It's a really strong study. N= ~1500, the cost-benefit ratio from remediation in improved education outcomes and lower social costs of crime is 1.8. Probably 1 million children across the US have been impacted by elevated blood lead levels over the last 20 years. there is no good reason to postpone acting on this problem, which is well understood by now.
The sample size overall is ~1500, but how many of those actually committed violent crimes in each group? I'd bet it's extremely low, which calls into question the statistical power of this study.
How about reading it using the link I provided, and considering it in the light of other studies cites in the original article and in the references section of this paper? I'm not claiming it to be the be-all and end-all of lead-specific social cost studies, but while we we discuss the reliability of the statistical conclusions large numbers of people are suffering the shitty first- and second-order effects of lead poisoning and society as a whole remains worse off because of a relatively fixable problem.
I've hypothesized for a while now that the Black Lives Matter movement might be distracting us from what might be the true cause of the problems they seek to address. Blaming the problem on "racist" cops by default instead of performing a root cause analysis is leading us to overlook the likelihood that poorer communities, that are often predominantly black, are more likely to be exposed to lead.
> I've hypothesized for a while now that the Black Lives Matter movement might be distracting us from what might be the true cause of the problems they seek to address. Blaming the problem on "racist" cops by default
Since BLM focuses on a wide array of social, political, and economic, and environmental issues (including interplay between issues in the various domains) involved in the social dismissal of the value of black lives, and not "racist cops by default" (indeed, the motivating event for BLM's formation wasn't even a law-enforcement killing), I think your complaint is misdirected and should instead be directed at whatever media channels you consume that give you this distorted view of BLM.
My sources here aren't media channels, but every single BLM member or supporter I've engaged in debate with (n>100) until this comment (probably because this is the first venue I've raised this where lead poisoning is the primary topic of conversation). To date, not a single supporter or member I've engaged with has acknowledged lead poisoning as a potential culprit when I try to raise it (probably because acknowledging lead poisoning as a cause requires one to also acknowledge the higher incidence of violent crime committed by black men, which is inconvenient to the racist police narrative they are pushing).
In these debates, I usually point to this table of FBI statistics, which shows a significantly higher level of crime committed by both men (all races) and black men in particular on a per capita basis as an explanation for the disproportionate number of men and in particular black men shot by cops.
Cops are more aggressive with black people but don't actually kill them at a greater rate relative to the number of violent crimes committed. Here is Roland G. Fryer's research showing this:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
I'm not discounting that black lives matter. I'm supportive of it. My point is that if we really care about fixing the problems that result in increased mortality in that demographic, we should instead be focusing on likely root causes such as lead poisoning. Lead should be getting so much more attention in the BLM debate, but it does not. Why?
every single BLM member or supporter I've engaged in debate with
Please don't be offended by this, but perhaps your communication skills are at fault. While it may be tiring for you, people who are dealing with a lot of really difficult problems often need to vent some frustration and anger, both as stress relief and to qualify you (or not) as a sincere ally who won't fade when progress is difficult.
If you're in too much of a hurry to sell your solution, notwithstanding your good intentions, your interlocutors are likely to be a bit skeptical because they've heard many such presentations before only to be disappointed by the lack of follow-through.
Being right is not always as important as being receptive when you're trying to establish new structural relationships under difficult conditions, whatever those happen to be. I hope this can make your future communications more rewarding, even though it may require a greater initial investment of time and patience.
Listen to what they want to tell you, and ask what they think about lead as an environmental and racial justice issue. It's not your responsibility to correct statistical misapprehensions they might have about the incidence of black crime or police use of force unless you are asked, there are plenty of people doing that already. If they're interested and and question your dataset, you can reply that you went with the most scientifically conservative statistics you could find and it's still a huge problem.
> It's not your responsibility to correct statistical misapprehensions they might have about the incidence of black crime or police use of force unless you are asked, there are plenty of people doing that already.
Whose responsibility is it? If someone is debating an issue I would hope they are familiar with and understand the underlying statistics relevant to their claims. If they claim conclusion X based on statistics Y but omit (intentionally or out of ignorance) that conclusion P is also plausible based on statistics Q, it is the responsibility of anyone aware of statistics Q to inform those claiming conclusion X that X isn't the only plausible conclusion one can arrive at because statistics Q exists that suggests conclusion P.
Are you seriously suggesting that someone aware of a different dataset that supports a different conclusion only bring attention to that dataset if those claiming the original conclusion are interested? That's preposterous.
