Violence in America

I saw this interesting chart suggesting violence in the US is on the decline (original image here):

This is via Krugman who doesn’t hesitate to grind his political ax a bit:

And that’s one reason I find all these laments about declining values among non-elite Americans hard to take seriously. If things like single parenthood were as bad as they say, how can social pathologies have declined so much?

Ugh, I say, politics and sociology. What a mess!

So I thought I’d like to tickle a bias of mine with the graph, too. Notice that the trend is the same in all OECD countries? They’re dwarfed by the scale of the US data. Oh, the statistical tricks we can play!

For a quick and dirty analysis, let’s just see what the demographics of the era have looked like (source):

You’ll see that society is aging pretty remarkably since the 70s. Common to almost all OECD countries.

Angry youngsters killing each other!