19 ms·

America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

339 points by LiveTheDream 14y ago

anigbrowl 14y ago
Mother Jones would have you believe that this is some great new breakthrough, but every paint shop or home center I've been in within the last 10 years, as well as many DIY product packages/instruction sheets has prominent warnings about the dangers of lead and information on how to safely mitigate it. Maybe it's just because I live in California, but you'd have to put your head under a rock to remain unaware of the dangers of lead in the home. There is good correlation between environmental lead and criminality, but it's not an open-and-shut case - this is one among several factors criminologists consider to be contributory factors.
- LiveTheDream 14y ago
  I didn't get that sense at all. The article acknowledges multiple times that this is not a new breakthrough. The point is that the danger of lead is so well known that it's strange criminologists don't make a bigger deal of the lead/crime correlation. More recent studies show the lead is even more dangerous than previously thought.
  - stmartin 14y ago
    So if they make a bigger deal, it almost becomes like causation rather than corelation, eh?
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    But criminologists do make a big deal of it. Here's a study from 5 years ago, which received wide public attention at the time, pointing out the correlation: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050101 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal... And the MJ article spends half the time talking about how economically worthwhile lead abatement measures would be, without bothering to report that lead abatement is already well subsidized and promoted, because policymakers at both the state and federal level are aware of the high long-term costs of childhood lead poisoning; google 'lead abatement site:gov' for an abundance of resources. Those bureaucrats and politicians aren't advising people to clean up lead-based paint and offering grants just to pass the time, they're doing it because they already know about the high social costs of lead contamination. That's also why unleaded gasoline is now the norm.
    - danielharan 14y ago
      Only the first author is a criminologist, and it's in a medical journal with images of brain scans. In fact, it sounds like the study mentioned in the original MJ post. A single reference by a criminologist in a journal of another field does NOT prove that criminologists take this seriously. Given the author claims to have contacted several experts in that field with none giving the lead theory any credence, you'd need a bit more evidence to show they do.
rayiner 14y ago
Fun fact: the banning of leaded gasoline was one of the biggest regulatory successes in history, and went a long way to validate the model. The use of leaded gasoline was a classic market failure. It saved a small number of companies a relatively small amount of money, but was on the net a huge negative for the overall economic because it basically pumped lead directly into the bloodstream of children through their lungs, making them dumber. It didn't really make anybody sick, though, and the ultimate impact was both difficult to quantify and valuate as well as impossible to trace to any particular manufacturers leaded gasoline in any individual case. The effect of the regulation was direct. As the phaseout was implemented between the 70's to the 90's, culminating in the outright ban of leaded gasoline in the 90's, the blood lead levels in the American population dropped from 16 micrograms per deciliter in 1976 to to 3 micrograms per deciliter in 1991. This drop corresponded to the avoidance of a several point drop in IQ among children (one study found a 3.9 point drop as lead levels in children were increased from 2.4 ugrams/deciliter to 10 ugrams/deciliter).[1] The regulation ended up costing the auto/gasoline industry billions of dollars to retool. However, researchers estimated that the avoided cost from dropping blood lead levels was $17.2 billion annually per 1 ugram/deciliter reduction.[2] [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1257652/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1257652/ [2] http://www.unep.org/transport/pcfv/pdf/brochurelead.pdf http://www.unep.org/transport/pcfv/pdf/brochurelead.pdf
- htf 14y ago
  Your profile says you're a lawyer. I have a question for you. Why did they need to ban leaded gasoline specifically? Wasn't it already illegal for anyone to spread poison in the air? Why was new regulation needed? Or, by "regulatory success", do you simply mean the recognition by the government that lead is poisonous?
  - rayiner 14y ago
    It's not illegal to spread poison in the air. Every time you drive your car you're spreading harmful chemicals into the air. Every factory or industrial operation spreads harmful chemicals into the air and water. You could theoretically ban pollution. That actually used to be the law in the 1600's. E.g. if you owned land on a river, the water had to leave your property as clean as it came in. As the industrial revolution happened, this rule was relaxed, because as it turns out it's impossible to make industry that doesn't pollute. The best you can do is balance the harms from pollution with the underlying beneficial activity. How do you achieve this balancing? The market doesn't work, because the parties aren't in contractual privity. You can use private litigation (sue someone for poisoning you) but that is wholly impractical. The litigation system is very well suited for resolving "you versus me" disputes based on tangible harms. It is not at all suited for resolving disputes between huge numbers of people based on statistical harms. Think of a suit against a leaded gasoline refiner. Two key things any plaintiff needs to prove in such a suit is: 1) what was the harm; 2) how did the defendant's activity cause the harm. How does a plaintiff prove her kid would have been 3-4 IQ points smarter but for the leaded gasoline produced? How does the plaintiff prove that her kid's harms weren't the result of say lead in pipes rather than lead in the air? Scientists can do models and experiments and tell you that the statistically a given type of pollution will cause certain kinds of harm in a population, but they can't tell you whether any particular injured person was injured from a particular type of pollution. The science here is statistical causation, but the law requires provable, traceable, causation. This (http://old.ccer.edu.cn/download/7874-1.pdf http://old.ccer.edu.cn/download/7874-1.pdf) is one of the most important papers in the economics of the law. It's also, incidentally, a fundamental paper of libertarian economics. Ronald Coase received a Nobel Prize in economics, partially for this paper. On Page 29, he basically explains why we use regulation rather than property rights enforced through litigation to address environmental harms.
greendestiny 14y ago
I'm tempted to repeat the oft said correlation is not causation. But really I have never thought that captures the problem I have with studies like this. Of course correlation does not necessarily imply causation. What I really find to be problematic is a small time series of data of a facet of a human behaviour across a population is probably going to correlate extremely well to many other time series across the same population. Or even other populations. How unusual should we find the correlation? What we might be seeing is nothing more than the average rate of change in a population to legislative changes. If it even shows that. If you take two time series that rise and then fall and overlay them on their peak I suspect most graphs look as convincing as the one presented.
- gruseom 14y ago
  This article cites research that goes way beyond the usual sort of correlation. How much stronger would the evidence need to get?
  - greendestiny 14y ago
    I'm not sure, how strong should such a correlation be to be considered evidence? That's the real question. And I think when it comes to annual averages of broad trends its a real question how we should interpret correlations. To me this article is data porn, its a story with data. It may be some part of the truth, but I think it exists to entertain the data literate - so we can follow along with the numbers and pat ourselves on the back for a fact discovered. Its enough analysis to be dangerous. And in case hackernews has become so infected with the kind of reddit thinking that can only see in black and white - yes I think reducing lead in gasoline is a very good thing.
    - jforman 14y ago
