Great Performance !

The final pair of crime-drop explanations concern two demographic trends. The first one received many media citations: aging of the population.

Until crime fell so drastically, no one talked about this theory at all. In fact, the “bloodbath” school of criminology was touting exactly the opposite theory—that an increase in the teenage share of the population would produce a crop of superpredators who would lay the nation low. “Just beyond the horizon, there lurks a cloud that the winds will soon bring over us,” James Q. Wilson wrote in 1995. “The population will start getting younger again….Get ready.”

But overall, the teenage share of the population wasn’t getting much bigger. Criminologists like Wilson and James Alan Fox had badly misread the demographic data. The real population growth in the 1990s was in fact among the elderly. While this may have been scary news in terms of Medicare and Social Security, the average American had little to fear from the growing horde of oldsters. It shouldn’t be surprising to learn that elderly people are not very criminally intent; the average sixty-five-year-old is about one-fiftieth as likely to be arrested as the average teenager. That is what makes this aging-of-the-population theory of crime reduction so appealingly tidy: since people mellow out as they get older, more older people must lead to less crime. But a thorough look at the data reveals that the graying of America did nothing to bring down crime in the 1990s. Demographic change is too slow and subtle a process—you don’t graduate from teenage hoodlum to senior citizen in just a few years— to even begin to explain the suddenness of the crime decline.

There was another demographic change, however, unforeseen and long-gestating, that did drastically reduce crime in the 1990s.

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Taken From : FREAKONOMICS - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything