Scott Alexander

There was no pot smoke, although marijuana was known to science it hadn't yet entered common use.

Then there was a surge in all these bad things, starting with litter in the 1950s and continuing to cheap boomboxes around 1990.

But this happened at the same time as the 1960s race riots, and white people fled to the suburbs and didn't encounter the urban environments where these problems were worst.

Around 2000, when the direction of white flight reversed and became gentrification, white people moved back to the cities, experienced the urban environment for the first time, and awareness of these problems rose.

This still doesn't quite cash out to a secular rise in squalor and disorder.

Murder rates in 1900 were still higher than today, and although there was no plastic waste, the streets of turn-of-the-20th-century cities were, quote, Let's sharpen our focus.

Theory 3.

Here's a graph.

Homicide rate and year-over-year percent change in homicide, 1900 to 2025.

It does indeed show a big dip between about 1935 and about 1974.

It's captioned, data on property crimes is worse but suggestive of the same pattern.

What caused this local minimum in crime?

Claude suggests a combination of low Depression-era birth rates, small cohort of adolescents in peak crime years, the wartime economy and post-war economic boom, high psychiatric institutionalisation rates, and, quote, cultural and social cohesion, end quote, in the wake of World War II.

But none of these explain why the trend should start in 1933, nor reach then-record lows by 1939.

Nor does it explain why we should update so strongly on this unique period that we still feel cheated 60 years later when things aren't quite as good.

Maybe this is just the way of things.

The Romans were constantly complaining about their failure to equal golden ages centuries in the past.

Still, I find it helpful to remember that although things are worse than the best they've ever been, except murder, murder might actually be beating 1950s record lows, they're not so bad by the standard of average historical periods.

Finally, theory four.

The squalor and disorder of the past took different forms than the squalor and disorder of the present.