America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
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]
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) 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.
The EPA generally doesn't ban things. Leaded gasoline was an unusual case because it was so harmful and also, in the grand scheme of things, quite replaceable. Usually what they'll do is specify that polluters that emit particular kinds of air pollution (sulfur, etc) must use a certain level of control technology. This creates certain market incentives for polluters to make this control technology as cheap as possible. However, this approach doesn't really reduce pollution as much as it should, since the EPA is usually quite sensitive to cost issues. But as a practical matter, some polluters should go out of business if the cost of thoroughly cleaning up their emissions outweighs the revenue from the polluting activity.
Trading schemes add a lot of unnecessary complexity and potential for abuse, and enshrine the idea that if you have polluted more in the past, you deserve to keep polluting more in the future. If your business model requires you to cost the society more in pollution than the value of your product, you should not be in business, regardless of how fine history your company has.
Instead just quantify the total harm caused by emissions the best you can, divide by total emissions amounts, and levy that as a tax per pound of emission. In such a system, not a single coal-fired plant would be in operation in the US.
They're more similar than you seem to think. Both internalize cost to the production of pollution. In a tax, the cost is fixed and the total amount of pollution is market-determined. With a cap it is the reverse. However, at the point where the prices agree, they are, in principle, equivalent.
> Trading schemes add a lot of unnecessary complexity and potential for abuse, and enshrine the idea that if you have polluted more in the past, you deserve to keep polluting more in the future.
Allocating pollution licenses to past polluters is only one possible way of distributing them. A cap-and-trade system could also to hold yearly auctions for each year's permits. The former is used many times in part because incumbents are less likely to oppose regulation. They may even be able to achieve efficiencies and sell their allocated permits at a profit because of cap-and-trade. But note that even though the incumbents are receiving the permits for free, they still have an incentive to reduce pollution when the cost of the efficiency is less than the cost of the permit.
> Instead just quantify the total harm caused by emissions the best you can, divide by total emissions amounts, and levy that as a tax per pound of emission.
Two problems is that the harm may be difficult to quantify in a price and more importantly the harm may not be linear in the amount of pollution. You could argue that the optimal solution would be for the government to estimate the harm as a function of the amount of pollution and hold some sort of complicated auction where the price depended on the quantity of pollution permits sold. However, I think this is too impractical for any real-world regulation.
I believe that's exactly why they are "preferred" by our political system. Whenever the political body starts to consider laws about pollution, the lobbyists for the polluters go into high-alert to influence the outcome. They don't want a straight tax, because that'll become a simple cost which is difficult to avoid. Instead they prefer a complex scheme that can be sold as if it has the same impact as the straight tax, but in reality it will provide ways to game the system to either avoid the costs or even make a profit for the polluting companies.
I'll never understand how people can suppose that a government solution, which consists of a massive nation-wide bureaucracy as well as an immense violent army of what I endearingly call "the conflict resolvers" (law enforcement, courts, etc.) funded mostly by compulsory financial levies on working residents, is by any definition or stretch of the imagination "more efficient" than private litigation.
... And if, after looking at the example of lead, you still don't understand the role of regulation, it's likely that you never will.
It's pretty clear to me that you have never been involved with "private litigation".
Litigation cannot exist without your so-called 'conflict resolvers'.
Or the insurance company also just says "No I don't like you, and since there is no actual way for you to enforce me paying you out, I just won't". Again, if the insurance company decides not to pay, they are enacting bad things on someone and not honoring an agreement. Fortunately since they have lots of free money and no expenses (other than those required to manipulate perception -- cheap payouts etc), they can just have their newspaper buddies out-shout anyone else and not actually be harmed by bad practices.
Why? Retail stores don't become the government or merge into one. Neither do private security agencies. It's unlikely that any organization could "become the government" unless a vast portion of society accepts them as the sole legitimate purveyor of violence, which is precisely what I don't want to happen.
> Or the insurance company also just says "No I don't like you, and since there is no actual way for you to enforce me paying you out, I just won't".
Then what would you do? Personally, I would stop paying them (and probably switch to another insurance company), and I suspect a vast majority of their customers would do the same thing, and probably long before it got to the point where it "became the government."