      The strength of the correlation or its time-scale have no bearing on whether the correlation should be considered evidence of causation. The fatal flaw of a correlation is that it can be specious — it can appear to explain reality, but really there's a third variable responsible for driving the phenomenon you're interested in. In this case, lead exposure and crime rate are correlated, but maybe lead doesn't cause crime at all: maybe something else causes crime that also happens to correlate with lead exposure. Who knows, maybe a certain pesticide was used at the same time that lead gasoline came into vogue, and that's really the true cause of the rise in crime rates. In research like this, when you can't do a manually controlled experiment, you have to control for hidden variables by some other means. And that's precisely what the investigators in this article did: they varied the input data to try to "shake out" other variables that might be behind the correlation. They looked at different time scales, different geographies, and different demographics, in an attempt to control for hidden variables that might be related to any one of those things. Every time you vary the input data and keep finding a correlation, your evidence of a causative relationship goes up. The gold standard, of course, would be to expose two random, double-blind sets of infants to lead and to a control substance and see what happens. But since that would be unethical (as we have reason to think lead is bad for you), we're stuck with animal studies or retrospective studies. Personally, I find the evidence in this article impressive, but it would take quite a lot of looking into their specific methods to come to any real conclusion.
ww520 14y ago
Didn't the rise of violent video games contribute to the decline of the youth violence? People were venting their frustration and excessive energy in video games instead of on the street, leading to less violence in real life.
- kolinko 14y ago
  any data to support this?
  - ww520 14y ago
    Google shows plenty of studies and sources. http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2011/05/18/uta-prof-video-games-leading-to-lower-crime-rates/ http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2011/05/18/uta-prof-video-games-lead... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13799616 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13799616 http://gamepolitics.com/2011/08/23/research-video-games-help-reduce-crime-rates-us#.UObLTnf76_Q http://gamepolitics.com/2011/08/23/research-video-games-help... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/8798927/Violent-video-games-reduce-crime.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/8798927/Vi...
    - kolinko 14y ago
      and this is something I can upvote :) although neither article supports your line of reasoning ("violence -> venting frustration -> less crime"), all of them mention the lack of time as a reason for crime drop.
- ww520 14y ago
  Wow. The downvotes. I usually don't care about the downvotes but I'm curious on this one. Did I say something off topic? Offensive? Trolling? Not contributing to the conversation? I merely pointed out another factor for the crime decline and got the downvotes. The HN crowd really doesn't like anything deviated from the norm? The HN quality is really going downhill.
- ndonnellan 14y ago
  I think it would be better if people stopped perpetuating the likely myth that emotions are similar to a hot gas that can be reduced in pressure by venting. - http://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/08/science/venting-anger-may-do-more-harm-than-good.html http://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/08/science/venting-anger-may-... - [PDF] http://illinois.edu/lb/files/2009/03/26/9293.pdf http://illinois.edu/lb/files/2009/03/26/9293.pdf *I'm not arguing against the video game link, just the suggested mechanism
knowaveragejoe 14y ago
I view the drop in crime as the result of a perfect storm of many factors, and perhaps this is another one. The explosion of media and the Internet occurred around the same time, so it's hard to say what caused it.
- lhnn 14y ago
  I think that's where "they" would point to the "distribution" evidence, that shows varying rates of the same correlation geographically. If we go on that, then you'd have to find another event that occurred at similar rates in similar geographic areas. Now, if only there were medical indications that lead causes violent behavior... the article only points to IQ issues, though there is likely more evidence elsewhere.
  - marcosdumay 14y ago
    > If we go on that, then you'd have to find another event that occurred at similar rates in similar geographic areas. There are lots of events that correlate with income (thus, with the geographical distribution). And lots of them correlate with the fall or raise of crime in the article. Getting an event that correlate with both raise and fall of crime, like lead intoxication does, will be harder. But I doubt it's impossible. The thing is, we have a causal nexus, we have the correlation, but we have no idea how strong the nexus actualy is, so we can't conclude the correlation is caused by the nexus. And we won't discover, because we won't conduct the kind of experiments needed for it.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  In 1996, the New York Times reported that crime had plunged for the third straight year, the sharpest drop since the end of Prohibition. Since 1993... Need I remind you that HTML 1.0 was released in mid-1993? The Internet wasn't exploding like you are thinking quite yet. Sure, it was on the rise, but certainly not among the sort of folks breaking windows and selling drugs.
  - knowaveragejoe 14y ago
bobdole5 14y ago
Oh now I get it. Criminal... Element hahaha
rsuttongee 14y ago
One scary fact is that one chemist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.) is largely responsible for the development of both Tetra-Ethyl-Lead and CFCs. Scary to think that the things you're working on can have such huge unintended negative side effects.
ars 14y ago
The Romans used to use lead acetate, i.e. sugar of lead as a sweetener. I wonder how much of history can be explained by this use of lead.
- ctek 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire#Lead_poisoning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire#Lea...
- archangel_one 14y ago
  I've read about that contributing to the fall of their empire before - I guess we'll never really know, but if it did then the impact of that element on human history must be massive. Wikipedia puts it out as an option: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_roman_empire#Lead_poisoning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_roman_empire#Lead_p...
  - ars 14y ago
    I'm actually thinking less of them being poisoned but rather if their aggression levels went up as a result, i.e. more wars.
    - archangel_one 14y ago
      I'm no historian, but I don't think more wars would have been the problem - they had plenty of wars before their downfall. If anything I thought things got worse once they were expanding less, because they no longer had an influx of resources from conquered territories.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  I've heard it was also used to waterproof wineskins, which would let the lead leach into the wine due to the acidity.
czzarr 14y ago
tl;dr version: http://tldr.io/tldrs/50e6993885d8d1617b000a23/americas-real-criminal-element-lead http://tldr.io/tldrs/50e6993885d8d1617b000a23/americas-real-... There is now enough statistical proof that lead is the prominent cause of crime. Crime rates and lead concentrations are extremely well correlated everywhere: the more lead in the environment, the more crimes will occur. Furthermore, it is scientifically proven that lead has a very negative impact on the brain, killing gray matter and impairing neuronal communication. Unfortunately, this theory hasn't been taken seriously by the government yet because it doesn't serve any political agenda.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  The EPA takes lead somewhat seriously. To the extent that every contractor in the U.S. has to account for it when doing even moderate amounts of home renovation.
- smsm42 14y ago
  The fact that lead is poisonous is definitely taken by the government seriously, and for quite some time. The hypothesis that crime is caused by lead is not, and it is not proven by correlation. I bet if you scan through millions of data series available on everything from wool production in New Zealand to average thickness of hairs of dogs in the USA, you could find a series that correlates very well with the crime data over the last century. Did you know, for example, that US stock market is driven by butter production in Bangladesh? Here it goes: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/1998/03/01/238606/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/199... http://business.time.com/2009/04/16/the-bangladeshi-butter-production-theory-of-asset-prices/ http://business.time.com/2009/04/16/the-bangladeshi-butter-p... Scientific proof of the cause IMHO needs much more than even very nice correlation.
don_draper 14y ago
He says his article is not partisan and I believe it is not meant to be, but there are political lessons to be learned. The market left alone doesn't always pick the best product, leading to the best outcome for society. Devout readers of Ayn Rand should take heed.
- Steko 14y ago
  Kevin Drum is an unabashedly left leaning blogger but he's of the Matthew Yglesias flavor that values intellectual integrity over beating the right. This piece was outstanding and he's consistently one of the highlights of my RSS feed each morning.
  - SeanLuke 14y ago
    I believe Kevin Drum is one of the more broadly respected bloggers in the blogosphere. He is liberal, yes, but is famously cautious, thoughtful, and considerate. In fact, it's a bit odd for him to be at Mother Jones now: his temperament seems more apropos for his previous post, on the front page of Washington Monthly.
  - DomreiRoam 14y ago
