8 ms·

> When lead was removed from gasoline, lead levels in the environment fell, and kids avoided the lead exposure that caused these developmental problems. About 2

by dalore 8y ago

> When lead was removed from gasoline, lead levels in the environment fell, and kids avoided the lead exposure that caused these developmental problems. About 20 years later, when those kids became young adults, crime rates fell. This, proponents say, is what explains the mysterious and persistent decline in crime beginning in the early 1990s. > It’s an intriguing idea — particularly since we don’t have a better explanation for the big changes in crime rates during this period. Did not freakanomics come up with a famous (and to me more convincing) argument that it legalized abortion was the reason for the drop in crime? At they very least it dispels the arguments we don't have a better explanation and doesn't even mention it. http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/ http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-sh...

opportune 8y ago
Another possibly large factor is that the crack epidemic (and all of its auxiliary crime - property theft, gang violence) started to die down
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  per-capita violent crime rate was basically flat in the 20 years leading to 1994, so I don't see how it could have been related to that.
philwelch 8y ago
The abortion hypothesis is a different explanation, but it's not necessarily a better one. The proposed mechanism for abortion is that mothers who will give birth to future criminals are more likely to get abortions than mothers who will not give birth to future criminals, which seems vaguely plausible, but it's a more indirect effect than the known effects of lead exposure on brain development. The lead mechanism is also easier to validate. Simply correlating the drop in crime with Roe v. Wade plus 20 years isn't enough--you also have to show some evidence which mothers and families demographically tend to produce more criminal children, and that these same mothers and families disproportionately chose abortion in greater rates after Roe v. Wade.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Nor is it an incompatible one. The sprinkler being on may be getting the grass wet. But the sprinkler being on does not mean that it isn't raining.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    It could be both, and that's when you have to do things like look at the crime rate in countries that banned leaded gasoline but didn't legalize abortion, or vice versa.
- hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
  The proposed mechanism for abortion is that mothers who will give birth to future criminals are more likely to get abortions than mothers who will not give birth to future criminals I don't think that's a correct explanation of their position. Instead, children born who would have been aborted if it were legally available are more likely to be born into environments that lead to increased propensity to criminal behavior: poverty, no father figure, poor supervision, etc.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    This is really one of the fundamental problems with the social sciences. So many studies in the social sciences take some spin on: - 1) Observe correlation in sample. - 2) Propose explanation for correlation - 3) Take new sample. - 4) See correlation still holds, therefore propose that explanation is the reason. Of course the thing that should be clear in that process is that the explanation is irrelevant. The explanation could well be 'because 1+1=3.' There's an insufficient amount of attention directed towards falsification, prediction, and experimentation that's more than 'toy studies' or abstractly related. In many cases there are reasons for the lack of these processes (ethical concerns, time constraints, unavailability of an appropriate sample, etc) but those reasons do not change the fact that without these processes, the 'science' provided by the above sort of logic is not science - it's just plain old fashioned speculation in a fancy suit.
noelsusman 8y ago
A wide variety of factors contributed to the decline in crime. The world is complicated. The interesting thing about the lead theory is that research has found effects far larger than anyone would have expected intuitively. The abortion theory makes intuitive sense, but as far as I know it hasn't been studied as rigorously.
lordnacho 8y ago
One of the interesting things about social science observations is there's a lot of noise. Both the lead and the abortion hypotheses could be true. In fact they could both be true AND the papers indicating one explanation could conceivably throw out the other explanation. If you're interested in one hypothesis, you might not spend the time going through alternatives as thoroughly as someone investigating the other. Looking specifically, the studies are always trying to isolate some effect, often using some sort of clever control derived from the proposed mechanism. So in this case there's a paper that points out how lead only goes into the water if the water is acidic, and they look at places with non-acidic water or non-lead pipes to control. For abortion, it's been a while since I read it, but there would be something along the lines of when abortion became widespread in a given community. You'd then look at differences in frequency and think about whether that came out in the crime stats when the kids got older. The rabbit hole is where you can come up with ever more interesting corollaries and data that support or do not support some hypothesis. You see this across the social sciences all the time. There's also confounding problems, say you know people tend to move to the city when they grow up (I don't know if this is true), then how valid is your birth -> crime data? Here's a load of random observations I thought up: - If abortion is the key, why do crime rates keep falling? Why is it not a step effect? - If it's lead, did crime rates increase 20 years after leaded fuel became a thing? - What if it's abortion AND lead? There are countries where abortion and lead are timed differently, how about looking at them? - What if it's neither, but both are caused by some other thing? Say economic development -> both?