The only ways for a private insurance company in a free society to remain dominant while consistently not honoring their agreements would be if society as a whole didn't care about the agreements being honored (which seems unlikely), if they gather enough power to physically oppress an entire region (which also seems unlikely these days, since very few governments are even able or willing to pull that off), or if they convince society that they should be allowed to have a monopoly on violence. That last one is a pretty good definition of "becoming a government," and it's certainly possible, but the whole argument I'm making is that society should not recognize any organization as having a monopoly on violence.
I guess I could hope for one reporter to be nice... but all the others making crap up about me for a few $K would make the other customers not actually pay heed. No penalty for the shady insurance.
Similarly you are making a big fuss over the difference between physical and economic violence. Yet you adamantly refuse to explain how a bunch of economic policies via collusion of the players, resulting in a scenario of "play by our rules or else get no way of eating or sheltering yourself" is any less violence than "do what we say or we shoot you". To me the difference is a false one: forcing me to do something with one death threat really isn't different than with another.
Finally, you somehow are confusing free market with "open and transparent operation of all economic players". We already see that isn't the case - most business hide most information about themselves the best they can, and rebel against any attempt to shed light on them. In fact government is more open about operations than almost all businesses, yet somehow there will be magic knowledge transfer between consumers and business about what those businesses really do once you take away government.
How do people find out that certain automobile are crappy? How do people know to avoid certain hospitals or certain doctors? I would never make the ludicrous claim that any arrangement of society would be utopia. People will get ripped off and bad things will always happen. It would simply be less common without government.
> you adamantly refuse to explain how a bunch of economic policies via collusion of the players, resulting in a scenario of "play by our rules or else get no way of eating or sheltering yourself" is any less violence than "do what we say or we shoot you". To me the difference is a false one: forcing me to do something with one death threat really isn't different than with another.
In the former situation, the "collusion of the players" is offering a crappy deal (with no physical violence) as an alternative to starvation. That means that if you truly would starve without the crappy deal (which would require you to be incapable of growing your own food), you are genuinely better off taking the deal. I don't see how this qualifies as "violence." You could make a decent argument that it is exploitation, which is a different argument altogether.
Except for the most part, there's no such thing as "the long run", since the entire concept depends on the universe being relatively stationary (from a probabilistic/statistical perspective). In fact, the universe, and especially the economy/culture/society, is highly non-stationary, making the entire notion of "the long run" fallacious.
In other words, your model assumes that aggregate consumer demand for a particular basket of goods will "stay still" long enough for bad actors to get weeded out. But this is an empirical claim, and one that has been shown to be frequently false. Indeed, its falsehood is in part responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.
The world is always changing deeply and unpredictably. In the imagined scenario above, your needs for insurance wouldn't remain constant, and neither would the base of providers. Indeed, the entire ontology of the marketplace would be constantly in flux, making "in the long run" free market approaches mostly impotent as compared with collective action that directly deals with the problems we face right now.
Don't be silly. The world would still be a horrible place. Heinous acts would be committed every day. People would be murdered, tortured, and raped. There would still be a lot of violence—it would just be a lot less than what we have today.
> In other words, your model assumes that aggregate consumer demand for a particular basket of goods will "stay still" long enough for bad actors to get weeded out. But this is an empirical claim, and one that has been shown to be frequently false. Indeed, its falsehood is in part responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.
Of course there is truth in all of this. But how is the government a better solution?
> The world is always changing deeply and unpredictably. In the imagined scenario above, your needs for insurance wouldn't remain constant, and neither would the base of providers.
Again, that's true of insurance just like it's true of cell phone providers, automobile manufacturers, etc. Again, how does government solve any of this?
Further, a society without government is much harder to imagine, because the idea of rules enforcement is sort of built into every society I've ever heard of - your proposal is "no rules enforcement at all, everyone do what they want in all cases". Sounds frightening - I would have to treat every single person I encounter as a terrible person, and they would have to do the same for me. If you think that is really not different than what exists now, you have the following issues: 1. you are too paranoid to do anything, 2. you must be extremely rude and agressive to people if they always treat you that way. 3. you must be terribly lonely. I pity you.
The point isn't that "government will solve any of this", it's that laissez-faire economics can't. Bad actors can skip from exploitation to exploitation -- if there would be less government, then everyone would need to look out for themselves all the time and there would be less social trust, with all the attendant effects.
It's the possibility that laissez-faire could do a much worse job than regulations that libertarians refuse to accept.
I think you have no idea what you are talking about. None.