    Do you know blog/people to follow leaning right that value also intellectual integrity? I noticed it is possible to find left of liberal media that includes facts references. But most of the right media at some point use the "market is right" or "less gouvernement is good" without arguments or sources and I find it quite annoying. So if you know smart right media in English or French please give the references.
    - rdl 14y ago
      Becker-Posner Blog: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ David (son of Milton) Friedman: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
      - Steko 14y ago
cateye 14y ago
Doesn't the article really miss medical evidence like the influence of lead on the brains, neurons, MRI scans and experiments with animals and stuff?
- lkbm 14y ago
  There's a second page that goes into that.
etherael 14y ago
Interesting case, the formatting of the article is a little foreshadowing of where my research into this led me. The scenario with the state taking credit for the decline in crime based on their policing rather than as is very convincingly demonstrated, lead poisoning. Lead poisoning has been a well known and understood phenomenon for a very long period of time, people understood even at the time of the discovery of leaded petrol that it was liable to lead to health issues of the exact kind outlined in the article. It was hardly some huge mystery that was only discovered in the last decade or so, more like rigorously suppressed well known facts that under active examination by government organisations were simply swept under the rug. http://www.environmentalhistory.org/billkovarik/research/henry-ford-charles-kettering-and-the-fuel-of-the-future/ http://www.environmentalhistory.org/billkovarik/research/hen... Specifically; Clearly, G.M. switched gears sometime in 1923 or 1924. When controversy broke out about the public health impacts of leaded gasoline in 1924, Midgley and Kettering told the media, fellow scientists and the government that no alternatives existed. “So far as science knows at the present time,” Midgley told a meeting of scientists, “tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these [antiknock] results, which are of vital importance to the continued economic use by the general public of all automotive equipment, and unless a grave and inescapable hazard exists in the manufacture of tetraethyl lead, its abandonment cannot be justified.”110 And at a Public Health Service conference on leaded gasoline in 1925, Kettering said: “We could produce certain [antiknock] results and with the higher gravity gasolines, the aromatic series of compounds, alcohols, etc… [to] get the high compression without the knock, but in the great volume of fuel of the paraffin series [petroleum] we could not do that.”111 Even though experts like Alice Hamilton of Harvard University insisted that alternatives to leaded gasoline were available,112 the Public Health Service allowed leaded gasoline to remain on the market in 1926. (Leaded gasoline was banned in 1986 in the US for the same public health concerns that had been expressed 60 years earlier). The government of the time was well aware of the risks and did practically nothing to stop the negative effects. There were several competing options available, but the politically best connected corporations who basically guided government policy in this area used their leverage to suppress knowledge and use of these options. They even prepared for the possibility that the government would actually take effective regulatory action against them despite their attempts to push them in the other direction; Interestingly, Kettering and Midgley came up with another fuel called “Synthol” in the summer of 1925, at a time when the fate of leaded gasoline was in doubt. Synthol was made from alcohol, benzene and a metallic additive — either tetraethyl lead or iron carbonyl. Used in combination with a new high compression engine much smaller than ordinary engines, Synthol would “revolutionize transportation.”113 When Ethyl leaded gasoline was permitted to return to the market in 1926, Kettering and Midgley dropped the Synthol idea. Of course, They had no need. The state was not only plain old negligent in the addressing of this threat, they used their power to suppress dissent by legal and regulatory channels; By the mid-1930s, the alliance between General Motors, DuPont Corp. and Standard Oil to produce Ethyl leaded gasoline succeeded beyond all expectations: 90 percent of all gasoline contained lead. Public health crusaders who found this troubling still spoke out in political forums, but competitors were not allowed to criticize leaded gasoline in the commercial marketplace. In a restraining order forbidding such criticism, the Federal Trade Commission said Ethyl gasoline “is entirely safe to the health of [motorists] and to the public in general when used as a motor fuel, and is not a narcotic in its effect, a poisonous dope, or dangerous to the life or health of a customer, purchaser, user or the general public.”114 Direct comparison between leaded gasoline and alcohol blends proved so controversial in the 1920s and 1930s that government studies were kept quiet or not published. For instance, a Commerce Department report dated May 15, 1925 detailed dozens of instances of alcohol fuel use worldwide.115 The report was printed only five days before the Surgeon General’s hearing on Ethyl leaded gasoline. Yet it was never mentioned in the news media of the time, or in extensive bibliographies on alcohol fuel by Iowa State University researchers compiled in the 1930s. Another instance of a “buried” government report was that of USDA and Navy engine tests, conducted at the engineering experiment station in Annapolis. Researchers found that Ethyl leaded gasoline and 20 percent ethyl alcohol blends in gasoline were almost exactly equivalent in terms of brake horsepower and useful compression ratios. The 1933 report was never published.116 Couple their state shepherding with typical shady commercial practices that are eerie early echoes of the windows OEM contract preferences microsoft has frequently been accused of engaging in; Also in the 1930s, as Ethyl’s marketing power grew, the company began to enforce what it considered to be “business ethics” on the market. Ethyl refused to grant dealer contracts to certain gasoline wholesalers, and often provided no formal explanation for their actions. The exclusion of “unethical” businessmen was especially aimed at those who cut prices, but it was a means of excluding from the entire fuel market any wholesaler who adopted practices which the oil industry disliked. Since wholesalers had to carry a wide range of products to survive, and since advertising had created enormous consumer demand for Ethyl, to be denied an Ethyl contract was in effect to be forced out of business. Most wholesalers could not or would not tell the Federal Bureau of Investigation why Ethyl would consider them unethical, but at least one wholesaler, the Earl Coryell company of Lincoln, Nebraska, blended ethyl alcohol about the same time that it could not get an Ethyl license.158 Pressure to stick with Ethyl leaded gasoline exclusively rather than try alcohol fuel blends would have been quite strong with this enforcement mechanism at the oil industry’s disposal, but it is difficult to estimate how many gasoline dealers wanted to use alcohol instead of lead. In 1940 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an anti-trust verdict against Ethyl, 159 but by then, the Midwestern alcohol fuel movement had disintegrated. And note the result of the belated slap on the wrist to ethyl being basically similar to the result of the MS / Netscape antitrust trial, it was so far after the action had already played out in the marketplace as to be basically meaningless. Damage done. That people here swallow this without doing further research and parrot the state as white knight line is somewhat disappointing. If anything on close analysis, this shows exactly the opposite and is just another data point on an extremely long line of evidence indicating that the state and its politics are capable of very little other than taking credit, and they don't let a little thing like being on the wrong side of the argument to begin with get in their way doing so.
locusm 14y ago
I wonder if there will be similar stories about CSG mining in 30 years from now...
gnoway 14y ago
Something no one has pointed out yet: http://www.lead.org.au/fs/fst27.html http://www.lead.org.au/fs/fst27.html The data is about 18 months old. I was only surprised that it was so few countries, I expected most of Africa to be represented.
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
Another common source of Pb during the same time frame is tobacco.
tibbon 14y ago
Alternative title: Heavy Metal Causes Crime :)
STRML 14y ago
The great blog Damn Interesting did a post about this about 5 years back. It's a great read. In fact I just read it yesterday and was very surprised to see the MotherJones article today. http://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/ http://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/ They tell a great story and reveal some interesting facts about Ethyl's creator, Thomas Midgley, who very unfortunately was also responsible for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). The collective amount of economic and social damage this single man is responsible for is staggering. It would certainly be fun to total it up and compare to various wars, natural disasters, etc.
- r00fus 14y ago
  While leaded fuels may have been avoided, I can't see how CFCs would have not been discovered by someone else.
