America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
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America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
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Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#2Mother Jones would have you believe that this is some great new breakthrough, but every paint shop or home center I've been in within the last 10 years, as well as many DIY product packages/instruction sheets has prominent warnings about the dangers of lead and information on how to safely mitigate it. Maybe it's just because I live in California, but you'd have to put your head under a rock to remain unaware of the dangers of lead in the home. There is good correlation between environmental lead and criminality, but it's not an open-and-shut case - this is one among several factors criminologists consider to be contributory factors.
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#3Mother Jones would have you believe that this is some great new breakthrough, but every paint shop or home center I've been in within the last 10 years, as well as many DIY product packages/instruction sheets has prominent warnings about the dangers of lead and information on how to safely mitigate it. Maybe it's just because I live in California, but you'd have to put your head under a rock to remain unaware of the…
I didn't get that sense at all. The article acknowledges multiple times that this is not a new breakthrough. The point is that the danger of lead is so well known that it's strange criminologists don't make a bigger deal of the lead/crime correlation. More recent studies show the lead is even more dangerous than previously thought.
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#4Fun fact: the banning of leaded gasoline was one of the biggest regulatory successes in history, and went a long way to validate the model.
The use of leaded gasoline was a classic market failure. It saved a small number of companies a relatively small amount of money, but was on the net a huge negative for the overall economic because it basically pumped lead directly into the bloodstream of children through their lungs, making them dumber. It didn't really make anybody sick, though, and the ultimate impact was both difficult to quantify and valuate as well as impossible to trace to any particular manufacturers leaded gasoline in any individual case.
The effect of the regulation was direct. As the phaseout was implemented between the 70's to the 90's, culminating in the outright ban of leaded gasoline in the 90's, the blood lead levels in the American population dropped from 16 micrograms per deciliter in 1976 to to 3 micrograms per deciliter in 1991. This drop corresponded to the avoidance of a several point drop in IQ among children (one study found a 3.9 point drop as lead levels in children were increased from 2.4 ugrams/deciliter to 10 ugrams/deciliter).[1]
The regulation ended up costing the auto/gasoline industry billions of dollars to retool. However, researchers estimated that the avoided cost from dropping blood lead levels was $17.2 billion annually per 1 ugram/deciliter reduction.[2]
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#5Fun fact: the banning of leaded gasoline was one of the biggest regulatory successes in history, and went a long way to validate the model. The use of leaded gasoline was a classic market failure. It saved a small number of companies a relatively small amount of money, but was on the net a huge negative for the overall economic because it basically pumped lead directly into the bloodstream of children through their l…
Your profile says you're a lawyer. I have a question for you.
Why did they need to ban leaded gasoline specifically? Wasn't it already illegal for anyone to spread poison in the air? Why was new regulation needed? Or, by "regulatory success", do you simply mean the recognition by the government that lead is poisonous?
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#6Mother Jones would have you believe that this is some great new breakthrough, but every paint shop or home center I've been in within the last 10 years, as well as many DIY product packages/instruction sheets has prominent warnings about the dangers of lead and information on how to safely mitigate it. Maybe it's just because I live in California, but you'd have to put your head under a rock to remain unaware of the…
I didn't get that sense at all. The article acknowledges multiple times that this is not a new breakthrough. The point is that the danger of lead is so well known that it's strange criminologists don't make a bigger deal of the lead/crime correlation. More recent studies show the lead is even more dangerous than previously thought.
So if they make a bigger deal, it almost becomes like causation rather than corelation, eh?
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#7I'm tempted to repeat the oft said correlation is not causation. But really I have never thought that captures the problem I have with studies like this. Of course correlation does not necessarily imply causation.
What I really find to be problematic is a small time series of data of a facet of a human behaviour across a population is probably going to correlate extremely well to many other time series across the same population. Or even other populations. How unusual should we find the correlation?
What we might be seeing is nothing more than the average rate of change in a population to legislative changes. If it even shows that. If you take two time series that rise and then fall and overlay them on their peak I suspect most graphs look as convincing as the one presented.
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#8Didn't the rise of violent video games contribute to the decline of the youth violence? People were venting their frustration and excessive energy in video games instead of on the street, leading to less violence in real life.
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#9Fun fact: the banning of leaded gasoline was one of the biggest regulatory successes in history, and went a long way to validate the model. The use of leaded gasoline was a classic market failure. It saved a small number of companies a relatively small amount of money, but was on the net a huge negative for the overall economic because it basically pumped lead directly into the bloodstream of children through their l…
Your profile says you're a lawyer. I have a question for you. Why did they need to ban leaded gasoline specifically? Wasn't it already illegal for anyone to spread poison in the air? Why was new regulation needed? Or, by "regulatory success", do you simply mean the recognition by the government that lead is poisonous?
It's not illegal to spread poison in the air. Every time you drive your car you're spreading harmful chemicals into the air. Every factory or industrial operation spreads harmful chemicals into the air and water.
You could theoretically ban pollution. That actually used to be the law in the 1600's. E.g. if you owned land on a river, the water had to leave your property as clean as it came in. As the industrial revolution happened, this rule was relaxed, because as it turns out it's impossible to make industry that doesn't pollute. The best you can do is balance the harms from pollution with the underlying beneficial activity. How do you achieve this balancing? The market doesn't work, because the parties aren't in contractual privity. You can use private litigation (sue someone for poisoning you) but that is wholly impractical. The litigation system is very well suited for resolving "you versus me" disputes based on tangible harms. It is not at all suited for resolving disputes between huge numbers of people based on statistical harms.
Think of a suit against a leaded gasoline refiner. Two key things any plaintiff needs to prove in such a suit is: 1) what was the harm; 2) how did the defendant's activity cause the harm. How does a plaintiff prove her kid would have been 3-4 IQ points smarter but for the leaded gasoline produced? How does the plaintiff prove that her kid's harms weren't the result of say lead in pipes rather than lead in the air? Scientists can do models and experiments and tell you that the statistically a given type of pollution will cause certain kinds of harm in a population, but they can't tell you whether any particular injured person was injured from a particular type of pollution. The science here is statistical causation, but the law requires provable, traceable, causation.
This (http://old.ccer.edu.cn/download/7874-1.pdf) is one of the most important papers in the economics of the law. It's also, incidentally, a fundamental paper of libertarian economics. Ronald Coase received a Nobel Prize in economics, partially for this paper. On Page 29, he basically explains why we use regulation rather than property rights enforced through litigation to address environmental harms.
Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
#10I view the drop in crime as the result of a perfect storm of many factors, and perhaps this is another one.
The explosion of media and the Internet occurred around the same time, so it's hard to say what caused it.