Did removing lead from petrol spark a decline in crime?

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615

by austinz • 12 years ago

213 270 12 years ago

spcoll2• 12 years ago

Many variables share this exact graph shape over the 1960-2000 period, without having anything to do with crime. It's not a particularly characteristic shape. This seems to be a textbook example of "correlation does not imply causation".

If there was causation (due to the neurological effects of long-term lead exposure during childhood years), then you would observe delayed correlation (at a 20 year scale), not simultaneous correlation.

Pfhreak• 12 years ago

Not that I disagree with you, but the graph in the article is adjusted 23 years between the two lines.

spcoll2• 12 years ago

Indeed, that had escaped me. It makes the case stronger then.

lclarkmichalek3• 12 years ago

Correlation does not imply causation, however correlation can be used to support a theory of causation. The article does address this point:

   "There is a substantial causal relationship," she says.
   "I can see it in the state-to-state variations. States
   that experienced particularly early or particularly sharp
   declines in lead experienced particularly early or 
   particularly sharp declines in violent crime 20 years later."

Without reading the paper, I will not venture any opinion on the hypothesis/research/etc itself. I do however thing it may take more than 5 words to completely dismiss the theory.

XorNot3• 12 years ago

The causative mechanism is the body of research done on the brains of criminals. We usually find reduced function or actual damage in the frontal cortex, and other regions associated with empathy and emotional processing.

The other group of people we find this in is those suffering from childhood lead exposure, and we know that the regions of the brain most affected are those which occur from lead exposure.

While not going so far as to imply everyone with this pattern becomes a criminal, it certainly increases the statistical likelihood that they are, and studies on people with extreme issues - i.e. psychopaths - tend to show that's its a pattern of life experiences which determine whether you learn to function in society, or go another path. Notable is the neuroscientist who was studying psychopaths and discovered he has the same sort of brain structure as one - but, is a scientist, married and has children.

Since we can't really control an individuals life experiences through policy, but they roughly sort out statistically based on socioeconomic status, it seems pretty clear that exposure to brain development inhibiting neurotoxins is going to give you a higher then expected fraction of criminally-inclined young adults.

ballard2• 12 years ago

Sort of related, neat history of another toxic gasoline additive: tetra-ethyl lead

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/

thrownaway24245• 12 years ago

I see you didn't click through and read the article.

coolsunglasses• 12 years ago

Speaking of toxic, do you think you could be less so? I realize you're a throwaway but you wouldn't need one if you weren't being abusive and rude.

ams61102• 12 years ago

This is the same additive discussed in the OP

midas0072• 12 years ago

This is a better article than the OP. Thanks.

lutusp14• 12 years ago

Some say it was a decline in environmental lead, as the linked article does. Some say it was the advent of mandatory sentencing and three-strikes laws. Some say it was the easy availability of birth control and abortion, meaning fewer unwanted children were born.

But, social psychologists to the contrary, we will never know, because this kind of study can never ascend to the level of science. All we can be sure of is a rise in ... not crime, but contentless articles whose titles end in a question mark.

lclarkmichalek3• 12 years ago

Antipositivism is a thing, like it or not. I've aways loved the quote from Heisenberg:

    > The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that
    > which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in
    > silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing
    > that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we
    > omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely
    > uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

Rejecting the entirety of a science because it deals in confidence values rather than "facts" is foolish; it might be better to judge works based on their quality, rather than some ranking that deems X to be a science and Y to be something other. I particularly love that you used the word "ascend"; I shan't be the first to compare positivism to scientism

beagle32• 12 years ago

"science", to some, implies a discipline subject to the scientific method - none of this discussion is. Replace "science" with "discipline" in your post and it will make sense.

lutusp14• 12 years ago

Rejecting the entirety of a science because it deals in confidence values rather than "facts" is foolish ...

I'm not rejecting pop psychology. I'm saying it's not science. Science requires something fundamental, it can be expressed in one word, and I invite the readers of this post to say what it is. As soon as the word leaves their mouths, they will realize why social psychology cannot be science.

When the physicists at the LHC observed what they thought might be the Higgs Boson, they refused to announce a discovery until the had a five sigma result. Five sigma is approximately equal to 2.8 * 10^-7 (explanation: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/17/...), and it expresses the probability that, if there is no Higgs particle, a random observation might create the observation that has been made.

Five sigma. That's science. Opinion articles whose titles end in question marks are not science. And I should not have to explain this to educated readers.

I particularly love that you used the word "ascend"; I shan't be the first to compare positivism to scientism

Scientism is an irrational confidence in science as an answer to all the world's problems. Social psychology is an irrational confidence in the power of articles that observe correlations without either proposing or testing theories about those correlations to accurately represent some aspect of reality.

lambda3• 12 years ago

What makes you say that this kind of study can never ascend to the level of science? This kind of study is science. It's imperfect, but all of science is; science is just a collection of tools to improve our knowledge of the world, coupled with the body of knowledge so gained. Some of those tools are stronger than others, or can provide more certainty.

Controlled studies in which you vary only one input to a system at a time, and observe the effect, are obviously a stronger tool than mere observational studies. But that doesn't make observational studies not science.

It's perfectly possible to determine which of these effects are more or less likely to be responsible; the different hypotheses that you make would make easily testable predictions, which can be tested independently because different jurisdictions have made these changes at different times. Lead was banned in different countries at vastly different times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead). Likewise, three-strikes laws have been introduced at different times in different places, and many places have never introduced such laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law). Easy availability of birth control and abortion may be a little harder to quantify precisely, but that can be done too.

Since some countries have only banned leaded fuel in the past 10 years, within another 10 or 15 we should be able to say with considerably more certainty whether this has a causal relationship. If the crime data for countries which banned it later follow the same pattern, that's a very strong indication that the theory is correct.