BLMers will scream "murder" and "hands up don't shoot" at the top of their lungs at every chance they get, but when confronted with the evidence that the alleged victim of a police shooting was in fact a violent criminal living in violent neighborhood, suddenly the movement is about social issues and body cameras...until the next shooting and the cycle repeats.
A movement genuinely pushing for reasonable police reform and replacing lead pipes (for all people of all colors) would be much better received. But the problem is the movement is self-evidently not about actually solving problems. It's about pushing racial narratives. I suspect responses to your comment will further affirm this.
> suddenly the movement is about social issues and body cameras.
The movement has always, from day one, been about social issues (with equal accountability foremost among those issues.)
Assuring that killers of blacks, law enforcement or otherwise, are held to account until and unless there is clear evidence of justification is central, however, to that.
> A movement genuinely pushing for reasonable police reform and replacing lead pipes (for all people of all colors) would be much better received.
Movements along both those lines exist and have for longer than BLM, and have beeb generally ignored (conversely, attention driven by BLM has been successful at driving general police reforms.) Those others are not much better received, no matter how many times concern trolls trot out the line that if only BLM wasn't about Black Lives it would somehow magically be better at advancing it's interests and incidentally better at other things, to.
It doesn't matter whether they're violent criminals. Our country has a court system. The role of judge, jury and executioner does not belong to police officers.
That's delusional. When a criminal reaches for a gun, or aims it at a person, or even tackles an armed cop, cops absolutely have the right and the obligation to shoot. And when BLM lies about criminals in the act of threatening cops, they endanger both cops and the very communities which they pretend to save.
I was just speaking to the part about being a "violent criminal living in a violent neighborhood" -- that doesn't justify shooting someone.
Typically in these cases the victim wasn't threatening the police officer's life in any way. Walter Scott was shot while running away. Freddie Gray was already safely in police custody. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes, not attacking anyone. Tamir Rice was a 12 year old playing with a toy gun.
What does it take to get people like you to acknowledge the existence of racial bias in policing? Here's a case form near where I live. The guy was shot, but note how police had been called out on two previous occasions when the guy was shooting at his neighbor's cars (one of which was occupied at the time) and they didn't arrest him.
The guy in Portland who murdered two people and injured a third a week or two back was taken into custody peacefully despite being armed with a large knife or a machete, I forget which right now. Dylann Roof murdered 8 or 9 people in a church last year but he was apprehended without incident when the police showed up. Conversely, some months ago in Florida a black caregiver who was trying to get an autistic mental patient out of a busy street and back to the assisted living facility lay down on the ground with his hands in the air when he saw a police car appear, preparing to explain the situation to the officer. The cop got out of his car shot him in the leg anyway. When he asked the officer why he had shot him, the officer replied 'I don't know.'
These are anecdotal examples rather than statistical proof, but you're divorced from reality if you don't think police treat suspects very very differently based on skin color. I'm afraid that I think it is you who are delusional.
I don't think people are disputing that there is racial bias in policing. What's being disputed are the cause(s) of the racial bias. Do the police have this bias because they are bad people who were raised to be racist or do they have this bias because some demographics exhibit statistically different patterns when it comes to violent crimes?
Hanlon's razor states that you shouldn't ascribed to malice what can better be explained by ignorance/incompetence/etc.
When even those officers belonging to the demographic experiencing the bias are guilty of being biased that suggests that Hanlon's razor is applicable and that the root cause of the police bias might be something else. Looking at the statistics for violent crime by race, shows why this bias and predisposition to being more aggressive with a certain might be explainable psychologically. It's human nature to form preconceptions based on experience.
Now that said, Hanlon's razor should also be applied in favor of the demographic responsible for violent crimes at rates several times higher than they exist in society. I have no reason to believe that anything about being black leads black men to be responsible for more crime then men of a different race, yet the statistics show this is the case. With this in mind, can we find some potential causes that might result in this. The two hypotheses that I think are reasonable to explore are lead poisoning and the lack of male role models due to incarceration. These are two causes that can impact one another. Higher lead levels could lead to greater violence that leads to greater arrests of black males which reduces male role models, and so forth.
When there is such a stark effect of lead poisoning on violence committed later in life, it's important that we give this serious consideration as one of the factors that might be really hurting the black community and its reasonable to infer the potential for causality of lead poisoning leading to violence that leads to bias against the lead poisoned group as being more violent.
