This feels like a good time to bring up the lead-crime hypothesis (flaws and all). For those who don't know, there's a strong (if faulty) correlation between lead levels in preschool children and crime rates: https://www.vox.com/2016/1/14/17991876/crime-drop-murder-lea...
Regardless of what you think about the hypothesis, the growth and crunch in lead levels during the last many decades is astounding and probably still has many bad effects on IQ and related factors, at least in the US
I like this roundup [1] as it hammers the point home with tons of observations across cultures, times, contexts, and methods of analysis. For instance, different cultures phased out lead gas at different times, and their subsequent crime charts were offset by the equivalent years.
Thanks, this is way more thorough than the links I was able to find / select from a quick search at the time.
If anything, I think I've accidentally experienced a lesser case of [Cunningham's Law](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law), where the veracity of the hypothesis is arguably pretty clear-cut and I just lacked the evidence, and the internet is obliged to correct/help in that regard!
I'm skeptical because of the number of factors involved in something as complex as terrorism but I give credit to the author for thinking of it and openly predicting it.
The car and its consequences has been a disaster for society. Even today we are pumping so many toxins in to the air to deliver a slower, less efficient, and more expensive form of transport. And it's not a problem that EVs or self driving cars can solve since a huge amount of the pollution comes from tires.
That conveniently ignores the non-tailpipe emissions, for example dust from tires and brake pads. I also suspect that it's only true in the lab, I have the pleasure of cycling through many clouds of noxious soot from supposedly modern cars whose owners just happen to press the throttle harder than what the NEDC requires.
And water is essential for life, so that must mean it’s impossible to drown, right?
Funny that people who say things like this and “CO2 is only 0.04% of the air” don’t want to try injecting 0.04% of their blood volume of hydrogen cyanide and seeing if such a tiny amount of something can have an effect…
Walkable cities + public transport. When I had a car it used to take me a minimum of 10 minutes to get anywhere. Cars have spaced out everything so far that over all we spend so much more time traveling. Now I live in a walkable area and almost everything I need is a few minutes away on foot, or a 20 minute train trip to the main city area.
I swear that living in NYC for nearly two decades has made me incapable of making a grocery list and shopping like pretty much everyone else in the country (only slightly kidding). I just walk down the street and grab what I need.
I did just miss the 6 train by 15 seconds and am standing on the platform as I write this, which I guess is annoying? I’ll take it over driving in traffic though.
Had a friend from Texas move near me in Australia and they have just been exhausted trying to keep up because they aren't used to walking. Walking here is the fastest and most convenient way to get around. By the time you get your car out and find parking, you could have already been there on foot.
You'll observe that the rate of obesity is extremely low in the walkable areas which I really think is heavily because the people there live more active lifestyles just getting around day to day.
The rate of obesity is low because of survivorship bias, nothing more, nothing less. For obese and/or disabled people, living in New York is an absolute nightmare if you can’t afford public transit.
Despite loving the city amenities, culture, nightlife, one of my family members had to give up and leave NYC because he couldn’t afford cabs everywhere and hated showing up to events late and sweat-soaked otherwise.
> For obese and/or disabled people, living in New York is an absolute nightmare if you can’t afford public transit.
Obesity has increased in recent years as people from all walks of life exercise less and eat out more.
Even when adjusting for poverty and race, studies have shown that close access to parks and other walkable areas, combined with good public transport, reduces prevalance of obesity.
Try vacationing a couple of weeks in a city that isn't build around cars and has good public transport, maybe you'll understand. Tokyo is nice for example. Note that there still are cars in Tokyo, nobody is banning cars.
I mean, yeah - They're pretty enthusiastically telling us that's what they want to do. It's not a conspiracy theory if they're actually advertising it...
The subsequent evidence is so strong that I don't think it's appropriate to call it faulty. In the paper "Life After Lead" they study a boundary effect of children who were just above and just below treatment thresholds for blood lead levels and the outcomes in terms of crime, school success, etc are stark. Figure 4(F) particularly.
