The rate of forcible rape seems to have declined dramatically since 1979, and Mark Kleiman argues that there's no reason to think that it's reporting error (indeed, the percentage of rapes reported to police has gone up.) He doesn't have a good explanation, and I certainly won't try to play amateur criminologist. But this is happy, if puzzling, news.
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Megan McArdle is a columnist at Bloomberg View and a former senior editor at The Atlantic. Her new book is The Up Side of Down.