It's fucking ridiculous that we can't have a reasonable academic discussion of this hypothesis without it and those considering it being branded as racist. It is anything but. No one here has suggested that a persons race is the cause of being more likely to be arrested for a violent crime. The hypothesis being proposed is that their race merely correlates and that lead poisoning may be a significant cause and that lead poisoning could have impacted anyone from any race, but it impacts black people more for unfortunate historical reasons. No one is trying to blame black people or men. We're merely trying to have an honest discussion of unfortunate environmental factor (lead poisoning) that maybe should be getting a lot more attention than it does in the discussion of why the racial bias against black people, especially black men exist. I wish that the problem of racial bias be solved as much as anyone else. The difference is that I'm not going to shut out any possible explanation just because its inconvenient to the politicized narrative being furthered by a group that violates Hanlon's Razor.
You're applying the hierarchical standards of a corporation to a loose-knit network of activists united by a common vision. This would be as foolish as dismissing the open source movement because of Richard Stallman's unfortunate tendency to cut his toenails in public.
One provisional study that wasn't published in a journal (and hence wasn't peer reviewed) and furthermore was conducted by someone far afield of the issue does not make a conclusive case about any hypothesis. As an antidote for such loose rhetoric, here are some criticisms of the paper:
Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Columbia University, voicing skepticism of the strength of Fryer's conclusion:
Objectives. To update previous examinations of racial/ethnic disparities in the use of lethal force by US police.
Methods. I examined online national vital statistics data for deaths assigned an underlying cause of “legal intervention” (International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, external-cause-of-injury codes Y35.0–Y35.7, excluding Y35.5 [legal execution]) for the 5-year period 2010 to 2014.
Results. Death certificates identified 2285 legal intervention deaths (1.5 per million population per year) from 2010 to 2014. Among males aged 10 years or older, who represented 96% of these deaths, the mortality rate among non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic individuals was 2.8 and 1.7 times higher, respectively, than that among White individuals.
Conclusions. Substantial racial/ethnic disparities in legal intervention deaths remain an ongoing problem in the United States.
---
It's not hard to find more of the literature that is more credible and contradicts this paper.
To be honest, I don't think you're carrying this discussion in good faith. Who knows? Maybe you've even duped yourself. Maybe don't take the word of an economist doing sketchy and loose research outside of his field of expertise. Being able to wield statistics isn't a scientific superpower. Sociological research isn't a bayesian cookbook recipe.
Take your third one for example, which was the quickest to process due to the presence of an abstract:
> Among males aged 10 years or older, who represented 96% of these deaths, the mortality rate among non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic individuals was 2.8 and 1.7 times higher, respectively, than that among White individuals.
If this is the argument you're making, than I'm not disputing this fact at all. I'm not arguing that the mortality rate for black individuals is equal to white individuals. It's not.
I'm arguing that the mortality rate relative to the frequency of violent crime is more proportional. Look at these statistics for violent crimes:
Futher to this, I think blaming Black Lives Matter for this is directing us from another group that is much more strongly opposed to addressing this: right-wing opponents of BLM, who are implacably and universally opposed to the idea that "environmental racism" could possibly exist and overlap heavily with opposition to environmental protection laws in general.
Yes, but it's not like they haven't published opinions on anything else. And again, it's not a corporation with a command hierarchy and unified messaging, it's a network of activists. Oftentimes I hear people saying 'why don't black people/the black community do XYZ' like they were their own country with their own legislature and executive.
We make lots of generalizations about all sorts of decentralized groups: conservatives, liberals, whites, the wealthy, the poor, etc and we manager to understand that we're generalizing--that we're talking about a statistical distribution of opinions or behaviors, but for some reason with BLM, the moment they are generalized, the "they are not a corporation" argument comes up, and I would argue this generalization about BLM holds a lot better than the average generalization about nearly any other group.
Exposure leads to behaviour modification which leads to law enforcement over-generalizing behaviour patterns they've observed. It will take some time to unwind this terrible mess even if the lead problem is eliminated entirely tomorrow.
This doesn't mean the cops aren't racist and that lead isn't a problem.
I'm sure this probably isn't the case, but what if lead exposure made you more likely to get caught for a crime but didn't affect the chances of committing one? Are there any all-else-being-equal studies that can tell us whether violent crime is higher in areas with a high rate of lead exposure?
The studies I've read seem to indicate that lead exposure erodes impulse control which leads to people making very bad decisions they'd otherwise not make.
