Did TV cause a rise in crime?
The first edition of Freakonomics made the controversial claim that the decline in the crime rate in 1990s America was down to the legislation of abortion after the Supreme Court’s famous Roe v Wade judgement in 1973. In other words, the underclass that was previously responsible for spawning a generation of criminality was no longer reproducing in quite such large numbers, and thus the criminals of the future were not even being born by the later 1970s and 1980s. Even if true, critics felt that this was freaknomics shading into the much less fun world of eugenics. Less controversially, and even less categorically clear, is the research that links the rise in crime with the spread of television across the US, which was staggered over the 1940s and 1950s and thus offers the social scientist a rare opportunity to observe human behaviour with a “control” sample. Yes, for every extra year a young American was exposed to TV in his first 15 years, there is a 4 per cent rise in the number of
