Lead Water Pipes in 1900 Caused Higher Crime Rates in 1920?
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
Problem is, every time I describe the problem and the reasoning behind it, no doctor takes me seriously to the point of laughing sometimes. It's ridiculous that lead's been researched so much, yet no doctor I've talked to understands it enough to even humor the idea. Not trying to self diagnose, but a little bit of "Hmm... yeah, maybe", would be nice.
I've also reached out to researchers in the field. The modern ones who've done extensive research have all moved to different fields and aren't willing to help out. Really frustrating. If anybody has any sources for help, I'd love it.
Are you on medication to help with the (diagnosed) bipolar disorder? Do you find that e.g. lithium eases your symptoms? If so, I'd be inclined to think you're bipolar -- irrespective of whether you also have low-level lead poisoning.
I agree with another poster - get tested for lead. No matter whether damage done is irreversible or not, it's good to prevent further damage.
I actually have had blood tests and nothing came from it. They're not very useful years after the fact.
I thought centerfire + small pellets meant you were talking about birdshot though a shotgun, like competitive skeet or trap shooting. But I guess there aren't too many indoor ranges for that (although there is at least one - the MSZU complex in Germany). Or perhaps one of the .177 cartridges like .17 HM2.
So we're probably talking about lead contamination on your hands, then. You can clean that off by washing your hands, and as long as you did so after shooting and particularly before you eat, I think you'd probably have been fine. But I'm not a doctor.
The hand contamination was definitely a thing. We weren't ever advised on washing our hands properly, so that risk is pretty high especially considering we would often eat snacks after. It was pretty irresponsible of all parties, but I have a hard time blaming my 16 year old self and my peers. The coach should've known better, though. The other concern was that here was a trap 10m down the line which flew up dust - apparently it was too expensive to clean (go figure). We'd sweep the ground, too, which kicked up a surprising amount of fine dust. Can't say for sure how much of that was lead.
I've thought about raising this as a legal issue, but if doctors can't take it seriously, I wouldn't even know where to begin on the legal front.
The task of making causal claims is a difficult one, and not one to be made lightly. The literature is replete with examples of this going terribly wrong, even with perceived physical justifications. See
[0]: tylervigen.com
[1]: http://nerdsonwallstreet.typepad.com/my_weblog/files/datamin...
[2]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/reinhart-rogoff-aus...
[1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jfeigenbaum/files/feigenbau...
I don't have time to check out the article this week, but will soon.
The real kicker is that lead pipes combined with acidic water have a higher effect than lead pipes combined with basic water.
Paper's here: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jfeigenbaum/files/feigenbau...
An important concern in a cross-sectional study such as ours is that the cities that installed lead pipes in the nineteenth century might have differed from the cities that did not in unobserved ways that were correlated with their homicide rates. Based on available data on the characteristics of the cities in our sample, we find little evidence that the cities that used lead pipes differed in observable ways from the cities that did not. Although larger cities, denser cities, and cities with comparatively low rates of home ownership were more likely to have used lead pipes, so were better-educated cities. High-homicide southern cities, meanwhile, were less likely to have used lead pipes. When we predict whether cities used lead pipes using all covariates, the only difference that remains statistically significant is the city population.
Using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) sample of the 1900 census, we calculate several city-level covariates that could be correlated with both lead pipe use and crime.17 These include each city’s population, population density, home ownership rate, and literacy rate, the share of each city’s population composed of African Americans, foreign-born residents, and single men aged 18 to 40, and the share of each city’s employed population working in manufacturing. We also create covariates for cities’ latitude and longitude...
> I don't have time to check out the article this week, but will soon.
Maybe reading first before accusing them of bad science is a good idea?
We've seen massive drops on the level of violent crime in the US (and beyond) over the last twenty or thirty years. And the attribution of that drop has huge ramifications. Should we double down on three-strikes laws, or can the drop be attributed to environmental factors like ambient lead levels due to leader gasoline?
What I see here is increased evidence for the lead poisoning hypothesis. We know that lead poisoning causes violent behavior; the evidence is indicating that elevated crime rates may be due to undiagnosed poisoning.