jwess 14y ago
It's scary to think that the transition to unleaded aviation fuel, or avgas, only began a couple years ago, and is scheduled for 2018 [0]. Currently, Avgas, which is different than jet fuel in that it's mainly used by private single-engine planes (ICE instead of turbine), can still contain up to 2.12 grams of lead per gallon [1]. Surprisingly, this 2.12 grams of lead/gal is termed 100LL, for 100-octane "low-lead". Up until the 1970's avgas could contain up to 4 grams of lead per gallon. I believe that lead exposure caused by the widespread use of avgas is a serious public health concern. Unfortunately most private plane owners are strongly against it due to the higher price of unleaded fuel. I really hope that the EPA succeeds in meeting their deadline. [0] http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas/ http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas/ [1] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-04-28/html/2010-9603.htm http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-04-28/html/2010-9603.ht...
- lutorm 14y ago
  The article says that lead in aviation fuels (and in solder) is a far smaller contribution to current lead levels than remaining lead paint. In the grand scheme of things, there just isn't that much avgas used, and it gets dispersed widely as opposed to concentrated where people live. I think the real problem is the big aviation piston engine companies (e.g. Lycoming and Continental) that seem to have no incentive to develop modern engines that can run on unleaded fuel. Newer engine manufacturers (e.g. Rotax, Jabiru) run fine on auto fuel, but they have a much smaller market. (It's sort of ironic that users of those engines, who should not be run on leaded gas, have a hard time finding unleaded gas at airports in the US.)
  - sokoloff 14y ago
    IMO, the FAA and their standardization processes for fuels like G100UL (GAMI), UL102 (Swift) and 91/96UL (Hjelmco) is the bottleneck here. GAMI in particular appears to have a fuel ready to use (in lab/prototype quantities) and has flown test flights in normally aspirated and turbocharged applications. (Turbos live a harder life, have lower detonation margins and are generally a more difficult test case. Many normally aspirated engines would run fine on ethanol-free pump gas from the corner service station.) I don't necessarily fault the individual FAA employees; they have every incentive to make GAMI, Swift et al jump through hoops to prove that their fuel is as safe and has as high detonation margins, even in worst case, high, hot and heavy departure conditions, as the proven over many decades 100LL fuel. It's a "heads I lose", "tails we push" set of incentives for them, so I don't blame them for being reluctant to move swiftly. I feel bad burning 100LL in an engine (from Continental) perfectly capable of (and even happier) running on ethanol-free 87 octane pump gas. I'd happily buy clean mogas instead of low-lead, but it's virtually impossible to find and low-lead is available at the overwhelming majority of airports.
sc68cal 14y ago
I posted this yesterday, the only difference is this is the "print" version. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5002806 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5002806
tokenadult 14y ago
There are a variety of really interesting comments here. Thanks for the pointers to other sources on history and economics besides the interesting magazine article submitted here. Having read the comment threads, I just wanted to respond to a couple of statements about Thomas Midgley, Jr., the chemist who had much to do with developing tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive and later Freon as a refrigerant. The accusation made against him in those comments is that he was accountable for untold human suffering around the world because of his inventions. But let's remember that during the twentieth century mortality and morbidity from all causes declined throughout the world, and that in the developed world, life expectancy at all ages has been increasing throughout my half-century lifetime to date. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-why-we-die-global-life-expectancy http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w... Technological progress is all about trade-offs. The trade-off that is beneficial and affordable in one decade may be supplanted by a trade-off that is more affordable and less incidentally harmful in a later decade. Improved transportation by motor vehicle doubtless had many side effects that were beneficial to human health, as did more efficient refrigeration and air-conditioning. On the available evidence, it is at least as likely that Midgley's work was net beneficial for humankind over the course of our parents' lifetimes and our lifetimes as it is that he caused net harm to humankind. We can't rerun history to be sure. Meanwhile, as we discover more about physics, chemistry, human physiology, and also economics and public policy, we can aim to make the best regulatory trade-offs we can in this decade. It's enough to be rational today and to try to improve the living environment for humankind according to our best understanding today. So far progress in improving human health in general has been remarkably steady worldwide for more than a century. http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2860ef54d218ce5ce19abe6a59/dc_biodemography_of_human_ageing_nature_2010_vaupel.pdf http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...
- Camillo 14y ago
  Very true. However, just going by the Wikipedia article on him, Midgley engaged in clearly unethical actions by helping to convince the government and the public of the safety of TEL even as he himself was suffering from the effects of lead poisoning.
nnethercote 14y ago
I think many of the commenters here didn't see that there is a 2nd page of this article (http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline?page=2 http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...) The first paragraph of that second page reads: "If econometric studies were all there were to the story of lead, you'd be justified in remaining skeptical no matter how good the statistics look. Even when researchers do their best—controlling for economic growth, welfare payments, race, income, education level, and everything else they can think of—it's always possible that something they haven't thought of is still lurking in the background. But there's another reason to take the lead hypothesis seriously, and it might be the most compelling one of all: Neurological research is demonstrating that lead's effects are even more appalling, more permanent, and appear at far lower levels than we ever thought." And the rest of the second page goes into much more detail. In other words, just saying "correlation doesn't imply causation" doesn't win you the thread. There is clear causation evidence at the neurological level.
- pertinhower 14y ago
  No, we don't see causation at the neurological level. The "correlation ≠ causation" meme doesn't just undermine overspeculative econometric conclusions: it undermines overspeculative biological conclusions too. The article may show correlations at the econometric level (I'm not convinced). It reports correlations at the medical level. But correlation still ≠ causation, and so it's not clear that lead causes crime "neurologically". Indeed it's not clear that any single factor trumps the human element in committing crime. At some level, crime is always a human choice. That's why we call it "crime." The overall fallacy of the article, therefore, is that statistical analysis—with its weak ability to establish causation—can shed more light on crime than human factors can, when crime is clearly a highly complex, volitional, and "human" behavior that resists analysis of any kind.
deleted 14y ago
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dutgriff 14y ago
I like how the graphs that show the correlation of lead and crime is on two largely different time frames. Yes they have similar patterns but you can match anything up if you mess with the x and y axis enough. The dates should match...
- eru 14y ago
  Why should the dates match, if you want to talk about a delayed effect?
- zolbatar 14y ago
  I believe they are trying to show how there is a delay between ingesting all the lead and it having a noticeable effect. I.e. it will take years for the the lead to have an effect. It's not instantaneous.
rdl 14y ago
This also explains why baby boomers are one of the worst generational cohorts (particularly in the US, where we had the most car and thus the most lead). Toddlers in the 40s and 50s. History (and current events) show how horrible they have been for the economy, politics, etc. -- just being inherently stupid might explain a lot of this.
wyuenho 14y ago
In light of recent extreme gun violence happening all across the USA, it would be nice if we could see some graphs of lead and gun violence placed together. Better yet, the crime level and lead level graphs for the Newtown, Aurora, Columbine and so on.
pertinhower 14y ago
Did I miss something? The New Orleans maps show soil lead levels and income levels. Even if these maps were to show correlation (it's not clear they do), and even if they suggested causation (which is anything but clear), we would need to see a crime rate map to even get at the question the article deals with. The maps are pretty. What are they meant to show?

