3 ms·

I don't see the connection. You can see parts of the world that had leaded gasoline but no increase in crime. It's highly likely that the lack of education expo

I don't see the connection. You can see parts of the world that had leaded gasoline but no increase in crime. It's highly likely that the lack of education exposes them to such risks but it's not enough to explain the wide spread fall in crime. For me personally, the would be criminals never being born makes more sense. If we just have less population being born from the low end of socioeconomic spectrum, there is simply less crimes being committed from this demographic.

macintux 10y ago
I don't know that anyone is asserting lead is the only culprit; socioeconomic trends are complex beasts. To reject it entirely however flies in the face of a significant body of evidence: http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-g...
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  This is insane. It's like saying Roman soldiers fought well because they drank wine out of lead flasks.. I'd be extremely careful not to conflate the two because there's no causation explained by simply showing a graph. Crime is a very complicated human behavior that arises from multitude of socioeconomic reasons: no money, no education, no opportunity, crime happens.
  - macintux 10y ago
    I find your emotional reactions to this puzzling. Is your last name perchance Midgley?
    - brilliantcode 10y ago
      no but I spent a lot of time studying this research when I was getting my econ degree and it made perfect sense to me. That might explain my emotional attachment to this theory, coupled with my sympathy towards African Americans downtrodden by institutional racism hidden in plain sight.
MaysonL 10y ago
From the article cited by tjalfi[0]: 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." The correlation even goes down to the neighborhood level: 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." [0]http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure...

macintux 10y ago

I don't know that anyone is asserting lead is the only culprit; socioeconomic trends are complex beasts. To reject it entirely however flies in the face of a significant body of evidence: http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-g...

brilliantcode 10y ago
This is insane. It's like saying Roman soldiers fought well because they drank wine out of lead flasks.. I'd be extremely careful not to conflate the two because there's no causation explained by simply showing a graph. Crime is a very complicated human behavior that arises from multitude of socioeconomic reasons: no money, no education, no opportunity, crime happens.
- macintux 10y ago
  I find your emotional reactions to this puzzling. Is your last name perchance Midgley?
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
    no but I spent a lot of time studying this research when I was getting my econ degree and it made perfect sense to me. That might explain my emotional attachment to this theory, coupled with my sympathy towards African Americans downtrodden by institutional racism hidden in plain sight.

MaysonL 10y ago

From the article cited by tjalfi[0]: 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." The correlation even goes down to the neighborhood level: 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." [0]http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure...