Lead Water Pipes in 1900 Caused Higher Crime Rates in 1920?

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/05/lead-water-pipes-1900-caused-higher-crime-rates-1920

by curtis • 10 years ago

147 67 10 years ago

astrodust2• 10 years ago

No doubt we'll find an unfortunate blip in twenty years in Flint.

bluedino• 10 years ago

Speaking of Flint (and Chicago as well), why are murders/shootings at new highs when they went down in the 90's like in every other area? Did they starting using lead paint again in the 80's?

sudojudo• 10 years ago

Pretty sure the up-tick has more to do with socioeconomics and the drug war than anything else.

I don't have any sources at hand, so take this with a grain of salt. But, I've often seen it argued that Reagan era drug policies were detrimental to poor minorities, especially black men. The problems we see today are the trickle-down effects (couldn't resist) of turning an entire generation of fathers into disenfranchised criminals.

ori_b• 10 years ago

Cities that used iron pipes, in contrast, had higher rates of death from circulatory disease, cancer, and cerebral hemorrhage. We know of no scientific literature to motivate these latter relationships.

Is it possible that this is just because people weren't dying of other things first?

toomuchtodo• 10 years ago

Supposedly you see the same drop in crime after lead was phased out of gasoline:

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure...

That tip took Nevin in a different direction. The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.
Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.
So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.
And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to "fill 'er up with ethyl," they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.

Shivetya• 10 years ago

Well he was certainly after a result he wanted, lead was phased out of house paints starting after 1971 and gone by 1978, meaning anything built before 78 was suspect. This may still be a problem in some older housing especially in cities. Leaded gasoline didn't fully phase out until the 80s and was still for sale in places until 91. Even in Canada leaded gasoline wasn't banned until 1990.

So while it definitely had a large influence we have to realize lead was everywhere, it was cheap, it had so many wonderful uses, but it most certainly didn't vanish in the seventies.

padiyar83• 10 years ago

Correlation between two variables, does not imply one causes the other.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...

Hondor2• 10 years ago

Do you agree that human's use of fossil fuels caused global warming? We only know that they're correlated, right? It was a singular event without a control that we discovered by analyzing historical data. A lot like this article's subject.

Retric2• 10 years ago

If you know nothing else about A and B it actually does. In terms of pure information theory / probability. Causation between random things is rare and causation is less rare in correlated things.

ves2• 10 years ago

How is this even remotely good science? So far as I can tell, they didn't admit the possibility that this can be either complete noise (if you have, say 100 diseases, and you're looking for time-series correlations, or performing tests with too low an alpha or power) or caused by a confounder.

The task of making causal claims is a difficult one, and not one to be made lightly. The literature is replete with examples of this going terribly wrong, even with perceived physical justifications. See

[0]: tylervigen.com

[1] http://nerdsonwallstreet.typepad.com/my_weblog/files/datamin...

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/reinhart-rogoff-aus...

[3] http://www.economist.com/node/5246700

josu• 10 years ago

The article is bad (MotherJones), the paper may be better [1]. I've only skimmed it, but it looks at the correlation between distance from a lead factory and homicide rate, which probably increases the signal/noise ratio.

[1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jfeigenbaum/files/feigenbau...

ves2• 10 years ago

Do you not admit the confounder that proximity to a lead factory should also correlate with socioeconomic status?

I don't have time to check out the article this week, but will soon.

sdenton4• 10 years ago

The real targets here are the crime rates, and the diseases known to be side effects of lead poisoning. And the question is, can we use high level aggregates to observe lead poisoning caused by industrial design decisions?

We've seen massive drops on the level of violent crime in the US (and beyond) over the last twenty or thirty years. And the attribution of that drop has huge ramifications. Should we double down on three-strikes laws, or can the drop be attributed to environmental factors like ambient lead levels due to leader gasoline?

What I see here is increased evidence for the lead poisoning hypothesis. We know that lead poisoning causes violent behavior; the evidence is indicating that elevated crime rates may be due to undiagnosed poisoning.