339 points by LiveTheDream 14y ago

Mother Jones would have you believe that this is some great new breakthrough, but every paint shop or home center I've been in within the last 10 years, as well as many DIY product packages/instruction sheets has prominent warnings about the dangers of lead and information on how to safely mitigate it. Maybe it's just because I live in California, but you'd have to put your head under a rock to remain unaware of the dangers of lead in the home. There is good correlation between environmental lead and criminality, but it's not an open-and-shut case - this is one among several factors criminologists consider to be contributory factors.

LiveTheDream 14y ago
I didn't get that sense at all. The article acknowledges multiple times that this is not a new breakthrough. The point is that the danger of lead is so well known that it's strange criminologists don't make a bigger deal of the lead/crime correlation. More recent studies show the lead is even more dangerous than previously thought.
- stmartin 14y ago
  So if they make a bigger deal, it almost becomes like causation rather than corelation, eh?
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  But criminologists do make a big deal of it. Here's a study from 5 years ago, which received wide public attention at the time, pointing out the correlation: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050101 http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal... And the MJ article spends half the time talking about how economically worthwhile lead abatement measures would be, without bothering to report that lead abatement is already well subsidized and promoted, because policymakers at both the state and federal level are aware of the high long-term costs of childhood lead poisoning; google 'lead abatement site:gov' for an abundance of resources. Those bureaucrats and politicians aren't advising people to clean up lead-based paint and offering grants just to pass the time, they're doing it because they already know about the high social costs of lead contamination. That's also why unleaded gasoline is now the norm.
  - danielharan 14y ago
    Only the first author is a criminologist, and it's in a medical journal with images of brain scans. In fact, it sounds like the study mentioned in the original MJ post. A single reference by a criminologist in a journal of another field does NOT prove that criminologists take this seriously. Given the author claims to have contacted several experts in that field with none giving the lead theory any credence, you'd need a bit more evidence to show they do.

rayiner 14y ago

Fun fact: the banning of leaded gasoline was one of the biggest regulatory successes in history, and went a long way to validate the model. The use of leaded gasoline was a classic market failure. It saved a small number of companies a relatively small amount of money, but was on the net a huge negative for the overall economic because it basically pumped lead directly into the bloodstream of children through their lungs, making them dumber. It didn't really make anybody sick, though, and the ultimate impact was both difficult to quantify and valuate as well as impossible to trace to any particular manufacturers leaded gasoline in any individual case. The effect of the regulation was direct. As the phaseout was implemented between the 70's to the 90's, culminating in the outright ban of leaded gasoline in the 90's, the blood lead levels in the American population dropped from 16 micrograms per deciliter in 1976 to to 3 micrograms per deciliter in 1991. This drop corresponded to the avoidance of a several point drop in IQ among children (one study found a 3.9 point drop as lead levels in children were increased from 2.4 ugrams/deciliter to 10 ugrams/deciliter).[1] The regulation ended up costing the auto/gasoline industry billions of dollars to retool. However, researchers estimated that the avoided cost from dropping blood lead levels was $17.2 billion annually per 1 ugram/deciliter reduction.[2] [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1257652/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1257652/ [2] http://www.unep.org/transport/pcfv/pdf/brochurelead.pdf http://www.unep.org/transport/pcfv/pdf/brochurelead.pdf

htf 14y ago
Your profile says you're a lawyer. I have a question for you. Why did they need to ban leaded gasoline specifically? Wasn't it already illegal for anyone to spread poison in the air? Why was new regulation needed? Or, by "regulatory success", do you simply mean the recognition by the government that lead is poisonous?
- rayiner 14y ago
  It's not illegal to spread poison in the air. Every time you drive your car you're spreading harmful chemicals into the air. Every factory or industrial operation spreads harmful chemicals into the air and water. You could theoretically ban pollution. That actually used to be the law in the 1600's. E.g. if you owned land on a river, the water had to leave your property as clean as it came in. As the industrial revolution happened, this rule was relaxed, because as it turns out it's impossible to make industry that doesn't pollute. The best you can do is balance the harms from pollution with the underlying beneficial activity. How do you achieve this balancing? The market doesn't work, because the parties aren't in contractual privity. You can use private litigation (sue someone for poisoning you) but that is wholly impractical. The litigation system is very well suited for resolving "you versus me" disputes based on tangible harms. It is not at all suited for resolving disputes between huge numbers of people based on statistical harms. Think of a suit against a leaded gasoline refiner. Two key things any plaintiff needs to prove in such a suit is: 1) what was the harm; 2) how did the defendant's activity cause the harm. How does a plaintiff prove her kid would have been 3-4 IQ points smarter but for the leaded gasoline produced? How does the plaintiff prove that her kid's harms weren't the result of say lead in pipes rather than lead in the air? Scientists can do models and experiments and tell you that the statistically a given type of pollution will cause certain kinds of harm in a population, but they can't tell you whether any particular injured person was injured from a particular type of pollution. The science here is statistical causation, but the law requires provable, traceable, causation. This (http://old.ccer.edu.cn/download/7874-1.pdf http://old.ccer.edu.cn/download/7874-1.pdf) is one of the most important papers in the economics of the law. It's also, incidentally, a fundamental paper of libertarian economics. Ronald Coase received a Nobel Prize in economics, partially for this paper. On Page 29, he basically explains why we use regulation rather than property rights enforced through litigation to address environmental harms.

greendestiny 14y ago

I'm tempted to repeat the oft said correlation is not causation. But really I have never thought that captures the problem I have with studies like this. Of course correlation does not necessarily imply causation. What I really find to be problematic is a small time series of data of a facet of a human behaviour across a population is probably going to correlate extremely well to many other time series across the same population. Or even other populations. How unusual should we find the correlation? What we might be seeing is nothing more than the average rate of change in a population to legislative changes. If it even shows that. If you take two time series that rise and then fall and overlay them on their peak I suspect most graphs look as convincing as the one presented.

gruseom 14y ago
This article cites research that goes way beyond the usual sort of correlation. How much stronger would the evidence need to get?
- greendestiny 14y ago
  I'm not sure, how strong should such a correlation be to be considered evidence? That's the real question. And I think when it comes to annual averages of broad trends its a real question how we should interpret correlations. To me this article is data porn, its a story with data. It may be some part of the truth, but I think it exists to entertain the data literate - so we can follow along with the numbers and pat ourselves on the back for a fact discovered. Its enough analysis to be dangerous. And in case hackernews has become so infected with the kind of reddit thinking that can only see in black and white - yes I think reducing lead in gasoline is a very good thing.
  - jforman 14y ago
    The strength of the correlation or its time-scale have no bearing on whether the correlation should be considered evidence of causation. The fatal flaw of a correlation is that it can be specious — it can appear to explain reality, but really there's a third variable responsible for driving the phenomenon you're interested in. In this case, lead exposure and crime rate are correlated, but maybe lead doesn't cause crime at all: maybe something else causes crime that also happens to correlate with lead exposure. Who knows, maybe a certain pesticide was used at the same time that lead gasoline came into vogue, and that's really the true cause of the rise in crime rates. In research like this, when you can't do a manually controlled experiment, you have to control for hidden variables by some other means. And that's precisely what the investigators in this article did: they varied the input data to try to "shake out" other variables that might be behind the correlation. They looked at different time scales, different geographies, and different demographics, in an attempt to control for hidden variables that might be related to any one of those things. Every time you vary the input data and keep finding a correlation, your evidence of a causative relationship goes up. The gold standard, of course, would be to expose two random, double-blind sets of infants to lead and to a control substance and see what happens. But since that would be unethical (as we have reason to think lead is bad for you), we're stuck with animal studies or retrospective studies. Personally, I find the evidence in this article impressive, but it would take quite a lot of looking into their specific methods to come to any real conclusion.

