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America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
2muchcoffeeman writes "The cause of the great increase in violent crime that started in the 1960s and peaked in the 1990s may have been isolated: lead. This leads directly to the reason for the sharp decline in violent crime since then: lead abatement programs and especially the ban of tetraethyl lead as an anti-knock agent in gasoline starting in 1996. There are three reasons why this makes sense. First, the statistics correlate almost perfectly. Second, it holds true worldwide with no exceptions. Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates. Third, the chemistry and neuroscience of lead gives us good reason to believe the connection. Decades of research has shown that lead poisoning causes significant and probably irreversible damage to the brain. Not only does lead degrade cognitive abilities and lower intelligence, it also degrades a person's ability to make decisions by damaging areas of the brain responsible for emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility. Another thing that stands out: if you overlay a map showing areas with higher incidence of violent crime with one showing lead contamination, there's a strikingly high correlation."
False Lead
And didn't help lead to the downfall of Rome as well? I believe they had a lot of lead in their wine containers.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
And here I thought it was Roe v. Wade. http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/
If you don't fill someone full of lead, they don't fill someone else full of lead?
its not lead its the upbringing of people out of poverty
over the last 40 some years the poverty rate has fallen, lots of products are cheap now. 30 years ago if poor people were bored they would go rob or kill someone. They called it Wilding in NYC like when the central park jogger was raped and beaten. these days poor people have x-boxes and you just play call of duty to pass the time
poor people have so much stuff compared to 40-50 years ago there is almost no reason to rob and kill any more
I'm throwing this damned mechanical pencil away.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
That might also explain why bait fishers are more aggressive than fly fishers .
Because the bait fishers constantly balance their tags with lead, by biting the split lead beads on to the nylon wire, thus depositing small amounts of lead on the front teeth each time.
I always used spinners.
People convicted of a violent crime suing the fuel companies for damages ?
From "Lead Poisoning Causes Crime?"
I only consume unleaded ice cream. Am I still susceptible?
You know, except for the whole fact that we know lead sequestering directly affects mental function in ways that cause the individual to become more violent.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Admittedly inspired by an XKCD comic, are they sure the violent crime/lead contamination map isn't just a slightly variant on a population density map? The more people, the more cars, the more lead contamination potential, etc.
An alternative theory I would propose is that as crime rates fall, people begin to worry about other more mundane things like lead exposure and begin to regulate it more.
Naw, violent crime causes ice cream.
Another thing that stands out: if you overlay a map showing areas with higher incidence of violent crime with one showing lead contamination, there's a strikingly high correlation."
There's probably a strong correlation with a lot of things, like population density. I bet if you look around where I live, you'll find very little lead, very few violent crimes, and very few people.
Obviously, cows reduce violent crime.
Sounds like they just want their octane back!
All that missing horsepower must be to blame!
They're a family heirloom - but they made me a criminal. IT WASN'T ME BUT THE TOY SOLDIERS THE WHOLE TIME !
The root of all evil on earth, it would seem? However, kind of interesting that the drop in crime is also correlated with the rise of the Sony PlayStation and XBox? Maybe instead of going out and getting drunk and trashing stuff, young men are staying home and getting less drunk and playing Modern Warfare.
Guns don't kill people
Bullets kill people
and of course bullets are made of lead
I only consume unleaded ice cream. Am I still susceptible?
Depends if it's fluoridated or not. There's a reason I only drink rain water and grain alcohol, you know.
I am not a crackpot.
The U.S. Prison population has filed a class-action lawsuit against God/Gaia/Allah/Buddha/Odin/every other "world creator" for creating lead and causing them to commit violent crimes. Each prisoner is seeking repayment in the form of $50,000 per year of incarceration, plus lawyer fees.
sudo make me a sandwich
all of this, yes.
furthermore, it is patently absurd to expect to find a single, simple chemical cause for the myriad complex and varied set of behaviors which fall under the umbrella of "violent crime".
it's the kind of childishly simplistic worldview that i'd expect of a libertarian, not Mother Jones.
i could live a little longer in this prison
It might just be the lead poisoning talking, but I sure seem to hear a bunch of voices all talking at once when I open the medicaldaily.com link.
I am not a crackpot.
Except it isn't just simple time correlation. There is also spatial correlation (areas with different lead contamination, different countries) and for individuals there is causal link between lead poisoning these behavioural problems.
Contrast that "study" to John Lott’s study that looked at every single city in every single county for all 50 states for an over 20 year contiguous time frame. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Guns,_Less_Crime
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
wut???
You'll find slackers in most every group of people...
You say a study is "BS" because your own anecdotal experience doesn't agree with it? Buddy, your IQ was never as high as you thought.
...some village is missing an nidiot.
and especially the ban of tetraethyl lead as an anti-knock agent in gasoline starting in 1996
I didn't know that I could legally be running leaded fuel in 1996. /snarky
Time to offend someone
You didn't even bother to read the full summary let alone the actual article did you?
Except we do know very well that lead exposure at a young age DOES result in poor impulse control, lower IQ, and a greater tendency towards violence.
The correlations mentioned have *many* likely tertiary connections that lead to conclusions other than the stated hypothesis. The removal of lead contamination and/or leaded gasoline from an area is probably highly likely to coincide with other general improvements to local conditions. Living standards probably went up at the same time: education levels, income levels, stress reduction, etc. The un-leading of the area was just one normal facet of improving overall living conditions, and it's likely the net of all of the improvements that reduces violent crime rate.
11*43+456^2
This is not just correlation.
Among the many studies that have been done they have shown a biochemical mechanism for brain damage and impaired brain function from lead ingestion. These are classic instrumental variable studies, not simple correlation.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Correlation is not causation. Does there appear to be a relationship? Yes.
Can we test this ethically in a lab to determine true cause and effect? Probably not.
Do I have any theories/data to refute the current one? No.
I looks like a lot of responders did not read the article. The evidence it presents is very persuasive; and while not everyone who reads and understands it will agree, they wouldn't be so dismissive -- unless of course they themselves suffer from lead poisoning.
They might actually be. There is a whole list of countries that you cannot import a vehicle from, unless the catalytic converter has been replaced or put back on, as they use leaded gasoline that would have poisoned that converter.
Time to offend someone
Did you read the actual article? He address those topics precisely. He waited to publish this article until he had a stack of corroborating studies using different methodologies. One study is nothing. Many different studies of many different places, and each one maps well? That's a whole heaping mound of coincidence.
you're sick, but it's the lead
Clearly this indicates that greater criminal activity leads to prior use of more lead.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
All that lead in your brain you just don't remember any of it, ya danged violent offender.
Not at all.
There's somewhat more rigor involved than your empty analogies.
http://xkcd.com/552/
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
Most victims of violent crime have been found to have large amounts of lead inside them.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I wish people had a better sense of graphs such they understood it means very little when the shapes of different data sets appear to be similar. This kind of "evidence" shouldn't even make it to a prestigious publication like /..
Yes
Except that the connection between lead and violent behavior isn't just a statistical correlation, but someone that we actually know how and why it works. It's called science: look into it.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Did you read the linked article in full? They have more than a simple correlation. They have multiple correlations cross-culturally, and at every level of analysis examined, national, state and neighborhood. It's also backed up by the neurobiological research about the effects of even small quantities of lead on the brain.
Yes, it is correct to be skeptical of claims of causation from correlational data. That's what additional research is for to check for other possible causes is for. That additional research has all supported the claim of causation, to a far higher degree than any other claimed cause.
Skepticism simply for the sake of skepticism is not a virtue. If you demand a high standard of proof, it behooves you to be ready to accept the claims of those who actually manage to meet that standard of proof.
You're kidding? Is this the first time you've read Mother Jones?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
RTFA:
Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum wrote that obviously the millions of children who were exposed to high levels of lead didn't all become criminals, but he notes that those on the margin may have been "pushed over the edge from being merely slow or disruptive to becoming part of a nationwide epidemic of violent crime."
You can't easily argue against statistical correlation, that's why it is such a great tool for propagandists.
Lead causes brain damage. This is a tested and demonstrated effect, proven as far as medical science is concerned. Linking low levels of exposure to to increased societal violence is a correlation with a previously proven causal link. So you missed the point.
What are you some Republican "causing pollution is a right, if it caused a crime 20 years later, all you have to do is prove it was linked to the atom of lead that caused the brain damage, and trace that atom back to the person that released it, and sue them. The free market fixes all."
Learn to love Alaska
And read the fucking article where he stresses that this is correlation.
After you have a lot of correlation and look at other studies, you start making guesses about causation.
Your witty Slashdot one-liner tells me every time you see stats, you just say that. RTFA, this isn't some loose correlation with nothing to back up his suggestions.
The upswing in violence started about 40 years AFTER the introduction of leaded gasoline. Kind of puts a big ass hole when trying to change that correlation into a causation.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
So just because you didn't become a criminal, means there can't be a correlation?
You're a sample of one. Your experiences, while important to you, mean nothing in isolation when it comes to statistics.
If one person in a hundred were to die a year in car crashes, and we changed cars to have different tires and suddenly ten people died a year, but you lived, that doesn't mean that the death rate didn't go up 1000%. You were just lucky and lived.
The article quite succinctly discusses how lead might take borderline violent people and trigger their latent violence. It's an interesting article. It seems you weren't a borderline violent person. Yay for you!
basically anything except their own half witted feckless personalities
And now we know that lead causes people to develop half-witted feckless personalities.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The uncomfortable truth is that there is very real evidence that society poisoned those people and THEN punished them for the natural consequences of that poisoning.
