Hey, check out Mayor Secretary Pete on childhood lead poisoning:
The benefit of *not being lead poisoned* is not speculative. It is enormous.
And because lead poisoning leads to irreversible cognitive harm, massive economic loss, and even higher crime rates, this work represents one of the best returns on public investment ever observed. https://t.co/uFVsTCebwt
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) March 8, 2024
I think Pete is the highest ranking official I've seen endorsing the lead-crime theory. Good work!
Kevin, you're just going to ignore the fact that the GOP is now openly pro-lead in the water?
To the GOP there are no facts. Just opinions, and inconvenient ones can be freely ignored.
-- Just more of reality's liberal bias.
A variation of Cleek's Law?
Lead poisoning has myriad effects beyond the crime hypothesis. Doubt that any person, thoughtful or not, would wish this one any child. But we’re dealing with today’s sad remnant of the Republican Party? Who knows.
It's a party that openly embraces sociopathy.
It's not necessarily their fault, they were probably exposed to too much lead as children. Between eating peeling paint, playing in dirt contaminated with tetraethyl lead, and spending too much time in under ventilated shooting ranges, they didn’t stand a chance.
Cruelty is a feature of their "solutions" to society's problems, not a bug.
GOP wants lead in our water so we can absorb radioactive particles in the coming nuclear holocaust.
Plus, they need to grow their base of half-wits.
(Don't hold me to the science--I'm relating the GOP position)
See, there goes Old Joe Biden again sending one of Those People out to talk about "science" when everybody knows he just wants to spend money to increase the deficit because ... um ... he hates America so much! Yeah, that's it!
Kris Kobach? I thought he had deservedly sunk into obscurity.
KK, uniting wheat farmers from Atchison to Zurich (Kansas...)
About time...
Now when and they going to follow your advice and remove the old windows and window sills?
Kevin, let me say that you should take a bow. OK, it's been a decade since you so elegantly summarized the Nevin/Wolpaw Reyes literature. But with crisp prose and lovely charts, you did as much as anyone to popularize this and bring it into the policy mainstream. The "good work" is as much yours as anyone's!
Mazel Tov, my friend.
(A reader since Calpundit)
So true.
Wait. Don't YOU think the benefits of replacing lead pipes are highly speculative relative to getting lead out of topsoil?
The pipes are either a current bad or a ticking time bomb. Lead in soil is more disperse and difficult to find.
But it's not an either-or.
Since topsoil removal is incredibly expensive and difficult it kind of is.
Causality, in regards to human behavior, is difficult for conservatives to deal with. From their perspective, we are born bad and only redemption and right beliefs (added later) will save us. That some exogeneous factor can make us worse and more likely to do harm to others doesn't square with their world view.
I have also had liberals push back on the lead hypothesis. I think it doesn't fully align with some pet beliefs about why people do evil, and they don't like the deterministic implications. Really, I think liberals have a difficult time dealing with the fact that some people are just shit from day one. It's a small percentage, but that percentage does a tremendous amount of harm.
Particularly if they've got power, or wealth, or high political position. We all know who we're talking about here, right?
Also, I think some of the speculating about motives is overthinking. Today's GQP seems motivated purely by
I1) pwning the Libz, and
(2) getting big "likes" on social media and the rest of the vast rightwing noise machine.
I've lately speculated that the reason democracy and capitalism work well together is that capitalism gives the higher-functioning Alpha psychopaths their own playground to play in rather than seeking 'ultimate power' through politics. Probably read that somewhere....
I've only known two psychopaths (where it was a certainty) in my life and both ended up in prison. They were also both....not very bright and that way out of the box. I shudder what to think they would have done were they higher functioning.
Lead-crime is based on the premise that rises and falls in crime in the 20th Century could be explained by lead in gasoline and its removal, yes? And there were/are various charts in support of same.
Lead water pipes pre-date leaded gasoline by decades. Centuries even. Are there corresponding charts for lead pipes and their removal and rise/fall in crime?
Lead was in gas, paint, more pipes, etc. It has all been dropping over that time.
Lead pipes aren't as big a problem as they sound like they might be because the interior becomes encrusted sealing in the lead. They're a problem only when they're new, for a year or two, or when they've been disturbed by something, as by vibrations from an earthquake or from construction, or passing trains or subways, carpet bombing, tornadoes. Every time you might hook up something new to the pipes it threatens to crack the patina.
Indeed. Scale is good.
(Opportunity for “that explains it” and dismissal as anecdatum aside, I grew up through the 60s to 80s in a circa 1915 DC townhome. Lead service pipes, and lead paint a plenty.)
So, that explains it.
Good. You can swing and hit a softball 🙂
I pride myself on the obvious.
Don't forget that the Flint Michigan lead problem and a lead problem in Washington, DC a little over 20 years ago was due to change is water treatment additives that caused corrosion of the patina causing the lead to again leach into the tap water running into the houses.
It does sound like an endorsement of lead-crime! Although I don't really think there's anything controversial about the idea that lead can lead to more violent and criminal behavior, at least individually. It's only unproven whether it's been responsible for the 70s-2000s crime surge.
The Rule of Seven Cs:
Correlation in Confirmation is Cause
Correlation in Contradiction is Coincidence
Clearly…
You should read the book The Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster. It details the catastrophic effects that lead water pipes had from the 1850s to 1940s. The severe medical risk of high lead levels were understood even in the 1850s. Blood lead levels reached as high as 30 microgram/dL simply from leaded water pipes. This was the cause of the enormous crime wave that started in 1900 and reached a climax in 1930. The next crime climaxed in 1995 when the crime from lead in gas reached the top. We still do not know what a society without crime from lead will look like because lead continues to cause harm even at current low levels.
The fact that KD jumps to attention whenever lead comes up in public discourse is starting to make me more skeptical of it, not less.
Youth crime is like infectious disease. Without lead there is virtually no youth crime and without infectious disease (due to vaccines) there are no pandemics. It is only after the crime and the pandemics have almost vanished because the causes have been removed do people start questioning whether we ever needed to bother. Explicitly, problems disappear because causes are removed.
The fact that KD jumps to attention whenever lead comes up in public discourse is starting to make me more skeptical of it, not less.
Why? Kevin obviously believes strongly in the LCH. Why would his reaction to news about this issue affect your take either way?
If you don't accept the hypothesis, fine. Show us your reasoning if you wish. But the fact that a certain journalist "jumps to attention" when an issue he cares passionately about comes up isn't a logical reason to either accept or reject the idea that environmental lead tends to increase crime.