America's Real Criminal Element: Lead • Hacker News Board

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#171

Post by DougWebb » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 2:57 PM UTC

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #76

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?

I have yet to understand how an emissions trading system is superior to a simple tax paid on all emissions. Trading schemes add a lot of unnecessary complexity and potential for abuse, and enshrine the idea that if you have polluted more in the past, you deserve to keep polluting more in the future. If your business model requires you to cost the society more in pollution than the value of your product, you should no…

"Trading schemes add a lot of unnecessary complexity and potential for abuse..."

I believe that's exactly why they are "preferred" by our political system. Whenever the political body starts to consider laws about pollution, the lobbyists for the polluters go into high-alert to influence the outcome. They don't want a straight tax, because that'll become a simple cost which is difficult to avoid. Instead they prefer a complex scheme that can be sold as if it has the same impact as the straight tax, but in reality it will provide ways to game the system to either avoid the costs or even make a profit for the polluting companies.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#172

Post by colomon » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 3:26 PM UTC

jkimmel wrote: post #77

colomon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it just feels like the entire article is too convenient. 1) Everything seems to work out perfectly, no matter how it is considered. For instance, if lead contamination in the ground is such a big deal, why does lead in gas track so closely to the crime rate? Wouldn't it be the case that it would track on the upside but not the downside? 2) He keeps on emphasizing lead lowers IQ. But the Flynn Effect suggests th…

As far as the Flynn effect is concerned, it's possible that the benefits of general increases in public health (to which the Flynn effect is oft attributed, though somewhat more controversially in recent years) negated the effects of lead on a large scale. However, this does not mean that the Flynn effect would not have had a greater observable magnitude had lead exposure not been so high. Part of me agrees with your…

Sure, it's possible (even probable!) there are any number of things affecting IQ. I'm just pointing out that if you'd plotted raw IQ levels versus time, the graph would have the opposite sign from what you'd expect from Drum's lead hypothesis. There may be an explanation that makes it all fit together, but it somehow needs to be addressed, not just ignored or hand-waved away.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#173

Post by rdl » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 4:39 PM UTC

This also explains why baby boomers are one of the worst generational cohorts (particularly in the US, where we had the most car and thus the most lead). Toddlers in the 40s and 50s. History (and current events) show how horrible they have been for the economy, politics, etc. -- just being inherently stupid might explain a lot of this.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#174

Post by rdl » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 4:46 PM UTC

rprasad wrote: post #104

wissler wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a market failure, it's a governmental failure, for this reason: if you spew poison into the atmosphere (it was known long before then that lead was poisonous), you should be expected to have to pay for the damages caused. But these companies knew they could get away with it with impunity, and they did. So, it was a governmental failure in the first place, and failure was piled on failure by not addressing th…

It's not a market failure, it's a governmental failure And therein lies the rub: in America, it is frequently not clear that the government has the power to regulate such activity. The Clean Air Act and other similar regulatory acts were considered revolutionary when they were passed because no one was sure if they were even legitimate exercises of federal power. Today, we generally agree that such regulation is with…

Questioning whether the federal government has the right to do something doesn't mean you don't believe government at any level has no right to do anything. There's a lot of stuff the federal government does which I don't think it should be able to do legally, but which state or local government should. Local effect pollution is one of these, although diffuse pollution should be handled federally. I guess you could handle pollution from Michigan affecting Pennsylvania by either PA entities (private or the state) suing MI entities (private or the state), such that MI makes it illegal to spread certain pollution across state borders.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#175

Post by rdl » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:06 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #140

lutorm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says that lead in aviation fuels (and in solder) is a far smaller contribution to current lead levels than remaining lead paint. In the grand scheme of things, there just isn't that much avgas used, and it gets dispersed widely as opposed to concentrated where people live. I think the real problem is the big aviation piston engine companies (e.g. Lycoming and Continental) that seem to have no incentive to…

IMO, the FAA and their standardization processes for fuels like G100UL (GAMI), UL102 (Swift) and 91/96UL (Hjelmco) is the bottleneck here. GAMI in particular appears to have a fuel ready to use (in lab/prototype quantities) and has flown test flights in normally aspirated and turbocharged applications. (Turbos live a harder life, have lower detonation margins and are generally a more difficult test case. Many normall…