I would find it hard to believe that the three strikes laws would have the same effect, as the reduction in crime has been happening fairly consistently nation-wide, while three strikes laws have been implemented at vastly different times in different states, or not at all. Lead levels are much more consistent nationwide, as those have mostly been national laws (with the exception of California banning leaded gasoline a few years earlier).

Anyhow, I strongly disagree that you can say that this isn't science. It's imperfect science; anything as complex as the social phenomenon of global crime levels is going to have a lot of complex, interacting factors and no one of them is going to be completely explanatory, and you are never going to be able to do significant studies with controlled inputs. But there are scientific tools for dealing with these somewhat more ambiguous situations, and we can and should apply them as the policy implications are quite substantial.

lutusp14• 12 years ago

What makes you say that this kind of study can never ascend to the level of science?

Because the uncontrolled nature of the observations means evidence cannot be reliably collected in a way that separates one cause from any number of unintended causes and side effects. The only way to get around these obstacles would be to feed one group of people doses of lead and compare them to another in a controlled setting, or isolate two groups of people, give one group the right to birth control and abortions, deny the other group those rights, and keep them from finding out about each other. Things that cannot be done for ethical reasons, and things that prevent social psychology from rising to the level of science.

This is why social psychology cannot be a science, and it explains why the field has the terrible reputation it has and deserves.

Link: http://chronicle.com/article/As-Dutch-Research-Scandal/12974...

Quote: "Even before the Stapel case broke, a flurry of articles had begun appearing this fall that pointed to supposed systemic flaws in the way psychologists handle data. But one methodological expert, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, of the University of Amsterdam, added a sociological twist to the statistical debate: Psychology, he argued in a recent blog post and an interview, has become addicted to surprising, counterintuitive findings that catch the news media's eye, and that trend is warping the field."

Anyhow, I strongly disagree that you can say that this isn't science.

Yes, I understand, but you haven't the slightest idea what makes science science. If you did, you would recognize this sort of article for what it is.

Social psychology deserves its reputation, science operates at a higher level, this is Science 101, and you have no idea what you're talking about. Not a clue.

There is a one-word summary of what science requires, that word is known to every qualified scientist, and you do not know what it is. How do I know this? You defended social psychology for over four hundred words without even mentioning it.

stretchwithme• 12 years ago

Might be able to confirm this by testing kids for lead poisoning in countries where leaded gas is still legal.

There are children that lived in the country and later move to the city. How early their exposure began would be the variable being tested.

You could treat all cases of lead poisoning you find and still be able to measure the impact of leaded gas on development.

Of course, I think the jury has been in on lead gas and paint for decades. But I guess for a poor country, an economic case must be made.

kevingadd• 12 years ago

Well, it's talking about chronic lead poisoning, not acute lead poisoning. Different things. It's interesting to consider that chronic lead poisoning could have escaped notice for a long time because the symptoms seemed like random variance to you or me when they were actually a trend.

lostlogin• 12 years ago

This has come up before with the Mother Jones article http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li... This article is better in my opinion. Good discussion on HN then too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006368

curtis• 12 years ago

For those searching for a TL;DR of the article, here is a much shorter blog post by the same author talking about the different kinds of evidence supporting the thesis:

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-and-crime...

One quote:

There are now multiple rigorous studies using different methodologies that demonstrate this correlation at the city level, the state level, the national level, and in different countries at different times.

downandout12• 12 years ago

Mother Jones....now there's a scientifically credible, impartial source.

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

Lead paint really can't be mentioned without bringing up the name, work, and abuse heaped upon Herbert Needleman who drew many of the associations between the use of lead in paint and brain damage to children, especially inner-city and underprivileged youth:

http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/health/why-is-lead-sti...

For his efforts, Needleman endured years of attacks denigrating the quality of his research and his integrity as a scientist. In 1982 the industry-funded International Lead Zinc Research Organization (ILZRO) went to the Environmental Protection Agency to accuse Needleman of scientific misconduct. The EPA convened a committee of experts, which concluded that Needleman’s study had not proved a connection between lead exposure and a child’s mental development. Needleman countered that the committee report contained serious mistakes. The EPA agreed, reversed the committee’s findings, and lauded Needleman’s “pioneering study,” saying it confirmed a “significant association” between lead exposure and childhood intelligence.

The ILZRO hired the public-relations firm Hill & Knowlton to publicize the original committee’s criticisms of Needleman.

Two scientists led the next attack on Needleman. One was Sandra Scarr, a developmental psychologist at the University of Virginia who had been a member of the EPA committee that disputed Needleman’s study. The second was Claire Ernhart, a developmental psychologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, who called Needleman’s study “slipshod.” Beginning in 1983, Ernhart, who had conducted lead research, received about $50,000 a year from ILZRO for research support but denies being beholden to the lead industry or speaking on its behalf. Scarr claims not to have received money from ILZRO other than expert witness fees and likewise denied industry influence....

In all, the attacks on Needleman’s work and integrity and his defense against them dragged on for 15 years.

Intentional disinformation is a major theme of this (59 minute) lecture by Philip Mirowski, an economic historian (he focuses largely on global warming but the principles and rationale apply broadly to other cases of economically incentivized disinformation): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7ewn29w-9I

Among other things, it references the work of Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming, and Robert N. Proctor's Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition.

I discuss these at more length here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/deep_ecology/comments/1yum2c/life_an...

gretful3• 12 years ago

Sounds like the attacks of the global warming alarmists on people that question their theories.

Jweb_Guru2• 12 years ago

Thanks for the link to that lecture, it's rather amazing.

maxerickson• 12 years ago

Sesame Street debuted in 1969.