What if I can't afford private insurance? What if I am not allowed private insurance?
Seems like decrying a 'monopoly of violence' and replacing it with a 'vibrant violence marketplace' is quite a few steps in the wrong direction.
What can anything do for you if you are killed? I don't understand the relevance. You could still have private life insurance to provide for your family, but that's no different than today.
> What if I can't afford private insurance?
What if you can't afford the fees associated with litigation in the government court system? I never claimed that my suggestion would suddenly make everything fine for poor people. It's always going to be worse to have less wealth, just like it is in our current society.
> Seems like decrying a 'monopoly of violence' and replacing it with a 'vibrant violence marketplace' is quite a few steps in the wrong direction.
I don't understand how. Neither system is a utopia, but a competitive system motivated by profit would probably be cheaper (because customers like lower prices) and less violent (because violence is expensive and risky) than a government monopoly.
> Then the security companies would start enforcing rules in their zones (remember property doesn't exist without someone there to enforce the property). Those security guys could take over the zone next door. Oh and prevent people from living. Repeat for larger and larger groups. Suddenly we have government of the feudal or warlard kind all over again.
There are so many leaps there that need justification.
What is to keep someone from killing me to get their way? Private insurance? Are they going to go to war for me after I'm dead?
>What if you can't afford the fees associated with litigation in the government court system?
Well, if the conflict 'resolution' involves the other party resorting to violence or theft, I can turn the matter over to the into the State whether I can pay for it or not. There are hard limits placed on how far the other party can go in getting what they want.
>violence is expensive
I don't see how violence is expensive. Violence is cheap. Bullets don't cost much. Rocks are even cheaper.
In fact, violence can be very profitable. Got $10 in your pocket? Just paid for my bullet and then some. Got a $30,000 car? Well now, that should pay for a few rounds.
What you propose is a fantasy, pure and simple. And not even a very plausible one.
Yes, that's the idea, although "going to war" is hyperbolic. Private insurance would be strongly incentivized to seek out and punish murderers, assuming of course that potential customers would find that service valuable. The leap from the government's monopoly on violence to a competitive alternative is no more drastic or complex than the leap from the government's monopoly on postal service to a competitive alternative. Features that customers valued would almost certainly abound, and ones they didn't care about or like would be less common. The key difference is that the competitive systems get their revenue from willing payers, while the government coerces money from every single employer.
> I don't see how violence is expensive. Violence is cheap. Bullets don't cost much. Rocks are even cheaper.
I don't mean the cost of weaponry. I mean that you have to pay thugs well, mostly because of the inherent risk I mentioned earlier. There is also risk of massive retaliation which can end up causing a lot of damage to humans and property.
> In fact, violence can be very profitable.
It can be, sure, but it's extremely expensive and extremely risky. That was my point.
It can be, sure, but it's extremely expensive and extremely risky. That was my point.
Violence is only risky because government makes it risky to commit violence.
Reality does not bear out your claims that turning everything over to private parties would magically solve the violence problem. In fact, places like Somalia and every conflict in Africa and the Middle East are strong evidence that violence would increase tenfold without a strong government. In contrast, the places with the lowest levels of violence are frequently places like Singapore or Europe with the highest levels of government.
Not true. Government law enforcement obviously contributes, but the tendency for people to defend themselves (and for third parties to intervene against perceived injustice) is the primary source of risk.
> In fact, places like Somalia and every conflict in Africa and the Middle East are strong evidence that violence would increase tenfold without a strong government.
I'm glad someone finally mentioned Somalia. Unfortunately, your beliefs are incorrect, and are in fact the opposite of the truth. See http://rkba.org/libertarian/maccallum/MacCallum-Somalia98.ht... and http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf .
I can't see what they have to do with this argument though. The first one is basically a speculative essay with little to support its ideas, interesting though they are.
The second one is more rigorous, but it seems to me that it works against your argument.
It contends that Law and Order is provided by Xeer, Somali customary law, which is a tribal artifact that has developed over centuries, and depends on people being recognized as having loyalty to a tribe because it makes the tribe responsible for harms done its by members to other tribes. Thew piece also states that although private courts exist (funded by successful businessmen), Shari'a courts perform an instrumental function in creating legal order.
Both pieces also state that the Somali central state, when it existed, was weak, rampantly corrupt and never successfully displaced these tribal and religious institutions.