We're talking about data here (not the plural of anecdote) and it is statistical, not 1to1.
Before you try to make something out of the statistical nature, note well that radioactive decay is statistical in the same way.
I predict that this will be almost entirely ignored because it IS an uncomfortable truth, it presents a non-punitive measure to fight crime that doesn't fund the police, it suggests a level of liability against GM and the oil companies that they could NEVER pay off (and worse, much of the money is due to poor people) and finally, it significantly shrinks the pool of people that others can feel morally superior to while dumping on them.
Except the summary actually calls out the "correlation is not causation" parrots
> There's a reason I only drink rain water and grain alcohol, you know.
You're a hick ?
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Except you've made a leap transforming beers to hammers. Your premise do not actually support your argument (which is obviously intentional) and you suggest it is similar his argument and then proceed to beat that strawman down. You follow up with a false dichotomy suggesting that either your argument is valid or his cannot be valid.
The problem is that his argument is supported by his premise where yours is not.
is leap is that lead is proven to cause people to become violent, therefore it is reasonable that the documented decline in known sources of lead poisoning could be related to a reduction in violence. This logically follows and his premise is supported.
Bullets are known to cause death. Therefore it is reasonable to suggest that the bullets I'm firing into the crowd might be responsible for the dead people in the crowd.
Cannabis is known to get you high. Therefore it is reasonable to suggest that the marijuana found in the stoned teenagers posession might have been what he used to get high.
Now lets try yours:
Bullets cause death. Knives cause death. Therefore bullets are made of knives.
Cats have claws. Dogs have claws. Therefore dogs are made of cats.
What a complete waste of a comment. How the hell were you moderated insightful? Do you really think the theory is that exposure to lead will definitely for-sure 100% turn you into a mugger, or do you think that this might be in any way statistical?
like a lead zeppelin.
What a crock of sh*t! I grew up around lead, lead pipes in the house, lead paint, lead-acid batteries, etc. I haven't tried to kill anyone, and last I knew, I had a very high IQ (well, at least in HS, many, many years ago anyway), so this study is BS! We need lead in every day life. We need lead in solder, batteries, electronics, weights, etc. Lead is a very important metal, we can not do without it.
I am so sick of these environmentalist freaks, so sick.
So sick you wish to do them violent harm perhaps? :)
Rush hour can make people more violent dude, the question is to what degree? The lead to crime theory isn't based on facts, but trend statistics, there's hard evidence that it affects the brain, but I don't think there's hard evidence of exactly how.
For my new get out of jail free card!
Except when it is. Note, there is no "proof" smoking causes cancer because all the appropriate studies to prove it are illegally unethical. All we have is a correlation. Stating that correlation != causation, you are affirmatively stating that smoking does not cause cancer.
That's an absurd position, as correlation sometimes does reveal a cause (more common that "just" sometimes).
Learn to love Alaska
They both are being talked about by a racist half-wit?
A corrupt interfering government? Rich white people pulling the strings to exploit others?
Learn to love Alaska
Hold on for a minute there - "society poisoned these people"? Like someone sat around cackling and had the idea to start a crime wave? Or is it because you got the idea that the oil companies can be blamed somehow, and are working backwards from there?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Then I took a statistics class. Now I don't.
Did you read the actual article?
You're actually suggesting slashdotters should read the article before commenting? What is wrong with you people!
You don't see how the environment could possibly have an effect upon the behavior of the people within it? You don't think that being brought up around criminals will make a person more likely to be a criminal than being brought up around law-abiding people? I've never beaten anyone up while drunk, but I still understand that alcohol can have the effect of making people prone to violence. Have you ever played the lottery and lost? Is that definitive proof to you that *no one* must win? Do you understand how statistics work?
Or do you just not understand the difference between explanations and excuses. No one cries foul when we explain why a plane crashed due to faulty parts or lack of maintenance. Things happen for reasons. It's not like there are just "bad" people who do "bad" things simply because that's their nature without any reason or cause for it to be so. Explanations aren't necessarily justifications or excuses; they can be, but they aren't inherently. Explanations are useful for preventing things from reoccurring.
If lead poisoning truely is a cause for increased violence, wouldn't you rather we know that and take action to mitigate that risk rather than just putting our fingers in our ears and shouting "No excuses! Those are just bad people!"
People are highly complex, but we're still products of the same deterministic universe as everything else. Unless you believe that people somehow transcend the causality of physics, your argument is completely nonsensical.
Except that the biggest cause of removing lead is laws against lead in gas, which is quite a large area effect. Assuming any tertiary effect could the same effect on this specific law as it has on the crime statistic would mean that most countries of the world would need an absurdly uniform distribution of those effects. Also once you have correlation at all the different levels, countries, states, towns, you'd need to have many different tertiary effects that in each case cause the same effects as a direct correlation, that you can rule out any indirect correlations. Then the question is only: Does increased lead causes crime 20 years later? and less lead cause less crime 20 years later? Or does more crime cause introduction of lead in gas 20 years earlier and less crime cause lead abolished 20 years earlier?
Higher octane indicates less power. Higher octane in a 8:1 compression big V8 will reduce your power. The only time it makes more power is when the engine deliberately reduces power when it detects lower octane. That's not a fuel problem, that's a design issue.
Learn to love Alaska
Correcting that last line in the summary:
"Another thing that stands out: if you overlay a map showing areas with higher incidence of violent crime with one showing -population density-, there's a strikingly high correlation."
That rain water is full of pollution. I suggest in the interest of your safety, you stick with the grain alcohol from now on.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Another thing that stands out: if you overlay a map showing areas with higher incidence of violent crime with one showing lead contamination, there's a strikingly high correlation.
Some of the cheapest land in Dallas is right by the old lead smelters, where you couldn't build without millions of dollars of decontamination. The poor live around there, the rich moved elsewhere. So I'd like to see an overlay with SES (socio-economic status) and the lead/crime maps.
Learn to love Alaska
You're actually suggesting slashdotters should read the article before commenting? What is wrong with you people!
I don't think it's wrong to suggest people read the article. I think it's wrong to expect people have read it. As articles go, this was quite a long one. I was as skeptical as anyone when I saw the article, but after reading it, I'm mildly convinced that the author is right. They did a ton of research, looked at multiple countries (with different timelines), looked at multiple occurrences of lead increases, and it all looks good.
N/t
How is it with sugar consumption. Is there a correlation? S
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Bullets are known to cause death. Therefore it is reasonable to suggest that the bullets I'm firing into the crowd might be responsible for the dead people in the crowd.
That is not a reasonable assumption unless you can determine that there are bullets inside of the dead people, that those bullets are in vital areas, and that organ failures where the bullets hit appear to have caused the death.
In other words, the correlation can be a starting point, but you have a whole lot more leg work to do after that.
I got there because the dangers of lead have been known since BEFORE TEL was introduced into gasoline and those significant risks were pointedly overlooked.
Meanwhile it's still a poisoning even if it was entirely unintentional.
Like I said, it is an UNCOMFORTABLE truth.
But, correlation is not causation. I'm not necessarily saying that it isn't true. But, I'm pretty sure you would find the same sort of correlation to asbestos whose abatement coincides nicely with this timeline too. The researchers will need to draw some blood samples from the general population at the time to find out for sure. Oh, damn we don't have a time machine. :-)
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
Cats have claws. Dogs have claws. Therefore dogs are made of cats.
I feel I should direct you attention to the famous case study: CatDog
And as he said, there can be a lot of other factors that come along with "lead reduction" (which he helpfully listed in his post) which are responsible.
Theres a lot more work that needs to be done before you can claim a causal link.
I'm more likely to believe what Levitt published in Freakonomics. They did a lot more work to show, and estimate, the effect size. This group seems to believe that just because "the statistics correlate almost perfectly" that they have a cause. However, there statistics are far from a perfect match. If it were, we would have reverted back to pre 1950's crime levels. We haven't, we're not really even close. I'll give them that it's probably had a bit of an effect, but the downward trend of 15-17 year old pregnancies correlates better to Roe v Wade then it does to Lead. Levitt showed the effect size based on how Liberally or Conservatively Roe v Wade was implemented. I'm not sure if Lead use is measured accurately enough State to State to do that kind of analysis, but you need something more than "Hay, look the trend lines match". Their map of New Orleans doesn't show nearly the correlation of Lead to Crime that I would expect if they were right about it. If you look, there is a strip near the river of "rich" 140K+ household with a 300 - 500 ppm lead range, and a very poor neighborhood in the North East part of the map that is 0 - 200 ppm lead. How does that "Match Up"?
are you kidding me? The entire western world used leaded gasoline for decades. Everyone was exposed to it. A small percentage of the population engaged in criminal activity and were punished for their criminal activity. You think you can excuse their behavior because there is found to be a correlation between lead and crime? Not a chance! There were plenty more people exposed to lead who didn't engage in criminal activity.
I guess most of the participants here are from North America.
One of the things that we simply can't seem to comprehend, is that MOST OF THE WORLD lives in grinding poverty.
I mean really, really poor. Hopelessly poor. You are born in shite, you live in shite, and every now and then, someone rich dumps shite on you. Your kids will never be educated or have the chance to escape, etc.
We in the US can't even begin to imagine that kind of poverty. Only a few communities in Appalachia even come close. Homeless vagrants in the US are rolling in dough, compared to the vast majority of folks in other nations. It fuels all sorts of social ills and pressures.
No X-Boxes for most of these folks.
It may or may not be lead, but I doubt poverty is the biggest driver.
Whoosh...