Retric2• 10 years ago

A lot of crimes in prisons goes unreported, so total crime stats are harder to calculate. EX: Murder seems to clearly be down, male on male rape may be up.

cuchoi• 10 years ago

Did you read the paper? (I am asking sincerely)

tinalumfoil• 10 years ago

From the paper:

Our second identification strategy, introduced by Troesken (2006) and Clay et al. (2014), exploits the fact that more lead particulate will leach into water with low pH levels. If lead exposure has a causal effect on homicide, more acidic water should be correlated with higher homicide rates only in cities that used lead water pipes.

So there's more causal evidence than appears in the Mother Jones article. The two references for their "identification strategy" don't seem particularly well-cited though. [1][2]

[1] http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/REST_a_00396

[2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/great-lead-water-pipe-disaste...

jamesash• 10 years ago

Around 1900, the "tin" in tin cans contained about 12% lead, which leached into fruits and vegetables. You have to wonder if there's any way of correcting for that. [Source: "The Great A&P" by Marc Levinson, page 50.][Edit: read the paper cited and they make no mention of this]

blatherard• 10 years ago

Do you suspect that lead to be distributed in a way that would confound the results? In the absence of a theory, I'd expect lead to be fairly evenly distributed amongst cities in that particular way.

lostlogin6• 10 years ago

I read the parent as pondering whether it would be possible to compare populations that have had leaded canned food to those that haven't.

tacos2• 10 years ago

I get all my science from motherjones.com! From fluoride to sugar to weed, this is where Pulitzer meets Nobel.

Seriously though: a motherjones.com post of this quality as #1 on HN is a new low. I miss the days of pg obsessively micromanaging everything 'round these parts.

yarou• 10 years ago

If memory serves, pg was actually pretty hands off - unless a submission was politically controversial, most topics were allowed.

I haven't really noticed anything different, other than dang commenting more publicly on moderation decisions.

tacos2• 10 years ago

pg was downright addicted and glued to this site, and pulled levers at all hours.

5ilv3r2• 10 years ago

Yeah, this is crap reporting. The author has no idea what he is even linking to.

curtis• 10 years ago

The blog post links to this paper: Lead Exposure and Violent Crime in the Early Twentieth Century -- http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jfeigenbaum/files/feigenbau...

qaq5• 10 years ago

Yes it's so easy to isolate all other possible factors, and correlation is obviously a definitive proof of causation.

dredmorbius2• 10 years ago

There is a causal relation between lead and brain development, with strong relations between brain development and causal activity.

This is yet another corralative relation between introduction of leaded plumbing and long-term behavioral impacts.

False premise on your part.

qaq5• 10 years ago

Yes obviously prohibition and organized crime are minor factors in homicide rates very convenient time period chosen. In larger urban areas using more lead pipes is obviously a dominating factor and obviously not being a major black markets in prohibition era and thus center for organized crime.

dzink• 10 years ago

Mentioned this to a doctor in the family and their instant reply back was "Lead poisoning medically results in lower IQ". Then found some info about it here: http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/newscience/iq-eff...

lostlogin6• 10 years ago

Should have asked him/her what the medical IQ scale looks like. I'd guess it's the same but more expensive.

5ilv3r2• 10 years ago

The author used the wrong chart and had to correct it?? Get this trash off the front page.

lostlogin6• 10 years ago

Did you notice this or just read the authors correction and notification of their mistake? How do you handle your errors? Or do you not make any?

bpchaps7• 10 years ago

Lead poisoning is especially strange. I'm convinced that I have it, in contrast to the bipolar diagnosis I've been given. I used to do competitive shooting where I'd practice five days out of the week and compete on average of maybe once each weekend. The projectiles we shot were entirely lead, there was never any push for cleaning our hands, and the lead trap was never, ever cleaned (lead dust yay).

Problem is, every time I describe the problem and the reasoning behind it, no doctor takes me seriously to the point of laughing sometimes. It's ridiculous that lead's been researched so much, yet no doctor I've talked to understands it enough to even humor the idea. Not trying to self diagnose, but a little bit of "Hmm... yeah, maybe", would be nice.

I've also reached out to researchers in the field. The modern ones who've done extensive research have all moved to different fields and aren't willing to help out. Really frustrating. If anybody has any sources for help, I'd love it.

colanderman• 10 years ago

Have you considered a blood test? [1] You could probably get a referral for generic blood work easily (claim you're concerned about vitamin levels or something), and then ask the testing agency to check for lead levels.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#Diagnosis

bpchaps7• 10 years ago

Blood tests are useless after a certain point, as far as I know. The tests for neurological effects are a bit more complicated and require bone biopsies. Been a while since I've looked into it, so I might be wrong.

solipsism• 10 years ago

What kind of outcome would you hope for? Isn't CNS damage from lead irreversible?