Whenever I see stories like this, I wonder what sort of impact it has had.

taf2• 12 years ago

Or to say the introduction of violent video games in the mid to late 90s and the rise in gun violence in schools in the last few years? Young children growing up with the increase exposure to violence could be related?

mikeash11• 12 years ago

Pac-Man was introduced in 1980. Many of the children who grew up with it have gone on to spend a lot of time eating pills in the dark while listening to electronic music. The link is clear.

CamperBob23• 12 years ago

Or to say the introduction of violent video games in the mid to late 90s and the rise in gun violence in schools in the last few years?

Oh, you must mean this ( http://www.theesa.com/policy/scotus_chart.gif ) rise in violence.

err4nt• 12 years ago

Okay, would you mind pointing out to me just when during this timeline you believe video games made a big impact...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the...

downandout12• 12 years ago

Correlation does not imply causation. While lead exposure may have something to do with it, an issue like the crime rate is driven by a number of complex factors.

Perfect example of why this type of analysis is ridiculous:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_indicator

jackvalentine2• 12 years ago

This is not a meaningful contribution to the conversation. If you'd read the comments and replies made before you posted perhaps you'd have been able to contribute something other than the trite "correlation does not imply causation" which may just be the most obnoxious phrase on the internet today.

downandout12• 12 years ago

I strongly disagree with the article for one reason: Correlation does not imply causation. That is what I said. I realize that my comment flies in the face of the opinion of radical environmentalists. Does that make my opinion invalid?

mikeash11• 12 years ago

Correlation does imply causation. It does not guarantee causation.

Someone• 12 years ago

Also, in this case, we have multiple cases of correlations. Throwing three sixes in a row wit a die isn't evidence that a die is loaded, but doing that 10 times out of 20 attempts? Highly suspicious.

Of course, with a die, we can weigh it, find its center of gravity, cut it poem, etc. that makes it easier to 'prove' what's the cause of our extraordinary luck.

Bu suppose we find that the die contains some mechanism that allows one to change its center of gravity. Then, we cannot be sure that all those '3 sixes in a row' throws were caused by a change in the center of gravity.

Here, the case is more difficult, because we cannot cut open the object of study.

dfc2• 12 years ago

You might enjoy this article: "Correlation does not imply causation: How the Internet fell in love with a stats-class cliché"

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

downandout12• 12 years ago

Cliche or not, in this case and many other cases, it remains true.

etfb• 12 years ago

That comment was such an epic burn, it contributed to global warming!

... Which is why, I suspect, the commenter you replied to won't believe it either. Sigh.

6d0debc0712• 12 years ago

Correlation does not imply causation.

Okay, accepting that as a working assumption for the argument: What does? It's not things happening together that implies it, it's not things not happening together that implies it - negative and positive correlation respectively - so what is it?

The only other explanation I can think of is an understanding of the underlying mechanism, but what's that understanding based on? It can't be understandings of underlying mechanisms all the way down - you have to acquire the data from observation at some point.

api3• 12 years ago

Lead is well understood to be a neurotoxin. There's a clear mechanism of action here.

Mvandenbergh2• 12 years ago

Correlation does imply causation, it just doesn't prove it.

Multiple correlations over different data sets, in the presence of an extremely plausible mechanism - we know for a fact what lead exposure does to developing brains - is as close as we ever really get to proving a causative link in this world.

thrownaway24245• 12 years ago

The incredible thing is that they still allow private aviators to use leaded gas, primarily because it would cost the owners of obsolete aircraft a few thousands dollars to either refit their engines, or get supplemental type certificates for unleaded gas. These joyriding dipshits fly all over the place spraying lead over everybody.

chmars• 12 years ago

You certainly seem to hate general aviation!

AV gas is being replaced step by step but since leaded gas has its advantages, the replacement process takes time – and there is no really convincing alternative. Anyway, the amount of lead is probably no significant factor in air pollution, there is simply not enough general aviator flying for that.

scoot• 12 years ago

45 years isn't long enough?

thrownaway24245• 12 years ago

I don't hate general aviation at all. But I do hate the segment of the AOPA who are basically an offshoot of the NRA, the 100LL-from-our-cold-dead-hands faction. It sounds like you are an aviator so you must be familiar with the people I am talking about.

It's true that if you average the consumption of avgas over the service of the planet you get a pretty small number, but that's no consolation to the family at the end of the airfield who actually gets all of that stuff deposited in their back yard.

MaggieL• 12 years ago

At $6/gal you can be sure we're not spraying a lot of it.

-- signed: Joyriding Dipshit

(jealousy is an ugly, ugly thing...)

Theodores• 12 years ago

Even more incredible is that our parents and grandparents willingly drove cars that spewed out lead into the atmosphere.

They knew lead was a poison.

Even the Romans knew lead was a poison so it wasn't like asbestos where suddenly a realisation was made.

Yet everyone pretended it did not matter. Everyone did what everyone else did. Nobody thought to avoid driving past schools because they weren't sure about the ethics of covering kids in a cloud of lead (with NO2, CO, O3, PAH's and maybe some invisible micro particles thrown into the mix).

thrownaway24245• 12 years ago

I don't think it's that people pretended it didn't matter. They intentionally sited the pollution in neighborhoods full of Those Other People. Take, as an example, my town of Oakland, California. Are there freeways all over West Oakland? You bet. Are there freeways in Piedmont? Of course not. Rich people have historically been pretty careful to keep the freeways out of their neighborhoods. Airborne lead doesn't get very far from the freeway before it hits the ground.

