I'm on the fence about some of those items, as there is actually less pollution in many cases than a generation ago in the water and soil. However, I do fully understand the effect on large masses of people with marginal/borderline functional IQs and with low self control. This is because I have done some reading about how the introduction of large quantities of lead into the environment with the mass introduction of the automobile (and leaded gasoline) and what it did to the public.

Now, some of it is correlation and multi-causal, but the generation that came up with lead everywhere, especially in the rain water (get the soil tested in any urban environment, you'd be shocked) created the crime waves of the 1960s and into the 1970s, and then they aged out of crime in their mid 30s and the crime rate started to drop. Then the next generation came up after the banning of lead gasoline and then we had crime rates start to drop by the late 1980s and into the late 2010s, where we were at 1950s levels of violence. Meanwhile, a high IQ nation like Japan had just as much lead everywhere as in America, but no associated crime epidemic.

edit to add that crime rates stated to go back up with the "racial reckoning" and associated de-policing of black America starting in the mid 2010s.

I'm on the fence about some of those items, as there is actually less pollution in many cases than a generation ago in the water and soil. However, I do fully understand the effect on large masses of people with marginal/borderline functional IQs and with low self control. This is because I have done some reading about how the introduction of large quantities of lead into the environment with the mass introduction of the automobile (and leaded gasoline) and what it did to the public.

Now, some of it is correlation and multi-causal, but the generation that came up with lead everywhere, especially in the rain water (get the soil tested in any urban environment, you'd be shocked) created the crime waves of the 1960s and into the 1970s, and then they aged out of crime in their mid 30s and the crime rate started to drop. Then the next generation came up after the banning of lead gasoline and then we had crime rates start to drop by the late 1980s and into the late 2010s, where we were at 1950s levels of violence. Meanwhile, a high IQ nation like Japan had just as much lead everywhere as in America, but no associated crime epidemic.