
Lead and Crime: Another Look - curtis
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/01/lead-and-crime-another-look?
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refurb
I'm not surprised. Any time I see a research paper that suggests a highly
complex issue, like crime, can be neatly explained by a single variable, my BS
meter goes off.

Could a reduction in lead levels contribute to the drop in crime? Sure, but
any effect would likely be drowned out by the multitude of other changes that
have happened over the past 60+ years.

I'm not sure what it is, but humans seem to be highly suceptable to simple
explanations for the world. If you need some examples, just browse snopes.com

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omginternets
>I'm not sure what it is, but humans seem to be highly suceptable to simple
explanations for the world.

Most things really are simple; If you see smoke, the simplest explanation
happens to be correct: there's fire.

The bias towards simplicity can also be seen as a bias towards parsimony,
which is almost always a good thing. We don't immediately recognize this truth
because we don't conjure up trivial examples, even though the overwhelming
majority of our reasoning is spent on trivial phenomena.

~~~
Houshalter
Also he's disputing a straw man. No one has claimed that _all_ crime can be
explained by a single variable. Only that a variable can have a big effect.
Other "simple explanations" for crime could be poverty, broken homes,
education, all the traditional explanations. All those are simple explanations
and single variables.

~~~
omginternets
I understood his claim a bit differently, namely as "Lead is an epiphenomenon,
and a single variable with a big effect is likely to be an epiphenomenon".

To be sure, I think the logic goes like this:

\- Lead is positively correlated with crime

\- Reduction in lead-levels is associated with multiple factors that are in
turn associated with gentrification

\- Thus, these gentrification factors are the true cause, and lead-levels just
happen to correlate with them.

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andreasvc
"Can it really be true that violent crime was declining between 1973-91?
There's no question that this is what the NCVS data tells us, but it sure
doesn't match what everyone thought was going on at the time. By the early
90s, virtually everyone in America was convinced that (a) crime had been
rising relentlessly for decades and (b) it would continue rising. (Remember
"superpredators"?) At a purely gut level, a crime decline during this period
sure doesn't feel right."

I think this can and may be true. See Pinker's arguments in The Better Angels
of our Nature. It seems obvious to me that people's perceptions of crime are
influenced to a huge extent by media reporting. People have irrational,
unfounded beliefs all the time, so I don't see why they should be indicative
of anything.

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newday
For all the faults of the reporting of crimes, the assumptions being made are
not nearly as logically sound as the assumptions seem to assert. Exposure to
leaded gas affects brain development, and impulse control. Alcohol for me also
affect my impulse control, and I become more aggressive, and in my youth,
violent/destructive. But at no point is my moral centre so far off that murder
becomes a viable option. So the assumption that violent crime rates matches
murder rates proportionally, is throwing another unknown variable into the
mix, and attempting to make that appear far more rational than it it.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I think most murders are just spur of the moment assaults that go too far, the
person dying is not premeditated like an Agatha Christie novel.

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todd3834
Reminds me of [http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-
correlations](http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)

~~~
omginternets
I don't think this is a spurious correlation, so much as an epiphenomenon.

