History's greatest crime fighter - Clair Patterson?!

[DerGolgo]

Some might say this belongs in Underground Politics, since it's about crime and the environment, but I disagree. It's about science, and not even the geeky kind, so I'm putting it here.
There is an interesting new thesis:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/ ... id=1202138

New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic.

It takes them two whole sub-headlines to get to the beef, but it is thus:

A recent study had suggested a link between childhood lead exposure and juvenile delinquency later on.
...
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.
Gasoline lead may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.

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.

This is intriguing. I've heard the same effects attributed to Roe v. Wade, this is also mentioned, but unlike the Freakonomics guy who came up with that, this was investigated and found to be not just plausible but probable by actual scientists. Note that I do think economics is a science, I just don't think there are presently any actual scientists in that field. And an "upside-down U pattern"?? Is it honestly beyond the average reader of Mother Jones to know what a damn normal distribution or bell curve is?

If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found.

Very interesting, not proof of causation, but quite definitely beyond mere correlation. But lead was in the petrol everywhere, not just in the USA, so unlike Roe v. Wade, the effect should have manifested all over the place. Did they?

Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia and found a close match. Ditto for Canada. And Great Britain and Finland and France and Italy and New Zealand and West Germany. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn't fit the theory. "No," he replied. "Not one."

Now, once upon a time, medicine would only endorse any new treatment when it's mechanism of action was well explained, empirical evidence of efficacy be damned. This is why naturopathy and other "alternative" forms of medicine were ignored for a long, long time. But these days, from what I've gathered, medicine damns the mechanism and just cares about empirical evidence of efficacy, statistics that show it to work or not. If that's good enough for finding something that cures, it's reasonable to accept the same standards for things that make ill, isn't it. Science may yet find other reasons for the development of crime and debunk this, but for now, this doesn't just make sense, it makes compelling sense, I think.

As regards the title of this thread, Clair Patterson was a geochemist who, in the middle of the last century, was working on radio-isotope dating the age of the earth. It took him many, many years, mostly because wherever he went to take samples and analyze them, there'd be lead pollution all over the place. He was one of the first to notice it and spend the rest of his life campaigning against the use of lead in gasoline and other industrial processes. He published scientific papers on lead pollution, and while he is largely forgotten these days, he is credited with pushing regulators to clamp down on the industrial use of lead and use in gasoline in particular. Considering the findings described above, he easily stopped more crime than any law maker ever, just with the fierce, blinding power of science.
And yes, he was a guy named Clair, maybe that's one of the reasons few people talk about his work these days. He did end up figuring out the age of the earth, eventually.

If Clair Patterson is the Batman of this story, Thomas Midgley Jr. might be Mr. Freeze.
After he invented tetra ethyl lead, he wanted to come up with a refrigerant that wouldn't kill people if a fridge or air conditioned sprang a leak, as often happened in the 1920s. A noble goal, but what he came up with was Freon, CFCs. After dooming the ozone layer, he got polio. To deal with his disability, he designed a system of levers and pulleys to help him get in and out of bed without assistance. Something went wrong and his contraption strangled him to death. Not a nice way to go, and probably not one he deserved. While putting lead in gasoline was a matter of greed and disinterest in, if not contempt for, the possible side effects of blowing all that lead into the air, he invented freon because, back then, hundreds of people would die at a time from a leaky AC in a hospital, or a broken fridges would wipe out entire families. Hate him as much as you will for the lead, with freon he had at least good intentions.

EDIT: Now, come to think of it, there might be a reason to connect this to politics, but only on the margins.
If juvenile lead exposure indeed makes people act immoral, unethically and, most importantly, dumber and without empathy, which is what a violent criminal is doing, is there perhaps a correlation between that lead exposure and ... the rise of conservatism? I don't mean regular old conservatism, mind, I mean Thatcherite, neo-liberal, corrupt, winnner-takes-all, Friedmanite conservatism, as we seem to have seen in the last thirty years or so. I'd be interested to see some data on when lead was phased out in the parts of the US where your tea party movement has the most followers. Was it later than in the areas where people are more, well, sane?

[roadmissile]

Something went wrong and his contraption strangled him to death.

Anyone else thinking auto-erotic asphyxiation?