So it probably tilts things towards people committing more brazen crimes which lead to higher arrest rates, but also more crime and violence in general.
The "all-else-being-equal" studies tend to focus on the primary source of lead: Leaded fuel. As many housing projects were built next to highways, people living there were exposed to significantly higher levels of atmospheric lead than in other more remote parts. When lead was banned from fuel, crime rates dropped, and you can see this play out in similar neighborhoods in different states where the phasing out happened at different times.
Only to the extent that focusing on any aspect of a multi-faceted problem distracts from other aspects of the problem. Read the DOJ report on Ferguson: the issue of racist cops and public officials is not invented.
Absolutely true, but on the same day that report was released the DOJ also released a report on the shooting of Michael Brown that essentially vindicated Darren Wilson and confirmed his account of the events of that day. It found that the "hands up, don't shoot" version of the events was not credible.
The problem that I think grandparent is highlighting is: BLM activism only seems receptive to hearing/addressing certain facets of the problem, facets that fit within a certain narrative. Aspects of the problem and possible solutions that lie outside this narrative are ignored, discredited, or (worst of all) actively attacked as racist perpetuation of the oppression.
This. At least someone gets what I'm trying to highlight.
Lead poisoning and intervention doesn't get enough attention. When the black community suffers lead poisoning at 1.6x the rate of the general population and there is solid evidence showing a link between lead poisoning and violent crime and poor impulse control, it seems to me like lead needs more attention than it gets from those that purport to value black lives.
Men commit more violence than women. No one will argue against these statistics. Black men commit more violence than men of other races. Few if any acknowledge these statistics. I see no reason why there is anything inherent about being black that would lead to this (nature), so it's important to come up with hypotheses that could explain this through nurture. The two I can come up with are lead poisoning and the lack of male role models. The latter gets some attention. The former gets none. When you see studies like this one posted today, where the results are so strong, it makes you wonder why this doesn't get more attention if we really care about addressing all factors that contribute to black men experiencing police violence.
A racist interpretation would be say that black men are more violent because they are black. That is not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that their race has nothing to do with the higher incidence of violence crime committed. I'm saying the exposure to lead might be contributing. Black people, especially black men are being victims twice. First, they are more likely to be victims of lead poisoning. Second, they are more likely to be victims of racial profiling, which itself might be amplified by the increased likelihood of violence caused by lead poisoning.
Your fallacy is: Relative Privation. It's not BLM's responsibility to "acknowledge" your point, and it's not even their responsibility to prioritize this specific issue in a way that you prefer. BLM's priorities also don't prevent anybody, such as yourself, from getting involved in environmental justice groups that are active in pursuing the lead-crime connection.
While lead may be implicated in the situation(s) that caused BLM to arise, it's not anything anybody can do anything about more than activism in terms of Flint, et al. That said, do you know who Nayyirah Shariff is?
Out of curiosity, what exactly is your goal in pursuing your line of logic, of needing "BLM" to "acknowledge" lead's role? What outcome would you like to see?
Disclaimer: I support equality, and believe any inequality in policing should be promptly corrected. I shouldn't have to make this kind of disclaimer, but it cuts down on the harassment for violating orthodoxy.
It's also kind of a bummer that BLM started with the "white cops killing black kids" narrative, then when the data showed that black cops are much more likely to shoot a black kid than are white cops, they transitioned to "cops are disproportionately killing black kids", then that was disproven and their issue became the more nebulous "systemic inequalities in policing", but not before a lot of criminal veneration (Michael Brown) and hand waving about how rioting may or may not be justified.
The moral of the story is they may have had a valid point, but they've totally discredited themselves and probably made policing less effective for the most vulnerable communities.
If this was their one true message all along, they were very clever about disguising it among all the other noise they generated (which is my point about them thoroughly discrediting themselves). It is convenient that each time their latest message is disproven, proponents say "that was never their true message, it was really about X!" And then X gets disproven and we move onto Y.
Do you have an example? This seems like dogwhistling without a concrete understanding of what you think their "latest message" is. Unless that latest message is, literally, the phrase "Black Lives Matter", which can easily stand on its own, it's difficult to see what issues you have with them.
I gave several examples, what are you looking for? Anyway, why would I be dogwhistling, and to whom? Is that supposed to be some thinly-veiled, unfalsifiable insinuation that I'm part of the alt-right? Because that's the only context I've read it in.