- sutterbomb 8y ago
  >> If it's lead, did crime rates increase 20 years after leaded fuel became a thing? Yes. The rise and fall of violent crime rates correlate very tightly to the rise and fall of leaded fuel, with a ~20 year gap. You see the same correlations in different countries that had different phase in / phase out times, and different U.S. states that had different timelines. (E.g. if a state phased out leaded gas 5 years earlier than average, their crime wave also started abating 5 years earlier than average)
  - refurb 8y ago
yters 8y ago
Legalizing previously criminal activities does tend to decrease crime, by definition.
- refurb 8y ago
  And changes in level of enforcement.
- yters 8y ago
  My point for the downvoters is that if something like abortion is inherently a crime, and legalizing it greatly increases the incidence of abortions, then it is false to claim the legalization of abortion reduces crime. For example, a large number of people (Catholics) consider abortion to be murder. If true, then the legalization of abortion has caused our murder rates to sky rocket.
Tade0 8y ago
Russia/Former Soviet Union is an interesting outlier, because abortion has been legal there since at least the 1920s(with an almost 20-year gap imposed by Stalin).
BurningFrog 8y ago
We actually have dozens of competing explanations for the crime rate decreases. Everyone and their uncle claims it's because of that thing they talked about all along! Which is why it's important to look at actual data and try to keep an open mind. This stuff is complicated!
Camillo 8y ago
There are other possible contributing factors, such as the decrease in testosterone, or the increase in obesity.
- nradov 8y ago
  The obesity rate only really accelerated sometime later.
  - dalore 8y ago
    The obesity rate accelerated when the US government started giving nutrition advice based on the diet heart hypothesis (which is wrong) and advised everyone to cut out saturated fat and eat mostly carbohydrates. It's a global experiment that has gone awfully wrong.
thelibrarian 8y ago
The legalised abortion argument has several holes in it, the big ones being: - why did the crime rates simultaneously drop in states where abortion was already legal before Roe v Wade? - why did crime rates have a similar drop in similar time frames in other countries regardless of the legality of abortion? There is a very strong correlation between the banning of leaded petrol and reduction in crime rates around the world.
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  We have a good case study since Ireland legalized abortion way later other countries, we only have to wait 20 years and see.
  - casefields 8y ago
    Not only that but Flint, Michigan and some other communities have tons of kids with huge quantities of lead in their blood. Reuters has been doing incredible investigative journalism: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead-testing/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead...
- fastball 8y ago
  If memory serves, the Freakonomics analysis looked at that?
meej 8y ago
Kevin Drum discusses this in his piece that popularized the lead-crime hypothesis in 2016[1]. Some of the research[2] into the lead-crime hypothesis was inspired by the abortion-crime hypothesis. [1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur... [2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w13097 http://www.nber.org/papers/w13097
GIFtheory 8y ago
> Did not freakanomics come up with a famous (and to me more convincing) argument that it legalized abortion was the reason for the drop in crime? At they very least it dispels the arguments we don't have a better explanation and doesn't even mention it. There was a bug in Donohue and Levitt's code which, combined with other factors, makes the effect go away, supposedly: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2005/12/01/oops-onomics https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2005/12/01/o...
int_19h 8y ago
It's not a particularly convincing argument when you look at other countries. The lead hypothesis, on the other hand, holds up remarkably well.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
- bobplus 8y ago
  The reason they have no food all day is cause they want to buy $300 Nike instead, new phones every six months, and old 4th and 5th hand luxury cars.
thinkcontext 8y ago
I can't find it now but I read something by a lead researcher that said the abortion effect is real but that the lead one is more predictive.
liftbigweights 8y ago
> Did not freakanomics come up with a famous (and to me more convincing) argument that it legalized abortion was the reason for the drop in crime? At they very least it dispels the arguments we don't have a better explanation and doesn't even mention it. It isn't a better one than lead. It was one of many correlated events. It was an interesting theory when it came out, but I don't think anyone takes the abortion argument seriously today since both abortion rates and crime rates have fallen together for nearly 40 years. Even when freakonomics came out, I remember my economics professor saying it was used to sell books. Also, if the freakonomics theory was valid, the legalization and widespread use of birth control ( which prevented far more pregnancies and births ), not abortion, should be getting the credit. You are comparing an ocean ( birth control ) with a small pond ( abortion ). The abortion theory is pretty much debunked now. That's why you don't hear about it anymore. It's most likely a confluence of events that has led to drop in crime rates. Birth control, less lead, more TV/internet/etc, longer education period and changes in the law or prosecutions. At the end of the day, nobody really knows what caused the decline in crime for certain. Abortion sells a lot of books and gets a lot of media support/press, but the continuing decline of both abortion rates and crime rates seems to indicate that abortion isn't the cause.