> Our second identification strategy, introduced by Troesken (2006) and Clay et al. (2014), exploits the fact that more lead particulate will leach into water with low pH levels. If lead exposure has a causal effect on homicide, more acidic water should be correlated with higher homicide rates only in cities that used lead water pipes.
So there's more causal evidence than appears in the Mother Jones article. The two references for their "identification strategy" don't seem particularly well-cited though. [1][2]
[1] http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/REST_a_00396
[2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/great-lead-water-pipe-disaste...
Is it possible that this is just because people weren't dying of other things first?
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure...
> That tip took Nevin in a different direction. The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.
> Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.
> So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.
> And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to "fill 'er up with ethyl," they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.
So while it definitely had a large influence we have to realize lead was everywhere, it was cheap, it had so many wonderful uses, but it most certainly didn't vanish in the seventies.
That "we don't know much" nuance rarely makes it into short articles. The closest I've seen is in the Atlantic, where they basically have a whole series devoted to problems with no easy answers.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/what-cau...
Maybe the lead theory is right, but these are tough issues that are well studied, full of methodological hazards, so it's worth being extremely cautious when interpreting results about anything that drives crime trends.
Well it made it into this one:
Click on my post from last year to get more details about both the strengths and weaknesses of this paper. As with any retrospective study like this, there are reasons to be cautious about the results.
Clicking the link gives us a pretty nuanced discussion:
On the negative side, it's risky to look solely at homicide numbers. This is because the absolute number of murders is small, especially on a city-by-city basis, and that means there's a lot of noise in the numbers. This is especially true when you're limited to a period of time as short as 15 years. There's also the fact that this was an era when lead paint was widely used, and that's very hard to tease out from the use of lead in pipes. Finally, there's the usual problem of any study like this: what do you control for? The use of lead pipes is plausibly unrelated to anything else related to crime, but it's impossible to know for sure. The authors do control for black population, foreign-born population, occupations, home ownership, and gender breakdown, and that reduces their effect size from 11.4 percent to 8.6 percent. Might some other control reduce it even further?
Plus there's the anomaly of Southern cities. Very few of them used lead pipes, but some did, and their murder rates were essentially no different from any other Southern cities. Why? It's possible that this is because their use of lead pipes was small (F&M have data on lead pipe use by city, but not on how much lead piping was used in each city). But it's still odd.
> it looks like lead really is the culprit
And yes,
> there are reasons to be cautious about the results
But that's immediately followed by,
> However, the main strength of this study is unquestionably important: it verifies the lead-crime link in [a new] environment...
That's not the level of nuance I'm looking for.
More specifically, I think articles tend to be stronger when they acknowledge that there are multiple theories for crime trends, several of which have some explanatory power, none of which really gives a complete picture.
If the title were "Lead contributed to higher crime rates" rather than "Lead caused higher crime rates," that would be the sort of concession I'm looking for.
Unreservedly agree with you about the older piece though. Even without discussing alternative theories, Drum's earlier article is a good example of science journalism that puts a paper in perspective, (titled "some new evidence" rather than "X causes Y"), and the content is really well balanced.
I don't have any sources at hand, so take this with a grain of salt. But, I've often seen it argued that Reagan era drug policies were detrimental to poor minorities, especially black men. The problems we see today are the trickle-down effects (couldn't resist) of turning an entire generation of fathers into disenfranchised criminals.
Like if dad's in jail, who cares if you end up there eventually.
Prison isn't a deterrent any more. In some communities doing time is just part of growing up.
Seriously though: a motherjones.com post of this quality as #1 on HN is a new low. I miss the days of pg obsessively micromanaging everything 'round these parts.
I haven't really noticed anything different, other than dang commenting more publicly on moderation decisions.
This is yet another corralative relation between introduction of leaded plumbing and long-term behavioral impacts.
False premise on your part.
As it is, I find it hard to extend that courtesy.
You might want to consider this in future. As the points you raise have merits, but not in the context and tone in which your make them.
2) Correlation does not prove causation