/RM

[DerGolgo]

Something went wrong and his contraption strangled him to death.

Anyone else thinking auto-erotic asphyxiation?

/RM

If he had been a rock-star, actor or other person of a profession notorious for their libido, that would be possible, probable even.
But he was a mad scientist. Well, maybe not mad, and more an engineer than a scientist. But still, the kind of guy who suffers from his hubris, from trusting his life to inventions rather than trusting people.

[Bigshankhank]

So, we just have to ride this out until all the lead-based violent criminals have gotten it out of their systems so to speak? Interesting read fro m an anthropological view, but I thought they had gone over all the bad stuff that lead did to children years ago ("that kid must eat paint" and similar comments). It's why lead has been taken out of most products that formerly contained it, the risk of mental defects along with the environmental damage.

[happycommuter]

Clearly urban areas have the highest concentrations of automotive environmental toxins, and we all know that cities are populated by helpless liberals. Ha, foiled by their own environmentalism!
Side note: true conservatives are of course in favor of conservation within reason. The cartoonish earth-raping version of conservatives is a travesty.

Lead down, fluoridated water, combination vaccines, and HFCS to go and we'll have a healthier, happier populace.

Many inventors have been killed by their inventions. There is a list on wikipedia.

[DerGolgo]

So, we just have to ride this out until all the lead-based violent criminals have gotten it out of their systems so to speak? Interesting read fro m an anthropological view, but I thought they had gone over all the bad stuff that lead did to children years ago ("that kid must eat paint" and similar comments). It's why lead has been taken out of most products that formerly contained it, the risk of mental defects along with the environmental damage.

There is still plenty of lead in the ground, and this comes out every summer. So it will probably be a while until it's truly gone gone. And a kid that got some kind of mental damage from lead exposure, making him or her sufficiently un-empathetic to embark on a life of violent crime or conservatism won't get better or get it out of his or her system. The problems that lead cause are developmental, stuff don't grow right, it leaves it's mark long after it's gone. The reason we see violent crime drop is more likely that those affected by it either ran afoul of the system and were pulled out of circulation, or managed to grow old enough to somehow integrate themselves into society and either hide their criminal activity or suppress their criminal urges entirely. Okay, that's what they got out of their system, in that regard, that analogy seems to hold up. Youthful exuberance and lack of life experience is a factor in leading people into criminal activity, coupled with lead related damage probably more so, and once those are out of the system, whatever damage the lead did won't be enough to entice the person in question to break the law violently. Yep, sounds about right.
Of course, it'd be cumulative. Some people who lack the inhibitions that would keep them from crime wouldn't get the opportunity to engage in obvious criminal behavior if, in their environment, there is less crime to begin with, less gangs to roll with, less fights to get into, etc. With no opportunity to get into violent crime, they'll probably express their lack of inhibition by texting while driving, disregarding speed limits and cheating on their taxes.

[kitkat]

Don't buy it.

The association between leaded additives and the crime rate remains undemonstrated because of a very common mistake--they did not make the cause & effect connection, but rather only the _correspondence_ connection , which is simply inadequate and proves nothing. You could just as credibly tie in Madonna popularity to the crime wave! lol Just because correlation occurs does not mean there is a *causative link*. Sociology notoriously screws that up all the time, thus it's "soft science" reputation (well-earned IMHO). For example--*if* this was at all real the implicit expectation would be a notably higher percentage of crime *within* the occupational groups which had the most exposure to this factor, nation (world) wide--mechanics come instantly to mind. And there was no such linkage demonstrated...nor do i think it exists. There are other curves that duplicate the crime wave of the 80's--which one must admit have a much better putative relationship to crime (reduction)--- for example the incarceration rate, police per capita and illicit drug use generally.

BTW, of course they found the correlation persisted in every country...*vehicle miles driven per capita* increased in every country during that period! Therefore it "links" with anything that increased during that same period.

Show me the hordes of batshit crazy, felonious, homicidal and gas-soaked mechanics and i'll start taking this idea seriously... freakin' sociologists... buncha quackery.

edited to add; There is a great deal of qualitative variance in the environmental sciences generally and in environmental reporting/media specifically. I personally think that the general (as opposed to occupational) health aspects of lead, mercury and asbestos have been way overstated. When one actually climbs down into the data that becomes patently obvious, actually. I think this desire to link physical environmental factors to behavior is due to a tendency towards looking for "easy fixes" to much more complex and intransigent social ills --by merely picking on substances to ban rather than addressing what i feel are the root causes, virtually all of which lie within the dominant economic system generally. Sort of a "Do something; even if it isn't right!" mentality. (Which mindset is certainly still at work fulltime to this day!)