ww520 14y ago

Didn't the rise of violent video games contribute to the decline of the youth violence? People were venting their frustration and excessive energy in video games instead of on the street, leading to less violence in real life.

kolinko 14y ago
any data to support this?
- ww520 14y ago
  Google shows plenty of studies and sources. http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2011/05/18/uta-prof-video-games-leading-to-lower-crime-rates/ http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2011/05/18/uta-prof-video-games-lead... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13799616 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13799616 http://gamepolitics.com/2011/08/23/research-video-games-help-reduce-crime-rates-us#.UObLTnf76_Q http://gamepolitics.com/2011/08/23/research-video-games-help... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/8798927/Violent-video-games-reduce-crime.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/8798927/Vi...
  - kolinko 14y ago
    and this is something I can upvote :) although neither article supports your line of reasoning ("violence -> venting frustration -> less crime"), all of them mention the lack of time as a reason for crime drop.
ww520 14y ago
Wow. The downvotes. I usually don't care about the downvotes but I'm curious on this one. Did I say something off topic? Offensive? Trolling? Not contributing to the conversation? I merely pointed out another factor for the crime decline and got the downvotes. The HN crowd really doesn't like anything deviated from the norm? The HN quality is really going downhill.
ndonnellan 14y ago
I think it would be better if people stopped perpetuating the likely myth that emotions are similar to a hot gas that can be reduced in pressure by venting. - http://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/08/science/venting-anger-may-do-more-harm-than-good.html http://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/08/science/venting-anger-may-... - [PDF] http://illinois.edu/lb/files/2009/03/26/9293.pdf http://illinois.edu/lb/files/2009/03/26/9293.pdf *I'm not arguing against the video game link, just the suggested mechanism

knowaveragejoe 14y ago

I view the drop in crime as the result of a perfect storm of many factors, and perhaps this is another one. The explosion of media and the Internet occurred around the same time, so it's hard to say what caused it.

lhnn 14y ago
I think that's where "they" would point to the "distribution" evidence, that shows varying rates of the same correlation geographically. If we go on that, then you'd have to find another event that occurred at similar rates in similar geographic areas. Now, if only there were medical indications that lead causes violent behavior... the article only points to IQ issues, though there is likely more evidence elsewhere.
- marcosdumay 14y ago
  > If we go on that, then you'd have to find another event that occurred at similar rates in similar geographic areas. There are lots of events that correlate with income (thus, with the geographical distribution). And lots of them correlate with the fall or raise of crime in the article. Getting an event that correlate with both raise and fall of crime, like lead intoxication does, will be harder. But I doubt it's impossible. The thing is, we have a causal nexus, we have the correlation, but we have no idea how strong the nexus actualy is, so we can't conclude the correlation is caused by the nexus. And we won't discover, because we won't conduct the kind of experiments needed for it.
sliverstorm 14y ago
In 1996, the New York Times reported that crime had plunged for the third straight year, the sharpest drop since the end of Prohibition. Since 1993... Need I remind you that HTML 1.0 was released in mid-1993? The Internet wasn't exploding like you are thinking quite yet. Sure, it was on the rise, but certainly not among the sort of folks breaking windows and selling drugs.
- knowaveragejoe 14y ago

bobdole5 14y ago

Oh now I get it. Criminal... Element hahaha

rsuttongee 14y ago

One scary fact is that one chemist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.) is largely responsible for the development of both Tetra-Ethyl-Lead and CFCs. Scary to think that the things you're working on can have such huge unintended negative side effects.

ars 14y ago

The Romans used to use lead acetate, i.e. sugar of lead as a sweetener. I wonder how much of history can be explained by this use of lead.

ctek 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire#Lead_poisoning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire#Lea...
archangel_one 14y ago
I've read about that contributing to the fall of their empire before - I guess we'll never really know, but if it did then the impact of that element on human history must be massive. Wikipedia puts it out as an option: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_roman_empire#Lead_poisoning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_roman_empire#Lead_p...
- ars 14y ago
  I'm actually thinking less of them being poisoned but rather if their aggression levels went up as a result, i.e. more wars.
  - archangel_one 14y ago
    I'm no historian, but I don't think more wars would have been the problem - they had plenty of wars before their downfall. If anything I thought things got worse once they were expanding less, because they no longer had an influx of resources from conquered territories.
stcredzero 14y ago
I've heard it was also used to waterproof wineskins, which would let the lead leach into the wine due to the acidity.

czzarr 14y ago

tl;dr version: http://tldr.io/tldrs/50e6993885d8d1617b000a23/americas-real-criminal-element-lead http://tldr.io/tldrs/50e6993885d8d1617b000a23/americas-real-... There is now enough statistical proof that lead is the prominent cause of crime. Crime rates and lead concentrations are extremely well correlated everywhere: the more lead in the environment, the more crimes will occur. Furthermore, it is scientifically proven that lead has a very negative impact on the brain, killing gray matter and impairing neuronal communication. Unfortunately, this theory hasn't been taken seriously by the government yet because it doesn't serve any political agenda.

maxerickson 14y ago
The EPA takes lead somewhat seriously. To the extent that every contractor in the U.S. has to account for it when doing even moderate amounts of home renovation.
smsm42 14y ago
The fact that lead is poisonous is definitely taken by the government seriously, and for quite some time. The hypothesis that crime is caused by lead is not, and it is not proven by correlation. I bet if you scan through millions of data series available on everything from wool production in New Zealand to average thickness of hairs of dogs in the USA, you could find a series that correlates very well with the crime data over the last century. Did you know, for example, that US stock market is driven by butter production in Bangladesh? Here it goes: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/1998/03/01/238606/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/199... http://business.time.com/2009/04/16/the-bangladeshi-butter-production-theory-of-asset-prices/ http://business.time.com/2009/04/16/the-bangladeshi-butter-p... Scientific proof of the cause IMHO needs much more than even very nice correlation.

don_draper 14y ago

He says his article is not partisan and I believe it is not meant to be, but there are political lessons to be learned. The market left alone doesn't always pick the best product, leading to the best outcome for society. Devout readers of Ayn Rand should take heed.