Every time the homicide rate goes up or down, we all cast about for causes. The usual suspects, the economy, policing, and number of prisoners, do not work out. The changes are usually national, while policing and prison policies differ over the country. Crime rates were low in the Depression, are low now, in our deep recession and were high during the prosperous 80's.
The historian David Hackett Fischer, in his book "The Great Wave" (one review here ) using over 700 years of British records shows that the homicide rate and inflation are closely correlated. High inflation, high crime, low inflation low crime. It certainly holds for the examples above. Fisher himself concedes that correlation is not causation, but it rules out the usual explanations.
Duh. Where is lead contamination most likely: a poor ghetto or a rich gated community? Which is more likely to have a higher rate of violent crime?
Your ignorance of the continent notwithstanding, it's a large continent with most countries that are stable and some that aren't. You'll need to be more specific on which one has genocide? 1?
As for insecurity, that occurs in wealthy countries that don't take care of their lower class populations such as the USA.
Read the summary and stop being a parrot with that stupid line.
The researches basically told you idiots to fuck off.
It's not my fault!
Answer, no, clearly they didn't read it at all, they were in too big a hurry to show how clever they are.
Actually, bullets and knives can be and are made of the same material.
Cats and dogs are also made of the same basic components that most all mammals are made of.
OF COURSE, I'm not supporting the crazy arguments, but I am just suggesting that unlike beer and hammers, your examples actually do have a correlation. And, on some level, beer and hammers are related too (they are made of atoms, after all...)
Except when it is. Note, there is no "proof" smoking causes cancer because all the appropriate studies to prove it are illegally unethical..
It's perfectly legal and ethical to expose cell cultures to cigarette smoke in vitro and observe more cancerous changes as compared to controls, which is certainly strong evidence of causation. If your standard of "proof" discounts animal or cell culture models you're discounting an awful lot of science.
Overlay it with a map of population growth and another of population density.
Where hell did did you get 'excuse'? From your political talking points bag?
Read the f'ing article - exposures varied dramatically by location.
Nobody involved in the study is "hating" lead or saying it should be banned or anything, so listing the practical applications of lead doesn't make the point you want to think it does.
Like I said, it's an uncomfortable truth, but it is just as certain as nuclear radiation. It's not even controversial from the standpoint of scientific analysis.
The population under study is huge. For a statistical analysis, you couldn't ask for a bigger sample to look at.
Surely you're not going to try telling me lead is a sweet treat we should add to lollipops? It is known to be harmful and the kind of harm it is known to do exactly matches the problem behaviors. The levels in the environment match the crime figures with the expected delay and they do so around the world.
Some of those criminals would still be criminals if the lead wasn't there. Some would not. As for the rest, it has been noted right here on /. that the 'average' IQ score is just a bit 'below average' these days.
Lead is a metal that bio-accumulates. Ethanol is an organic molecule that is easily metabolized by your body. The two are not comparable.
There are also more significant organic solvents to worry about. Ethanol is added to gasoline in concentrations of around 5% and it's less volitile than gasoline. That means the concentration of ethanol in the air must be far less than that of gasoline. If you're exposed to enough ethanol to have the effect of one shot of liquor, you're also being exposed to enough gasoline to equal 10 or 20 shots.
The idea that ethanol in gasoline is has any biologically relevant effects at all is highly implausible.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Absolutely correct! For all we know, the correlation could be the other way around: Violent criminal behavior causes lead poisoning. For example, when someone gets all criminally violent at me I shoot him full of lead. QED, cogito propter unum. In your face, "science"!
That's actually a pretty interesting and perhaps valid correlation. Thanks Freakonomics!
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I got there because the dangers of lead have been known since BEFORE TEL was introduced into gasoline and those significant risks were pointedly overlooked.
Or perhaps the simpler explanation is that the specific risks and effects of TEL were unknown at the time. I might be convinced of a few countries overlooking the dangers or Big Evil Oil managing to make a few health & safety agencies look the other way, but pretty much every agency in every single country?
This study is interesting because it shows that the effects of TEL might have been much larger than we ever suspected. But it's idiotic to lay blame for that on oil companies or even society as a whole, in hindsight. The only uncomfortable thing about your statement is the phrasing "society poisoned those people" because it implies that society is liable, meaning endless unwarranted lawsuits by greedy people who think every misfortune entitles them to a big slice of the public pie.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Your witty Slashdot one-liner tells me every time you see stats, you just say that. RTFA
This exact correlation can be found to any substance that we used in the 60's but banned later and was eliminated in the 90's: DDT, asbestos, CFCs etc. Hell I bet you would find this correlation in the decline in radio listeners and a rise in the quality of American made cars. They didn't prove anything. If they compared blood samples from the prison population and the general population, during that time period, and found that the prison population had higher levels of lead then they would start to have convincing statistics. This is just a guess that maybe these numbers mean something. I would say the correlation is strong enough to warrant further investigation. Until then it is just a guess that maybe somehow lead and crime were related in this time period.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
It's not a simple correlation. It's a correlation that matches in multiple countries, at different times, and at different scales. It also has support from individual data (higher lead exposure also correlates with higher aggression in children). And higher lead exposure in childhood correlates with loss of brain volume in the prefrontal cortex in adulthood - an area of the brain that deals with impulse control.
A random chance correlation seems pretty unlikely. A common cause a bit more likely, though I'm not sure what could be common about the use of an anti-knock chemical and violent crime a couple of decades later would be and of course a common cause of the reduction of the use of an anti-knock chemical and violent crime a couple of decades later would be.
Is your changed belief a correlation with taking the class or was it caused by taking the class?
Why would is it absurd that a substance which has been shown to cause increased aggression and lower impulse control and lower intelligence would have any effect on "violent crime"?
Sure it's not a proven fact, but absurd seems a stretch.
There are leadless solders, and they're required by law in most uses these days. In batteries which use lead, the lead therein is pretty well isolated from the world outside. By mass, electronic use of lead other than solder is mostly leaded CRT glass, which is becoming obsolete. Lead is a poor choice for weights due to toxicity and softness, although it's still cheaper than better alternatives like stainless steel or brass. You neglected to mention bullets, where the density and controlled malleability of lead is important; I don't know if there's a suitable replacement here. In short, for most uses lead's chief advantage is low price, and it has good alternatives that allow it to no longer be "a very important metal". I am not aware of any application in which "we can not do without it", just some in which the alternative is impractical (car batteries).
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Higher octane indicates less power.
Citation needed...
Octane specifies the compression combustion threshold only (how much it can be compressed before it spontaneously combusts); many high octane fuels have higher energy density; many others do not. In high performance, high compression engines (like my Porsche), the higher octane (higher compressibility) fuels can be compressed as intended before combusting, permitting more complete combustion and higher power. My Porsche will retard timing (reducing power) to run on down to 91 octane (RON+MON/2 method, standard in the U.S.; IIRC that's about 95 octane Euro), though it really wants 98 octane (Euro) per the manual.
Did a reduction in colour TV use also correlate with a reduction in violent crime? Did the rise and fall in number of space launches correlate with the rise and fall of violent crime levels?
Show your correlation if you really think it matches as well as this one.
Of course correlation doesn't prove causation, but you don't disprove it by pointing out a bunch of other things that don't correlate at all.
1. Correlation exists between global warming and decrease.
2. Effect is global. (That's why it's called "global warming.")
3. I'm not sure of the third reason, but if you give me a few hundred thousand dollars in grant money I can spend the next ten years studying the effects and any other correlations I can amass.
Since you clearly know nothing about statistics why do you feel the need to comment on them?
Donohue and Levitt botched the study: a programming bug meant they failed to control for things they thought they were controlling for. Furthermore, they accidentally predicted the total number of arrests instead of the arrest rate, as they should have.
Take another look at your Boolean algebra textbook. A -> B (lead poisoning leads to an increase in violence) does not mean that B -> A (an increase in violence means there must be lead poisoning).
I remember when they made 4 digit'ers smart.
So now correlation IS casuation?
Yeah, they probably will try to use that defense. It might even get some people to feel sorry for them. Unfortunately, that pity is somewhat misplaced. It's not that these people don't have "half witted feckless personalities", they really do. But why do they have these personalities? Turns out, in a statistical way, there's a trend that lead makes you grow up into a more violent person. So, there's a very logical reason for the pity. The question is what you do about it?
Let's say you moved to the edge of civilization and learned that the locals had a policy of trepanizing their young, to appease the gods or whatever. How would you deal with the masses of obviously screwed adults that just can't think none too good?
Stop the practice? Good first step. (And the hell with their sacred culture. Relative moralism is in full effect. It's wrong to me and mine, and we have the power to stop it. Bloody hell, we're talking about trepanning kids!)
Treat the affect adults just like normal people? Doesn't work so well, they really ARE screwed in the head. Literally. They can't function like normal people.
Treat them just like the non-trepanized? The ones that, baring everything else, should know better? That seems... awfully unfair.
The individualistic streak that runs hot through libertarians faces problems when it comes to kids having an unfair childhood. Sometimes they would have been geniuses in different settings. Sometimes they'd be scalp-carving psychos no matter what. Sometimes you can elk out some of the genius, even at 40. Sometimes their personality is burned in and reform isn't possible, or simply isn't worth it.
I don't think there's a simple generic answer.
Exactly! How could they be so stupid not to think of that!?
Oh wait. They did. They repeated the study in different countries that got rid of lead at different times. They repeated the study in different US states that phased lead out at different rates. They repeated the study at the city and even neighborhood level wherever there was accurate data on lead and crime levels. Then they tracked kids for decades, measuring lead levels and their rate of criminal convictions. And at all levels in all locations the correlations played out exactly the same. This is legitimate, serious research and the researchers did their jobs and collected a huge amount of data before publishing.