> "cops are disproportionately killing black kids", then that was disproven
Was that disproven? The studies that I've read have shown disproportionate police shooting fatality rates among African American men, especially in the unarmed case when adjusted for population. [1]
The unarmed case is the one I pay attention to the most as I think that it (mostly?) filters out cases where shootings were justified.
I'd like to keep an open mind so I welcome any reading that has disproven the disproportionate argument.
When I looked at that data source last year, I read through every case of unarmed black males killed by police. Many of them were actually armed, but with a tree branch or some other blunt object which weren't considered to be weapons. Some were truly unarmed but clearly attacking police (think Michael Brown). A few others were bystanders hit by a stray bullet as police shot at armed suspects (clearly not racism). If memory serves, there were only 12 national police shootings of African Americans where the police shooting was likely malicious. I think the number for whites was comparably low, and I think these are both too low to be statistically useful.
There have been a few others as well. I should also clarify that my use of "disproven" is too strong. I should have said "the bulk of the evidence supports a contradictory conclusion" or some such.
> The unarmed case is the one I pay attention to the most as I think that it (mostly?) filters out cases where shootings were justified.
An armed person can be shot and it can still be unjustified. The presence of a gun does not mean there was any danger or even the appearance of danger.
An unarmed person can give the appearance of having a weapon or may pose a clear threat regardless and such a killing could be justified.
I think mostly paying attention to the unarmed case allows the armed case to mask any potential problems, while also includes the implicit assumption that unarmed cases are mostly unjustified will exaggerate the appearance of problems.
You really can't, because black people are arrested, tried and convicted WAY disproportionately to the actual rate of crimes. eg white people smoke weed as much or more than black people, and are arrested at a far lower rate for it.
These statistics don't involve a trial or conviction. It's based entirely on the police report when the crime was reported and only includes the race of the offender when that information is known.
A minority of police shootings involve violent crime. You will also notice that nonviolent crimes are the biggest issue, with BLM most concerned about things like Eric Garner or Tamir Rice, who was twelve years old.
"Perusal of Table 4 reveals that suspects were an average age of 36, with whites somewhat older
than blacks. Thirty-nine percent of the suspects were involved in a violent crime, 17% in a property
crime, and 5% in a drug crime. Hispanics were less likely to be involved in a violent crime,
while blacks were more likely to be involved in a property crime than whites or Hispanics.
Blacks are least likely to be armed."
Per my sibling comment, laypeople often assume the UCR cannot be trustworthy because it is collected, compiled, and analyzed by policing agencies; however, it's data are supported by the national crime victimization survey, whose data comes from victims and is collected and compiled by the justice department. So your point is even stronger than you made it out to appear. :)
The national crime victimization survey largely agreed with the FBI's Unified Crime Report (on matters of race and violent crimes, anyway). The latter is data collected by policing agencies and the former comes from victims. If law enforcement discriminated against Blacks, we would expect a discrepancy between these reports (it's possible that the victims are simply "equally racist", but given that the victims of black offenders are themselves overwhelmingly black, this is unlikely). Also, there have been a few other studies like this one[1] which don't find anti-black bias in sentencing, conviction, etc. This doesn't mean it doesn't exist, just that the conclusion of a racist criminal justice system is not entirely supported by the evidence.
One anecdote about the weed thing, since that comes up so often--I live in Chicago and apart from festivals, I never see white people strolling around downtown smoking weed, but I do see this probably once a month, and the user is consistently black. The white people I know who use marijuana do so at home and out of public view. This is just an anecdote, but cultural differences in usage could better explain the arrest discrepancy than police racism. At least I would like to discontinue the trend of assuming that every gap is necessarily and automatically attributable to discrimination.
"The Times analysis found that among the largest police departments in each of those four states, black drivers were between 1.5 and 5.2 times more likely to have their cars searched than white drivers. These searches occur with the consent of the driver, so the officer doesn't need to meet any legal standard, like probable cause, to initiate one. [...] More recent figures from 2014 and 2015 published by the New York Times show blacks who are searched are around 20 percent less likely to be carrying contraband than whites who are searched. "
Studies have also shown that disproportionate police shooting fatality rates among men when adjusted for population (50% of the population are men but 96% of those shot by police are men).
Violent crime rates are the more useful base rate than the general population. This is the best study I've seen to date that attempts to take into account rates of violent crime: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
>Blaming the problem on "racist" cops by default instead of performing a root cause analysis is leading us to overlook the likelihood that poorer communities, that are often predominantly black, are more likely to be exposed to lead.