Steko 14y ago
Kevin Drum is an unabashedly left leaning blogger but he's of the Matthew Yglesias flavor that values intellectual integrity over beating the right. This piece was outstanding and he's consistently one of the highlights of my RSS feed each morning.
- SeanLuke 14y ago
  I believe Kevin Drum is one of the more broadly respected bloggers in the blogosphere. He is liberal, yes, but is famously cautious, thoughtful, and considerate. In fact, it's a bit odd for him to be at Mother Jones now: his temperament seems more apropos for his previous post, on the front page of Washington Monthly.
- DomreiRoam 14y ago
  Do you know blog/people to follow leaning right that value also intellectual integrity? I noticed it is possible to find left of liberal media that includes facts references. But most of the right media at some point use the "market is right" or "less gouvernement is good" without arguments or sources and I find it quite annoying. So if you know smart right media in English or French please give the references.
  - rdl 14y ago
    Becker-Posner Blog: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ David (son of Milton) Friedman: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
    - Steko 14y ago

cateye 14y ago

Doesn't the article really miss medical evidence like the influence of lead on the brains, neurons, MRI scans and experiments with animals and stuff?

lkbm 14y ago
There's a second page that goes into that.

etherael 14y ago

Interesting case, the formatting of the article is a little foreshadowing of where my research into this led me. The scenario with the state taking credit for the decline in crime based on their policing rather than as is very convincingly demonstrated, lead poisoning. Lead poisoning has been a well known and understood phenomenon for a very long period of time, people understood even at the time of the discovery of leaded petrol that it was liable to lead to health issues of the exact kind outlined in the article. It was hardly some huge mystery that was only discovered in the last decade or so, more like rigorously suppressed well known facts that under active examination by government organisations were simply swept under the rug. http://www.environmentalhistory.org/billkovarik/research/henry-ford-charles-kettering-and-the-fuel-of-the-future/ http://www.environmentalhistory.org/billkovarik/research/hen... Specifically; Clearly, G.M. switched gears sometime in 1923 or 1924. When controversy broke out about the public health impacts of leaded gasoline in 1924, Midgley and Kettering told the media, fellow scientists and the government that no alternatives existed. “So far as science knows at the present time,” Midgley told a meeting of scientists, “tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these [antiknock] results, which are of vital importance to the continued economic use by the general public of all automotive equipment, and unless a grave and inescapable hazard exists in the manufacture of tetraethyl lead, its abandonment cannot be justified.”110 And at a Public Health Service conference on leaded gasoline in 1925, Kettering said: “We could produce certain [antiknock] results and with the higher gravity gasolines, the aromatic series of compounds, alcohols, etc… [to] get the high compression without the knock, but in the great volume of fuel of the paraffin series [petroleum] we could not do that.”111 Even though experts like Alice Hamilton of Harvard University insisted that alternatives to leaded gasoline were available,112 the Public Health Service allowed leaded gasoline to remain on the market in 1926. (Leaded gasoline was banned in 1986 in the US for the same public health concerns that had been expressed 60 years earlier). The government of the time was well aware of the risks and did practically nothing to stop the negative effects. There were several competing options available, but the politically best connected corporations who basically guided government policy in this area used their leverage to suppress knowledge and use of these options. They even prepared for the possibility that the government would actually take effective regulatory action against them despite their attempts to push them in the other direction; Interestingly, Kettering and Midgley came up with another fuel called “Synthol” in the summer of 1925, at a time when the fate of leaded gasoline was in doubt. Synthol was made from alcohol, benzene and a metallic additive — either tetraethyl lead or iron carbonyl. Used in combination with a new high compression engine much smaller than ordinary engines, Synthol would “revolutionize transportation.”113 When Ethyl leaded gasoline was permitted to return to the market in 1926, Kettering and Midgley dropped the Synthol idea. Of course, They had no need. The state was not only plain old negligent in the addressing of this threat, they used their power to suppress dissent by legal and regulatory channels; By the mid-1930s, the alliance between General Motors, DuPont Corp. and Standard Oil to produce Ethyl leaded gasoline succeeded beyond all expectations: 90 percent of all gasoline contained lead. Public health crusaders who found this troubling still spoke out in political forums, but competitors were not allowed to criticize leaded gasoline in the commercial marketplace. In a restraining order forbidding such criticism, the Federal Trade Commission said Ethyl gasoline “is entirely safe to the health of [motorists] and to the public in general when used as a motor fuel, and is not a narcotic in its effect, a poisonous dope, or dangerous to the life or health of a customer, purchaser, user or the general public.”114 Direct comparison between leaded gasoline and alcohol blends proved so controversial in the 1920s and 1930s that government studies were kept quiet or not published. For instance, a Commerce Department report dated May 15, 1925 detailed dozens of instances of alcohol fuel use worldwide.115 The report was printed only five days before the Surgeon General’s hearing on Ethyl leaded gasoline. Yet it was never mentioned in the news media of the time, or in extensive bibliographies on alcohol fuel by Iowa State University researchers compiled in the 1930s. Another instance of a “buried” government report was that of USDA and Navy engine tests, conducted at the engineering experiment station in Annapolis. Researchers found that Ethyl leaded gasoline and 20 percent ethyl alcohol blends in gasoline were almost exactly equivalent in terms of brake horsepower and useful compression ratios. The 1933 report was never published.116 Couple their state shepherding with typical shady commercial practices that are eerie early echoes of the windows OEM contract preferences microsoft has frequently been accused of engaging in; Also in the 1930s, as Ethyl’s marketing power grew, the company began to enforce what it considered to be “business ethics” on the market. Ethyl refused to grant dealer contracts to certain gasoline wholesalers, and often provided no formal explanation for their actions. The exclusion of “unethical” businessmen was especially aimed at those who cut prices, but it was a means of excluding from the entire fuel market any wholesaler who adopted practices which the oil industry disliked. Since wholesalers had to carry a wide range of products to survive, and since advertising had created enormous consumer demand for Ethyl, to be denied an Ethyl contract was in effect to be forced out of business. Most wholesalers could not or would not tell the Federal Bureau of Investigation why Ethyl would consider them unethical, but at least one wholesaler, the Earl Coryell company of Lincoln, Nebraska, blended ethyl alcohol about the same time that it could not get an Ethyl license.158 Pressure to stick with Ethyl leaded gasoline exclusively rather than try alcohol fuel blends would have been quite strong with this enforcement mechanism at the oil industry’s disposal, but it is difficult to estimate how many gasoline dealers wanted to use alcohol instead of lead. In 1940 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an anti-trust verdict against Ethyl, 159 but by then, the Midwestern alcohol fuel movement had disintegrated. And note the result of the belated slap on the wrist to ethyl being basically similar to the result of the MS / Netscape antitrust trial, it was so far after the action had already played out in the marketplace as to be basically meaningless. Damage done. That people here swallow this without doing further research and parrot the state as white knight line is somewhat disappointing. If anything on close analysis, this shows exactly the opposite and is just another data point on an extremely long line of evidence indicating that the state and its politics are capable of very little other than taking credit, and they don't let a little thing like being on the wrong side of the argument to begin with get in their way doing so.

locusm 14y ago

I wonder if there will be similar stories about CSG mining in 30 years from now...

gnoway 14y ago

Something no one has pointed out yet: http://www.lead.org.au/fs/fst27.html http://www.lead.org.au/fs/fst27.html The data is about 18 months old. I was only surprised that it was so few countries, I expected most of Africa to be represented.

hcarvalhoalves 14y ago

Another common source of Pb during the same time frame is tobacco.

tibbon 14y ago

Alternative title: Heavy Metal Causes Crime :)

STRML 14y ago

The great blog Damn Interesting did a post about this about 5 years back. It's a great read. In fact I just read it yesterday and was very surprised to see the MotherJones article today. http://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/ http://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/ They tell a great story and reveal some interesting facts about Ethyl's creator, Thomas Midgley, who very unfortunately was also responsible for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). The collective amount of economic and social damage this single man is responsible for is staggering. It would certainly be fun to total it up and compare to various wars, natural disasters, etc.

