I used to believe that my personal development was strictly a private affair, and didn't have much impact on the society around me. But that view changed during the summer of 1993. Let me tell you what I experienced. That summer in Washington, DC, I was one of nearly four thousand participants in an experiment organized and monitored by a group of social scientists. As you may know, the District of Columbia has one of the highest rates of violent crime of any city in the world.
Crime tends to go up in warmer weather, and that summer was particularly hot and muggy.
After two months, they went back home to their jobs and families. The researchers applied sophisticated time series analysis techniques to control for other variables known to influence crime, such as weather, seasonal trends, and police and community anti-crime activity. The results were then scrutinized by an independent project review board, consisting of sociologists and criminologists from the University of Maryland, Howard University, American University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Denver. Had we stayed longer, the trend lines showed the drop would have been more than 42 percent. These dry statistics translate into a genuine reduction in pain, suffering, and trauma for the people of the District of Columbia.