Leaded gasoline - The root of urban crime?

This is a really fucking fascinating article detailing a few researchers' work that seems to point to leaded gasoline usage post-WWII with the rise of crime in urban areas and subsequent falloff in the 90s.

I hope this gets more attention and if it's true, it would be a no-brainer for some kind of stimulus-type funding.

The closing thought is the kicker:

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline

Kevin Drum's been all over the place promoting the article. It's actually not at all a new conclusion; I heard about it years ago when I first read Freakonomics (the Freakonomics guys determined that the reduction in crime was the result of an increase in abortions. That's Freakonomics for you...) From what I gather, the econometric evidence for the lead/crime link is quite strong.

edit: That being said, I don't mean to sound disparaging! I'm really glad that this is getting more attention, and his conclusion is spot on.

Last time around I thought it was "well, how about that" but there weren't really tight controls on other factors. Sounds like the 2007 papers have zeroed in on it?

Yeah from what I gather now it's pretty much proven (insofar as econometrics can prove stuff). Apparently attention is shifting to identifying the biological mechanisms at play.

Well, this will make most of 1970s and 1980s crime politics literally insane sounding.

Weird trivia: the guy who invented leaded gasoline also discovered chlorofluorocarbons. Yep, one guy was responsible for a significant chunk of our 20th century environmental damage.

Very interesting.
Makes, sense, whenever I see an old hot rod or muscle car go by with lead additives and I smell that rancid exhaust my heart races and I start driving fast.

Insofar as the 1970s and 1980s crime politics reflected underlying racial politics, it's already sort of insane.

When time travel is invented, that guy had better watch out.

Kevin Drum linked this article: The Secret History of Lead

"This shit is so poisonous you can't even let it touch your skin, let's add it to fuel!"

I... I don't even know where to start with this.

Holy shit.

Yeah. This was an eye-opener.

"GM couldn't dictate an infrastructure that could supply ethanol in the volumes that might be required. Equally troubling, any idiot with a still could make it at home, and in those days, many did. And ethanol, unlike TEL, couldn't be patented; it offered no profits for GM. Moreover, the oil companies hated it, a powerful disincentive for the fledgling GM, which was loath to jeopardize relations with these mighty power brokers. Surely the du Pont family's growing interest in oil and oil fields, as it branched out from its gunpowder roots into the oil-dependent chemical business, weighed on many GM directors' minds."

Wow, as always control = $$$$
Wonder how different this world would be if they had used Ethanol.

Yeah, a shining example of why you can't trust big business to 'do the right thing'.

Jesus.

This sort of thing should have people rioting in the streets, but no one knows and no one cares.

Except you can vote people in the goverment out of office, and the end goal of people in goverment isn't, "To make the guy in charge more money". And I really think quite a few big business leaders could probably be classified as psychopaths. Romney for example, could be pretty easily declared as such.

And half of them want to get rid of the EPA.

Well, it's obviously not doing its job very well if it allowed lead to be used in gasoline in the first place.

You mean other than the fact that the EPA didn't exist at the time?

Ok, now I'm reduced to eye-balling the murder rate in Japan (country that first started phasing out lead from gasoline and were done around 1980) vs. other high income countries which phased it out in the late 1980s or a bit later. Of course, knowing the problems/benefits of using the murder rate as a measure, I should probably leave that to an actual study. And I have access to journal databases, so I should probably spend some time doing that instead.

Also, some of that is working as intended. The House keeps passing bills to stop the EPA (and OSHA) from creating and enforcing rules that maybe possibly might have a negative effect on the economy. Because fuck human and environmental health if we might have to pay incrementally more taxes. It's despicable, but it's what a lot of Americans have convinced themselves that they want.

Can "we" really vote the people in government out with rulings like "Citizens United" ?

And the end goal of people in government isn't to make the guy in charge more money, it's to make themselves more money. (judging from my own grim opinion of those elected)

The Guardian weighs in.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis...rime-lead-poisoning-british-export?CMP=twt_fd

via Kalle

Ouch!
lawsuit time?

This is, seriously, pitchforks-in-the-street level stuff. I don't expect anything concrete to come of it, but I'm glad to see the Mother Jones story getting traction elsewhere. Here's hoping it picks up steam.

Well, to be honest, you and I know and we're not out rioting in the streets. It's so transcendentally huge and also whiffs of tinfoil that I'm not sure where to go with it.

Hey, if you want to riot I'll riot with you.

But one guy taking to the streets isn't a riot. It's a loud asshole who is probably going to end up in jail.

Zactly. And most people (for instance my Facebook friends) don't seem to either believe in it or care about it.

On the bright side, the next time a libertarian pillock starts going off on another rant about how The Market will self-regulate I've got yet another example to wave in front of them.

Yeah, but will they care or listen? Someone who thinks that "the market" is some sort of self-regulating utopia machine is so divorced from reality that you can hardly hope to sway them by showing them examples of reality. Even Adam Smith thought that markets required regulation.

A scientist whom I respect, and who also is a neurologist, which is a plus in this case.

tl;dr - I wouldn't call this ranting in the street material, if only because it's remarkably difficult to tease any sort of precise magnitude of effect out of the data. The Mother Jones article might be just a touch on the hysterical side in trying to attribute "90% of the increase in crime" directly to lead exposure, but a broader analysis indicates that maybe a 20% share of total overall crime being "lead-related" (as opposed to a fraction of an increase, which is linguistically indistinct) is a reasonable number, and a high enough one to be worth concern. Most policy proposals designed with the intention of further reducing lead exposure are probably cost effective toward their desired ends - meaning that we can approach these propositions presuming a reasonable probability of solvency for the identified harms (at which point the decision as to whether or not a specific policy proposal should be done would be based on comparative weighting of the advantages and disadvantages of the policy itself, without much bother as to likelihood of solvency).

Further tl;dr - The science is pretty clean, so whether a particular policy should go depends on what budgetary tradeoffs and outside impacts you can identify, meaning that if you assume infinite money and no downside, any policy to reduce lead exposure will have definite benefit.

Relatedly, crime rate just keeps on falling in the UK come rain or shine:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jan/24/fall-uk-crime-rate-baffles-experts

Lead poisoning is joined by, improved policing (hey you never know) the ubiquity of smartphones (helping to destroy teenage boredom) and the continuing devaluation of formerly steal-able goods (technology never stopped getting cheaper) in the fumble to try and explain the phenomena.

I wonder if gas station attendants had significantly higher crime rates than people who weren't? It's an amusing thought,

Car mechanics.

My understanding is that it's exposure as a child that's the real big factor; I gather it's less harmful (though still terrible) to adults.