4 ms·

Yes this seems like a very interesting, important and overlooked issue.

• nawgz 5y ago
  I also think the fellow stating that we are not better off for having unleaded fuel is overstating the matter. Lead in fuel was quite strongly correlated with crime rates, no?
  • namibj 5y ago
    Yeah, but also general societal changes. Correlation is not causation.
    • nawgz 5y ago
      Sure, but lead has multiple known mechanisms which would indeed cause individuals to be more likely to commit crime, and serious efforts to get lead out of fuel correlated pretty strongly with a maxima in crime rates that had been steadily increasing for decades. [0] While it is clear to me that there were other legislative and possibly environmental changes that also contributed to this drop, I think that applying 'correlation is not causation' here while applying no scrutiny to the argument that "removing lead from fuel didn't do shit" is pretty facile. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis