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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?
I'm throwing this damned mechanical pencil away.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
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...
its not lead its the upbringing of people out of poverty
Except that the rise in the standard of living of the poor does not match the decline in crime.
Yup. If the study were true, China would be one of the most violent countries on Earth. Rich people can afford better products, ie, products with less led in them. Rich people have other, non-violent, ways of stealing large sums of money. I personally believe that the arrival of the internet, cheap entertainment be it games or porn, and easy access to information, has kept people busy at night. And porn and possibly less stressful masturbation has helped release a lot of pent up sexual energy.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
So did the number of poor people suddenly rise in the 1980s and 1990s and fall back in the 2000s?
Naw, violent crime causes ice cream.
Not to mention the spectacular semi-permanent decline in the economy since 2007 has not resulted in a permanent spectacular increase in crime.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
They called it Wilding in NYC like when the central park jogger was raped and beaten
... as if that was a real thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_Jogger_case#Convictions_vacated
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
That's dumb. Poor people from the early 80's might not have had X-boxes, but they did have video games (Atari, Intellivision and Odyssey systems spring to mind, not to mention arcade games which were just taking off). Plus (and this applies even if you go back before the 80's) there was still TV, books, magazines, radio, and so on. Sorry, but 20th-century crime rates can't be blamed on a lack of entertainment options for the poor. At least not by anyone who 1)is being honest and 2)knows what the fuck they're talking about.
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.
Obviously, cows reduce violent crime.
There's evidence to the contrary.
Seriously, I think the fall in crime is linked to a rise in apathy. The younger generation are passive media consumers, not actively doing much, crime or otherwise.
With the notable exceptions that the poor now use violent crimes to obtain said x-boxes.
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.
Obviously, cows reduce violent crime.
The cow moo does sound awfully like a Buddhist monk chanting for inner peace. Perhaps there is a soothing effect?
sudo make me a sandwich
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.
poor people didn't have any stuff 40-50 years ago and don't have stuff now. Poverty isn't the people with low incomes living in trailer parks and low income housing, They are the people pushing shopping carts on the streets with children in tow. Although neither of these groups has as much stuff as you imply and both spend time hungry with no food.
...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
Nobody in a right state of mind is going to rob or kill a random someone just because they're bored.
However, lead poisoning causes brain damage, which can lead to psychosis. And the study shows correlation between violent crime rates and lead concentration.
If it were just a matter of being bored, I would fear for the world. That would imply that we're all rapists and murderers, and that unless we're significantly distracted by our 'stuff' we're prone to rape and murder out of sheer boredom. That's not really the case though. For the most part, people don't rape and murder eachother, except under pretty significant mental distress or disorder.
A study like this is useful because it might bring up other ways of investigating criminal trends. Could there be something environmental that causes mental health issues in a population? Drug/alcohol abuse? Lack of health care opportunities? Birth defects caused by some environmental source? Toxins from some environmental source?
Dismissing it as "people just have more x-boxes so they probably don't get bored and kill people" is pretty pointless. Does poverty factor into it? Maybe. But can we tell if poverty instigates the crime, or if the mental degradation caused by something like lead poisoning (or drug/alcohol abuse, or mental deficiency from birth) both instigates the crime and makes the person have a more difficult time caring for themselves leading to a life of poverty?
That's not even to say that bringing people out of poverty doesn't help the situation. It has a mental effect (reducing stress by making available necessities). But why weren't those people in Central Park just happy to play chess? It's not just that they had nothing better to do, it's more likely that they had a problem that went ignored.
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?
Your theory is a very good one. Not that I think it's likely to be correct, but it's good in that it's easily testable.
Which happened first? Banning leaded gasoline, or the drop in crime? People aren't going to ban leaded gasoline in anticipation of crime rates dropping and having a more secure, better standard of living tomorrow, the vast majority of arrests happen within hours or days of the crime, and every last one has a report. Dates of where leaded gasoline was used are also well-documented.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself, "Jeez, these guys are scientists, why wouldn't they think of something so simple as checking the dates?" And if you are, congratulations. Now you're starting to think. The tricky part is realizing, and really internalizing the lesson, that you never get to stop.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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.
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
Lead paint is not a major source of lead. The only reason it was so newsworthy is that it was more likely to hit rich kids with more immediate and identifiable results. 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. And the toys used locally in China do not match those exported, so stories of toys exported with lead doesn't mean that a child in China is surrounded by it.
And your wording of the issue is insane. It's not like they have toys on the shelf separated out "leaded" and "unleaded".