All this really seems to be saying is that, just like everywhere else before the emergence of the nation state, Somalia was governed by tribal law and religion. In the case of Somalia, a functioning nation state never really emerged, and so it fell back to tribal law and religion.
This turns out not to be as bad as the failing central state, or the horror stories portrayed by the mainstream media, but although falling back to tribalism and religion might not be as bad as the media portrays, it hardly seems like a model for how to improve on what we have.
If that were true people wouldn't be killed over pocket change today.
It seems to me that your position is only maintainable if you take many questionable assumptions as a given -- here are a couple:
-People are rational actors. -People will operate in an environment with good enough information available to make good decisions. (This would be tough to begin with but with overlapping rules in place this could really be a crippling burden in your purely market driven world.)
Keeping just those two assumptions intact seems...improbable.
There is no organization of individuals which routinely kill people over pocket change, is there? Obviously, single individuals can and do commit nearly any physical act you can conceive of. That doesn't mean that all acts are affordable to deploy on a massive scale, especially when you're worried about earning a profit.
I chuckled at your assumptions, because they apply equally (or I might argue, more so) to a challenge of the desirability of government. Remember, what we call "government" is really just a bunch of people that society recognizes as the sole legitimate purveyors of violence—that's the only difference. The only change I'm proposing is for society to recognize no individuals as the sole legitimate purveyors of violence, rather than a select few. The fact that people irrational and ignorant is all the more reason to not allow any of them to become the sole legitimate purveyors of violence.
Yes, there are. Frequently over nothing at all.
Suppose I kill someone. Now you'll turn to a private law company to judge/punish me. I then proceed to kill that company's employees. Will you now invoke a third private law provider in their name? Who will pay for it? Even if all the law providers were mutually insured, in this arrangement, as long as I can overpower each private entity, there is no effective law.
Why? This is an unsubstantiated claim, and I don't see why it's any truer than claiming that competition in the retail industry will be worse than a government-owned retail monopoly.
> Suppose I kill someone. Now you'll turn to a private law company to judge/punish me. I then proceed to kill that company's employees. Will you now invoke a third private law provider in their name? Who will pay for it?
All you're arguing here is that my proposition would not be a perfect utopian society, which I would never be foolish enough to claim. It's no different than asking "What if I kill someone, then kill the cops that show up, then kill every other law enforcement agency that shows up, then kill the entire national military?"
Wrong. They are a group of people acting within a common framework of rules. These rules constrain their behavior, especially violent behavior. Part of this framework works to ensure no one person, small group or even large sub-group can act independently of these rules.
>The only change I'm proposing is for society to recognize no individuals as the sole legitimate purveyors of violence, rather than a select few.
This opens violent action to anyone who cares to engage in such behavior by whatever rules they see fit.
>The fact that people irrational and ignorant is all the more reason to not allow any of them to become the sole legitimate purveyors of violence.
I disagree. I think this is a fine argument for having a common set of rules for violent action agreed upon and enforced by as many people as possible. The irrational and ignorant will be held in check according to the common rules by everyone else with that responsibility.
No, but people agreeing to the tenants of the document do. This would be no different in your proposal only there will be exponentially more documents (agreements) to keep track of.
> and voting is not a realistic way to keep government accountable to the people.
Voting is not the only way to keep government accountable (legal action being another -- revolution or threat of revolution being yet another, civil disobedience etc, etc.), but as far as a basic way to make sure government will reflects the governed's will, voting does a decent job. The evidence for this is that more extreme and direct action is relatively rare...at least in the West.
>An individual simply has no recourse to everyday government injustices (like taxation or prosecution for drug possession).
Taxation is an injustice? How so? I don't find it to be unjust. I get a lot of value, personally, from the taxes I pay. And drug possession? I personally don't feel that drugs should be considered contraband but many people have. Those laws are changing, however, through voting no less, as public opinion shifts.
>If you insist that government represents the people, fine, but it's still tyranny of the majority/plurality.
I live in the United States. It is a Republic. This means that while most laws flow from the majority and everyone must live under those laws the rights of minorities are protected. Thus tyranny is held in check. Also, minority and majority are fluid terms. They are not so much tied to an individual as a gross bloc, but to individual opinions held by those individuals regarding the laws, rules and regulations under consideration. The same person will find themselves in the majority on some issues and the minority in others. In short, individuals often don't find their will wholly repressed by the rules of the majority. Also, the rules tend to be slow to change and cannot be applied arbitrarily. This is opposed to a tyranny where the rule is absolute, arbitrarily applied and make no room for unassailable rights.
