America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

Post by maxerickson » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 1:04 PM UTC

etherael wrote: post #49

Interesting case, the formatting of the article is a little foreshadowing of where my research into this led me. The scenario with the state taking credit for the decline in crime based on their policing rather than as is very convincingly demonstrated, lead poisoning. Lead poisoning has been a well known and understood phenomenon for a very long period of time, people understood even at the time of the discovery of…

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 1:27 PM UTC

vbuterin wrote: post #40

htf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may ask a second question: what do you think of emissions trading as a solution instead of bans on specific sources like leaded gasoline?

Generally, some kind of economic incentive solution works much better than outright bans. It allows the market itself to decide what instances of pollution provide enough value to justify their harm and which ones don't. The problem is, however, that while such solutions work out great for global (or at least highly distributed) externalities, as you can simply set a rate of some given number of cents per ton of CO2…

Post by clavalle » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 1:50 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #28

rayiner wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 revolu…

> You can use private litigation (sue someone for poisoning you) but that is wholly impractical. I'll never understand how people can suppose that a government solution, which consists of a massive nation-wide bureaucracy as well as an immense violent army of what I endearingly call "the conflict resolvers" (law enforcement, courts, etc.) funded mostly by compulsory financial levies on working residents, is by any de…

Post by jpdoctor » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 2:35 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #28

rayiner wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 revolu…

> You can use private litigation (sue someone for poisoning you) but that is wholly impractical. I'll never understand how people can suppose that a government solution, which consists of a massive nation-wide bureaucracy as well as an immense violent army of what I endearingly call "the conflict resolvers" (law enforcement, courts, etc.) funded mostly by compulsory financial levies on working residents, is by any de…

Post by ndonnellan » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 3:08 PM UTC

ww520 wrote: post #8

Didn'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.