I haven't read the article yet, but I'd imagine there is a delay in crime based on development time. You don't show someone a lead pipe and then they go out and hit someone with it. But you put unsafe levels of lead in an expectant mother, and raise the child with extra lead, and then crime will increase when he's 15+.
Learn to love Alaska
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/
Can't afford pliers?
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.
Except that doesn't cover all of it. The (original) article also mentioned that during the "white flight" era of violent crimes in cities, it was assumed that high population density would necessarily imply higher rates of violence (per person). But since phasing out leaded gasoline, violent crime per capita is roughly the same in cities of different densities: and as a result we are seeing the re-gentrification of urban areas.
But yeah, it is fun commenting on things without reading articles.
The neurological effects of lead are known and reproducible. Translating individual effects to society effects is an exercise in statistics because you can not create isolated control groups in society without adding extraneous and often unmeasurable effects.
There is almost no such thing as an absolute scientific proof in sociology. The best you can do is lower the error bars of your statistical model of highly correlated qualities.
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."
Biting? Who ever did that? That's what your pocket knife was for.
As for more aggressive, well... I guess I could understand that conclusion. We were there to catch trout. Fly fishermen were apparently there to show off to other fly fishermen.
/. is the perfect place for it. Talk about getting some serious peer review...
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/
Youth crime dropped coinciding with the release of the Playstation, contrary to what Jack Thompson would like everyone to believe. And it went down from there as gaming became more popular. Cause and effect? Who knows.
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.
Well, the current theories don't actually provide us with predictable results, even against *historical* data. This theory does. It's worth being looked at rather than simply dismissed out of hand.
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.
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
A corrupt interfering government? Rich white people pulling the strings to exploit others?
Learn to love Alaska
There was lead in paint for two reasons. Pigment and anti-fungal.
White lead paint was fairly high in lead and was pretty bad for kids that ate it. All the other colors only had a trace for it's anti-fungal properties. Initially they replaced the anti-fungal lead with mercury, not sure if that's still true. There was an argument for removing the lead pigment but leaving the traces.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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?
Unfortunately, nobody has been able to serve papers, and they're not clear on jurisdiction.
And, randomly, Buddha wasn't a world creator. He was a mortal man like you and I -- there *is* no specific creator in Buddhism. Depending on who practices it and where they come from, Buddhism isn't even technically a 'religion'.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Not to mention the spectacular semi-permanent decline in the economy since 2007 has not resulted in a permanent spectacular increase in crime.
It should of course be observed that a decline in an economy does not equate to a decline in standard of living. The standard of living in the western world has steadily risen fairly consistently across the countless recessions of both local and global magnitude that have occurred.
"His name was James Damore."
Wikipedia: Lead paint or lead-based paint is paint containing lead, as pigment, with lead(II) chromate (PbCrO4, "chrome yellow") and lead(II) carbonate (PbCO3, "white lead") being the most common. Lead is added to paint to speed up drying, increase durability, maintain a fresh appearance, and resist moisture that causes corrosion.
Also, as might be expected by those who have handled tin-lead solder, lead is soft and flexible. This helps lead paint adhere for a long time on surfaces with differing thermal coefficients of expansion.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Couple additional reasons too: lead decreases the drying time of oil-based paints, and also produces relatively strong paint films. It's a fantastically useful pigment, actually, aside from that poisonous thing.
But, if you subdivide across multiple countries, states, and cities where the lead in gasoline was phased out at different times and the 22 year correlation remains consistent, it becomes highly unlikely that you will find something(s) else that can account for the change.
And, as you said it is statistical because clearly every child exposed to lead during those time periods did not become a criminal. Some just suffered from losing a few IQ points (or whatever intelligence measure you care to use). But, you take a large group of people that have all the other risks for becoming criminals and add lead on top of that and you get a significant rise in crime.
I'd bet if you measured the unprosecuted crimes committed by bankers, lawyers, insurance agents, and politicians, you'd find that the crime rate is actually quite high.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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!
How many of those are there really?
I would think that group would be served the most by assistance programs, unlike the typical crazy homeless person.
How do we help these folks if their needs are not being currently addressed?
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.
Are you sure about that?
"U.S. Poverty On Track To Rise To Highest Since 1960s" <URL:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/us-poverty-level-1960s_n_1692744.html?>
By your logic, our crime rates should be about what they were in the 1960s.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
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...
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
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.
False. "Wilding" in general, and that famous NYC case, were totally fictitious bullshit made up by wild-eyed media and cops. The convictions of the juveniles were overturned years later, when a single man confessed and also had DNA evidence confirm it. Ken Burns had a documentary on their story at Cannes just last year. Exemplary case study of the great fraud that is our law-enforcement and security apparatus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_Jogger_case
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Just to make sure i get this right.
