On the decline in crime, it is to the ruling class's advantage for there to be a hulking mass of barbarians outside the door to terrorize the populace and keep them shuddering in fear. Rulers don't mind a high crime rate despite anything Trump might say. High crime affects the poor and minorities disproportionately and creates economic opportunities in manufacture of guns, their paraphernalia and new weaponry escalating in deadliness. Also, security services and a myriad of other things. I know people who are actually having secret rooms built into their homes to hide their weaponry.
There was a rogue economist named Steven Levitt who dated the start of the crime decline to the date when young men would be turning 16 except they did not exist due to Roe vs. Wade. (that sentence was tricky to compose!) The ruling class also wants there to be a large permanent population of poor people, it keeps wages low. 
Hmm. I don't think I would agree that the confusion over crime is deliberately manufactured by the entire "ruling class." For sure it was deliberately manufactured (or spread) by Trump, to rile up his lower-income supporters. I saw it happen in debates when he would describe places like Chicago (i.e., big cities with lots of black people) as roiling cauldrons of violent crime, implying it was getting worse and worse. I'd be yelling at the screen, "What the hell are you talking about? Crime is way down!" But, as I said earlier, people who live in medium-size cities -- i.e., the working-class part of Trump's base -- that were hard hit by the oil bust or whatever might actually be seeing some rise in local crime and therefore assume it's that much worse in "inner cities." Was it your friend on FB I started debating about this? Somebody in CO. She said crime was getting worse, jobs were getting scarcer, etc. and I said the opposite was true. Turned out we were just looking at it from different perspectives. We became friends on FB.
Creating the illusion of high crime might benefit the gun industry but the entire ruling class doesn't back the gun industry, and I can't think of many other industries besides the obvious (home alarm systems, etc.) that would benefit from an unrealistically high perception of crime.
I also don't think I would agree that the ruling class favors widespread poverty to suppress wages. After all, it also suppresses customers. They may not have to pay their employees as much, but they don't need as many employees because they can't produce as much because there's nobody to buy their goods and services. Rich people (many, at least) do want to keep taxes low, however, so they don't want government money used to pay for services to poor people, including ones that might help lift them out of poverty. Unfortunately, they aren't usually moved to say, "Well damn it, let's make sure there are fewer poor people!" Instead they just say poor people don't deserve it, they're lazy, they're greedy, whereas we need to be able to keep every single million we can get, etc.
As for Steven Levitt, I have heard his theory. But it's larger than that -- the entire Gen X is much smaller than Boomers, so logically you would expect crime to have dropped when Gen Xers were at prime crime-committing age -- mid-teens to maybe 30ish. And back then economists did attribute at least some of the crime decline to that. But Gen Xers are now mostly in their 40s and 50s. Millennials, who range from mid-teens to mid-30s, are at prime crime age, and there are actually more of them than Boomers (just by like half a million; probably partly because some Boomers have died off). So logically, if crime is merely a factor of the number of people who haven't been aborted, it should be back to where it was in the '70s and '80s.
I cover generations stuff and I have never heard the smaller size of Gen X attributed to abortion. In any case, abortion is still legal and now we have a giant younger population.
Anyway, I think most women who have abortions are middle class and up. Kids most likely to commit crimes live in poor communities, where women are less likely to get abortions.
Topic: In the New Yorker... (Read 2403315 times)