

The Crime of Lead Exposure  - cwan
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/the-crime-of-lead-exposure/

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JacobAldridge
Interesting that the article makes no reference to the Abortion argument put
forward in Freakanomics (and defended in its sequel) which argued that making
abortions more available in the mid-1970s led to fewer crimes from the 1990s
on as those criminals weren't born (that's a bad summary of their detailed
argument; don't attack my straw man).

In many ways this is why economics is the dismal science, as are its offshoots
in the social sciences. There's excellent data to support the lead claim.
Excellent data to support the abortion claim. It could be either, both, or
neither in varying degrees, since we're backloading outcomes rather than
making predictions.

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bugsy
Thanks for posting that, it's good to see some other explanations for reduced
crime. Crime in a society is a very complex phenomenon and not easily
explained. I remember a few years ago when Freakanomics popularized the theory
that crime went down because of Roe vs Wade increased abortions, in particular
abortions of troublesome minorities who cause crime, implying that criminality
was correlated to race. This idea is now a widely held belief even though
there are lots of things that have changed over the years that you could just
as easily also correlate but are not necessarily causal.

At least with this one (lead) there is actual known scientific data showing
that lead exposure does increase violent behavior and there is a causal link
(lead poisoning leading to a specific sort of brain damage).

edit: ah and having just pressed post I see that someone else here was
thinking of the same comparison.

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srbloom
What is the modern lead? BPA?

