In The Blogs

Make Mine Unleaded

| Tue Oct. 13, 2009 2:04 PM PDT

Speaking of books, here's a passage from Mark Kleiman's When Brute Force Fails that I've been meaning to blog for a while:

Given the decrease in lead exposure among children since the 1980s and the estimated effects of lead on crime, reduced lead exposure could easily explain a very large proportion — certainly more than half — of the crime decrease of the 1994-2004 period. A careful statistical study relating local changes in lead exposure to local crime rates estimates the fraction of the crime decline due to lead reduction as greater than 90%.

Mark's book is focused on a particular strategy for reducing crime, so this topic gets only a couple of pages in a chapter on miscellaneous methods of crime control. But surely it deserves more?¹ If it's really true that lead reduction was responsible for most of the post-1990 decrease in crime, and if changing demographics played a role as well, doesn't that mean that everything else probably had almost no effect at all? Broken windows, open-air drug markets, three-strikes laws, CompStat, bulging prison populations, etc. etc. — all of them together couldn't have had more than a minuscule impact if lead and demographics explain almost everything.

I don't really have a lot to say about this, actually. Mainly I just wanted to highlight this passage because it's pretty interesting. It seems a little discouraging, though, if it's really true that all our best efforts to reduce crime over the past couple of decades have had a collective impact only barely different from zero.

On the other hand, it certainly means that federal spending to eliminate lead from houses ought to be a no-brainer. It would cost about $30 billion, but as Mark says, it would probably save us at least $30 billion per year in reduced crime. The fact that Congress didn't allocate this money long ago makes you wonder if maybe the Capitol building could use a lead abatement program of its own.²

¹Of course it deserves more. So here's a bit more.

²The stimulus bill included $100 million for lead abatement, which is fine. But considering just how effective lead reduction is on all sorts of policy levels, it's sort of a crime that they couldn't manage to dig up a little more than that out of an $800 billion total.

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Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here.

Comments

I imagine lead drinking

Submitted by B on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 2:34 PM PDT.

I imagine lead drinking pipes is why the Romans were so territorially aggressive.

crime reduction

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 2:42 PM PDT.

Decreased lead exposure is one factor. Increased availability of legal abortion is another. (Fewer unwanted kids.)

Donor

Hey, I read _Freakonomics_

Submitted by Sydney Carton on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 5:59 PM PDT.

Hey, I read Freakonomics too. They have a sequel coming out, you know.
(Edit: Me and practically everyone else in this thread...)

Freakonomics

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 2:43 PM PDT.

It's interesting to read this alongside the argument popularized by Freakonomics that the decline was due to the legalization of abortion.

You forgot Abortion

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 2:52 PM PDT.

I remember a few years ago there was a big stink when a few social scientists reported that the leading cause of the crime rate dropping was the legalization of abortion.

The academic paper that

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 2:57 PM PDT.

The academic paper that started (?) all this was one of my college professor's:

Reyes, Jessica Wolpaw (2007) "Environmental Policy as Social Policy? The Impact of Childhood Lead Exposure on Crime," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy: Vol. 7 : Iss. 1 (Contributions), Article 51.
DOI: 10.2202/1935-1682.1796
Available at: http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/vol7/iss1/art51

Don't forget hookworms!

Submitted by Trippp on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 3:37 PM PDT.

OK, so this is not totally on topic, but it does tie in with the theme of public health promotion being good for capitalism and good for society. Long story short, in the US the stereotype of "lazy Southerners" was mostly caused by the prevalence of hookworms in the South, and research (which Rockefeller funded to open new capitalistic markets in the South) discovered the culprit and also found the solution - keep human feces at least 4 feet away from human flesh, like say in a six foot deep hole in an outhouse.

Hookworms can't reproduce, people have energy, the economy is stimulated, and everyone benefits. Except the hookworms. Until now. When they are making a comeback in the treatment of allergies and asthma.

I wish the ultra-rich of today were that civic minded.

Tripp

pot

Submitted by MarkH on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 4:35 PM PDT.

What would be the effect on 'crime' if pot possession for personal use was legalized?

Pot legalization

Submitted by Ethan (not verified) on Wed Oct. 14, 2009 6:09 AM PDT.

It would be dramatic, but it wouldn't affect the statistics used for these comparisons. They are based on murders or violent crimes. There's a fair amount of violence associated with the drug trade, but where I live (Canada) there's still a drug trade, but many fewer murders. I think it's a focus, but not a cause.