You are claiming that as crime rates fell people began to worry about more mundane things and so they went back in time 20 years to regulate lead use?
And I guess also that as crime rates when up people began to worry less about more mundane things and so they went back in time 20 years and told them about a great anti-knocking additive?
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.
"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
Except that the neurological effects of lead poisoning are well known, and include lower IQ, increased aggressiveness, and poor impulse control - practically a recipe for making someone more inclined to commit criminal acts. And if you read the article you'll see that several different studies show the same correlation:
1) National crime rates rose and fell with a high correlation to the rise and fall of leaded gasoline 23 years earlier
2) Individual states phased out leaded gasoline at different rates - their crime rates likewise fell at correlated rates
3) A study of other nations shows that Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Finland, France, Italy, New Zealand, and West Germany (all those named in the article) all show the same high correlation between crime rates and their own leaded gasoline use and phase-out, with not one nation studied failing to show it.
4) Studies of ongoing effects show that cities (and even neighborhods, in the case of New Orleans where the data was available) with high lead contamination correlate extremely well with high-crime areas, even when neighborhoods have been long since gentrified.
That many studies all seeing an extremely close correlation suggests that there is almost certainly something to it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Once dried, it wasn't that bad, so long as you didn't peel it off in pieces and then ingest those pieces.
Learn to love Alaska
DI did an article on this about 5 years back: http://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/?action=print
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."
Well, someone did get raped and beaten. That was a real thing. Just not raped and beaten by the people they extracted confessions from and put in jail for it.
> 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.
So did the number of poor people suddenly rise in the 1980s and 1990s and fall back in the 2000s?
'Tis possible.. of course, a greater possibility is that whoever posited this theory is a fucking imbecile who fails to realize that correlation does not equal causation.
I'm never for lack of amazement at the number of highly educated people who, for all their worldly knowledge, still can't comprehend the concept that while ceteris paribus is fine for discussing abstract theories in the classroom, it does not apply to the real world.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I know prices in Canada and US tend to be different, but really, they were under $50 in the 80s? Especially the early 80s?
At pawn shops they were, and pawn shops are still quite popular among those who populate the lower rungs of our economic ladder.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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
The rape was real, those accused were vindicated. Additionally, it is likely that the person who did the rape did not act alone, it couldn't be proven who the others were.
So, while there is insufficient evidence to convict, there is evidence that it happened. IT was a real event, with real consequences.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I haven't read the article yet, but I'd imagine there is a delay in crime based on development time.
"In a 2000 paper he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. "
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.
Ah, wilding - roaming gangs of feral (black) youth raping and beating nice (white) women.
Turned out to be one white psycho rapist - the so called "wilding" gang were innocent.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
They also had the slinky!
and the weed they smoke while playing the games they also bought with the proceeds of crime.
greater than 90% of violent criminals arrested during those two decades were all cigarette smokers
Citation Needed.
Nearly 90% violent criminals arrested during those two decades were MALE. ;-)
Cigarettes and/or Lead exposure was not gender specific, yet murder statistics are.
So put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
What? All these were the providence of the middle and upper classes back in the 80's. Poor people had the arcade, but that's where a lot of the violence happened too.
It's not the games themselves that made people violent (or less so). It's the physical proximity. Separate them with a wall and some anonymity, and they're suddenly not as violent anymore. They'll trash talk and curse, but they won't be trying to make new holes in one another.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
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.
Poverty isn't the people with low incomes living in trailer parks and low income housing, They are the people pushing shopping carts on the streets with children in tow.
Not true:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/measure.html
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
No, that would be the rich.
But we're not supposed to mention their crimes - which get automaticaly defined as "non-violent" no matter how many people suffer, and no matter how bad the suffering.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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!
Did you even read the study? There's a 23 year lag. If the study is true, China will become more violent.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
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
But, you take a large group of people that have all the other risks for becoming criminals and add lead on top of that and you get a significant rise in crime.
Well that's the theory put forth here.
From TFA:
Tulane University toxicologist Howard W. Mielke found that children exposed to high levels of lead in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a significant uptick in crime 20 years later.
However, left un-explained is why the lead only caused a significant rise in male crime in the cited time period. Unless they can explain why there was no uptick in female offenders, there appears to be a flaw in their reasoning.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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).
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?
:(){
Pocket knife? That was only for opening up the sinker if it was closed to tight. We always bit them, although I used the pre-molars since the front teeth were already chipped.