Your overall point is right, though, that mid-20th-century motorist pretty much behaved like an oblivious jerk for decades.

theandrewbailey• 12 years ago

Our parents and grandparents were the joyriding dipshits.

benjiweber• 12 years ago

Many people still drive around cars that spew toxins into the atmosphere.

Air pollution from cars kills 50,000 a year in the UK [0]. Apparently closer to 200,000 a year in the US.

But it's even worse than that. 1.24 million each year are killed directly by motorists.[1] There are more young people killed directly by motorists than malaria or aids.

And yet many people are happy to continue driving around.

It's not like this is unavoidable. Electric cars are here, we could move the pollution out of cities. We could design our cities to be safer for walking and cycling. We could invest in public transport and pass on the cost of some of the externalities of cars to motorists.

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/mar/22/air-pollu... [1] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs358/en/

rpmcb2• 12 years ago

As a "joyriding dipshit," I can assure you we're not spraying you with lead. General Aviation is moving away from leaded fuel in general. In fact, Shell recently announced an unleaded alternative to AvGas that can be used in a normal engine without issue. No new equipment required.

http://www.aopa.org/News-and-Video/All-News/2013/December/3/...

thrownaway24245• 12 years ago

That's wonderful, but get back to me when the FAA (or the EPA) actually outlaws 100LL. Offering unleaded gas at airfields, even if that happens, won't solve the problem of people using leaded gas. Hell, there isn't even an FBO anywhere around where I live that offers an autogas pump. It's 100LL or JetA or nothing.

throwaway00102• 12 years ago

Getting rid of lead in gasoline is important because we consume a LOT of gasoline. We don't consume nearly so much Avgas -- it's about three orders of magnitude difference and as such it's a drastically smaller pollution source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas#Consumption

If you're truly concerned about lead in the environment you'd be best served going after old structures with leaded paint -- not Avgas.

ak217• 12 years ago

Old structures with leaded paint don't routinely spray it in a fine mist of particulates from several thousand feet in the air, do they?

Do I understand correctly that leaded paint is harmless until scratched or otherwise dispersed?

mikeash11• 12 years ago

And yet avgas is still responsible for nearly half of lead emissions in the US now. That seems significant.

PavlovsCat2• 12 years ago

That graph seems silly, why use two different time scales?

6d0debc0712• 12 years ago

They're showing it roughly twenty years later. The argument being, in effect, that lead exposure when young lead to later-life criminal behaviour.

PavlovsCat2• 12 years ago

Oops, now I feel silly :) Thanks.

andrew93101• 12 years ago

I think the idea is that lead exposure in childhood leads to crime later in life

yukichan• 12 years ago

I've read about a couple of different explanations for changes in crime rates. I think freakanomics has discussed greater prevalence of abortions[1], and one thing I've heard in academic circles is that crime reporting has gotten better. You could actually make predictions with this article's question. There may have been areas where lead was used in petrol for longer than others, one could compare across regions and see if the time at which petrol was changed also adheres to drop in crime to see if there is still a correlation.

http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-sh...

dayyan• 12 years ago

It is probably more accurate that allowing unwanted children to be aborted resulted in the drop of crime 20 years later than the removal of lead. This was mentioned in Freakonomics the movie as yukichan linked.

XorNot3• 12 years ago

Yeah except that is 1 datapoint cherry picked vs. the wealth of evidence across national borders that leaded petrol was to blame.

wobbleblob2• 12 years ago

Levitt and Dubner wrote down a number of interesting theories about lots of things, but I think they overthought this one.

The crime rate rose and dropped pretty neatly along with the proportion of young men in society. The median age is much higher now than it was 30 years ago. Crime, especially violent crime, is a young man's game.

Perhaps they are right and roe vs wade was one of the factors in raising the median age, but it seems that people today want smaller families, and have more control over this than a generation ago. You can't assume that if a woman has an abortion, a miscarriage and two kids over her lifetime, she would have had four children if it hadn't been for the abortion and the miscarriage.

XorNot3• 12 years ago

While I've been generally convined Freakonomics is to be considered suspect on this, the argument you present in the last paragraph doesn't counter it: the Freakonomics point was that absent abortion, people were forced into having children earlier when they were not ready to support them fiscally or emotively due to their situation, whereas with control of their fertility they can choose when they are best prepared and most desired them.

vacri10• 12 years ago

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.

vacri10• 12 years ago

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.

jtheory3• 12 years ago

Lead was removed from petrol at a time of massive upheaval in the way the public looked at raising their kids.

Okay; now did that public view also change per-state, and per-country, tracking the date ranges that lead was removed?

The crime rates track when lead was added/removed regionally, not just generally.

kbenson• 12 years ago

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.

vacri10• 12 years ago

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.

spamizbad2• 12 years ago

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?)

As for youth distractions: The internet did not have significant saturation until the 00s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_States seems to indicate that in 2000, only 2.5% of Internet users had broadband.

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.

vacri10• 12 years ago

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 :)

TazeTSchnitzel• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

downandout12• 12 years ago

Careful, they're out in droves downvoting anyone that disagrees with the premise of this story.

vacri10• 12 years ago

We don't need Betteridge's Law quoted every single time there's a question mark in the article title.

corprew• 12 years ago

'they'?

DanBC5• 12 years ago

I downvoted you. I didn't downvote you because you disagree with the article, but because your comments are empty dismissals of the headline without addressing the points in the article.

I also downvote anyone who mentions betteridge if they don't make any other point. Comments like those are toxic and pointless. They add nothing to any discussion. We know that headlines are usually stupid and misleading and link baity. Ignore headlines. Read the article and talk about that instead.

dfc2• 12 years ago

I do not think this is a constructive comment. What was the point of submitting this comment?

