Remember the lead-crime hypothesis? Is there a lead-Trump link?

And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early ’40s through the early ’70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.
Gasoline lead may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.

Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the ’60s through the ’80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early ’90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/

Duncan Black over at www.eschatonblog.com brought this up a while back. Antisocial behavior that becomes bad enough results in crimes that show up as arrests and convictions, but there are lots of antisocial behaviors that don't show up in crime statistics. Black speculated that much of what we see in politics these days springs from the same impairments in impulse control, empathy, and anger management that supposedly drove the crime wave. The main difference being that street thugs tend to be a lot younger than Senators, so the effect would show up later.

Otherwise there's not that much difference. A street thug jacks your car. A Rethug jacks your country.