Then pay the government voluntarily. I would have no problem with that. The problem is with taking people money when they aren't okay with it. I consider threatening someone with violence unless they pay you money to be unjust, which I don't think is that bizarre of an opinion.
> I personally don't feel that drugs should be considered contraband but many people have.
The error you're making is trying to represent government action as something voluntary or up to personal opinion. Just like with taxation, you say that you don't consider drugs contraband, but many people do. That would be fine if it was left at that. The problem is that the group people who do consider drugs to be contraband have implemented a vast organized system of violence against the other group. I don't have a problem with the difference in opinion. The problem is with the violence.
> I live in the United States. It is a Republic. This means that while most laws flow from the majority and everyone must live under those laws the rights of minorities are protected. Thus tyranny is held in check.
Did you go to public schools in the USA? I did, and I was repeatedly taught that as well. Later, when I actually looked into it myself, I realized it's simply not true. The USA government was founded in an attempt to create one of the smallest centralized governments in history, and in a relatively short period of time it has grown into one of the largest centralized governments in history. Just because a legal document, your school, and you yourself say that rights are protected doesn't mean they are.
> The same person will find themselves in the majority on some issues and the minority in others. In short, individuals often don't find their will wholly repressed by the rules of the majority.
Sure, no one is "wholly repressed," but that's a pretty low bar. I would prefer that no one be violently oppressed by the majority at all.
> This is opposed to a tyranny where the rule is absolute, arbitrarily applied and make no room for unassailable rights.
Have you followed the legislation, ongoing attempted legislation, and executive action regarding the "war on terror" in the past decade or so? American citizens have been assassinated in drone strikes without any pretense of legality. Alleged criminals or "terrorists" have been tortured and detained indefinitely without being charged. Prominent political leaders have explicitly said that the rule of law does not apply to people who are considered by the government to be a threat to the government.
Ok. Then would you keep the non-payers from enjoying the benefit of the infrastructure put into place by the payers?
> I consider threatening someone with violence unless they pay you money to be unjust, which I don't think is that bizarre of an opinion.
It is bizarre because it rarely comes to that. The threat of violence is quite a few well understood steps down in the process. What you propose is to replace those well understood steps to violent action with an overlapping, ever changing patchwork of rules. And wishing for violence to simply not exist is not an option.
>I would prefer that no one be violently oppressed by the majority at all.
Violence exists. It will always exist as long as people are mortal or can feel pain. The trick is controlling and limiting it's use. What you propose is replacing the potential of violent action by rules laid out by the majority by rules created by any individual or group that cares to fashion them and with the resources to carry them out against anybody or group that cannot muster a reprisal great enough to make the cost outweigh the benefits to the violently acting group.
>Just because a legal document, your school, and you yourself say that rights are protected doesn't mean they are. >Have you followed the legislation, ongoing attempted legislation, and executive action regarding the "war on terror" in the past decade or so? American citizens have been assassinated in drone strikes without any pretense of legality. Alleged criminals or "terrorists" have been tortured and detained indefinitely without being charged. Prominent political leaders have explicitly said that the rule of law does not apply to people who are considered by the government to be a threat to the government.
These things stand out because they are not the normal course of business.
Violence is always a specter (a potential action) in any conflict between people. The question is; How do we minimize the role of violence in coming to resolutions to conflicts? I think the rules we've evolved to answer that question of the course of human history have done a decent job.
Do you have a different set of rules that you think would better optimize this minimization problem? I'd love to hear it.
And sadly you are dealing with a Libertarian and you will.
Express them like this? yeah. Well, libertarians and Jehovah's witnesses.
On Hacker News comments? What in the world are you going on about?
Of course not. It was already false, long before I declared it so.
> Violence is always a specter (a potential action) in any conflict between people. The question is; How do we minimize the role of violence in coming to resolutions to conflicts?
I agree completely.
> I think the rules we've evolved to answer that question of the course of human history have done a decent job.
I disagree completely.
Show me how it is false. I am a very reasonable person who is prone to change his mind when presented with a solid argument. I am inviting you to make that argument.
You are the one claiming that litigation can exist without government. Litigation has never, in all of recorded history thus far, existed without the backing of government. Thus, the burden of proof is on you.
