Despite the older generation insisting that society would be better if youngsters were forced to give up shooty computer games and do wholesome things like wheel bicycles up steep hills to deliver loaves of Hovis bread - fewer people are being nasty to each other.
But why..?
Weirdly there is a theory that suggests it could all be down to lead poisoning.
For most of the 20th Century, recorded crime has risen steadily upwards on a sharp incline - a bit like that sepia-tinted hill that people never used to wheel their bicycles up.
Then, inexplicably, in the early 1990s, something really odd started to happen.
People began to be less stabby towards each other - and recorded violent crime has continued to fall, in broad terms, ever since.
The sudden decline was echoed in industrialised urban centres across the globe - with varying approaches to crime and punishment - and observers were at a loss to explain why.
Some began to identify a possible link between the amount of lead in petrol and the violent crime statistics. They found that those who were infants in the early 1970s, when exposure to lead in petrol was at its peak, were responsible for the highest rate of recorded violent crime in the early 90s.
One of the main players behind the theory is US economist Rick Nevin who was one of the first to notice that following the ban on lead in petrol, a corresponding fall in violent crime occurred two decades later.
The theory goes like this - lead is a poison that is absorbed into the bloodstream.
It causes kidney damage, inhibits growth and damages the nervous system.
Studies have also shown that exposure to lead during pregnancy reduces head circumference of infants - exposure also has been shown to inhibit IQ and lead to aggressive and dysfunctional behaviour.
Could this have driven the rise in violent crime? Going further; Could lead poisoning have lead to the decline of the Roman Empire?
It’s a fact that Romans pioneered the use of lead piping for their water supply… So perhaps it’s a case of unfortunate plumbing choices that caused the greatest empire of its day to turn in on itself in a violent self destructive vortex.
However, opponents of the lead fuelled crime theory say that the factors behind violent crime rates are many and varied - a combination of complex social and economic factors.
They say that to reduce the argument to biological causation is the equivalent of phrenology - the pseudoscience of determining likely criminals from the shapes of their heads.
But I’m going to ignore this because most people prefer to think that there are simple reasons behind complex problems. And although the truth - like most truths - probably sits somewhere in the unattractive muddled middle ground, who wants to read about that?
And if you want to argue about it, bear in mind that I was brought up in the 1970s and my brain is probably swimming with lead - so watch it.