TLDR? Go read the article before yelling correllation != causation.
Also motivated thieves, like bankers, politicians, and most CEOs of modern multinationals. We just haven't gotten to properly labeling them as criminals yet. You go on with your beliefs though--conservatives just love simple answers to complex problems, especially if it offers an opportunity to demonize another group.
"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."
Correlation, accurate or not, can lead to other conclusions that simply get us thinking in another direction. Causation can be determined later--the important aspect is thinking things out in a different way.
It worked on me. It got me thinking about something called "Mad Hatter's Disease" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_hatter_disease ) and even "Minimata Disease" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimata_Disease ). Both are examples of neurological damage as a result of toxic substances being ingested. Both of these "diseases", in light of current events--random mass-shootings, seem somehow relevant to this article. Perhaps the people that are going around shooting people for no apparent reason are our modern-day Mad Hatters. Is there some commonality that might be of a chemical nature amongst all of these people? Pharmaceuticals? Environmental pollutants?
Mad Hatter's Disease had some very peculiar effects, most being of a social nature--shyness, irritability, etc--that aren't readily apparent until someone else is involved. If that person is a loner by nature, nobody would be the wiser until it was too late.
Maybe the problem isn't guns or mental illness, but simple poisoning? Has anyone checked these people for something like this?
Octane reflects the resistance to detonation. It isn't directly related to "compressibility" as you assert. And higher octane is almost always accompanied by lower energy density (I know you asked for a cite, but http://www.appropedia.org/Energy_content_of_fuels is all I could find). I'm not sure what your complaint is about, other than talking about your Porsche (probably a 944).
Learn to love Alaska
I am too lazy to read the details here, but an interesting thought popped into my head that may or may not be applicable.
As we all know correlation does not imply causation, blah blah blah. But what if two factors cause one another? We would have a set of phenomenon (say, poverty, unwanted children, leaded fuel use and violence) arise and fall together. Not that all of these would have equal influence on one another, but you catch my drift.
Now I am sure people have studied this extensively, but it perhaps we have some degree of bias against the phenomenon since we frequently look for simple mono-causal explanations.
DI did an article on this about 5 years back: http://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/?action=print
Like so much of what is passed-off as science these days, there's very little actual "science" and much more statistical analysis and presumption.
Everybody was exposed to essentially the same lead from "leaded gas" but most people were no more likely to be criminals either way. Then, of course, there are all the workers who handled lead as part of their daily jobs (people who handled lead tire weights, people who assembled circuit boards, people who used lead solder on pipes, etc) and were no more likely to be criminals than people of the same education, income and, and social groups but with different jobs.
I no longer wear neck ties, since I have discovered that every man who has ever worn a neck tie is dead or is going to die....
Although this discovery does not explain all violent crime, it seems to indicate something that will need, should need addressed: very likely none of the CRIMINALS during this time voluntarily or willing took lead to induce their psychosis. They were poisoned; by their environment, by society, by ignorance. At the very least, this raises a interesting "mens rea" situation. Certainly, if someone suffered a blackout from fever induced by severe food poisoning while driving home from the restaurant, ran off the road and killed someone, we wouldn't lock them in a cage and call them "animals". However this study is basically saying that very large numbers of people were inadvertently poisoned, made sick, causing neurological damage, and they were then treated to some of the worst, inhumane treatment (prison, electrocution, lethal injection) that any ill human being has ever endured.
So the question is: when is America going to start realizing that prison as a "deep dank hole" is an inhumane basis of punishment rooted more in religious dogma (making people "suffer" for their sins) than in true causality--neurological (and quite inadvertent) defect? Is there any reason for prisons to be such cold, horrific places? Certainly we can look back on the asylums of the early half of the 20th Century with contempt; yet we, societally, accept prison rape and beatings, isolation and estrangement as fodder for comedy. I am no advocate of a plush lifestyle for those convicted of horrific crimes, but neither am I tolerant of such treatment of those who are neurologically incapable of making better, more rational decisions. We need to STOP putting people in prison for stupid crimes (drugs, financial crimes) and confine the use of "corrections" budgets to making safe, healthy places for the sick to live out their lives under proper (medical, if necessary) care.
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
> There's a reason I only drink rain water and grain alcohol, you know.
You're a hick ?
Wow, someone isn't up on their Kubrick movies.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Poor people commit crimes. Poor people get stuck with most pollution. What else is new. Now its possible that some small fraction of additional criminality is due to physiological effects of poisoning or even psychological anger at living in crap conditions. But all of it? Not a fat chance. Poor areas are full of violence even in the areas of the world that do not have much lead producing industry.
By telling a joke you've buried the lead. Good job, our water supply is now polluted.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Bullets cause death. Knives cause death. Therefore bullets are made of knives.
They are both wedges and when a bullet breaks apart on an impact, it turns back into knives. After that process, the knives are called shrapnel.
Cats have claws. Dogs have claws. Therefore dogs are made of cats.
Yes, but a unit of dog is measured in negative cats. Like negative temperature. Dogs are greater than an infinite sum of cats. Dogs chase cats, whereas cats chase everything less cat. By default every furry animal is at most half cat, but through quantum effects a population inversion can occur where an animal is more dog than cat. An exotic state of animal known as man's best friend.
Also, if you flip Schrodinger's box upside down, the cat becomes a dog.
In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found.
This is why I continue to think that experiments should be performed on half the states at a time, especially if we're not sure about something. For example, the idea to drop working hours to 50-75% of what we have is a 'risky' plan, but could make people much happier. So we try it out on half (or some fraction of) the states. Another idea is to try fluoride in water at 0.1ppm, 1ppm, 2ppm. Similar experiments can be used for chlorine or ozone (I'm not making any judgements on those or saying that conclusions haven't already been reached by the way).
By experimenting on half (or some fraction of) the states like this, we create a kind of 'evolution', where we can filter out bad ideas, and keep good ones. Or at least more likely be able to do so.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
it is patently absurd to expect to find a single, simple chemical cause for the myriad complex and varied set of behaviors which fall under the umbrella of "violent crime".
Not when that "myriad complex and varied set of behaviors" can all be linked to a single brain function: impulse control. Especially not when lead has repeatedly been show to directly affect impulse control.
So long as Chinese children are not likely to chew on their lead-paint toys, then they will get no more lead than someone in a no-lead country.
Clearly you have not been in the presence of a toddler for any length of time.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Yes! I just want to strangle those f*ckers to death with my bare, lead-hardened hands! And bash their g*dd*amn heads in with my lead-hardened skull!
And you!! I will find you and rip out your entrails with my lead-hardened teeth, just to prove how lead doesn't increase violent tendencies in people!
I'LL KILL YOU ALL
You don't need a bullet in you to die from one.
We could test this theory too. I'll shoot you with a gun and if the bullet then exits your body, you shouldn't die from it!
Actually we have a pretty good idea of what the neurological effects of lead poisoning are - lowered IQ, increased aggression, less impulse control, and poor attention to start with. And we know at least some of the how: lead can replace calcium ions it the critical Calcium-ATPase pumps, it impairs synapse formation, and causes loss of the myelin sheathes.
This study now shows that there's an extremely good correlation between leaded gasoline fume exposure and crime rates about 20 years later. And it shows up across several unrelated data sets - national, state, and every other studied country in the world.
So from one direction we see that lead affects the human brain in ways that might well make people more prone to criminal activity, and from another we have a strong correlation with multiple confirmations between a drastic spike in lead exposure and a similar drastic spike in crime rates. Sure sounds like something worthy of being taken more seriously than all the "more cops", "more prisons", "drugs are bad", etc. grandstanding that all have far more tenuous claim to having any scientific validity.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
? The lead to crime theory isn't based on facts, but trend statistics
so, it's not based on facts, it's merely based on facts.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
You're missing the point.
You can go on and on all you want about personal responsibility. But at the end of the day, if factor X increases the probability of people doing action Y, and the cost of dealing with Y multiplied by the increased number of people doing it costs more than dealing with X, refusing to fix the problem is short-sighted and stupid. Doing so because it offends some people's blind faith in the inviolability of free will is even dumber. We know, for a fact, that there are biochemical influences on decision making and action. That doesn't *excuse* any *particular* person's actions, nor does it mean we shouldn't lock them up for committing crimes. But it does mean that there are external influences on those actions.
Now mind you in an ideal world it would be the people who produced the leaded gasoline in the first place who would pay for the cost of the cleanup, but that's never going to happen.
The correlation matches the different phase outs not only in different states but different countries as well. Not so with any other phased out substance.
Of course if the rate went up from 1 of 100 to 10 of 100, it really didn't go up 1000%.
It went up 900%.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Poor people commit crimes. Poor people get stuck with most pollution. What else is new.
If that were true, then why was there a 20-year lag for the crime spike, with respect to the phase-in and phase-out of leaded gasoline?
TFA is not claiming that lead poisoning is the only, or even the main reason for crime in general. What they're trying to explain is specifically the crime spike that occurred in US and other developed countries. Said crime went far beyond "some small fraction", and it did not correlate particularly well with any kind of poverty spike.
furthermore, it is patently absurd to expect to find a single, simple chemical cause for the myriad complex and varied set of behaviors which fall under the umbrella of "violent crime".
They are not trying to find a single cause for violent crime in general. They're trying to find a cause for a hereto unexplained spike in violent crime, that all existing theories don't seem to be explaining particularly well.
RTFA - they do cover the poverty angle. It doesn't match as well as you think it would (and it does not explain the time lag, either).