Yet another advantage for aviation diesels (like the Thielert, Delta Hawk, etc.), largely developed due to the military drone program. They can run on Jet-A/JP8/diesel, and getting clean diesel is a whole lot easier than clean gasoline.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#176

Post by rdl » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:08 PM UTC

DomreiRoam wrote: post #167

Steko wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kevin Drum is an unabashedly left leaning blogger but he's of the Matthew Yglesias flavor that values intellectual integrity over beating the right. This piece was outstanding and he's consistently one of the highlights of my RSS feed each morning.

Do you know blog/people to follow leaning right that value also intellectual integrity? I noticed it is possible to find left of liberal media that includes facts references. But most of the right media at some point use the "market is right" or "less gouvernement is good" without arguments or sources and I find it quite annoying. So if you know smart right media in English or French please give the references.

Becker-Posner Blog: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

David (son of Milton) Friedman: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#177

Post by ricardobeat » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:17 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #162

ricardobeat wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organized crime, drug dealers, etc. often kill people for small offenses, "honor" crimes, ratting out, snooping or just for fun. Haven't you seen any mafia/yakuza movies? Real life is much, much worse.

Drug dealers in the form you're talking about can only exist when there is drug prohibition, and it's highly unlikely that a society based on polycentric law would prohibit drugs. The economics of a lot of organized crime also can be explained government.

Even in a centralized state, the best, most efficient and reliable way to distribute illegal items would be total decentralization. Huge crime rings still exist though: where there is the opportunity to monopolize a resource, people will do it. That will only be exaggerated in your imagined anarcho-capitalist state. Even resources like water, energy, raw materials would be subject to monopolization, and very likely enforced through weaponry, not law. Can you see where that's going?

Suppose I kill someone. Now you'll turn to a private law company to judge/punish me. I then proceed to kill that company's employees. Will you now invoke a third private law provider in their name? Who will pay for it? Even if all the law providers were mutually insured, in this arrangement, as long as I can overpower each private entity, there is no effective law.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#178

Post by Camillo » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:17 PM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #31

baddox wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I'll never understand how ... And if, after looking at the example of lead, you still don't understand the role of regulation, it's likely that you never will.

I wouldn't blame him, though. He might have breathed in a lot of lead as a child.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#179

Post by Camillo » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:31 PM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #75

There are a variety of really interesting comments here. Thanks for the pointers to other sources on history and economics besides the interesting magazine article submitted here. Having read the comment threads, I just wanted to respond to a couple of statements about Thomas Midgley, Jr., the chemist who had much to do with developing tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive and later Freon as a refrigerant. The accus…

Very true. However, just going by the Wikipedia article on him, Midgley engaged in clearly unethical actions by helping to convince the government and the public of the safety of TEL even as he himself was suffering from the effects of lead poisoning.

Re: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

#180

Post by hydian » Sat, Jan 05, 2013, 5:38 PM UTC

colomon wrote: post #61

greendestiny wrote: post #7

I'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 sam…

Yeah, it just feels like the entire article is too convenient. 1) Everything seems to work out perfectly, no matter how it is considered. For instance, if lead contamination in the ground is such a big deal, why does lead in gas track so closely to the crime rate? Wouldn't it be the case that it would track on the upside but not the downside? 2) He keeps on emphasizing lead lowers IQ. But the Flynn Effect suggests th…

Good points...just possibilities:

1) Maybe lead in the ground has the same general level of danger as lead paint? Other sources of lead were covered in the article.

2) It is possible (probable even) that the levels of lead have been retarding the growth of IQ, but not reversing it.

3) Ignoring that even your link mentions that the data is skewed due to higher survivability as medical technology has gotten better, this is a separate trend on a separate scale and not really all that relevant. It could possibly be explained by lead from other sources (plumbing maybe?) or other factors outside of the scope of this particular study. If anything, your link reinforces that there was an issue as the homicide rates climbed sharply before suddenly dropping off again.