[DerGolgo]

kitkat, I agree with most of what you're saying (especially regarding asbestos and sociologists), but I must point out a few problems with your statements.
First of all, you demand to be shown blood-thirsty mechanics. That's a straw man argument, no one claimed that lead exposure makes people violent in general.
What the researchers here point out is that lead exposure during childhood corresponds with violent crime during early adulthood. They make it quite clear that the two curves don't correspond for the same time, but with a 23 year gap.
Furthermore, no sociologists seem to have been involved, two economists did most of the comparing of data from eight different countries and the various US states. Economists may know nothing about explaining the economy, but they are usually solid with numbers and statistics.
A pharmacologist, a research professor at that, is quoted regarding the same correlation being observed not just on a national level, not just for individual cities, but even for individual neighborhoods.

In fact, Mielke has even studied lead concentrations at the neighborhood level in New Orleans and shared his maps with the local police. "When they overlay them with crime maps," he told me, "they realize they match up."

This is not mere statistical correlation, this is not only on a national level, this is close geographical correlation.
Truly, one has to ask how many criminals commit their crimes in the neighborhoods in which they grew up.
But few people manage to climb out of the social stratum they are born into, so even if they move to a different neighborhood, it's not likely to be fundamentally different from the old one. Prices will be similar where crime rates are similar, hence if there is in fact a causal relationship, lead levels are likely to be similar, also.

The detrimental effects of lead on children are well known, have been well observed, documented, researched and explained. Lead paint has been banned and everyone got into a frenzy about lead in toys from China because, among other things, for children under six, lead exposure can lead to problems in neurological development. This is a causal relationship well known and documented as such.
Lead is observed in other scenarios, where it correlates with another effect. Another effect, violent crime, which may be linked to the known and documented effects of lead. At least one pharmacologist finds this link to be plausible enough to be worth talking about.
That the observed correlation may be caused by the diverging quality of data from different sources is possible, but we are talking about data from various cities and states in the USA and eight countries in total - that they all skew in the same direction, or are all sufficiently fuzzy for any interpretation to be inserted is less than likely.

There are other curves that duplicate the crime wave of the 80's--which one must admit have a much better putative relationship to crime (reduction)--- for example the incarceration rate, police per capita and illicit drug use generally.

Indeed, these may have lowered the crime rate, they surely had an influence. But where is causality established here?
Making tougher laws, locking more people into prisons, hiring more cops - these are all reactions to a rising crime rate. More illicit drug use is only possible when the opportunity to use these drugs is presented to the users, which rising crime rates take care of.
If lead is indeed the cause for the decades long wave of violent crime we have seen come and go, things would look no different than they do now - yes, there may be a different explanation for the drop in crime, and that is worth investigating also, but that doesn't automatically negate the possibility that it was lead, after all.

If nothing else, this warrants further investigation. I'm not entirely convinced myself, a lot of crime comes from poverty, discrepancies in wealth, social injustice. But even with these other explanations for a rise in crime, it's still possible that the crime only rose as steeply as it did, and then declined with little or no change to the social causes I mentioned here, because neurological impairments from childhood lead exposure amplified what would otherwise have been only social unrest.
Ignaz Semmelweiss had only a statistical correlation when he demanded doctors should stay the hell out of the maternity ward, germ theory was developed only after he himself had died of an infection, in a hospital (mental hospital, but still).
A correlation between lung cancer and cigarette use was noticed way before a causative relationship was proven and documented, as the cigarette companies never tired of pointing out whenever they got dragged into the courts.
It's possible that a causative relationship may be established here also, that this correlation is only the first step. It's also possible that the correlation will turn out to be nothing more, if even that, and that no causation will ever be established.
But when both statistics and geography coincide so perfectly, and a causative relationship that might explain causation here is already known for the same cause and related effects elsewhere, it would not be very wise to dismiss this new thesis out of hand.