But anyway, Medieval Iceland is always cited as the closest thing to a nation-wide private legal system. Admittedly, it's not exactly the system I would prefer, because there are still some roles that are not open to competition. But it's fairly close, and it should be close enough to help you imagine such a system.
If you can look at social arrangements smaller than entire nations, there is plenty of private (and voluntary) dispute resolution all around the globe. In fact, that method of conflict resolution is often chosen voluntary by both parties to avoid the inefficiencies or perceived unfairness of government.
You mean private litigation which employs gov't judges to adjudicate and the gov't police to enforce? If so, you have a confusing definition of private.
The only private litigation I'm aware of is the mob, which has a self-contained judgement and enforcement arm. I would agree with you: They're damn efficient.
No, I mean private litigation and conflict mediation that is private. There is a lot of that already.
And what happens when the private company doesn't agree with the arbitrage result?
Eliminating atmospheric lead may have been a consideration, but in my recollection it wasn't the primary consideration; people were more concerned about unburned hydrocarbons producing smog.
The land, the soil, the fisheries, the ability of the atmosphere, sea and more to absorb and process our waste, the aquifers, the top soil, the forests, etc.
Apart from that, our cultural heritage, our science and inventions, the electromagnetic spectrum. I'm sure you can think of more.
Sadly, today we live in the belief that we need to convert all of this, or rather more and more of it, into goods that can be monetized.
For a great book on the subject, I warmly recommend Sacred Economics. You can read it online, download or order on http://sacred-economics.com/.
At one point a coworker of mine raised the idea that when you do some process that is painful sometimes it means you need to do it more. Because doing it more frequently can force improvements in process, technique, or tooling which then produce dividends.
And therein lies the rub: in America, it is frequently not clear that the government has the power to regulate such activity. The Clean Air Act and other similar regulatory acts were considered revolutionary when they were passed because no one was sure if they were even legitimate exercises of federal power.
Today, we generally agree that such regulation is within the scope of the federal government's power, but that is only because we have already grown up in a society where the government exercises such power.
However, as you can see from some comments on this thread, some people still deny the federal government's ability to regulate commercial activity.
His works probably did more environmental damage than those of anybody else in history.
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.
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.
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.
But in the case of lead, the causal chain from lead exposure to worse behaviour is fairly well understood.
The whole thing sound like classic fitting the preconceived conclusion. But there's also something like this:
>>>> Not only does lead promote apoptosis, or cell death, in the brain, but the element is also chemically similar to calcium.
How lead is chemically similar to calcium? They are on opposite ends of the periodic table and have very different chemical properties. That, of course, does not prevent lead from messing with ion channels, but saying lead is chemically similar to calcium is wrong.
Then you go on to explain how lead is like calcium in its bioavailability, so in relation to the operations of a human body, lead is chemically similar to calcium (only dangerous).
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/126/1/5.full
For example, lead’s ability to pass through the blood–brain barrier (BBB) is due in large part to its ability to substitute for calcium ions (Ca2+)
How do you show that something is not caused by a hidden Z? All one can hope for is a preponderance of evidence. If the following passage from the article is true, then the preponderance here is stronger than a generic correlation-is-not-causation objection can just dismiss:
"In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found."
Thus your hidden Z would have to move in sync not only with X and Y, but also with their widely varying rates in different states. That's a high bar – especially if there are legal and institutional explanations for why leaded gas was phased out at different rates in those places.
For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it; other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
I did not see such explanation done in this case - it looks like everything described talks about what matches the hypothesis, and no effort is done to look for alternative explanations and refute them.
>>>> Thus your hidden Z would have to move in sync not only with X and Y, but also with their widely varying rates in different states.
Use of gasoline is highly correlated with use of cars, which again is highly correlated with income, population density, business activity, etc. Any of which can be also associated with crime. I.e. if both effects are caused, say, by population density (I do not say it is, I just take it as an example), then gasoline use would raise and crime would raise when population density raises (say, because some economic factors attract people, like it happens now in North Dakota due to shale gas boom) and both would fall when some factors cause population to move away - as it happening in Detroit, for example. There might be also other factors.
>>> In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found.
And this is exactly what she would find if both were strongly related to some third cause Z, but completely causally independent from each other. The fact that the MJ author takes it as evidence confirming the causation means they do not understand how causation needs to be proven. It is not evidence for causation, since it equally applies to both when causation exists and when it does not.