I haven’t read the paper, but I wonder how well they control for economic status. I’d expect the better off a family is the less lead they have in their life - and I’d expect economic status to actually be a cause of better education, health, incarceration, etc.
They said “we compare outcomes for children who are similar across observable characteristics but differ in eligibility for intervention due to blood lead test results.” Economic status is observable, so ide guess it’s I caused; but I only read the abstract.
Late Soviet writers such as Strugatsky brothers would often bring out the topic of barbarism and brutality which is characteristic of Human race and had to be fought at all times...
...which is, as far as we know now, not innate but looks like symptoms of chronic lead poisoning.
The surprising is that this side turned to be manageable.
People around them ended up not wanting to actively destroy themselves and their environment. That was the big surprise of 00's and it coincided with aftermatch of when the lead gas was outlawed.
It seems based on the last years' news that the USA is having a reenactment of that now, though. I wonder what it takes this time to fix things.
I think the "crime is caused by exposure to lead" hypothesis has taken a major hit in recent years. The homicide rate went from 4.99 per 100,000 in 2019 to 6.81 per 100,000 in 2021. There was no sudden increase in lead exposure, either in recent years, or decades ago, that can explain that increase.
I'm not saying that lead has no effect on crime, but some people were claiming that lead exposure was the single primary cause of violent crime. When you get sudden changes in the crime rate like that, it's pretty clear that something else is going on.
Do you mean faulty, logic, or faulty, supporting evidence? I think if something is plausible, but unsupported by evidence, the logic can be sound, but the supporting evidence faulty; but if something is implausible, then it would be the logic that was faulty and to me it seems like that crime and behavioral changes are caused by lead is certainly plausible, so I don’t think it’s a logical failure here. It may just be a failure of the evidence.
So.. How do you know the evidence is faulty, though? I mean, can you definitively prove it’s faulty? if you can’t, then you have to consider there’s a possibility that it’s causal?
See above. The Vox article made this seem like logic around the hypothesis is more faulty than it probably is, given other replies.
I understand my meaning might've confused HN commenters but I genuinely feel that the intent of my words in the initial comment is intuitive, and don't have time or bandwidth to argue about the semantics. I am sorry for the confusion. I obviously can't definitively prove it is faulty, and was merely trying (likely incorrectly so) to summarize the believed veracity of the hypothesis.
I thought that's what you were doing, intuitively, and I wasn't attacking you. I know how it can feel that way. It's more like a jumping off point for other commenters to hop onto, a group conversation if you will, but the threaded nature does make it look like a direct challenge/reply to you.
You know you can't be sorry for other people's confusion tho, right? That might be some semantics for you! :) haha
Have a good day and thanks for sharing this interesting ref!
It does correlate, and it is accounted for. We have evidence to believe the causal arrow points lead=>poverty. This is because the natural experiments of phasing out leaded gasoline in different countries at effectively randomized times produce subsequent decreases in lead poisoning (and downstream crime). This is as close to a controlled "give one population lead poisoning" experiment as you can ethically run.
But there is also poverty => poor housing in less desirable areas => more pollution in general. Including Air pollution, car exhausts, lead from leaded gasoline.
This is well known e.g. (1) and seems like it would be a large effect.
I'm not saying that this invalidates the studies on lead, I'm sure that the researchers know how to do it far better than I do, and have spend a lot more time on accounting for it; just that poverty drives increased pollution exposure, as a general rule.
For poverty effects to dominate across countries, there would need to be a causal relationship between phasing out leaded petrol and countries' distribution of income; it looks implausible at first glance. It's much easier to phase out leaded petrol than to make persistent changes in the distribution of income. It would be very surprising if all countries not only did so, but did so at the same time.
Quite, phasing out leaded petrol at different times is the kind of "natural experiment" that can demonstrate the effects of lead reduction not poverty reduction.
This is not the same thing as "poverty drives increased pollution exposure, as a general rule" which is still true.
Other things drive pollution exposure too, like general use of leaded petrol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
Regardless of what you think about the hypothesis, the growth and crunch in lead levels during the last many decades is astounding and probably still has many bad effects on IQ and related factors, at least in the US