I think this one is more relevant:
http://xkcd.com/1138/
They didn't find a single, simple chemical cause for all violent crime.
They found evidence for a causal connection between exposure to a single, simple chemical, and an increase in *probability* for violent crime.
That's no different than noting that if you surreptitiously expose a million people to small amounts of a chemical which increases hunger, they will show higher rates of diabetes and obesity than a million people who weren't exposed to that chemical. That doesn't mean the chemical is the only cause of obesity or diabetes.
It's not even that much of a stretch. Certain types of brain injury are already known to increase impulsiveness and propensity for violence.
The specific risks and effects of TEL were known as early as 1923, when the inventor took a prolonged vacation to cure lead poisoning. Here are excerpts from the wikipedia article for Thomas Midgley, Jr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.
[...] In December 1921, while working under the direction of Kettering at Dayton Research Laboratories, a subsidiary of General Motors, Midgley discovered that the addition of TEL to gasoline prevented "knocking" in internal combustion engines.
[...] In 1923, Midgley took a prolonged vacation to cure himself of lead poisoning. "After about a year's work in organic lead," he wrote in January 1923, "I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air." He went to Miami, Florida for convalescence.
[...] However, after two deaths and several cases of lead poisoning at the TEL prototype plant in Dayton, Ohio, the staff at Dayton was said in 1924 to be "depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program." Over the course of the next year, eight more people would die at DuPont's Deepwater, New Jersey plant.
[...] On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever. However, the State of New Jersey ordered the Bayway plant to be closed a few days later, and Jersey Standard was forbidden to manufacture TEL there again without state permission. Midgley himself was careful to avoid mentioning to the press that he required nearly a year to recover from the lead poisoning brought on by his demonstration at the press conference.
:(){
Or perhaps the simpler explanation is that the specific risks and effects of TEL were unknown at the time.
They were known by those who came up with it pretty soon, but they were successfully concealed (it's not that it wasn't public knowledge, it's that most of the public was successfully kept ignorant of it). It started with using "ethyl gasoline" for the brand name, without mentioning lead (specifically so as not to scare off customers), and went from there. The whole story is pretty well documented. Heck, at one now-infamous point, the inventor actually poured TEL on his hands and breathed its vapors for a minute in a public press conference to showcase how it all is perfectly safe - and then went to Europe on a one-year rehabilitation course.
Did you read the article? Because the "exact" correlation also applies to other cultures, corresponding to the time they phased out lead. Did all cultures phase out DDT/asbestos/CFCs at the same time as they phased out lead?
:(){
This exact correlation can be found to any substance that we used in the 60's but banned later and was eliminated in the 90's: DDT, asbestos, CFCs etc.
Did you miss the part where they went to several different countries where the period during which leaded gasoline was different, and in all cases the formula they came up with (correlation with a time shift of 23 years) held true?
Except that it's well established in the medical community that lead poisoning causes lowered IQ, increased aggression, and poorer impulse control. All changes which could very easily mean the difference between an "at risk" individual being tempted to commit a crime, and actually doing so.
Moreover this isn't a single study - the correlation has been observed in every state and nation in the world where it's been examined. If it were a one-of study then certainly, it might well be worthy of more study, but shouldn't be assumed to be accurate. With that many independent confirmations from around the world though - across both cultural differences and different leaded fuel uptake and phase-out curves, you've got to start taking it seriously. As an explanation for a drastic worldwide spike in crime rates it certainly has far more scientific validity than drug usage, increased number of cops, increased incarceration rates, or pretty much any other explanation that's been offered up to date, all of which have been effectively touted as excuses spend far more money to less effect than this article suggests.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
all of this, yes.
furthermore, it is patently absurd to expect to find a single, simple chemical cause for the myriad complex and varied set of behaviors which fall under the umbrella of "violent crime".
it's the kind of childishly simplistic worldview that i'd expect of a libertarian, not Mother Jones.
...but then again, this is the same sort of rhetoric levied against the Australian pair who discovered that ulcers were caused by gut bacteria. Yet they proved to be (mostly) correct.
Sometimes a simple answer is true, even though it's rejected by common wisdom as being "too simple" and "unproven". Of course, something this complex is going to have MANY causes and factors, but this does seem to call for a test of brawl-happy rodents drinking from leaded water containers.
its not lead its the upbringing of people out of poverty
over the last 40 some years the poverty rate has fallen, lots of products are cheap now. 30 years ago if poor people were bored they would go rob or kill someone. They called it Wilding in NYC like when the central park jogger was raped and beaten. these days poor people have x-boxes and you just play call of duty to pass the time
poor people have so much stuff compared to 40-50 years ago there is almost no reason to rob and kill any more
Are you serious? Poor people used to rob and murder for entertainment? Violent crime is declining because poor people can afford Xboxes? What the fuck are you talking about? Are you seriously comparing your ass-pluck hypothesis with statistical investigation of decades of global data? Where's your evidence? I'm guessing it's somewhere in the residue coating the interior of your crack pipe.
And the whole "wilding" thing was pretty much a media invention; in case you've been hiding under a rock (which I firmly believe to be the case at this point), the case of the Central Park jogger has been officially put to bed. The five young men had their convictions vacated after serving years in prison. Their confessions were coerced, and the real culprit was a serial rapist. The media were instrumental in whipping up public outrage against the boys and the New York D.A. gave the people their pound of flesh, never mind the fact that they were completely innocent.
I've seen some really stupid shit on Slashdot, but this is right up there, or down there, with the stupidest. And it was modded Insightful too. Unbelievable. You seriously need to do humanity a favor and not speak again. Ever.
I don't think it's wrong to suggest people read the article. I think it's wrong to expect people have read it.
You think it's to much to ask that people don't blather about the article until they have, at least, RTFA; in the comment section on said article? o_0 (Mind=Blown)
What else is new? This might be new to you: rich people commit the same amount of crimes, often on a larger and more heinous degree.
Did population density crash once lead was removed from gasoline? Because if population density was the source of the correlation, the removal of lead from gasoline should have no effect on violent crime, since most major cities are still major cities today...
:(){
So is it lead or SSRIs or just the fact that we give assholes a lot excuses for being assholes these days?
P.O.E. !
How exactly do you think science works? You discover a correlation in data set 1, you then go looking to see if the same correlation appears in independent data sets. Get enough independent confirmations and it's really hard to argue that there isn't some sort of link. If the correlation is extremely strong, and you also have a sound theory as to how changes in variable 1 causes changes in variable 2, then other researchers should probably start taking you seriously and either look for specific flaws in your research or alternate causal explanations (does v3 cause v1 and v2). It's not nearly as nice and neat as in experimental science where you can individually tweak the various variables to see if you can disrupt the apparent correlation, but for something like this where you can't very well go out and do experiments to test it in good conscience that's as good as it gets.
The evidence certainly seems far better for the phasing out of leaded fuel being responsible for falling crime rates than for the increase in the number or aggressiveness of cops, or increased incarceration. If nothing else it's a reason to start seriously re-examining the effectiveness of our crime-fighting policies for the last several decades - if crime rates would have drastically fallen regardless of what we did then the increasingly draconian (and expensive) policies we keep building up may in fact be totally ineffective and the money completely wasted.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Woosh to you! The hick is a general protecting his precious fluids!
when was that?
Now you just don't understand what correlations means at all. You really should take more stats courses.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
racist much?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I highly recommend this book: "Thinking About Crime" by James Q. Wilson, who lectured at Harvard for 26 years. He backs up his arguments with a lot of data and makes a compelling case.
One of his observations was that crime shot up during a period of declining poverty, during the 60s, which cast doubt on the popular notion that poverty is the primary driving factor of crime. He also discussed the notion that people do in fact respond to rewards and penalties, which supported the notion that punishment can deter. This seems rather obvious to most observers but was not accepted by the sociology/criminology "orthodoxy" the 1960s and 1970s.
You seem to be talking about convicting beyond a reasonable doubt which is a much higher standard than I look for before I'm to suggest something might be a cause. I'm pretty sure the threshold for suggesting something that logically follows the apparent evidence may be case is no higher than that there be some apparent evidence.
You also missed the point. If lead exposure was reduced and reduced violence alone occurred you would merely have correlation as you suggest. But the argument I was defending was not making that case. He was (correctly) arguing that there is already known link between violent tendencies and lead exposure.
None of that makes the post I responded to anything but a host of rhetoric tossed at the gp because with no evidence (correlation or otherwise) is skeptical and in an emotional I resort to rhetoric sort of way not a productive let me provide constructive criticism way.
There are other sources of lead then from the pipes. I saw a study (sorry, can’t cite) that was looking at the lead pollution levels in the air. During Roman times high – during the dark ages low. To make that much lead pipe you have to smelt a lot of lead – which I would assume would have the same impact as leaded gasoline. Sorry, but I can’t cite if the concentrations where the same.
That hypothesis was pretty definitively disproved a number of years ago. Just like the phantasmagorical "welfare queen driving a Cadillac", the myth refuses to die, though.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Beer and Hammers being made of atoms does equate to beer being made of hammers.
That was sort of the point. His arguments amounted to pointing out some random correlation or common trait and then jumping to conclusion that isn't even suggested by the correlation or common trait. The article at least makes an argument that follows the correlation they've found and the argument being mocked was merely pointing out there is additional support beyond that correlation.
At the end of the day the only thing we KNOW are that there are patterns and we've labeled things and built models around them. A pattern is nothing but a group of correlations. Perform an experiment and the result is a correlation to the experiment. Repeat it again, and it remains a correlation. In other words, at some point ALL evidence is nothing but correlation.