The idea that BLM is just a distraction because your "root cause analysis" points to lead poisoning is laughably offensive. I don't think most BLM supporters would assert that "'racist' cops" are the "root cause" of America's mistreatment of black people, rather they're the most visible expression of a system that devalues black lives, because they kill dozens of black people with impunity every month. Lead pipes are just another, less visible, expression of the same system, just like the still segregated school systems, the gerrymandered voting districts, and the 400 years of history that led to the present.
> I don't think most BLM supporters would assert that "'racist' cops" are the "root cause" of America's mistreatment of black people
Anecdotal, but every single supporter I've engaged with to date until this comment, n>100.
My point is that lead does not get nearly the attention it deserves.
The Google search results for "lead poisoning site:blacklivesmatter.com" returns exactly one result, which is a statement on Flint, Michigan, that makes no mention of the relationship between violent crime and lead poisoning.
It's not like they have the ability to bring legal action against those that pollute their areas. And unfortunately, that's how it is playing out. Richer (read: White) neighborhoods are kep pollution-wise cleaner in both soil and air pollution. Whereas communities primarily African American are dirtier. Chemical factories move in, coal factories start up. Polluting industries take over, primarily because people haven't the money to "NIMBY" them.
I'm not a fan of BLM, but I am pretty sure you're mischaracterizing their efforts.
From what I've read they seem focused on targeting institutional racism - and police reform is just one component of that. Their approach is far broader and I am pretty sure they've made linkages with the "environmental justice" movement which is very much focused on problems like the effects of lead contamination.
can you point to an example of "institutional racism?"
So, that, at least we have a clear starting point of something that needs addressing.
Speaking in general does not help anybody. I, for one, would not know where to look if you simply state "institutional racism", without giving me an example of what it actually means.
Come on now, I bet your ability to use search engines and public knowledge bases is actually great. It's a broad topic of frequent debate, and other posters aren't obligated to bring you up to speed on it. You can at least familiarize yourself with the popular concepts and then figure out your perspective in relation to those.
It's rude to demand that people drop what they're discussing in order to give you foundational knowledge you can so easily pick you for yourself.
"Foundational knowledge" implies ability to effortlessly recall examples, especially since it would help educate a fellow in need.
So far you just pushed the puck away and sent me to a search engine.
I don't think you understand their platform very well. Police bias, which is a real thing, is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the structural racism issues they care about.
You might like to consider how public spending for lead abatement correlates with demographics. Flint, MI is an obvious starting point for your inquiry.
I'm very supportive of BLM, which is not the same thing as an endorsement of every single thing everyone in a BLM shirt or at a BLM event has ever said. Just like any networked attempt to disrupt the status quo, there will be a certain number of missteps, mistakes, pivots, and so on. The fact that BLM is a social rather than technological undertaking doesn't make it so different from any other kind of startup.
It generally seems to be a lot easier to generate political action around certain types of issues than others. It's hard to get hundreds of people into the streets to demand better transportation and sewer system repair, even if those issues are measurably more impactful than something like police violence.
That conviction rates in some disadvantaged communities are so much higher has also been linked to disproportional levels of policing in those communities.
A potentially contributing factor does not invalidate legitimate civil rights concerns in another area.
The lead-violence correlation is very, very interesting. What always makes me wonder is how much historical effect environmental factors like this must have had. Lead used to be ubiquitous, between paint, pipes, roofing, glass, solder - the Romans even cooked in lead vessels at times.
There's probably no way of ever teasing out all the different factors, but when you read accounts of what daily life was like in, say 18th century London, and a.) violence was quite common-place, and b.) virtually everyone kept themselves inebriated enough to fail a breathalyzer at all times. Probably b.) contributed a good deal to a.), but if everybody is also suffering from low-level chronic lead poisoning...
Never mind cooking in lead vessels, they used lead acetate as an artificial sweetener in their food. I've often wondered if this was something that contributed to their downfall.
What makes it worse is that the Romans knew lead was toxic. But they thought its effect was limited to the production process, which was mostly done by slaves and other people of no apparent value.
The Opium epidemic lead to a freaking trade war [1].
How about crack cocaine and other designer drugs, incl. highly potent cannabis, alcohol and cigarettes as factors?
Crime and violence has been falling steadily over the past century too. Makes you wonder if this significant social change isn't because of better education, social programs, etc., but simply because of other factors like this that we're simply unaware of.
