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Comment by hnzix | Hacker News Reader

See also the Lead-Crime hypothesis, which proposes a causal relationship between the banning of leaded petrol and a sharp decline in crime rates:

[0] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/74298000/gif/...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615

Leaded petrol was made possible by Thomas Midgley, who also discovered Freon resulting in CFCs and the ozone hole.

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Imho the whole history around TEL [0] is a pretty sad example of human hubris and our tendency to underestimate the negative impacts of our actions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and...

Less about human hubris and more about the single drive to maximise profit to the detriment of any other considerations. My favourite part:

By 2000, the TEL industry had moved the major portion of their sales to developing countries whose governments they lobbied against phasing out leaded gasoline.

Monsters.

It is always weird to me how people refer to these people as monsters, but do very little to stop their actions, and seem to actively support them if it makes their life even slightly easier. Classifying the people who make these decisions as monsters is stupid, because it somwhow makes them seem outliers from the average human moral conduct. They aren't outliers. That is just simply how most humans are or become when they are given a large amount of power.

If we want real change we are going to have to realize that 99.9% of humans are lazy, selfish, and err on the side of evil.

In a similar vein, the presence of lithium in drinking water has been shown to reduce violent crime, as well as general cognitive disorders [1][2].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1699579

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24919696

The article touches on that:

> Sub-lethal exposure to lead in humans has been linked to increased aggression, with people who grow up in high-lead neighborhoods having a higher probability to be incarcerated for violent crime. They also tend to score lower in standardized tests.

Wasn't this kind of debunked?

No. The general conclusion seems to be that lead wasn't the only thing related to the decline of violent crime in the US but it was probably a significant factor.

The evidence is not only from the US. It's from all over the world. Different developed countries have moved to unleaded different times and their violent crime rates decline as well.

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