As DeadCatX2 points out, we certainly DID know. Society *IS* liable. Uncomfortable indeed! It's hard to blame you for trying so hard not to see it, nobody likes the sensation of nausea.
At the very least, it suggests that the conditions prisoners are maintained under are unconscionable given that at least a significant portion wouldn't be there but for this debacle. If it makes you feel any better, U.S. criminal 'justice' over the years coupled with it's lack of public healthcare leaves American society much more liable than U.K. society.
Meanwhile, according to the eggshell skull rule, if you commit a tort against another (such as poisoning them), you are fully liable for all of the damages even if they are exceptionally susceptible and the damages are well beyond what you expected.
It's not just those who might have been poisoned to the point that they grew up to be criminals, the liability extends to all of their victims and all those who spent significant sums to avoid becoming a victim as well. Then there's the property owners who saw their property values decline due to lead poisoning driven crime waves.
Realistically, there isn't enough money out there to actually pay all of the compensation that is due. That doesn't excuse doing nothing. Even from a purely economic viewpoint (throwing morals and ethics completely out the window), the ROI for cleanup is huge.
If dogs are made of cats, that actually explains quite a bit.
He may have been classist, but I didn't see anything you could identify as racist. FWIW, his comments echo those put forth by the authors of Freakonomics, albeit DontScotty avoids the use of PC terms. Likely for effect.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Troll Alert.. By an AC who is on the forefront of fighting prejudice, misinformation and propaganda.
Everytime the ADHD topic comes up. And I mean EVERYTIME, betterunixthanunix tries to introduce FUD about ADHD and he demonizes ADHD by associating it with an underground drug culture.
He outright lies as well, for example he states this:
It is still being debated amongst psychiatrists if the rise in ADHD diagnoses has to do with an actual rise in ADHD occurrence, or if it is because we are better at identifying the problem, or if it is just over-zealous prescription.
Which is a complete fabrication. There is ZERO debate in the medical community about ADHD diagnoses. Most doctors, especially in the United States (where most of this anti-ADHD propaganda is coming from) are in fact reluctant to write prescriptions for fear of losing their licenses. Remember folks, you can't even buy cold medication in the United States without asking a pharmacist for permission and showing her your ID. Remember that in the United States there is a government mandated shortage of ADHD medication (because the DEA has the same type of views as betterunixthanunix). And all of the respected and notable medical researchers will tell you that ADHD is a vastly under-diagnosed condition. There is no doubt amongst the researchers.
Of course there will always be quack doctors who will spread FUD about ADHD, just like there are archaeologists who will claim that there is evidence that the pyramids in Egypt were built by space aliens. Of course these people will be a very small minority but they will also be the most vocal. Think how how it took people to disavow the propaganda that vaccines cause autism? And still uninformed people like betterunixthanunix will still sprout their propaganda.
I will give you a Wikipedia link about ADHD that has 152 references so you can make your own decision. But you have to ask yourself: will you believe the ignorant, highly biased statements of betterthanlinux, who offers no evidence and no citations. Or will you believe in the science about ADHD and stimulant treatment which has been going on for decades?
Correct, and thanks. It went up ten times (that's what I was thinking).
Doesn't change my point of course. :)
GMAFB!
Just another data point to add to my prognosis that the human race will eventually kill itself...with sheer, grinding, idiocy!
Except that the study explicitly showed that population density was not a correlate. Which means that that xkcd, while still amusing, does not seem to be particularly relevant at all.
it's the kind of childishly simplistic worldview that i'd expect of a libertarian, not Mother Jones.
Hey moron, the Mother Jones article merely refers back to the actual scientific studies, which are published in actual scientific journals. If you have anything useful to add other than a lame attempt to poison the well, then please do criticize the actual original research and show us how you refute the actual science (there are multiple different studies showing similar results, and some of these studies are extremely detailed, having factored in far more factors than you could even dream up).
My other UID is three digits.
...you consider the arab muslims of northern africa to be rich white people and a "corrupt interfering govt" because the violence, genocides and rampant crime and insecurity seems to be concentrated only in sub-sahara africa.
No, you're missing the point. If factor X increases the probability of people doing action Y, and the entire population is exposed to factor X, then factor X can't be used as an excuse by the small portion of people that actually do action Y. The difference between those that do action Y and those that don't is personal responsibility!
It's even more; some of the studies actually go as far as correlating blood lead levels, e.g.:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050101
I actually read all the articles in depth before reading the slashdot coverage and it's shocking how mind-numbingly idiotic the commentary here is when you compare it to the science itself.
My other UID is three digits.
Not only that, but if he'd read the article, he'd realize there isn't just one "actual article", there are multiple, e.g. different journal articles. And it's very comprehensive, and presents a fairly watertight case.
My other UID is three digits.
What's shocking is that with most stories, it's the other way around... and the commentary doesn't change.
Funny though, the other effect mentioned is lowered IQ.
My other UID is three digits.
What the hell are you talking about? Who said anything about adding lead to lollipops? You're trying to claim that "society" fed lead to people, those people then committed crimes because of the lead, and then society stuck them in prison. That's a hugely stupid assertion. The entire population of North America was exposed to exhaust from leaded gas combustion. You can't excuse those that committed crimes as being victims. Not everyone exposed committed crimes. Personal responsibility still matters.
Most seem to agree that modern psychiatric medicine causes most school shootings, but I'd theorize that maybe sniffing strange exhaust because of strange gasoline might have some effect. Possibly the rise in shootings is a direct result of ethanol in gasoline.
www.ssristories.com
So you know what your IQ would have been had you grown up in a lead-free environment that was otherwise exactly the same? Funny, I would have thought someone with a "very high IQ" would know about things like a scientific control, the value of an "anecdote" (single data point), and logical fallacies. On the contrary, I put your comment forth as a data point that appears to confirm the hypothesis.
My other UID is three digits.
So, the people that put the lead into the environment need not take personal responsibility; that's only an obligation of the people that were exposed to the toxin.
Not everyone Typhoid Mary cooked for came down with typhoid fever and not woman who took thalidomide gave birth to a deformed baby.
Some people exposed to Chernobyl's radioactive spew are just fine today.
There is absolutely no controversy that exposure to lead in the amounts actually in the environment will result in a pattern of brain damage that causes criminal behavior. There is absolutely no controversy that that lead came from leaded gasoline. There is absolutely no controversy that lead was known to be harmful before it was introduced into gasoline.
Go ahead and plant your head in the sand if you like, but you are certainly shunning truth in the process.
pastafazou, are you being deliberately dense? The "entire population was exposed" is an insane distortion of the facts. Exposures were highly varied; that's one of the primary points of the article.
I believe that should be
"Therefore, cats are made of dogs.",
not "Therefore dogs are made of cats."
Roman empire fell due to expansion of its government policies, destruction of the Republic, which by the way, was quite advanced in terms of property ownership and adherence to contracts once upon the time.
Wrong. The Roman Empire fell due to infighting and unsustainable expansion. It covered too much territory for the infrastructure and technology of the day. A small war could erupt and conclude in less time than it would take just to get notice of said war to Rome and have someone there make a decision (let alone act on said decision) about it. The concentration of power in the empire - which is very much parallel to the kind of power concentration you frequently preach for - was a big part of what killed the Roman Empire.
I'm sorry that you failed history when you were an undergraduate at a state run school in a socialist-leaning country.
It was the constant expansion of the government due to reduction of the Republic to tyranny of one dictator after another
Why then should anyone support the dictatorship that you want to see installed in the US?
since property rights don't mean anything once you have a dictatorship
But yet somehow, the dictatorship you want to see installed in the US won't cause erosion of property rights? And yet you try to claim that other people don't understand history...
Don't go trying to claim that you have a deep understanding of historical politics when you fail to acknowledge that you are attempting to bring fascism for the people.
I suspect a correlation between you spewing garbage and your not reading the FA.
The analysis in the article is OK, but this is a tricky enough statistics question that only real experts in statistics can evaluate how likely it is that lead is the cause of the increase in crime rate, as opposed to just a correlation. This goes well beyond any generalized sqrt(N) type statistics, or simple correlations.
I am not disagreeing (or agreeing) with the results of the study, my statistics background (and I'm a working physicist) is simply not good enough to evaluate this work.
The polio virus increases the odds that your legs will quit working, but the whole world has been exposed to polio. Therefor, those who ended up with their legs not working clearly had some sort of moral failure, QED.
Funny, but it is really for the environment not the target. Most bullets pass through and then end up in the ground eventually.
Where do you think the lead of the bullet came from?
The ground.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Double Woosh.
Where on earth did I suggest that anyone should be able to use lead exposure as an excuse for crime? I gather you missed where I specifically stated otherwise because you were too busy grinding that axe. My point was that it's likely cheaper to pay for lead abatement than pay for the resulting crime 20something years later.
Though, actually, your claim that personal responsibility is necessarily the difference is false. If I expose everyone to a toxic chemical and not all of them experience symptoms, it's equally plausible that the variance is due to biochemical differences or random chance. And your premise that "the entire population is exposed to factor X" is also false; different subpopulations are exposed to different amounts of lead, and the frequency and severity of neurotoxicity varies with exposure.
Besides, asserting something as "personal responsibility" is basically sticking a process in a black box. Brains aren't bottles filled with magical soul dust. The choices we make are a consequence of biochemical processes, and the evidence that these choices can be affected by physiological factors is overwhelming. You still have to hold people accountable for their actions; violent and impulsive criminals don't belong on the street even if their actions are influenced by biological factors outside their control. But if we can do something about those factors in the first place. we should.
Freakonomics is where I was first exposed to the idea.