Crito• 12 years ago

Betteridge's Law of Headlines is not always true. You can demonstrate this by constructing the headline "Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines always true?"

If the law is always true, then the answer to that headline is "Yes", even though the law dictates that the answer must be "No." This is paradoxical. However if the law is not always true, then the answer to the headline is "No". This invokes no paradox.

dhughes• 12 years ago

Yup, Cosmos was on tonight, subject: lead. It's nice to see it got some brains fired-up.

PBS also had a great series the Poisoner's Handbook about different poisonous elements and the one about lead was more in-depth about leaded gasoline. Charles Norris was an amazing person! http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/introduc...

parfe• 12 years ago

NPR just ran the story "Study: Half Of Jailed NYC Youths Have Brain Injury"

The study found nearly 50 percent of both boys and girls reported traumatic brain injuries that resulted in a loss of consciousness, amnesia or both. And they said 55 percent of those injuries were caused by assaults.

An estimated 60 percent of adult prisoners have a brain injury, according to a study of prisoners in South Carolina.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3045728...

The US justice system has become extreme in the pursuit of punishment vs treatment and rehabilitation.

mikeash11• 12 years ago

"Become"? When was it not?

troels• 12 years ago

Prisons were initially invented as correction facilities, rather than instruments of punishment. Before this, crime was mostly dealt with by physical punishment.

AlexMuir2• 12 years ago

That is vs 30-40% of the general population.

There's nothing unexpected here. Youths mostly go to jail for violence. The more fights you get into, the more likely you are to be injured. I'd imagine that there's a far larger percentage of number of jailed youths with knife scars than those in school. That doesn't mean knife scars cause people to end up in prison.

edoloughlin• 12 years ago

I'm no neurologist, but i suspect that a brain injury might change your personality more than a scar from a knife fight, possibly making you more likely to engage in criminal behaviour.

baddox2• 12 years ago

It's not really in pursuit of punishment either. It's in pursuit of putting taxpayer money into people's pockets.

jrockway• 12 years ago

There is plenty of money to be made in curing mental illnesses. A prison is a lot less profitable than a drug.

A_COMPUTER• 12 years ago

Are there countries, or locations in the USA that could be used as a control for this hypothesis? Places that didn't get rid of lead.

enf2• 12 years ago

The control is Australia, which got rid of it about a decade later than the US.

api3• 12 years ago

Are there places that still use it?

klipt• 12 years ago

South Africa only phased it out completely in 2006: http://www.southafrica.info/services/consumer/clean_fuel0812...

stormbrew2• 12 years ago

I think there are still places that are within the 20 year window of the abolishment of lead, but they'd be disappearing pretty fast. Since we can probably assume that there is no place in the world that will or would indefinitely allow the use of lead in gasoline (and if they would, obtaining meaningful crime reporting numbers out of them might be tricky), comparing the time lag across jurisdictions is the best control we'll probably get.

adwf• 12 years ago

There are places that got rid of lead much later than others, they also showed a corresponding later decline in crime levels. What's even more interesting is that the decline occurs regardless of criminal policy (eg. zero tolerance or rehabilitation, shorter/longer sentences).

ignostic• 12 years ago

It's been suggested that the removal of lead from fuels, paints, etc. may explain the fact that our IQs have risen since about the same time, and since leveled off somewhat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Say what you will about environment, but the lead explanation seems to match historical data in all the ways we'd expect it to. Find something that lead does, and we find a trend showing its decline since we started eliminating lead.

api3• 12 years ago

I wonder how this interacts with IQ differences by ethnicity, given that historically some ethnic groups tended to live in inner cities where lead exposure would have been significantly greater.

thaumasiotes2• 12 years ago

This has been studied. Gains from the Flynn effect don't show a relationship to race effects in IQ.

ern• 12 years ago

Reading the Wikipedia article seems to indicate that most of the rises in IQ due to the Flynn effect happened during the period when fuel lead levels were high.

Would they have risen faster without lead?

gretful3• 12 years ago

Speaking of historical data: leaded plumbing is linked to the decline of the Roman Empire.

shabble• 12 years ago

Are there reliable sources on that?

Also, using Lead Acetate[1] as an artificial sweetener probably didn't help matters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%28II%29_acetate#Sweetener

aliakbarkhan• 12 years ago

[citation needed]

Panoramix• 12 years ago

This is debunked here: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23o92d/on_cos...

spingsprong• 12 years ago

I what some people here seemed to be missing, is this correlation isn't just lead was removed from the environment and 23 years later crime went down. It's that various areas has differing degrees of lead pollution and started reducing it at different times.

The places that reduced lead pollution first, saw the drop in crime first, the places that reduced it later saw the drop later. The eras that initially had high levels of lead had a larger drop in crime than areas that always had a low level.

And it's not just the USA either. The pattern holds pretty accurately for various nations around the world, like in Europe. Those who banned leaded fuel first, saw the drop in crime first, those who banned later, saw the drop later.

And these nations had massively differing crime policies. Some nations increased prison sentences to try and deter crime, and crime went down. Some nations put a huge effort into reforming criminals, and crime went down. And some nations cut prison sentence, and crime went down.

shawkinaw• 12 years ago

Not to mention the fact that it makes a lot of sense. Statistics is not the only evidence supporting this theory.

mendicantB2• 12 years ago

Statistics is the means of testing whether or not something is evidence.

I understand what you meant, it's an intuitive conclusion, one that doesn't seem like magic. But, something making sense usually does not correlate with or serve as evidence of it being true.

charlieflowers• 12 years ago

Perhaps another study should be done following individuals. It seems a decent attempt at disproving the hypothesis.

Take say 50 specific individuals ... actually look at where they lived each year of their lives, and estimate as accurately as possible their lead exposure. If they move cross country, "follow" them and estimate the change in lead exposure accordingly.