The Inventor of Leaded Gas

Submitted by gmoke (not verified) on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 4:42 PM PDT.

Thomas Midgeley was the chemist who was most responsible for the use of lead in gasoline even ethanol was known to do the same job. Thomas Midgeley was so sickened by his work with lead that he had to take a year off to detoxify, yet he testified that lead was safe as an additive in gasoline.

Thomas Midgeley was also the inventor of Freon, the CFC refrigerant that was principally responsible for the thinning of stratospheric ozone layer.

I nominate Thomas Midgeley as the first geoengineer and the patron saint of geoengineering. He may have been the most destructive man in history.

gmoke, Thanks for that

Submitted by Trippp on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 5:09 PM PDT.

gmoke,

Thanks for that information. If I find out Midgeley broke up the Beatles I am really going to be pissed!

Tripp

More evidence

Submitted by RobertWaldmann on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 9:16 PM PDT.

Another bit of evidence on lead and crime comes from longer ago. I read somewhere on the web, that indoor use of leaded paint increased around 1900 then declined (to use by irresponsible landlords who didn't use it in their own homes). That suggests a crime wave in the 20s and waddayaknow.

On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence for effects of broken window and shutting down open air drug markets etc. Just follow Sir* William Bratten around the country and watch crime rates fall in every city he serves.

* I kid you not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Bratton

You've written about this

Submitted by Jesse (not verified) on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 9:36 PM PDT.

Kevin, you already know about this.

Remember July 10, 2007, does lead exposure lead to terrorism?

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_07/011659.php

And a Foreign Policy blog post about lead and crime references both Nevin's work -- which is described in the Washington Post article you linked above -- and your own 7/12/07 blog post about lead and terrorism.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2007/07/12/does_lead_poisoning_lead_...

By the way, I don't think these findings are discouraging at all! It just means we need to invest in public and environmental health. That's a good thing. New York City's current crime rate is wonderful, and as we get closer to identifying the precise causes of that, the better we can allocate our future resources. Is that discouraging?

Lead is a better theory than abortion

Submitted by Steve Sailer (not verified) on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 10:18 PM PDT.

I looked at the theory that lead caused the big crime increase of 1964-1975 in some detail here:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/07/lead-poisoning-and-great-1960s-freako...

Overall, I think it's a significantly more plausible theory than Levitt's famous abortion-cut-crime theory (which suffers from the problem that the highest juvenile murder rates ever seen in the U.S. were among youths born immediately after Roe v. Wade -- Levitt simply didn't know enough about crime history to notice that before his paper got publicized.)

However, I'm not convinced by the lead theory.

First, we don't see a crime rise in Japan where there was bad lead pollution in the cities.

Second, lead pollution started becoming a problem during WWII and started being cut back in the 1970s, but the crime rise is almost all in the 1964-1975 period.

But, there may be good explanations for these problems.

Lead-poisoned legislators ?

Submitted by joel hanes (not verified) on Tue Oct. 13, 2009 10:42 PM PDT.

It would be interesting to have good historical data on the body-burden of lead for all our political figures. The partisan and regional cross-tabs would be fascinating.

If lead abatement actually has reduced criminality, one might hope that it will also improve our legislatures. Perhaps much of the egregious bone-headedness of certain famous boneheaded politicians, past and present, could be explained as a symptom of lead poisoning.

Of course, acute alcohol poisoning also tends to promote agression and criminality, and there's no question that many of our political class throughout history have been pretty serious tipplers.

Steve Sailer: I think lead

Submitted by Barbara (not verified) on Wed Oct. 14, 2009 5:44 AM PDT.

Steve Sailer: I think lead could explain increases in crime rates but that social mores obviously contribute to an overall environment that makes increases in violent crime more or less likely as a resutl of lead poisoning -- Japan, I think, is a great example of a society in which external forces are strong enough to drastically limit the opportunity for social deviance no matter how impulsive you might be. America in the 1950s might also have been more like that, but America in the 1960s and 1970s was much less so.

I dated a medical student who worked in an inner city Chicago hospital, and he was convinced that lead poisoning explained a lot of social deviance among African-Americans. For one thing, as he said, when you worked with toddlers, black children were as bright as whites, but there was clearly a deterioration between the groups over time and he simply could not believe that social, rather than environmental, factors played that big of a role in changing something so fundamental as intelligence.