No one disputes that other factors are important. For instance cultural attitudes about violence are important. As is the reach of civil government. Not to mention that in the US violence is a particular problem because of ready access to handguns.
My take having read about this theory for about ten years now it looks like the preponderance of the evidence says that lead exposure is at least as significant as the above. Meaning it's not just this study, it's all the other ones as well. With the lead thoery you have the following.
1. A known mechanism. Lead cause brain damage with poor impulse control.
2. Dose response correlation between lead exposure and violent crime.
Thing that freaks me out is what did exposure to lead and resulting poor impulse control do to politics in the US.
As pointed out elsewhere in the thread, different countries phased out tetraethyl lead in gasoline at different times, and their respective drops in crime correlate well with those dates.
"Current aircraft engines feature valve gear components which are designed for compatibility with the leaded ASTM D910 fuels. In such fuels, the lead acts as a lubricant, coating the contact areas between the valve, guide, and seat. The use of unleaded auto fuels with engines designed for leaded fuels can result in excessive exhaust valve seat wear due to the lack of lead. The result can be remarkable, with cylinder performance deteriorating to unacceptable levels in under 10 hours."
Also lead is an anti-knock agent so it is used to get to the very high octane ratings in Avgas.
And it seems the problem may be solved soon!
"By May 2012, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA Unleaded Avgas Transition rulemaking committee) had put together a plan in conjunction with industry to replace leaded avgas with an unleaded alternative within 11 years. Given the progress already made on 100SF and G100UL, the replacement time might be shorter than that 2023 estimate."
It may be helpful to ask why. Why might aviation engines still be using leaded gasoline? If one knew why avgas was still leaded, that might point to possible practical, implementable solutions.
Yes, laziness, ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, malice, etc, are all possibly valid answers to "Why?". But accepting such answers without scrutiny when another answer may be closer to the truth is a bad habit, IMO. If you were to come into a legacy codebase at work and assume that the previous authors incompetent idiots, you'd probably be less productive than if you assumed that the previous authors had problems to solve and chose the best option available to them given the constraints at the time. Keeping in mind past and current goals, and past and current constraints is probably going to get you further than, "This is bad! Change it!"
Can anyone explain to me why the group that had high exposure but an intervention that reduced their exposure to about 5 on the graph, has much lower violent crime levels than the group that had an exposure of around 5 and no intervention?
That does seem like an issue with the study, from the pdf:
"Two primary channels emerge through which intervention affects antisocial behavior and cognitive outcomes. First, intervention may dramatically reduce the amount of continued childhood exposure to the dangerous neurotoxin by directly reducing exposure risks within the home environment. Second, long-term benefits may occur through improvements in early-life health unrelated to any changes in lead exposure. [11] ...
[11] The elevated BLL intervention package includes treatments previously demonstrated to impact later-life outcomes such as: visits from health workers; increased medical care; nutritional assessments and dietary modifications; and referral to the Special Supplemental, Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Prior research documents long-term benefits from programs similar to each of these elements ..."
Why didn't they control for the other intervention treatments? One where they reduce BLL + other treatments, and one where they didn't reduce BLL but still gave the other treatments?
This is a reasonable question which has some very good answers.
The data is from a program that aimed to mitigate problems from high lead. The program's primary aim wasn't to allow papers to be published about their research goal many years later. You make the best use that you can of the data that you've got. And don't insist on the perfect data that you don't have.
But even if this had been designed as a pure research program, the design that you suggest would never be approved on ethical grounds. We accumulated enough data many years ago on the negative impact of lead that we cannot in good conscience withhold treatment for the sake of collecting better data. Review the history of the Tuskegee Study for an example of why such ethical guidelines were put in place.
> Why didn't they control for the other intervention treatments? One where they reduce BLL + other treatments, and one where they didn't reduce BLL but still gave the other treatments?
This is a good question, but keep in mind it's not a randomized control trial, they are using some clever techniques to look backwards on data from an existing program.
They could expand the study and compare to other children who had health workers in the home for unrelated reasons. But those unrelated reasons could themselves affect 'antisocial behavior and cognitive outcomes'
Efforts to reduce lead exposure in the 1980s arguably were behind much of the lower crime rates in the 1990s and 2000's that we've seen. There are other studies cited in relevant wikipedia articles like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#cit...
And yes, crime rates are significantly lower adjusting for population, though that's not always conveyed accurately by those in authority and the news media.
Wow, yes, could be very true!! Could be related to higher crime rates by certain minority groups that may tend to live in old homes with lead paint.