Once you have an assessment of the lifetime lead exposure of the 50 people, see if it predicts their levels of criminal behavior or aggression.

bjeanes• 12 years ago

I'm not sure that would work. The 20 odd year lag seems to be a generational gap, not a delay in concrete effects on any specific person.

gwern4• 12 years ago

Crime is rare enough that you wouldn't get any sort of conclusive result from the variations in lead level among 50 people.

(Example: suppose 0.1% of people become murders in their lives, and lead is 100% responsible for every murder, and you had 2 groups of 50 people who had either tons of lead or no lead exposure at all; what will the result be? Likely, no murderers in your total group of 100 at all and certainly no difference between the two groups - despite extremely generous assumptions!)

FranOntanaya• 12 years ago

Aren't the politics required to enforce lead reduction the same that would tackle crime, though? I don't think there are many enviromentally-friendly corrupt parties.

lmm• 12 years ago

Huhwhat? What's corruption got to do with it?

wisty• 12 years ago

You wouldn't think there were many corrupt religious parties either, but politics doesn't always work that way.

jtheory3• 12 years ago

The crime reduction reliably occurs 20 (23, from the graph?) years after the lead reduction; there's no response in the crime rate until the less-lead-exposed babies have become adults.

The politicians who tackled crime (or didn't, or did whatever) 20 years ago haven't been in power most of the time since then, generally.

I've read about this theory before; it's impressive and (to me, at least) pretty persuasive.

mixmax3• 12 years ago

If the theory is true it could also account for the fact that violent crime is more abundant per capita in urban areas compared to rural areas since lead from gasoline will obviously be more abundant in cities with lots of cars per square mile compared to rural areas with very few cars.

Here's a link (2 minutes of googling..) showing the difference. http://www.victimsofcrime.org/library/crime-information-and-...

Timmmmmm• 12 years ago

Yeah pretty sure that's because of other more obvious factors:

* Greater anonymity in cities * Higher population density * Juxtaposition of poverty and wealth

Flow• 12 years ago

Thank you for this really interesting comment.

I wonder if the lead could leave the body, and if the effects it had are somewhat reversed over time, for those that lived in environments with much traffic.

Do you have any idea about this?

ekr• 12 years ago

If I remember correctly (haven't read this article), there's some sort of offset between decrease in lead and crime reduction, which seems to suggest that it is infants and young children who are affected, or lead actually affects the development of some areas of the brain (the offset was explained by the fact that infants and children don't usually commit crimes, but they do once they get slightly older).

So it is not lead itself, (or the presence of it in your organism) that makes you more likely to commit crimes, but having your brain development impaired by it while an infant that does.

I don't have time to search for the article, but it came up with the last discussion on this topic here.

duskwuff• 12 years ago

My understanding is that lead poisoning during pregnancy and early childhood causes the brain to not develop normally, which is what likely leads to a propensity to criminal behavior. Removing lead from the body later in life would be unlikely to help, as the damage has already occurred.

achy• 12 years ago

It's always interesting when statistics correlate across multiple frames (time, location, etc.); however that still doesn't prove causality. I'm inclined to think that the causes behind an area being slow to remove leaded gasoline could also affect crime rates.

edmccard2• 12 years ago

I'm inclined to think that the causes behind an area being slow to remove leaded gasoline could also affect crime rates.

The statistics show a 20-year lag between the banning of leaded gasoline and reduction in crime rates. So even if "unwilling to ban leaded gas" and "high crime 20 years later" could be correlated, it seems less likely that the same things that cause "willing to ban leaded gas" are also the cause of "lower crime 20 years later".

abandonliberty• 12 years ago

The answer to any headline question is supposed to be 'No!'

Thank you.

jrochkind13• 12 years ago

This reminds me very much of the study that correlated legalized abortion with a decline in crime -- I believe it also showed it wasn't just a general global trend with legalized abortion and dropping crime, but that places that legalized abortion first saw crime drop first etc.

I think the conclusion is obvious: Removing lead from petrol lead to legalized abortion. Or was it vice versa?

But seriously, I think we need statistical analysis showing the correlation between legalized abortion and unleaded gasoline. Perhaps it would actually show that places that legalized abortion first actually WERE correlated with places that unleaded gasoline first.

It would be silly to assume causation there, even if the correlation were just as strong. Which would be a useful reminder about correlation and causation. Just because you have a correlation where causation is _plausible_ still doesn't mean causation.

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

What they might also be misssing -- and the article highlights this -- is that its not just a correlation analysis. There's also a fairly well-developed explanation for the causal mechanism that justifies the hypothesis -- lead has already been established to have significant effects on brain development and behavior (and been specifically linked problems in impulse control and executive functioning.)

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

Midgley is perhaps among the most damaging engineers the world has known: he is responsible for both tetraethyl lead additives to gasoline (the subject of this article) and chloroflorcarbons, responsible for damaging the Earth's ozone layer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.

This story is also a very strong argument toward both regulation of markets due to externalities (lead in gasoline and paint were defended vigorously by their respective industries for decades), and of the argument that there are some products and services which, despite being profitable to those dealing in them directly, impose a net negative cost to society as a whole.

Such activities are often difficult to recognize strictly because of the nature of externalities: they're diffuse, affecting many individuals, often incrementally in a small way, often indirectly and, in the case of environmental lead, with impacts lagging cause by decades.

