This always amuses me. Crime in the US was rising... until the mid-90s when the twin powers of the ridiculously high incarceration rate j-curved and the internet bringing all sorts of indoor distractions happened.
I mean, who would have thought that teenage delinquency would be reduced by distributing computer games, giving them something to do rather than wander the streets being bored?
And if lead really is responsible for 90% of the crime, as stated in the article by the chief propagandist, then before leaded fuel was around, crime should have been negligible - and it clearly wasn't.
Edit: perhaps the lead-in-your-fuel people should debate against the concealed-carry people, since both of them claim absolute ownership of the decline in US crime from the mid-90s onwards.
Problem with the CC argument is that this trend has been witnessed in other countries that have no such gun laws. And if the US was a special case, how would it explain all the cities that saw a drop in crime with restrictive gun laws (Several of which were deemed unconstitutional a decade after the crime drop began?)
Video games exploded in popularity in the 1980s while crime was still rising - not to mention this was a time when arcades were far more prolific, so you could make the argument that entertainment was more accessible to youths with families that couldn't afford video game systems in 1980 than 1990 onward.
Going out to an arcade puts you out and about. And when the money runs out, the arcade has no further interest for you. There's no money to run out with a video game at home. While there were some homes with consoles and computers in the 80s, home computers didn't really take off for the general public until the 90s, and you see also that it was the 90s when the game industry at home really took off. You don't need the internet to play video games.
As for CC, it should be clear I'm not fond of their arguments :)
Looking at crime stats by age and gender of arrest [1] You see an across-the-board decline for men and women. You're telling me a 60 year old woman was too busy playing Doom on a 486 to commit a violent crime?
So, keeping in context of my original comment, do you have statistics for how many 60-year-old women are engaged in teenage delinquency?
Keep in mind that the period you're talking about in the US (1993+) is around the start of hysterical anti-crime politicking, with a soaring incarceration rate, and heavily increased funding for policing.
Or for something more relevant to 60-year-old women in the 90s, how about it being more socially acceptable to leave an abusive husband? Or better social support services than previously?
There's a lot of different things that affect crime - I'm not saying in the slightest that any one thing is responsible for crime or lack thereof.
Actually, the trend appears to be that it was dropping since the late seventies, but had a small upswing in the early nineties before dropping substantially more.
The answer is that criminology is affected by a wide variety of factors, and making statements like the guy in the article that 90% of crime can be attributed to one factor is nonsense.
I've mentioned elsewhere a plausible third factor that drives both, and that the data for Australia does not match this pattern. And that I'd like to see this European data that apparently matches it - the linked papers in the article do not mention it.
It's far from the ironclad causative link that you're implying.
> making statements like the guy in the article that 90% of crime can be attributed to one factor is nonsense.
> I've mentioned elsewhere a plausible third factor that drives both
You see the problem here? You claim that a factor being able to drive that much is nonsense, and then you... claim to have identified another factor which drives that much (of both lead and crime).
No, that's you putting words in my mouth. I mean, your first reply to my commentary was specifically against me saying that there are multiple factors in criminology.
Yes, you can argue that because I said 'a factor that drives both' that I meant only one single ironclad factor, but in the context of all that I've written, it's clear that I'm talking about a range of changes - including, again, my comment that elicited your first response, where I explicitly point out multiple factors affect criminology. My first comment in this thread (the heavily downvoted one up there) pointed out two other factors that have been attributed to the decrease in crime as well.
I've also presented graphs of Australian violent crime that don't appear to follow trends in each other, let alone the supposed 'lead-free' crime reduction that this theory presents.
Exactly how many different factors do I have to present to potentially explain variability? To suggest that it's more than one factor that has a significant effect on crime?
Edit: I should probably also point out that the "a" factor I mentioned isn't a single thing that can be measured with a single number like "atmospheric lead", but a suite of many different things dealing with a wide-ranging cultural change (see response to DanBC below)
> I mean, your first reply to my commentary was specifically against me saying that there are multiple factors in criminology.
No, my first reply was that there very clearly was a high fit to the data, and so something is going on that is in need of explanation, be it lead or another confounding factor, and so it was nonsense to claim that it was nonsense that a single factor could matter.
> I've also presented graphs of Australian violent crime that don't appear to follow trends in each other, let alone the supposed 'lead-free' crime reduction that this theory presents.
> Exactly how many different factors do I have to present to potentially explain variability? To suggest that it's more than one factor that has a significant effect on crime?
You should present something. Otherwise you're engaged in know-nothingism: 'it could be something else! who knows? whoooo knooowwwwssssss...'
Actually, thinking about it further, It's funny that in none of these articles is the point put forward that the kind of people who would want to better educated themselves about and eliminate poisons for the better welfare of their family might also be the kind of people who would try to raise and socialise their kids in a better manner. Lead was removed from petrol at a time of massive upheaval in the way the public looked at raising their kids. This argument would suggest that both reduced lead in petrol and 20-year-later-lowered-crime are both sourced from improved parenting and social actions.
The papers linked in the article don't actually say that, and I'd like to see the papers that do - have you a link to them?
And is it so hard to think that the more progressive regions might do several things earlier than the less progressive regions? I'm not saying this is the actual mechanism at play, just that it's a plausible mechanism that is causal for both trends - something that's always overlooked in thees articles.
Anyway, I spent an hour looking at crime graphs for Australia this afternoon, and I can't see a common pattern at all. Australia banned leaded fuel in 1986 and it was completely phased out by 2000. But the crime graphs are all over the place. Homicide is stable-but-downward. Assualts are rising. Robbery has been both up and down. If lead is the 'silver bullet' against violent crime 20 years later, why the increase in assaults? I just don't see the preliminary patterns required for this "causation" to work.
The 60s and 70s were a time of massive social upheaval, and people came out of it with a better understanding of how to see other people by merit rather than by tradition. The "Think of the Children!" political slogan rose to prominence in the 70s. This is also the time of better rights for minorities, first wave feminism, and the rise of the phenomenon of questioning authority. Kids raised under the hippy ethos (and related) were far more common than in the 50s. The environments they grew up in had more equality and diversity measures from the civil rights movements. Not perfect, but certainly significant change.
I mean, who would have thought that teenage delinquency would be reduced by distributing computer games, giving them something to do rather than wander the streets being bored?
And if lead really is responsible for 90% of the crime, as stated in the article by the chief propagandist, then before leaded fuel was around, crime should have been negligible - and it clearly wasn't.
Edit: perhaps the lead-in-your-fuel people should debate against the concealed-carry people, since both of them claim absolute ownership of the decline in US crime from the mid-90s onwards.