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So it takes some work, but using indirect approaches like natural experiments can help us look back at the dramatic crime increase of the 1960s and find some explanations.

One major factor was the criminal-justice system itself. The ratio of arrests per crime fell dramatically during the 1960s, for both property and violent crime. But not only were the police catching a smaller share of the criminals; the courts were less likely to lock up those who were caught. In 1970, a criminal could expect to spend an astonishing 60 percent less time behind bars than he would have for the same crime committed a decade earlier. Overall, the decrease in punishment during the 1960s seems to be responsible for roughly 30 percent of the rise in crime.

The postwar baby boom was another factor. Between 1960 and 1980, the fraction of the U.S. population between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four rose by nearly 40 percent, an unprecedented surge in the age group most at risk for criminal involvement. But even such a radical demographic shift can only account for about 10 percent of the increase in crime.

So together, the baby boom and the declining rate of imprisonment explain less than half of the crime spike. Although a host of other hypotheses have been advanced—including the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern cities and the return of Vietnam vets scarred by war—all of them combined still cannot explain the crime surge. Decades later, most criminologists remain perplexed.

The answer might be right in front of our faces, literally: television. Maybe Beaver Cleaver and his picture-perfect TV family weren’t just a casualty of the changing times (Leave It to Beaver was canceled in 1963, the same year Kennedy was assassinated). Maybe they were actually a cause of the problem.

People have long posited that violent TV shows lead to violent behavior, but that claim is not supported by data. We are making an entirely different argument here. Our claim is that children who grew up watching a lot of TV, even the most innocuous family-friendly shows, were more likely to engage in crime when they got older.

Testing this hypothesis isn’t easy. You can’t just compare a random bunch of kids who watched a lot of TV with those who didn’t. The ones who were glued to the TV are sure to differ from the other children in countless ways beyond their viewing habits.

A more believable strategy might be to compare cities that got TV early with those that got it much later.

We wrote earlier that cable TV came to different parts of India at different times, a staggered effect that made it possible to measure TV’s impact on rural Indian women. The initial rollout of TV in the United States was even bumpier. This was mainly due to a four-year interruption, from 1948 to 1952, when the Federal Communications Commission declared a moratorium on new stations so the broadcast spectrum could be reconfigured.

Some places in the United States started receiving signals in the mid-1940s while others had no TV until a decade later. As it turns out, there is a stark difference in crime trends between cities that got TV early and those that got it late. These two sets of cities had similar rates of violent crime before the introduction of TV. But by 1970, violent crime was twice as high in the cities that got TV early relative to those that got it late. For property crime, the early-TV cities started with much lower rates in the 1940s than the late-TV cities, but ended up with much higher rates.

There may of course be other differences between the early-TV cities and the late-TV cities. To get around that, we can compare children born in the same city in, say, 1950 and 1955. So in a city that got TV in 1954, we are comparing one age group that had no TV for the first four years of life with another that had TV the entire time. Because of the staggered introduction of TV, the cutoff between the age groups that grew up with and without TV in their early years varies widely across cities. This leads