This is also a very powerful case of negative impacts accruing largely due to socioeconomic circumstances not ascribable to the conscious and voluntary decisions of those directly affected: neither the infants and children exposed to lead, nor the victims of the criminal acts they transacted on a probabilistically greater scale, had entered into any sort of voluntary or legally recognized agreement with the manufacturers of leaded gas and paint. Punches a bit of a hole in that whole libertarian argument which promptly ... sinks like a lead balloon.

tim333• 12 years ago

Mildly off topic but Bill Bryson is interesting on how we ended up getting lead in petrol in the first place http://enconv.org/docs/index-26824.html?page=11

Except: "So in 1923 three of America’s largest corporations, General Motors, Du Pont, and Standard Oil of New Jersey, formed a joint enterprise called the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation (later shortened to simply Ethyl Corporation) with a view to making as much tetraethyl lead as the world was willing to buy, and that proved to be a very great deal. They called their additive “ethyl” because it sounded friendlier and less toxic than “lead” and introduced it for public consumption (in more ways than most people realized) on February 1, 1923.

Almost at once production workers began to exhibit the staggered gait and confused faculties that mark the recently poisoned. Also almost at once, the Ethyl Corporation embarked on a policy of calm but unyielding denial that would serve it well for decades. As Sharon Bertsch McGrayne notes in her absorbing history of industrial chemistry, Prometheans in the Lab , when employees at one plant developed irreversible delusions, a spokesman blandly informed reporters: “These men probably went insane because they worked too hard.” Altogether at least fifteen workers died in the early days of production of leaded gasoline, and untold numbers of others became ill, often violently so; the exact numbers are unknown because the company nearly always managed to hush up news of embarrassing leakages, spills, and poisonings. At times, however, suppressing the news became impossible, most notably in 1924 when in a matter of days five production workers died and thirty-five more were turned into permanent staggering wrecks at a single ill-ventilated facility. ..."

drakaal• 12 years ago

I ate lead paint chips I turned out fine... None of those felony charges stuck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckeye_CableSystem

I don't doubt that the reduction of lead in our environment has reduced the amount of mental illness. But I also think changes to truancy laws in the US in the 70s helped, advancements in psychotherapies, and drugs for the treatment of mental illness helped. Identification of treatments for ADD and ADHD helped.

Changes in the economy helped, we had more women in the workforce which meant we had more ability for families to survive father's unemployment.

Wider adoption of TV meant people became more aware of crime, and criminals were easier to catch.

So yes, lead removal was probably a contributor, but I think it was bigger than that.

vixin• 12 years ago

Maybe there is an interesting story to be written concerning another heavy metal - mercury and its use in dental amalgam.

Aside from whether it's prudent - irrespective of current evidence - to permanently store a compound containing 50% of a neurotoxin an inch or two from your brain, the release of almost 3,000 kilograms (6,613 lbs.) of mercury (data for 2005 alone) into the atmosphere from crematoria is cause for worry. Wikipedia notes that 'Good empirical data on the magnitude of mercury emissions from crematoria, however, are lacking'. No one is interested I guess.

dschiptsov• 12 years ago

Correlation is not causation. Of course, there is a correlation between pollution and "depression" (as in "depressive regions") or "desperation", but it is not a direct cause of seemed decline in crime.

My bet is that the decline (or at least shift to less dramatic "technological/financial" crimes) is a cultural phenomena, influenced heavily by cheap and easy credit and media (especially so-called "social media"). It is just not cool or fashionable to be a dumb looter or a "primitive" gangster anymore.

Nowadays one has to be "a clever guy" - a cheater instead of a criminal, an internet tycoon, overcharging credit cards of idiots who had ordered a colon cleanser form a stupid website, instead of simple armed robber of a drugstore on the corner.

This works even for Russia, which, putting aside some African extremes, is the most criminalized society in the world. Even for them it is more fashionable to run a porn studio to sell pictures in the net than robbing trucks or brutally killing each other for a used BMW car.

Nowadays one has to be "clever" to steal from the government, to gamble the corrupted [banking] system , cheat on idiots in internet, and even with their own credits and mortgages.

The shift from stupid brutality to technological/financial/social "cleverness" (as they think of it) is what others call "decline in crime".)

NAFV_P• 12 years ago

An enlightening article, it reminded me of an article from the Guardian on ammonia synthesis and its environmental and social impact:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/03/fritz-haber-f...

1stop• 12 years ago

Removing lead also lead to greater usage of facebook! Look at the stats!

Lead Usage:

   |\
   | \
   |  \
   -----

Facebook usage:

   |  /
   | /
   |/
   -----

EDIT: While my post is satirical, and slightly obnoxious, it presents about as much evidence and citation as the article. The graph he presents (where did that come from?) doesn't even show proper correlation, it just kinda-sort-of fits.

matthewmacleod4• 12 years ago

First off, this is a news article - not a peer-reviewed study. You can't reasonably expect complete detail to be included - have a look at the linked papers.

Second, there's substantially more detail in here than you have stated. For example, the correlation between the decrease in violent crime and the use of lead is reproduced in areas with differing crime policy, and shows a similar kind of decline in areas which stopped using lead earlier or later than others.

Third, "it just kinda-sort-of fits" is all you will ever get in anything outside of pure mathematics. The real world is pretty noisy, and exact correlation is never going to happen.

jmnicolas• 12 years ago

I'm a target shooter, I wonder how the lead contained in the bullets and that is burned at firing time is affecting me :s

DanBC5• 12 years ago

This was a concern for the armed forces who have conducted studies on lead-alternatives for ammunition. (Aplogies if I get my bullet terminology wrong - I have little idea about this stuff. Here I'm talking about the lead slug projectile part of the round of ammunition).

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19116438

I think that alternatives cause other problems by stripping the gun barrel and etc.