Then, one can always read the actual documents, rebuttals, and re-rebuttals.
"In 2005 Levitt published rebuttal to these criticisms in which he re-ran his numbers to address the shortcomings and variables missing from the original study. The new results are nearly identical to those of the original study. Levitt posits that any reasonable use of the data available reinforces the results of the original 2001 paper"
Not only does lead degrade cognitive abilities and lower intelligence
Seems like it.
Sounds like the class helped.
[FUCK BETA]
hahaha
idiot.
Are you suggesting that being violent causes your brain to produce lead?
If I serve you cyanide instead of salt, I poisoned you, regardless of whether it was an accident on my part or not.
Beer and Hammers being made of atoms does equate to beer being made of hammers.
But you could make a (not very practical) hammer out of frozen beer.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I completely agree. If we actually want to measure whether or not, for example, laws have the desired effect, this would be a very reasonable way to do it. Science should not be confined to laboratories. We're essentially running uncontrolled experiments in the nation as a whole when we ought to be running controlled experiments.
Fast forward your empirical analysis to the US and Afghanistan and the current economic crisis
Then I took a statistics class. Now I don't.
A little learning is a dangerous thing.
Most notably, "imply" is not being used in the strict mathematical "=>" sense, but rather in the normal English sense. So correlation can indeed often suggest that something is a cause (or contributory cause) of something else, it's just that in the real world you can never say "it is 100% sure that X (and only X) causes Y" since X and Y are not going to be simple things.
For example, in any discussion of crime figures, you can't simply ignore other factors such as geography, the economy, education, political climate, technological advancements, average weather conditions or anything else, as they all may have some effect too.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'd laugh harder, but i have this gammy leg, see...
If this is true, considering all the living structures that have been rebuilt in New Orleans, when will we see a change in our crime statistics?
Right now, our crime rate is incredibly high and we're 7.5 years out from our "lead purging" event. Many of the poor areas were in the flood zone. Many people came back, but kids in these areas are still making the wrong decision in choosing a gun to solve their problems.
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
That's a quote from a Monty Python comedy, in case someone doesn't realize that.
Lead in fuels has been banned since the 60's not 1996. Additionally there is little to no evidence that lead based ammunition causes lead pollution.
What? A cardinal logical sin greater than "cum hoc, ergo propter hoc" marked insightful?
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Are you being deliberately dense? Cars are everywhere. Leaded gas was everywhere. You can't tell me that the majority of the population of New York somehow managed to avoid exposure to the exhaust of the millions of cars on their streets! Just because there's a correlation found between levels of lead and violent crime doesn't mean you can excuse all of the violent offenders for their actions, which sjames is attempting to do! He's claiming that all the violent offenders were poisoned, the poisoning triggered their violent activity, and they were incarcerated, and the incarceration was unjust because it's not their fault! That's fucking bullshit, and you know it!
Man what a crap site. Here's some adblock plus filters to help with it if anyone actually wants to RTFA in peace:
medicaldaily.com###article_right350
medicaldaily.com###extraBox
medicaldaily.com##P[style="font-weight: bold;font-size: 11pt;height: 21px;"]
medicaldaily.com##.article_tool_box
medicaldaily.com###share
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Enjoy.
Yes, there is a controversy! You don't have a clue about lead in the environment! All you've done is read about a study that suggests a correlation between lead exposure and violent crime, and you jump to the conclusion that all the violent offenders were unjustly incarcerated because they were poisoned and it's not their fault! Lead was being added to gasoline since the 1920's, long before anyone knew about the hazards. It was being used in plumbing, it was being used to make paints, and it was used in many industrial applications. Not everyone exposed to lead resorts to violent crime! Lead wasn't phased out of gas until the 80's. Therefore, I was exposed to lead, as was anyone else born before 1980 and traveling by car on a daily basis. I haven't committed any violent crimes, nor have a large number of other people exposed to lead. Just because a correlation has been seen, it doesn't excuse the behavior of those who actually commit a violent crime. That's my problem with your posts. You're trying to absolve ALL VIOLENT CRIMINALS from their actions! You said "very real evidence that society poisoned those people and THEN punished them for the natural consequences of that poisoning". There are people who have been poisoned by lead to the point they die from it, yet they did not resort to violent crime. So please spare me your bullshit analogies to Chernobyl or Typhoid Mary. The fact remains that not everyone that is exposed to lead resorts to violent crime. Therefore, there is some personal responsibility involved, and those criminals were RIGHTLY incarcerated!
Damn low flying planes again...
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Some people are claiming the common cause is likely SSRI medications.
I flipped a coin today and it landed tails. There's my iron clad proof that people claiming to have had a coin land heads up all all a pack of liars!
Welcome to Federalism. A concept Republicans give lip service to and Democrats run screaming from.
In Freakonomics, the authors postulate the decrease in crime rate in the late 90's was due to Roe v. Wade and the legalization of abortion. They claim to see similar trends (about 15-20 years after the legalization of abortion, crime rates plummet) in other countries that have legalized abortion. The thought being that unwanted babies are often given up for adoption and/or do not have as a loving up-bringing as a wanted child, which then leads to criminal behaviors.
Lead, abortion, which one is it? Its likely not both.
Causation != correlation.
Doesn't change fact that it was mined, transported, smelted, transported again, manufactured (and transported some more) using fuel and electricity that result in the atmospheric emissions of lead, mercury, SO4, NO2, cadmium, etc., etc...
But why quibble over what happens between extraction and you missing your intended target?
Naggers?
From the summary: "Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates." If this is true, does it mean violent crime causes lead contamination?
You are not a killer, therefore lead, which you grew up around, is not a factor in the causation of behavioral problems?
You may have had a high IQ in high school, but I'm betting you didn't take statistics or epidemiology, let alone ecology or systems theory.
But don't get mad, there's still time!
That would be a waste of perfectly good beer! *punches you in the upper arm* Party foul!
Wait... what kind of beer are we talking about?
Kind of old news. When I was in school 8 years ago, one professor gave us a handout with much of the same information. Wonder why this is suddenly making the rounds again. My understanding is that this linkage has been fairly well accepted since the 1990s.
The article makes a lot of sense. Here is a twist on it. Iodine helps the body get rid of heavy metals. Overworked soils can become depleted of iodine. Maybe it happened to the Romans too? Although the USA stupidly made it worse starting in the 1960s by reducing the use of iodine in bread, which may have made the leaded gasoline issue worse:
http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james37.htm
"Forty years ago the food industry decided to remove iodine from baked goods and replace the iodine with bromine. Iodine and bromine appear similar to the thyroid gland and bromine easily binds to the thyroid gland's receptors for iodine. Bromine, however, is of no value to the thyroid gland unlike iodine and it inhibits the activity of iodine in the thyroid gland. Bromine also can cause impaired thinking and memory, drowsiness, dizziness and irritability. This substitution of bromine for iodine has resulted in nearly universal deficiency of iodine in the American populace. Iodine therapy helps the body eliminate fluoride, bromine, *lead*, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum and mercury. Could this substitution of bromine for iodine have been carried out to increase diseases and thus create more need for pharmaceutical drugs?" [My emphasis]
Seaweed can be a good source of iodine, BTW.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
- doesn't fund the police
- worse, much of the money is due to poor people
- shrinks the pool of people that others can feel morally superior to while dumping on them.
You were saying something in another post about having an axe to grind?
It's high capacity magazines and racists like George Bush. We all know that.
This explains the Mexican cartels, Russian Mafia, as well as other ultra violent groups.
pastafazou, take some personal responsibility on yourself and READ what the others are saying. Nobody is saying 'excuse' here except you, and nobody is saying we should let people out of jail.
BTW, you write like a twelve-year-old, and your inability to understand a simple argument about exposure levels is, well, sad. Go read up on Dunning and Kruger .
From Kevin Drum's article in MotherJones:
> When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn't fit the theory. "No," he replied. "Not one."
Switzerland doesn't seem to fit the theory at all:
Crime statistics:
http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/de/index/themen/19/03/03/key/straftaten/haeufigste_delikte.Document.21953.xls
Lead levels:
http://www.kuefo.de/staff/storch/pdf/blei/mosiman.blei.Gaia.pdf
(first chart on page 206)
*t
decades of the "who's yer daddy" culture in the poorer inner city parts, with people who travel out of their little zone very little, and a certain cultural pride of promiscuity, can be expected to lead to a certain amount of unintentional inbreeding among young adults of a similar age group. Keeping this behavior going along with the relatively young age of a lot of breeding age inner city youth and a long active breeding lifetime for males, can possibly lead to increasingly stunted family trees. Since inbreeding among humans tends to manifest itself less in physical deformities and more in behavioral issues, it would be a good idea to begin an investigation to see if this is a culprit. It will of course require the removal of a lot of "sacred cows" and "PC" beliefs. But if a small "trailer court" or "appalachian town" can be culturally viewed as a source of inbreeding, a culturally and economically isolated "inner city" with a larger starting population should be suspect as well.
Throwing the idea out as "improbable" or even hiding behind tactical terms like "racist" is dangerous to both understanding the problem and to scientific progress as well-using dogma to stifle research and ideas is bad whether that dogma is political correctness, or a religion.
Correct. We all know that criminals are democrats. Remove the democrats from the country to get rid of the crime! democrats believe it is ok for them to break the law - laws do not apply to democrats - in their minds!