by dalore 8y ago

opportune 8y ago

Another possibly large factor is that the crack epidemic (and all of its auxiliary crime - property theft, gang violence) started to die down

ebikelaw 8y ago
per-capita violent crime rate was basically flat in the 20 years leading to 1994, so I don't see how it could have been related to that.

philwelch 8y ago

The abortion hypothesis is a different explanation, but it's not necessarily a better one. The proposed mechanism for abortion is that mothers who will give birth to future criminals are more likely to get abortions than mothers who will not give birth to future criminals, which seems vaguely plausible, but it's a more indirect effect than the known effects of lead exposure on brain development. The lead mechanism is also easier to validate. Simply correlating the drop in crime with Roe v. Wade plus 20 years isn't enough--you also have to show some evidence which mothers and families demographically tend to produce more criminal children, and that these same mothers and families disproportionately chose abortion in greater rates after Roe v. Wade.

bunderbunder 8y ago
Nor is it an incompatible one. The sprinkler being on may be getting the grass wet. But the sprinkler being on does not mean that it isn't raining.
- philwelch 8y ago
  It could be both, and that's when you have to do things like look at the crime rate in countries that banned leaded gasoline but didn't legalize abortion, or vice versa.
hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
The proposed mechanism for abortion is that mothers who will give birth to future criminals are more likely to get abortions than mothers who will not give birth to future criminals I don't think that's a correct explanation of their position. Instead, children born who would have been aborted if it were legally available are more likely to be born into environments that lead to increased propensity to criminal behavior: poverty, no father figure, poor supervision, etc.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  This is really one of the fundamental problems with the social sciences. So many studies in the social sciences take some spin on: - 1) Observe correlation in sample. - 2) Propose explanation for correlation - 3) Take new sample. - 4) See correlation still holds, therefore propose that explanation is the reason. Of course the thing that should be clear in that process is that the explanation is irrelevant. The explanation could well be 'because 1+1=3.' There's an insufficient amount of attention directed towards falsification, prediction, and experimentation that's more than 'toy studies' or abstractly related. In many cases there are reasons for the lack of these processes (ethical concerns, time constraints, unavailability of an appropriate sample, etc) but those reasons do not change the fact that without these processes, the 'science' provided by the above sort of logic is not science - it's just plain old fashioned speculation in a fancy suit.

noelsusman 8y ago

A wide variety of factors contributed to the decline in crime. The world is complicated. The interesting thing about the lead theory is that research has found effects far larger than anyone would have expected intuitively. The abortion theory makes intuitive sense, but as far as I know it hasn't been studied as rigorously.

lordnacho 8y ago

One of the interesting things about social science observations is there's a lot of noise. Both the lead and the abortion hypotheses could be true. In fact they could both be true AND the papers indicating one explanation could conceivably throw out the other explanation. If you're interested in one hypothesis, you might not spend the time going through alternatives as thoroughly as someone investigating the other. Looking specifically, the studies are always trying to isolate some effect, often using some sort of clever control derived from the proposed mechanism. So in this case there's a paper that points out how lead only goes into the water if the water is acidic, and they look at places with non-acidic water or non-lead pipes to control. For abortion, it's been a while since I read it, but there would be something along the lines of when abortion became widespread in a given community. You'd then look at differences in frequency and think about whether that came out in the crime stats when the kids got older. The rabbit hole is where you can come up with ever more interesting corollaries and data that support or do not support some hypothesis. You see this across the social sciences all the time. There's also confounding problems, say you know people tend to move to the city when they grow up (I don't know if this is true), then how valid is your birth -> crime data? Here's a load of random observations I thought up: - If abortion is the key, why do crime rates keep falling? Why is it not a step effect? - If it's lead, did crime rates increase 20 years after leaded fuel became a thing? - What if it's abortion AND lead? There are countries where abortion and lead are timed differently, how about looking at them? - What if it's neither, but both are caused by some other thing? Say economic development -> both?

sutterbomb 8y ago
>> If it's lead, did crime rates increase 20 years after leaded fuel became a thing? Yes. The rise and fall of violent crime rates correlate very tightly to the rise and fall of leaded fuel, with a ~20 year gap. You see the same correlations in different countries that had different phase in / phase out times, and different U.S. states that had different timelines. (E.g. if a state phased out leaded gas 5 years earlier than average, their crime wave also started abating 5 years earlier than average)
- refurb 8y ago

yters 8y ago

Legalizing previously criminal activities does tend to decrease crime, by definition.

refurb 8y ago
And changes in level of enforcement.
yters 8y ago
My point for the downvoters is that if something like abortion is inherently a crime, and legalizing it greatly increases the incidence of abortions, then it is false to claim the legalization of abortion reduces crime. For example, a large number of people (Catholics) consider abortion to be murder. If true, then the legalization of abortion has caused our murder rates to sky rocket.

