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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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
You'll find slackers in most every group of people...
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.
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.
http://xkcd.com/552/
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
> There's a reason I only drink rain water and grain alcohol, you know.
You're a hick ?
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Except you've made a leap transforming beers to hammers. Your premise do not actually support your argument (which is obviously intentional) and you suggest it is similar his argument and then proceed to beat that strawman down. You follow up with a false dichotomy suggesting that either your argument is valid or his cannot be valid.
The problem is that his argument is supported by his premise where yours is not.
is leap is that lead is proven to cause people to become violent, therefore it is reasonable that the documented decline in known sources of lead poisoning could be related to a reduction in violence. This logically follows and his premise is supported.
Bullets are known to cause death. Therefore it is reasonable to suggest that the bullets I'm firing into the crowd might be responsible for the dead people in the crowd.
Cannabis is known to get you high. Therefore it is reasonable to suggest that the marijuana found in the stoned teenagers posession might have been what he used to get high.
Now lets try yours:
Bullets cause death. Knives cause death. Therefore bullets are made of knives.
Cats have claws. Dogs have claws. Therefore dogs are made of cats.
What a 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? :)
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'
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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
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.
Because all the lead that has accumulated from burning leaded gasoline while it was widespread has just magically disappeared away?
This group seems to believe that just because "the statistics correlate almost perfectly" that they have a cause.
They happen to believe that they have a cause because they have came up with a simple rule of correlation based on two data sets, and then went on to see if it applies to a dozen different unrelated ones (matching the dates of introduction of leaded gasoline and the ban on it in various countries across the globe) - and they found that the correlation still holds in all cases that they've measured so far. In other words, they've made a prediction, and found that it matches the facts. That's hard science.
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.
:(){
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 !