Down here at the pawn shop

[Undertoad]

why spanking children causes street crime and [talk of hitting] is not the result of living in desperate poverty where everyone struggling causes friction

Sweden banned spanking in 1979 so they now have an entire complete generation of adults who have not been spanked. The country has not failed. Volvos are still excellent cars.

But we expect they did not one day wake up and say, "by gaw, we have been doing it all wrong all this time! we shall immediately pass legislation making it impossible for anyone to strike a child!" and then there was suddenly no hitting.

We expect they were headed that way all along. And they were a successful culture. So to restate your question: did becoming successful make them stop hitting? Or was stopping hitting part of what made them successful?

I would guess that there's a whole bunch of cyclical problems where poverty leads to X leads to poverty.

But we can't just gift 20% of the population out of poverty, so we should also encourage people to change X.