Yes, this means causation is hard to prove. It is.
Does that mean that causation is proved? Of course not. But it does mean that the evidence here is stronger than garden-variety correlation.
By doing a controled study.
Of course, in this case, we're better not knowing than paying that kind of cost.
How could the entire population ever be better off 'not knowing'? If there was a button to exchange a few babies or animals lives for the possible outcomes presented at the end of the article, I would do it in a heartbeat.
I's be interested in seeing what you think on that score after reading TFA and possibly even the studies that it talks about.
Honestly I don't know, but I do think there is a real problem in our understanding of how to interpret population level trends. The rigorous camp simply wants to throw out everything that isn't a double blind study. The optimistic are convinced of every similar looking graph. I think we should be doing more meta-analysis of these things and building up a Bayesian sort of set of priors to apply to these results.
> A second study [23] found that high exposure to lead during childhood was linked to a permanent loss of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex—a part of the brain associated with aggression control as well as what psychologists call "executive functions": emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility.
1) Everything seems to work out perfectly, no matter how it is considered. For instance, if lead contamination in the ground is such a big deal, why does lead in gas track so closely to the crime rate? Wouldn't it be the case that it would track on the upside but not the downside?
2) He keeps on emphasizing lead lowers IQ. But the Flynn Effect suggests that IQ started going up in the 1930s and has only (maybe) started to level off very recently. It's the exact opposite of what you'd expect based on lead exposure from leaded gas.
3) Long term crime rates have been mostly going down for centuries: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/06/lon...
Mind you, I'm fully in agreement that lead sucks and I sure as hell don't want my kid exposed to it. It's just that I'm far from convinced that the crime rates change mostly because of lead exposure. It seems far too tidy an explanation.
Part of me agrees with your overall conclusion about the corollary nature of the research as a whole, but those are my two cents on that particular point.
Lead has a wider range of neurological effects than just reducing IQ. The causation may be more likely: lead -> unknown neurological changes -> more criminality & lower IQ.
1) Maybe lead in the ground has the same general level of danger as lead paint? Other sources of lead were covered in the article.
2) It is possible (probable even) that the levels of lead have been retarding the growth of IQ, but not reversing it.
3) Ignoring that even your link mentions that the data is skewed due to higher survivability as medical technology has gotten better, this is a separate trend on a separate scale and not really all that relevant. It could possibly be explained by lead from other sources (plumbing maybe?) or other factors outside of the scope of this particular study. If anything, your link reinforces that there was an issue as the homicide rates climbed sharply before suddenly dropping off again.
Hate to drive by this interesting thread, but wasn't this same crime drop attributed to the legalization of abortion?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_Legalized_Abortio...
Via http://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/22/scientific-american, which cited Reyes' work on the lead theory, here's a link to a striking critique of the abortion theory:
http://www.economist.com/node/5246700?story_id=5246700
Someone inspected Donohue and Levitt's code and found a bug that meant they hadn't controlled for what they claimed they had. "Fixing that error reduces the effect of abortion on arrests by about half, using the original data, and two-thirds using updated numbers."
David (son of Milton) Friedman: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Tyler Cowen, Scott Sumner, Reihan Salam, Will Wilkinson, Conor Friesendorf.
Picking just one conservative I'd choose Cowen without blinking because he's a volume blogger with a wide net so you'll often get the best of right leaning commentary on the subjects he's interested in.
It obviously doesn't follow that governments can never do anything right.
People constantly misrepresent Ayn Rand and slander those who agree with her. Please stop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand)#Politics...
And here's a freebie from some googling:
>As far as the role of government is concerned, there are laws--some of them passed in the nineteenth century--prohibiting certain kinds of pollution, such as the dumping of industrial wastes into rivers. These laws have not been enforced. It is the enforcement of such laws that those concerned with the issue may properly demand. Specific laws--forbidding specifically defined and proved harm, physical harm, to persons or property--are the only solution to problems of this kind.
So perhaps Rand had nuanced views on this, but I don't hear the same nuance in her followers. And I don't see how the two quotes can be reconciled either.
She called the economic and political system resulting from this "laissez-faire capitalism," or more commonly just "capitalism."
In context of the partial quote you gave, "unregulated" means "without economic regulations," not "without any laws."
