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Crime Reduction Linked To Lead-Free Gasoline

Posted by kdawson on from the getting-the-lead-out dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Even low levels of lead can cause brain damage, increasing the likelihood of behavioral and cognitive traits such as impulsivity, aggressiveness, and low IQ that are strongly linked with criminal behavior. The NYTimes has a story on how the phasing out of leaded gasoline starting with the Clean Air Act in 1973 may have led to a 56% drop in violent crime in the US in the 1990s. An economics professor at Amherst College, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, discovered the connection and wrote a paper comparing the reduction of lead from gasoline between states (PDF) and the reduction of violent crime. She constructed a table linking crime rates in every state to childhood lead exposure in that state 20 or 30 years earlier. If lead poisoning is a factor in the development of criminal behavior, then countries that didn't switch to unleaded fuel until the 1980s, like Britain and Australia, should soon see a dip in crime as the last lead-damaged children outgrow their most violent years."

4 of 616 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Prison Population by bmo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "It couldn't be related to the fact that we have more criminals than ever cooling their heels in prison?"

    TFA says that _violent_ crime is down. If there are fewer violent offenders, then how does that explain why the prisons are overfilled? The prison population exploded because we're putting more _nonviolent_ offenders in jail.

    Bad troll, no cookie. Try better next time.

    --
    BMO

  2. Re:Lead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think you need to be exposed to actual lead, not just xenophobic media hysteria about lead.

  3. Re:RTFP! by toganet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That doesn't make abortion right
    Exactly, it's preventing a lifetime of neglect and misery that makes it right, along with the other benefits to society brought about by decreased population growth.
  4. Correlation and causation by jpfed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Reading the article, they already control for abortion, the average crime rate per year, the average crime rate for individual states, and even the effects of people moving from one state to another. The lead level measurements were finer grained than "lead existed before this date, then, everyone stopped using it"- they included state-by-state, year-by-year measurements in their lead data, adjusting for population density (as a surrogate for traffic density).

    This was a sophisticated analysis; I wouldn't call it, as some commenters above have, "junk science". It would be surprising for their observed relation to hold, but their interpretation be incorrect. It would be interesting for someone to really come up with an alternative explanation of this paper's observations.

    As a side note, I'm pretty sure that by now most lay people, and everyone reading this forum, is aware that correlation does not imply causation. And I'd be willing to guess that the vast majority of scientists have been aware of this elementary statistical fact for some time. It's likely that scientists take many potential influences into account before submitting for publication. So can we please exercise some restraint in the future and actually read the article before denouncing it as "junk science" because, as everyone knows, correlation is not causation? I am emphatically not asking people to take what the researcher says on faith, but if you decry the article without reading it, then your words are essentially noise.