Agree about the fly fishermen. A dozen bait fishermen could be lined up on a breakwater in the space that one fly fisherman would claim as his exclusive territory. Normally crossing his line a few times would take care of that nuisance, though.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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.
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?
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.
Said by someone who was never poor, either now or in the 80's.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
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.
He was a mortal man like you and I
Right, not counting all of the magic hocus-pocus stuff he did, because he wasn't, really, right?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
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
I would have to go back through the article, but I believe that in terms of aggression lead has a bigger impact on men than women.
Correct, and thanks. It went up ten times (that's what I was thinking).
Doesn't change my point of course. :)
Well, it's also possible that the reduction in crime rates has been the cause to more people being able to lead-abatement tasks, and hence the observed reduction in lead.
https://xkcd.com/552/
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.
I haven't read the article yet, but I'd imagine there is a delay in crime based on development time
You'd imagine right; the curve matching aligns well on approximately 20 years. The actual article is quite detailed and well done.
My other UID is three digits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, as might be expected by those who have handled tin-lead solder, lead is soft and flexible. This helps lead paint adhere for a long time on surfaces with differing thermal coefficients of expansion.
This is total non sequitur nonsense.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I doubt they will ever be addressed under our system. There is too much tug of war to avoid paying for assistance programs. As a consequence those who don't want to pay for them make sure there are enough roadblocks that take the form of checks against abuse or limitations to who qualifies that many people can't get assistance or get too little or can't apply it where they need it. The benefits are also very low.
My S/O and I experienced a term where I was unemployed. At the worst of it we were in a long term stay studio. My S/O is on disability and essentially that entire income went to paying just enough to keep a phone from being turned off and paying to stay in the studio. At that time work wasn't obtainable, not even part time retail or fast food work let alone things in my field. That left us with no money for food. In order to get benefits I essentially had to lie and say we ate and prepared meals separately and were separate households. My S/O and I then each had benefits although the S/O got almost nothing in comparison and that still left us scrounging at the end of the month and yes we would still have a few days without food.
Even with that I was only allowed benefits for three months without finding employment. It didn't matter if I looked and had documentation to prove it. The final month I finally got a job and got the first paycheck just in time for the Food stamp cutoff. We got very lucky, there was no way I could get the job on public transportation and they were raising the cost of our room which we obviously couldn't have done. Luckily we found another rat apartment that required no deposit and was two blocks from the new place of employment, got it with rent just low enough to cover UHaul if we counted the miles very carefully, and got the job which paid me just about the time we'd run out of food.
Was this some great effort that was the result of the pressure to get a job from the benefits? Nope. I was already actively looking both for decent and p/t lousy jobs during that entire period so there was nothing more to do. It was sheer dumb luck. Actually I happened to get two offers in the same week.
I spend 2.5-3x our combined monthly benefit after perjury on a weekly basis for food to cook at home. What I spend is too much but the benefit is way way too low. And there isn't really assistance for housing (it exists but the vouchers are in extremely limited supply and there is a 6+ month waiting list to be rejected). There are no more cash benefits so those are out. Medical benefits, you can forget it unless you have a child. And cutting off people's benefits if they can't find a job is inexcusable. In fact benefits should continue for a couple months after you find full time work that causes you to exceed the benefit threshold. If you get or have a job that pays less than the benefit threshold you should get full benefits, it should be all or none. You shouldn't punish people for finding employment that is just keeping them in a hole of poverty. We also need utility assistance, not one or two bills in a program that is underfunded and only applies in the worst of winter or some such either but actual full utility assistance.
What does the census have to do with anything? You know the true poor in this country aren't even counted in the census.
I agree with parent post, this article is bs. Venezuela and Mexico have become one of the most violent countries in the hemisphere, and this is after switching to unleaded gasoline since the early 90s. Violence has a lot more to do with other stuff like drugs, lack of infrastructure and services in towns, unemployment, etc. Oh and dare I say the most evident of all? Lack of good law enforcement, from the corrupt and inept policeman to the corrupt and bureaucratic judiciary.
You don't have to starve to be hungry. You can get a day with many generous people at McDonalds and have 5 without and still be fat. You might not be dying but you will be hungry an awful lot.
He was a mortal man like you and I
Right, not counting all of the magic hocus-pocus stuff he did, because he wasn't, really, right?
You mean become enlightened? Just like Jesus and all of the others, the Buddha was just a righteous dude with some good ideas. Too bad all of the troglodytes surrounding them think it's more important to worship them as gods than listen to a word they had to say.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
"Becoming enlightened" seems to involve supernatural goings-on, on his part. How many Buddhists are willing to say that that entire part of the narrative is BS?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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 !
