Social conservatives have been lamenting cultural decline for centuries: youth are fucking everything up with their crazy, disrespectful ways and and no one gives a shit about anyone else, and so on.
However, my understanding is that -- if you want to measure cultural decline broadly, by looking at crime rates (especially murder rates) -- things are getting way way better. Historians of crime estimate that number of murders per 100,000 was vastly higher in the Middle Ages than it is today. (I'd be interested if anyone knew of a good paper on this).
[WS:] The above is a statistical fallacy, since crime is not randomly distributed. It concentrates in certain sub-cultures. Therefore, citing population-wide crime rates is seriously misleading. For some social groups - it overestimates the risk of criminal victimization, thus fueling crime scares that we witness in this country. For other groups - it grossly underestimates that risk.
With that in mind, the real question is the existence of hyper-violent subcultures with greatly elevated risk of criminal victimization. This phenomenon is known to social science at least since the 1930s - and the explanations have nothing to do with people being overworked. They have everything to do with the community structure, specifically:
1. The existence of transient communities, where people move in and out frequently, and
2. Share little or no stakes in those communities and maintain little or no social ties with other members;
3. Lack of support structure that deprives children of nurturing care and positive role models, which in turn leads to
4. The emergence of gangs that adopt violent and criminal norms of behavior, which
5. Further erodes the weak community structures and
6. Facilitates spreading the culture of poverty, delinquency and violence that justifies and condones criminal and violent behavior.
This phenomenon is not limited to the United States - it exists everywhere where there are large transient and unstable communities - anything from shantytowns to refugee camps. The crime and violence rates in those areas are much higher than those in the US ghettoes with one big difference - they go largely unreported in official accounts and statistics elsewhere, whereas they are well documented in the US.
Consequently, an illusion is created that the US is more violent than most countries. The fact of the matter is, however, that outside ghettoes, the US is a pretty safe an non-violent place - not much different from other developed countries. It is only certain places and communities that are significantly more violent, but they are pretty much segregated from the rest of society. However, even those violent and crime ridden subcultures pale in comparison to similar subcultures in other countries.
That illusion is further reinforced with the glorification of violence that many US males espouse. But again, this is mostly all talk and very little bark. US males my talk their violent macho fantasies, but they are generally rather tame in everyday interaction, and seldom get physical. Europeans (especially Brits, Germans, Irish, or Poles) are more likely to engage in brawls and fist fights than US-ers, even though they talk is not as soaked in glorified macho violence as that of many US-ers.
To sum it up, US is not more violent than other countries, but suffers from the illusion of being more violent due to better crime statistics, certain misleading methods of calculating crime rates, and popular culture of violence. In reality, only certain subcultures are much violent that the national averages but those subcultures are less violent than comparable subcultures elsewhere.
Wojtek