r00fus 14y ago
While leaded fuels may have been avoided, I can't see how CFCs would have not been discovered by someone else.

jwess 14y ago

It's scary to think that the transition to unleaded aviation fuel, or avgas, only began a couple years ago, and is scheduled for 2018 [0]. Currently, Avgas, which is different than jet fuel in that it's mainly used by private single-engine planes (ICE instead of turbine), can still contain up to 2.12 grams of lead per gallon [1]. Surprisingly, this 2.12 grams of lead/gal is termed 100LL, for 100-octane "low-lead". Up until the 1970's avgas could contain up to 4 grams of lead per gallon. I believe that lead exposure caused by the widespread use of avgas is a serious public health concern. Unfortunately most private plane owners are strongly against it due to the higher price of unleaded fuel. I really hope that the EPA succeeds in meeting their deadline. [0] http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas/ http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/avgas/ [1] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-04-28/html/2010-9603.htm http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-04-28/html/2010-9603.ht...

lutorm 14y ago
The article says that lead in aviation fuels (and in solder) is a far smaller contribution to current lead levels than remaining lead paint. In the grand scheme of things, there just isn't that much avgas used, and it gets dispersed widely as opposed to concentrated where people live. I think the real problem is the big aviation piston engine companies (e.g. Lycoming and Continental) that seem to have no incentive to develop modern engines that can run on unleaded fuel. Newer engine manufacturers (e.g. Rotax, Jabiru) run fine on auto fuel, but they have a much smaller market. (It's sort of ironic that users of those engines, who should not be run on leaded gas, have a hard time finding unleaded gas at airports in the US.)
- sokoloff 14y ago
  IMO, the FAA and their standardization processes for fuels like G100UL (GAMI), UL102 (Swift) and 91/96UL (Hjelmco) is the bottleneck here. GAMI in particular appears to have a fuel ready to use (in lab/prototype quantities) and has flown test flights in normally aspirated and turbocharged applications. (Turbos live a harder life, have lower detonation margins and are generally a more difficult test case. Many normally aspirated engines would run fine on ethanol-free pump gas from the corner service station.) I don't necessarily fault the individual FAA employees; they have every incentive to make GAMI, Swift et al jump through hoops to prove that their fuel is as safe and has as high detonation margins, even in worst case, high, hot and heavy departure conditions, as the proven over many decades 100LL fuel. It's a "heads I lose", "tails we push" set of incentives for them, so I don't blame them for being reluctant to move swiftly. I feel bad burning 100LL in an engine (from Continental) perfectly capable of (and even happier) running on ethanol-free 87 octane pump gas. I'd happily buy clean mogas instead of low-lead, but it's virtually impossible to find and low-lead is available at the overwhelming majority of airports.

sc68cal 14y ago

I posted this yesterday, the only difference is this is the "print" version. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5002806 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5002806

tokenadult 14y ago

There are a variety of really interesting comments here. Thanks for the pointers to other sources on history and economics besides the interesting magazine article submitted here. Having read the comment threads, I just wanted to respond to a couple of statements about Thomas Midgley, Jr., the chemist who had much to do with developing tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive and later Freon as a refrigerant. The accusation made against him in those comments is that he was accountable for untold human suffering around the world because of his inventions. But let's remember that during the twentieth century mortality and morbidity from all causes declined throughout the world, and that in the developed world, life expectancy at all ages has been increasing throughout my half-century lifetime to date. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-why-we-die-global-life-expectancy http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w... Technological progress is all about trade-offs. The trade-off that is beneficial and affordable in one decade may be supplanted by a trade-off that is more affordable and less incidentally harmful in a later decade. Improved transportation by motor vehicle doubtless had many side effects that were beneficial to human health, as did more efficient refrigeration and air-conditioning. On the available evidence, it is at least as likely that Midgley's work was net beneficial for humankind over the course of our parents' lifetimes and our lifetimes as it is that he caused net harm to humankind. We can't rerun history to be sure. Meanwhile, as we discover more about physics, chemistry, human physiology, and also economics and public policy, we can aim to make the best regulatory trade-offs we can in this decade. It's enough to be rational today and to try to improve the living environment for humankind according to our best understanding today. So far progress in improving human health in general has been remarkably steady worldwide for more than a century. http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2860ef54d218ce5ce19abe6a59/dc_biodemography_of_human_ageing_nature_2010_vaupel.pdf http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...

Camillo 14y ago
Very true. However, just going by the Wikipedia article on him, Midgley engaged in clearly unethical actions by helping to convince the government and the public of the safety of TEL even as he himself was suffering from the effects of lead poisoning.

nnethercote 14y ago

I think many of the commenters here didn't see that there is a 2nd page of this article (http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline?page=2 http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...) The first paragraph of that second page reads: "If econometric studies were all there were to the story of lead, you'd be justified in remaining skeptical no matter how good the statistics look. Even when researchers do their best—controlling for economic growth, welfare payments, race, income, education level, and everything else they can think of—it's always possible that something they haven't thought of is still lurking in the background. But there's another reason to take the lead hypothesis seriously, and it might be the most compelling one of all: Neurological research is demonstrating that lead's effects are even more appalling, more permanent, and appear at far lower levels than we ever thought." And the rest of the second page goes into much more detail. In other words, just saying "correlation doesn't imply causation" doesn't win you the thread. There is clear causation evidence at the neurological level.

pertinhower 14y ago
No, we don't see causation at the neurological level. The "correlation ≠ causation" meme doesn't just undermine overspeculative econometric conclusions: it undermines overspeculative biological conclusions too. The article may show correlations at the econometric level (I'm not convinced). It reports correlations at the medical level. But correlation still ≠ causation, and so it's not clear that lead causes crime "neurologically". Indeed it's not clear that any single factor trumps the human element in committing crime. At some level, crime is always a human choice. That's why we call it "crime." The overall fallacy of the article, therefore, is that statistical analysis—with its weak ability to establish causation—can shed more light on crime than human factors can, when crime is clearly a highly complex, volitional, and "human" behavior that resists analysis of any kind.

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dutgriff 14y ago

I like how the graphs that show the correlation of lead and crime is on two largely different time frames. Yes they have similar patterns but you can match anything up if you mess with the x and y axis enough. The dates should match...

eru 14y ago
Why should the dates match, if you want to talk about a delayed effect?
zolbatar 14y ago
I believe they are trying to show how there is a delay between ingesting all the lead and it having a noticeable effect. I.e. it will take years for the the lead to have an effect. It's not instantaneous.

rdl 14y ago

This also explains why baby boomers are one of the worst generational cohorts (particularly in the US, where we had the most car and thus the most lead). Toddlers in the 40s and 50s. History (and current events) show how horrible they have been for the economy, politics, etc. -- just being inherently stupid might explain a lot of this.

wyuenho 14y ago

In light of recent extreme gun violence happening all across the USA, it would be nice if we could see some graphs of lead and gun violence placed together. Better yet, the crime level and lead level graphs for the Newtown, Aurora, Columbine and so on.

pertinhower 14y ago

Did I miss something? The New Orleans maps show soil lead levels and income levels. Even if these maps were to show correlation (it's not clear they do), and even if they suggested causation (which is anything but clear), we would need to see a crime rate map to even get at the question the article deals with. The maps are pretty. What are they meant to show?