Tade0 8y ago

Russia/Former Soviet Union is an interesting outlier, because abortion has been legal there since at least the 1920s(with an almost 20-year gap imposed by Stalin).

BurningFrog 8y ago

We actually have dozens of competing explanations for the crime rate decreases. Everyone and their uncle claims it's because of that thing they talked about all along! Which is why it's important to look at actual data and try to keep an open mind. This stuff is complicated!

Camillo 8y ago

There are other possible contributing factors, such as the decrease in testosterone, or the increase in obesity.

nradov 8y ago
The obesity rate only really accelerated sometime later.
- dalore 8y ago
  The obesity rate accelerated when the US government started giving nutrition advice based on the diet heart hypothesis (which is wrong) and advised everyone to cut out saturated fat and eat mostly carbohydrates. It's a global experiment that has gone awfully wrong.

thelibrarian 8y ago

The legalised abortion argument has several holes in it, the big ones being: - why did the crime rates simultaneously drop in states where abortion was already legal before Roe v Wade? - why did crime rates have a similar drop in similar time frames in other countries regardless of the legality of abortion? There is a very strong correlation between the banning of leaded petrol and reduction in crime rates around the world.

LoSboccacc 8y ago
We have a good case study since Ireland legalized abortion way later other countries, we only have to wait 20 years and see.
- casefields 8y ago
  Not only that but Flint, Michigan and some other communities have tons of kids with huge quantities of lead in their blood. Reuters has been doing incredible investigative journalism: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead-testing/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead...
fastball 8y ago
If memory serves, the Freakonomics analysis looked at that?

meej 8y ago

Kevin Drum discusses this in his piece that popularized the lead-crime hypothesis in 2016[1]. Some of the research[2] into the lead-crime hypothesis was inspired by the abortion-crime hypothesis. [1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur... [2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w13097 http://www.nber.org/papers/w13097

GIFtheory 8y ago

> Did not freakanomics come up with a famous (and to me more convincing) argument that it legalized abortion was the reason for the drop in crime? At they very least it dispels the arguments we don't have a better explanation and doesn't even mention it. There was a bug in Donohue and Levitt's code which, combined with other factors, makes the effect go away, supposedly: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2005/12/01/oops-onomics https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2005/12/01/o...

int_19h 8y ago

It's not a particularly convincing argument when you look at other countries. The lead hypothesis, on the other hand, holds up remarkably well.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bobplus 8y ago
The reason they have no food all day is cause they want to buy $300 Nike instead, new phones every six months, and old 4th and 5th hand luxury cars.

thinkcontext 8y ago

I can't find it now but I read something by a lead researcher that said the abortion effect is real but that the lead one is more predictive.

liftbigweights 8y ago

> Did not freakanomics come up with a famous (and to me more convincing) argument that it legalized abortion was the reason for the drop in crime? At they very least it dispels the arguments we don't have a better explanation and doesn't even mention it. It isn't a better one than lead. It was one of many correlated events. It was an interesting theory when it came out, but I don't think anyone takes the abortion argument seriously today since both abortion rates and crime rates have fallen together for nearly 40 years. Even when freakonomics came out, I remember my economics professor saying it was used to sell books. Also, if the freakonomics theory was valid, the legalization and widespread use of birth control ( which prevented far more pregnancies and births ), not abortion, should be getting the credit. You are comparing an ocean ( birth control ) with a small pond ( abortion ). The abortion theory is pretty much debunked now. That's why you don't hear about it anymore. It's most likely a confluence of events that has led to drop in crime rates. Birth control, less lead, more TV/internet/etc, longer education period and changes in the law or prosecutions. At the end of the day, nobody really knows what caused the decline in crime for certain. Abortion sells a lot of books and gets a lot of media support/press, but the continuing decline of both abortion rates and crime rates seems to indicate that abortion isn't the cause.