Historically, the great great great painter Caravaggio was quite violent/irritable and died sadly so so young (30 something) and many theories are that he was quite irritable/violent because of lead poisoning (he was prolific, working all the time with lead points).
Definitely true. Nowadays painters use bleached titanium to get a brilliant white, but until the late 19th century lead salts were the norm. Basically you hammer out ingots of lead into flat strips, roll them up into a cylinder, and seal them in ceramic jars full of vinegar for 6 months. When you take them out the lead has turned white and is them ground up into powder and mixed with oil.
You can still get this from a few specialty suppliers and it's reasonably safe to use as long as you wear gloves paint slowly enough that you don't get it all over your skin. Ingested lead is much more dangerous than skin contact, and of course the process of grinding the treated strips of lead into powder was a respiratory and gastric disaster - although people were not completely clueless and apprentices in art studios would often cover their lower face with a wet cloth.
Considering it's the basis of the entire hypothesis, here's the nature of the intervention:
All cases with two BLL tests exceeding the alert threshold (10
ug/dL) trigger
eligibility for an intervention which includes the following actions: education for caregivers (which includes nutritional advice and information about reducing
exposure in the home); a voluntary home environment investigation; and a
referral to lead remediation services. A more intensive intervention can be
triggered by tests over 15
ug/dL or 20
ug/dL. In addition to educating caregivers
and providing a referral to remediation services, the intensive intervention
typically includes: a mandatory home environment investigation; nutritional
assessment; medical evaluation; developmental assessment; and a referral to
the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children
(WIC)
From the article: "The statistical significance of the drop is extremely strong"
I haven't read the source paper yet, but the way this is phrased makes me skeptical of the strength of these findings. Having worked briefly on a lead remediation project for a city government who has been in the news recently for lead, I can tell you that this is a really tough question and the confounding factors are huge. The political consequences mean that folks have incentive to seriously overstate (or understate) the importance and validity of a study like this.
There have been several studies over the years and the evidence is strong.
Crime rates seem to drop with 20 year lag after TEL phaseout in gasoline starts. Different countries banned TEL at different times and it's very hard to deny connection.
Unfortunate that you're being down-voted for being skeptical, this study does have some issues confounding the results:
"The elevated BLL intervention package includes treatments previously demonstrated to impact later-life outcomes such as: visits from health workers; increased medical care; nutritional assessments and dietary modifications; and referral to the Special Supplemental, Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Prior research documents long-term benefits from programs similar to each of these elements ..."
The article title on the original site was changed from "... Confirms the Lead-Crime Hypothesis" to "... Bolsters the Lead-Crime Hypothesis", since "It's a good study, but it's still just one more study." Title here should be changed likewise.
>The underlying common pathway for all of these associations might be lead's adverse effects on executive functioning [19–21], resulting in poor impulse control.
Low impulse control in general seems to be one of the is the strongest predictors of criminal behaviour, whatever the cause.
No, but it does provide an "environmental" explanation to counter those that would like to introduce eugenics back into polite society and who point to lower IQs in poorer populations as proof of their inherent (and unfixable) inferiority.
I'm reminded of the story about how an IQ researcher spotted the telltale signs of fetal alchohol syndrome before it was named, but had put it down to the bad genes of the native tribes he was studying. It seems when you'd decided that something in inherited, it's very easy to overlook environmental causes, even when they have very noticeable impacts.
So, you're claiming that just about everything that makes us in inheritable, until things like intelligence comes into scope? Far smarter people than you or I have claimed the contrary. That's not to say environmental variables can change how IQ drifts, but there is nevertheless a large part founded on genetics.
Lead lowers IQ (and has other negative impacts). Fetal alchohol syndrome lowers IQ (and has other negative impacts). Adding Iodine to salt apparently raised average IQ by 15 points in areas where the natural diet was low in it.
Many things are apparently very inheritable, like height, yet in certain generations almost everyone is taller than their parents due to environmental factors. This isn't exactly rocket science.
My point was that in history, the people accused of being genetically inferior (the jews, the irish, the italians, native americans, africans, chinese etc.) have generally been outgroups that have been unfairly targeted by pseudo-science, not that IQ does not have a hereditary component.
I get where you're coming from, but you can't honestly just use this as a counter-balance to genetic pseudo-science. You can't argue with genetic pseudo-science at all! You have to make your case about the foundational science first.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/07z65p9a5wdppfl/LifeAfterLead_AEJ_...