AgentME• 10 years ago

It would stop them from wasting time thinking it was something else.

ridgeguy• 10 years ago

Possible it was more than the lead bullets. Lead styphnate has been a component of centerfire ammo [1]. That use would put it in vapor form near the firearm where it could be readily inhaled.

I agree with another poster - get tested for lead. No matter whether damage done is irreversible or not, it's good to prevent further damage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centerfire_ammunition

bpchaps7• 10 years ago

Even though they were center fire, they were .177 lead pellets and I doubt they have that. I'll check it out, though.

I actually have had blood tests and nothing came from it. They're not very useful years after the fact.

vlasev• 10 years ago

An important question is - do your peers also suffer from similar things?

bpchaps7• 10 years ago

I wouldn't doubt it, but it's hard to get back in contact with most of them to confirm. . There was a research paper about an Alaskan rifle team which talks about short term lead poisoning effects, though. I'd imagine they suffered long term effects. I can't find the longer version after a few searches, though.

brownbat2• 10 years ago

Crime trends are hard, and every theory we have seems to have its own set of weird statistical quirks.

That "we don't know much" nuance rarely makes it into short articles. The closest I've seen is in the Atlantic, where they basically have a whole series devoted to problems with no easy answers.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/what-cau...

Maybe the lead theory is right, but these are tough issues that are well studied, full of methodological hazards, so it's worth being extremely cautious when interpreting results about anything that drives crime trends.

Steko2• 10 years ago

That "we don't know much" nuance rarely makes it into short articles.

Well it made it into this one:

Click on my post from last year to get more details about both the strengths and weaknesses of this paper. As with any retrospective study like this, there are reasons to be cautious about the results.

Clicking the link gives us a pretty nuanced discussion:

On the negative side, it's risky to look solely at homicide numbers. This is because the absolute number of murders is small, especially on a city-by-city basis, and that means there's a lot of noise in the numbers. This is especially true when you're limited to a period of time as short as 15 years. There's also the fact that this was an era when lead paint was widely used, and that's very hard to tease out from the use of lead in pipes. Finally, there's the usual problem of any study like this: what do you control for? The use of lead pipes is plausibly unrelated to anything else related to crime, but it's impossible to know for sure. The authors do control for black population, foreign-born population, occupations, home ownership, and gender breakdown, and that reduces their effect size from 11.4 percent to 8.6 percent. Might some other control reduce it even further?

Plus there's the anomaly of Southern cities. Very few of them used lead pipes, but some did, and their murder rates were essentially no different from any other Southern cities. Why? It's possible that this is because their use of lead pipes was small (F&M have data on lead pipe use by city, but not on how much lead piping was used in each city). But it's still odd.

brownbat2• 10 years ago

On the other hand,

it looks like lead really is the culprit

And yes,

there are reasons to be cautious about the results

But that's immediately followed by,

However, the main strength of this study is unquestionably important: it verifies the lead-crime link in [a new] environment...

That's not the level of nuance I'm looking for.

More specifically, I think articles tend to be stronger when they acknowledge that there are multiple theories for crime trends, several of which have some explanatory power, none of which really gives a complete picture.

If the title were "Lead contributed to higher crime rates" rather than "Lead caused higher crime rates," that would be the sort of concession I'm looking for.

Unreservedly agree with you about the older piece though. Even without discussing alternative theories, Drum's earlier article is a good example of science journalism that puts a paper in perspective, (titled "some new evidence" rather than "X causes Y"), and the content is really well balanced.

rdancer• 10 years ago

I wonder what else may have been happening circa 1814–1818 that could make people more violent in its aftermath?

madengr• 10 years ago

The media refuses to say where the Flint, MI lead is coming from. It's coming from lead pipes in private residences, since the minerals in the water have changed.

askyourmother• 10 years ago

Well the lead removal has reduced crime, but the plastic replacement pipes and the hormone disrupting chemicals contained within are certainly having a great effect! Wonder if they will start to chart that?

Lead Water Pipes in 1900 Caused Higher Crime Rates in 1920?

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