?
I remember the 1990s as a pretty good time for economic growth. Maybe that offered less incentive for crime.
I’m a little skeptical a Supreme Court opinion could reduce crime rates two decades later.

Content: Crime rates rose and fell in other industrialized countries in tandem with the United States over the past 50 years. Did they see similar declines when they liberalized their abortion laws? Demonstrating its effect in lowering foreign crime rates would strengthen the argument for its role in the U.S. decline, too. ANSWER
Wait, if other countries also had similar rises and declines in crime, that suggests the decline’s cause might be a factor that crosses borders. I think I read a Mother Jones article about something like this a few years ago…
QUESTION
Are you thinking of lead? The neurotoxic element stunts intellectual growth in children and causes behavioral problems when they become adults, but it wasn’t seen as a possible culprit for a nationwide crime wave until recently. In her 2007 paper on the relationship, economist Jessica Reyes attributed a 56 percent drop in violent crime in the 1990s to the removal of lead from gasoline after the Clean Air Act of 1970. With children born after the early 1970s less affected by lead’s toxic effects, the logic goes, they would be less likely to commit crimes once they reached their 20s in the early 1990s. Mother Jones reporter Kevin Drum helped popularize the theory in his 2013 cover story. “ In states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime declined slowly,” he wrote. “