

America's Real Criminal Element: Lead - sc68cal
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline

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gruseom
This is a tour de force of reporting on empirical research in an area that
could hardly be of greater social importance. Drum deserves 100x more
attention for this than he got for breaking the Romney 47% video in September.

Concidentally via [http://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/22/scientific-
american...](http://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/22/scientific-americans-
gun-error/) from a couple weeks ago, here's a link to Reyes' paper on the
lead/crime theory:

<http://www3.amherst.edu/~jwreyes/papers/LeadCrimeBEJEAP.pdf>

And here's a striking critique of the Freakonomics abortion/crime theory,
which I suppose most people here have heard of:

<http://www.economist.com/node/5246700?story_id=5246700>

Someone inspected Donohue and Levitt's code and found a bug that meant they
hadn't controlled for what they claimed they had. "Fixing that error reduces
the effect of abortion on arrests by about half, using the original data, and
two-thirds using updated numbers."

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sc68cal
Slight nitpick - David Corn, the DC Bureau Chief broke the 47% video.

But yeah, Kevin Drum does great work.

> And here's a striking critique of the Freakonomics abortion/crime theory,
> which I suppose most people here have heard of:

I have not heard of this! Thank you for sharing!

~~~
gruseom
Bah, you're right! "David Corn", "Kevin Drum" — I plead isomorphic syllables
and similar ideologies. But I'm still an idiot. Thanks.

~~~
sc68cal
It's impossible to be an idiot and read MJ. Cheers!