I think maybe it's you that should READ what others are saying. sjames, the original poster to which I replied, claimed that "society poisoned those people and THEN punished them for the natural consequences of that poisoning". My post in response merely states that "society" did not actually poison "those people". Society itself was being poisoned, and not everyone that was "poisoned" resorted to violent crime. And trying to insult me by claiming I write like a twelve-year-old is pretty juvenile itself, don't you think? I understand about exposure levels. And I also understand that not everyone that gets poisoned by lead resorts to violent crime. Are you suggesting that there's an exposure level past which the subject is guaranteed to commit violent crime? That seems to be what sjames is arguing, and it is definitely false.
I read the article and it has only slightly more causative value than the "abortion reduces crime" argument, which is also possibly salient, but underscores something...
liberalized society, where the environment and individual rights are important tends to cause the increase in lead abatement programs AND the liberalization of women's rights programs and it seems likely to me that children growing up under this increased liberalism may have different ideals about personal liberty and the need to be a part of the collective group of society in a functional way.
Still no causation, only a strong correlation and I note that the article most frequently uses the phrase "strong correlation", where it is only the slashdot summary that harps on "causation".
I read the article and it has only slightly more causative value than the "abortion reduces crime" argument, which is also possibly salient, but underscores something...
Still no causation, only a strong correlation and I note that the article most frequently uses the phrase "strong correlation", where it is only the slashdot summary that harps on "causation".
A liberalized society, where environmental issues and personal rights are important tends to cause the increase in lead abatement programs AND the liberalization of women's rights programs and in addition, it seems likely to me that children growing up under this increased liberalism may have different ideals about personal liberty and the need to be a part of the collective group of society in a functional way.
It also seems totally reasonable that a society that leads the trend in lead abatement programs might also lead a trend in better parenting, and vice versa.
I never said that I deny the findings, nor that one shouldn't ever draw conclusions, just that there is not, yet, a really good single-factor causative relationship that can be drawn here.
I read the article and it has only slightly more causative value than the "abortion reduces crime" argument, which is also possibly salient, but underscores something...
A liberalized society, where environmental issues and personal rights are important tends to cause the increase in lead abatement programs AND the liberalization of women's rights programs and in addition, it seems likely to me that children growing up under this increased liberalism may have different ideals about personal liberty and the need to be a part of the collective group of society in a functional way.
It also seems totally reasonable that a society that leads the trend in lead abatement programs might also lead a trend in better parenting, and vice versa.
I never said that I deny the findings, nor that one shouldn't ever draw conclusions, just that there is not, yet, a really good single-factor causative relationship that can be drawn here.
Methamphetamine impairs brain function as well, and also maps very closely with increases in crime rates in geographic and temporal studies.
Does it too cause crime?
Or is it, perhaps, also a co-equal phenomenon of changes in social attitudes, education, health, etc that are far more complex than one factor?
I can't believe this got -1 flamebait, that's insane! hah
No, it's not "watertight" for causation, it shows a STRONG CORRELATION, to use the original authors words.
The fact that the strength of the correlation is strikingly similar to the strength of the correlation with abortion rates doesn't surprise me.
There are a number of other factors that closely track with the crime rates on a delayed timescale.
I propose that changes in a society that might itself lead to both increased focus on education, rights, safety, child care and also to focus on issues such as lead-abatement is a more plausible causative factor than some simplistic "single element" cause like "brains has lead, case closed".
I still, having read the articles, find it more likely that they are a co-equal result of some other more general change in society.
Childbirth rates did, incidentally, crash during the 1970s and 1980s in cities, with the bulk of growth in all western societies coming from immigration.
Just FYI.
This same society has a principle - eggskull principle. If someone has a very weak skull, in an argument with a stranger if the stranger hits this person with his fist to injure him but ends up killing him, the stranger gets charged with murder not just assault. Even though "not everyone" that was hit this way died.
So why such principles do not apply when the society as a whole is "guilty" ?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
When you try to write like an adult, it almost looks like you have a rational argument.
But you're really trying too hard to make some sort of binary point. In your world, there apparently are no degrees of responsibility; for you, the offenders are completely failing in personal responsibility, since there isn't a 100% certainty that poisoning will cause someone to commit a violent crime. The culpability of others is only acknowledged in "scare quotes" so it can be dismissed.
The real world isn't binary, it's much muddier and convoluted - someone can be both culprit and victim, both good and bad, both affected by society and affecting others in society. There are several posts in this thread that reply to yours that make this point very well; you should not just read them, but absorb them.
PS - no, that's not at all what sjames is arguing.
Ask yourself this: where are the actual reports, papers and other factors that were removed as being unrelated and why.
I got sucked into this article as well, but after my father, Richard Wellinghurst, who has been with the Jefferson County Health Department for many years, had corrected my in on this. Lead to get into the system and do damage would take years of ingestion to have an effect of poisoning. being in the environment is not enough, you have to pretty much eat it to get in to your system.
Bullets shot into people and not removed, could also do it, if the let is not addressed but the bodies responses to trauma done to the body. Foreign substances are encased in a cocoon of scar tissue and thus separated from the body, sorry I do not know the proper terminologies but the essence it there.
Skin contact is not enough to cause this effect and an open wound would not be enough as well; you would have to keep re-opening the wound and keep rubbing it with lead. The body does not absorb lead like that, it has to be ingested.
The Roman succumbed to the effects of lead, after a few generations using it for cups, plates and other things that are constantly being used with foods and drinks. This also would have to keep in mind we are far more hygienic then we were in the past, even if you look back as recently as the 1950s; just on the simple fact more people bath on a regular bases.
We live in an era, were people use scare tactics to get there points across and appeal to emotion and not logic. I am as human as the next person, and get caught off guard. If you need an example, ask any politician for there opinion on any give subject, especially a hot topic, and you might get a good look as what emotional motivated fact are like. Obviously there are a few responsible politicians out there, but I can't see any on the federal level for all of the BS flying around.
Just remember, lead has been in the environment long before man walked on two legs, and will be long after we as species, before homo-sapiens and after.
His response to my post on facebook:
Sorry but very bad analysis of the data by whoever did this, Lead poisoning has been a problem since the Roman Empire, it just has been better understood and able to be detected in both the environment and the people in the past 50 - 75 years. The correlation I do see in the data would lead me to believe that older less well maintained housing stock and crime do, geographically, relate. And please remember (anyone reading this comment) my wife and I are both retired Environmental Public Health Professionals with a combined 60 years of local Environmental Heath experience including her 12 years as a supervisor in the Louisville Jefferson County Childhood Lead Poison Prevention Program and my 3 years as division manager including CHLPP as one of my programs. While lead poisoning is a contributing factor to "bad" behavior let's remember it is the parenting of the child that is the greatest influence on eventual behaviors.
Maybe you have a comprehension problem. I hear that's a side effect of lead poisoning, you should get that checked out. It is quite clear what sjames was arguing. He clearly stated that society poisoned people, and then society punished those same people when the consequences of their poisoning led them to commit violent crime. That's exactly what he's arguing. Why you're referencing other posts in this thread is baffling. I am not referring to any posts other than what sjames wrote. Please reference the original post as well as the various posts in which I have quoted his exact words. It was that argument that I had a problem with. Correlation is not causation, you must know that if you are a regular to slashdot, and if you've read any of the other posters on this subject. I understand that the numbers match up extremely well. What is not understood is why the correlation exists. Does lead poisoning trigger violent behavior? Or does it result in poor decision making? Maybe it impairs an individual's ability to comprehend the long term results of their actions. For all we know, it could be a complex interaction of lead poisoning combined with other external influences, such as smoking, drug use, depression, or who knows what else. We don't know the answer, and for sjames to assume that lead poisoning is directly causing people to commit violent crime is clearly wrong. But that is what he did, and I disagreed with him. Do you agree or disagree with his statement?
Some acknowledgment that the world is complicated - progress!
Next time, you might try starting with a post like this one. Then, we can have a reasonable discourse about the word 'cause', and how it's distinct from 'sole cause'. We'll also mix in a talk about how you can draw reasonable conclusions from highly-correlated data without necessarily knowing everything in the causality chain.
We can also discuss paragraphs. But that'll be next time.
So half states with slaves and half not?
Well, maybe.
so you've shifted from debating the actual subject to personal attacks. I'll take that as your concession. Have a great day AC.
Weak attempt at a save, dude. The 'personal attack' stone might work a bit better if you weren't casting it from a glass house. It might also have worked a bit better to storm off at one of the earlier posts where I really did make personal attacks.
Bookmark this thread; read it again in a few months; be embarrassed.
I'm reposting this since for whatever reason my comment did not make it the first time I posted it.
Switzerland doesn't seem to fit the theory at all:
Crime statistics:
http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/de/index/themen/19/03/03/key/straftaten/haeufigste_delikte.Document.21953.xls
(these are official statistics published by the swiss governement)
Lead levels:
http://www.kuefo.de/staff/storch/pdf/blei/mosiman.blei.Gaia.pdf
(first chart on page 206)
(double checked against trends publised by admin.ch (the swiss goverment site))
*t
absolutely wrong. Octane number is not a measure of energy content, only anti-knock (compressibility before detonating). It is possible to raise the octane number while lowering energy content (e.g. ethanol), and also to raise the octane number while raising energy content (TEL)
kids these days. resistance to detonation DOES in fact mean how much it can be compressed before detonation (compressibility).
"leaded" gasonline, with tetraethyllead, does have higher energy content and higher octane number. just because you live in the era of the idiocracy, with ethanol, you think higher octane always indicates less power. octane number says nothing about energy density in itself.
Octane isn't a measure of energy content, but it correlates strongly with energy content.
Learn to love Alaska
And CNG/LPG has higher octane and lower energy content, and Diesel has lower octane and higher energy content.
Learn to love Alaska