On a gentle tangent I sometimes wonder how many rounds of ammunition were fired during Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And how much brass and lead there is for local populations to recover and sell. And whether that's worth the risk of handling unfored ammunition or finding cluster bomblets or similar.

logfromblammo2• 12 years ago

The brass would be more easily recovered. The lead and depleted uranium is not quite so simply recycled.

Recall that hollow-point ammunition is banned for use by national armies. A lot of their munitions are designed to tumble in soft tissue or to shatter on impact. Some rounds are intended to send a rivulet of liquified metal through armor.

Under such conditions, I am sure that a lot of the fired rounds ended up as dust, to either be inhaled immediately or to become a soil contaminant later. Turning every battle site into a Superfund-style cleanup is unlikely according to the local economics.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

If I shot a lot, I would be concerned: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19395342

I use lead-free pellets in a pellet rifle, which we keep on hand to shoot at animals that want to eat our chickens. It seems like a lot more pellets are lead-free now than just a few years ago. I don't like the idea of lead pellets laying around on my property. Most lead-free pellets also claim to be "high velocity' so it seems unlikely they are wearing the rifle barrel more than lead pellets.

frik• 12 years ago

The European Union (EU) banned lead from petrol in 2000. [1]

Airplanes are still allowed to used leaded petrol!! [1]

And the immigration movement to Europe increased the crime. [2]

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorenbenzin#Verbleites_Benzin

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Europe

jamesbrownuhh• 12 years ago

I wonder if the result could be less about the lead itself having a direct effect on behaviour, and the action of the removal of lead being identified as "something obvious and beneficial which would be good to do" as being coincident with a greater enlightenment amongst those making the rules?

I.e. to what extent "we should remove lead from petrol as that is obviously bad" is actually a handy indicator of more considered minds running the shop, those minds also being more predisposed to the kind of other "obviously good" decisions which could also have brought about an eventual reduction in crime.

mrfusion• 12 years ago

Does anyone think there could also be a link between lead in fuel and Alzheimer's? If there was, at what point would we start seeing Alzheimer's cause decline?

kayoone• 12 years ago

Previous HN discussion a year ago with 200 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006368

ap222133• 12 years ago

I grew up in the 90s and can affirm that violence was substantially higher than now. It was common to get into 'street fights' just for something to do. But, I'm also curious whether there were higher death rates for the potentially violent, which could have also rapidly reduced crime rates.

Of my friends in the 80s / 90s, I've had around 20 of them die over the course of 20 years. Of those who've died, I can say the great majority were in the 'violence prone' category. They generally seemed to have lower ability to gauge risks and sought out risky behavior, frequently.

ap222133• 12 years ago

Why all the down votes? HN is becoming a hostile wasteland.

pmorici• 12 years ago

Is there anything new in this article? There was another piece that I think I remember reading on HN about a year ago on this same topic.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

puppetmaster3• 12 years ago

A bit like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_controversy

rwhitman• 12 years ago

I've never seen a study correlating the rise and ubiquity of video games with the drop in crime.

Before video games, bored young males ran around the neighborhood making mayhem. Today they sit in front of an xbox. I personally think the people who would be out committing violent crimes are still in society they just have a way doing it virtually.

akgerber• 12 years ago

I can't find a link at the moment, but I've seen articles where parents in bad neighborhoods talk about buying their sons video game consoles specifically to keep them sitting at home, rather than out on the dangerous streets.

SonicSoul• 12 years ago

funny, i was just speaking with someone this weekend who was convinced about correlation to crime in NYC vs legalized abortion. (Donohue-Levitt hypothesis) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_ef...

Symmetry3• 12 years ago

Scott Alexander had a pretty good blog post on other sorts of potential biological correlates with crime recently.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/18/proposed-biological-exp...

aestra• 12 years ago

This is relevant. Always use cold water from your pipes to cook with and drink especially if you live in an older home. Also let the water run for a minute to flush out the pipes if it hasn't been used in a while.

The EPA states:

Flush your pipes before drinking, and only use cold water for consumption. The more time water has been sitting in your home's pipes, the more lead it may contain. Anytime the water in a particular faucet has not been used for six hours or longer, "flush" your cold-water pipes by running the water until it becomes as cold as it will get. This could take as little as five to thirty seconds if there has been recent heavy water use such as showering or toilet flushing. Otherwise, it could take two minutes or longer. Your water utility will inform you if longer flushing times are needed to respond to local conditions.
Use only water from the cold-water tap for drinking, cooking, and especially for making baby formula. Hot water is likely to contain higher levels of lead. The two actions recommended above are very important to the health of your family. They will probably be effective in reducing lead levels because most of the lead in household water usually comes from the plumbing in your house, not from the local water supply.

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8615/is-there-an...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/health/29real.html?_r=0

ds9• 12 years ago

It's significant that there is this advice, and it supports the point of the article, but this is really insufficient. If you can't be sure of the water quality at the tap (as parent notes, different from the quality at the plant where the utility measures contaminant levels), then it's best to use a filter that removes metals (as well as biological contaminants).

Also people should be aware: the government somehow allows pipes and fittings to be sold as "lead free" when in reality they contain up to a few percent of lead.

BAKidd• 12 years ago

Be careful with filters-the main issue with lead is that it leaches from pipes and/or solder. Most of the cases I am aware of in modern (post 1970s) US homes were related to whole house reverse osmosis systems, because the ion-free water had so much more capacity for free metal ions. If you have hard water, it is almost impossible to persuade lead out of the pipe into solution. If you do want to use a filter, make sure you have an at the tap point filter as well.

jbb555• 12 years ago

No. It's mostly due to the big increase in standards of living over the past 40 years. But the BBC don't want to admit that things have actually improved quite a lot because it conflicts with the narrative they try to push day after day so it must be...petrol.

Did removing lead from petrol spark a decline in crime?

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