So, that's how you reconcile things.
There is actually no "nuance" here at all; this stuff is all totally "black and white," clear and consistent, in her writing.
You say "I don't hear the same nuance in her followers," but I'm not sure who you're actually referring to here. Objectivists are quite few and far between. For example, most people in the Tea Party who are Atlas Shrugged fans don't actually understand Rand on an intellectual level.
When people scream "oh no regulation," they mean "no rights-violating/improper laws," but there are other cases where "regulation" just means "laws."
It's not as if Rand claimed to be "against regulation" and left it as that, which would be pointless and sloppy.
In talking about politics, as elsewhere, she was extremely precise: the point of the government is to protect the individual from the initiation of force.
Force is also well-defined in her work, and it includes poisoning someone.
What about law requiring those who give others food to warn them about potential allergens?
What about a law requiring that warning to be stated in a clear, easy to read manner (rather than hidden fine print)?
(say the allergen is soy, which is not an obvious ingredient in say, ice cream, yet is present in a lot of ice creams).
The line isn't so clear as you pretend.
Everything you have asked about has a very straightforward answer, but you lack the philosophical context to see that.
It's like asking a chemist to explain molecular bonds, when you don't even know that atoms exist.
As I've said, the proper principle of government is to protect individuals from the initiation of force by others.
Since the reasons for this principle are out of the scope of this discussion, yes, you could certainly find some way to appear to pick on it and score points, yet actually fail to do so successfully.
Nonetheless, correctly applying this principle means that if something is always a poison to everyone, it's not a legitimate product. There is no legitimate use. Producing it and selling it is simply initiating force.
On the other hand, if something is a legitimate food, it's fine to sell it.
There is a separate question about allergens. It is an allergic person's responsibility to make sure they don't ingest allergens.
The government forcing people to label things is an initiation of force and a violation of rights.
Absent such regulation, there would still be plenty of food producers who make information about food content publicly available, since it is needed by their customers who have allergies, and for other reasons.
In the cases where food producers do not publish their ingredients (in which case, probably nobody should consume the food...), people with allergies would just be out of luck.
It seems to me that the principle of government being solely to protect individuals from the initiation of force by others is a great one, and should be the primary one. For bringing this idea into my consciousness, I am grateful to Ayn Rand and those who propagate her work.
However, "sophacles" doesn't seem to be arguing against the principle. He or she seems to be arguing against a simplistic interpretation of its implications.
For example you say: "correctly applying this principle means that if something is always a poison to everyone, it's not a legitimate product. There is no legitimate use. Producing it and selling it is simply initiating force."
Who decides what is a poison to 'everyone'? Well since by the correct application of the principle, it is the government's responsibility to protect individuals from this initiation of force, it must therefore be the responsibility of the government to recognize these situations.
Does that mean that the government needs to set up a science infrastructure to decide what is harmful to 'everyone'?
If so, how is it to staff this infrastructure with scientists, and how is it to decide who is qualified to do the work? Perhaps it needs to establish an education system for this purpose. Given that working as a government scientist by necessity means giving up a lot of time that could otherwise be spent securing shelter and provision for the future, perhaps the government should set up a way to house and provide for its employees in their old age... and so it goes on.
I'm all for the principle, seriously. I just don't see how it helps to offer unrealistically simplified interpretations of how to apply it to people who are interested enough to engage.
Unless you really do think that Ayn Rand had a perfect and complete prescription for the best of all possible societies...
I haven't read that book, but while I'm sure there are many facts in it, the overall tone (and motivation for its writing) is a giant (and dishonest) character assasination. Supposedly this is documented extensively in the book, "The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics" (by James Valiant), though I haven't read that, either.
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.
I wonder how much of history can be explained by this use of lead.
Wikipedia puts it out as an option: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_roman_empire#Lead_p...
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.
Scientific proof of the cause IMHO needs much more than even very nice correlation.
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/ [1] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-04-28/html/2010-9603.ht...
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.)
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.
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/2eb51e2...
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.
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/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.
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.
- http://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/08/science/venting-anger-may-...
- [PDF] http://illinois.edu/lb/files/2009/03/26/9293.pdf
*I'm not arguing against the video game link, just the suggested mechanism
The explosion of media and the Internet occurred around the same time, so it's hard to say what caused it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I.e. it will take years for the the lead to have an effect. It's not instantaneous.
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.
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.