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]
I'd bet those don't factor into the number of violent crimes that may be caused by lead anyway.
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'!"
In the Mother Jones article, they say "Although both sexes are affected by lead, the neurological impact turns out to be greater among boys than girls." I'm not sure what their source is for that, but it certainly sounds plausible that such a difference could exist. Your stating that there is a flaw in their reasoning assumes that the effects of lead on the brain do not differ by gender. Do you have a source that shows that the effects are the same?
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.
Believing in any of that isn't a requirement of Buddhism. Lots of it was added after, lots of it should be treated as allegory, and some of it was intended to appeal to existing religious beliefs a very long time ago.
As a Western Buddhist, I don't believe in any of the 'religious' parts of it. In some places it's been around long enough that people do treat it like you can expect miracles and all sorts of things, and that can lead to problems -- really, it comes down to Four Things.
It starts from there, and then from there is pretty broad. Which is why it's compatible with pretty much anything from Hinduism, Judaism, and Atheism -- because at core, there's nothing supernatural to believe in.
It's pretty malleable, and as often as not ends up integrated with local religions. But if you read any of it, and leave out some of the more esoteric bits, it's very much not like a religion. It's kind of more self-help guide than bogeyman.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
While I would prefer this be handled properly by society via a proper social welfare system, I wonder if there is not another way to handle this.
Since I am skeptical of charities in general and outright pissed at what they pay their executives I would love to see a person to person version of this. For instance some sort of website that would match those in need with those who want to help while still keeping it anonymous. A website might not be the best move, with the limited access to technology some of these people might face, but my seeing that as a solution is I fear an occupational hazard.
While I agree with your sentiments in the last paragraph the timeline has me a little confused. Is this still a situation you find yourself in even after finding employment, or was this a very recent event still?
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
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.
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
Man what a crap site. Here's some adblock plus filters to help with it if anyone actually wants to RTFA in peace:
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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.
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.
This was about 2 years ago. The job I mentioned the story worked out well. I've seen multiple promotions and numerous pay increases in that 2 years and am actually living comfortably again and paying plenty of taxes.
For the impoverished who aren't homeless and/or mentally ill a website should be accessible enough. They can use the local library. I see the homeless at the library so they must have provisions for it but every public library I've been to has wanted a couple pieces of evidence that I live inside their tax district. Maybe they are getting on the roster at a homeless shelter or something and using that address. Another example of people trying to 'prevent abuse' throwing up red tape hurdles for those in need to cross and forcing them to learn to work the system.
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?
I used to be able to play Spy Hunter forever for just 25 cents.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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.
Well, 2500 years ago, audiences liked a good story, but there is no need to believe in magic in Buddhism -- that's the window dressing from the first narratives, but the substance of 'enlightenment' doesn't involve becoming a god as Westerners think. In Zen they say "before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water" ... and "after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. You don't suddenly become some magical entity -- at least, not while people are looking. ;-)
That's not to say that some people don't treat the Buddhas like gods, but that's not actually universal to Buddhism. That's usually an integration with existing local religions where it grew.
You would be surprised. There is no requirement of being a Buddhist to believe in gods, miracles, or supernatural things. Even the Dalai Lama says some teachings are not meant to be taken literally, and strongly believes in the scientific method -- reality is true, and your beliefs need to match that. Most Buddhists probably gloss over the super-natural stuff as allegorical.
At its core, it's observations about human nature, and the things that do and don't work to help make us suffer less -- which is to say it's a self-help manual, albeit one that's been subject to scrutiny for quite a while.
There's some great stories, but that's not central to the message, and isn't really treated as literal truth by most people. But the meat of it isn't what most people think it is, it's more about fixing your own damned self.
You can be a complete atheist and call yourself a Buddhist. You can also be a practicing Catholic.
If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Which is why it's compatible with pretty much anything from Hinduism, Judaism, and Atheism -- because at core, there's nothing supernatural to believe in.
True. But the reason is better explained here. If you ignore the superior tone of the author you'd be able to concentrate on the concept of "history centricism" that the author has introduced. That is the real reason some "religions", or in general philosophies are compatible with others and others are not.
And for the same reason, Hinduism is also compatible with Judaism and Atheism, and Christianity.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
What does the census have to do with anything?
The US Census Bureau determines what the legal qualifications for 'impoverished' are... something you should know, if you followed the link I provided.
Who does and doesn't get counted has nothing to do with this discussion, nor is it the only job of the Census Bureau.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
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?
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.
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