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Found this kind of interesting:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27067615

"Unless someone is telling us that the brain is not involved in decision-making then lead has to be relevant to crime"

Dr Bernard Gesch



"A lot of people would say that correlation isn't cause," he says. "But it seems that the more the exposure, the more extreme the behaviour. I'm certainly not saying that lead is the only explanation why crime is falling - but it is certainly the most persuasive. Unless someone is telling us that the brain is not involved in decision-making then lead has to be relevant to crime."

So why isn't this theory universally accepted?

Well, it remains a theory because nobody could ever deliberately poison thousands of children to see whether they became criminals later in life.

Lead theorists say that doesn't matter because the big problem is mainstream criminologists and policymakers who can't think outside the box.

I listened to this guy on NPR a few weeks ago. The scarier result of his study is that the results could be used to imply that you can test to see which people are more likely to commit crimes later because of how their brains work. We are one step closer to punishing people for pre-crime.

This theory has been bubbling under for some time.

Correlation is not causation, of course, though it would be interesting to know the coefficient of correlation between lead in petrol and violent crime.

However, as the article says,

But Roger Matthews, professor of criminology at the University of Kent, rejects that. He says biological criminologists completely miss the point.

"I don't see the link," he says. "If this causes some sort of effect, why should those effects be criminal?

It is always a good idea to be suspicious of simple remedies for complex social issues.

I think there was once a correlation study to how ice cream sales spiked and so did murder rates.

ITs not really that new.

There might be something else at work that is causing these problems. Not the fuel. Probably the downturn of the economy, and the rising temperatures. More people are murdered during the summer than during the winter.

But more people commit suicide during the winter.

It also might be that there is better weather or that the cooling temperatures effect us. Just pondering.

 d-usa wrote:
I listened to this guy on NPR a few weeks ago. The scarier result of his study is that the results could be used to imply that you can test to see which people are more likely to commit crimes later because of how their brains work. We are one step closer to punishing people for pre-crime.

i saw that movie, in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king

That's where I think the interview with the guy that I heard on the radio did a pretty good job with all the issues.

I think that the study showed that the majority of criminals had a certain pattern of activity that showed up on their brain scans, and that there may be a correlation (which of course doesn't equal causation) between that activity and their criminal activity. But some criminals didn't have any of these changes, and others with these changes are not criminals. It appears to be one factor, but not THE factor.

It also showed that more of these changes happened with people that grew up during a time when lead was present in more areas (paint, gasoline, etc) and that the rate of these changes has gone down since then. But it is still present, and that presence is not the ultimate indicator of criminal activity.

Great academic stuff, but limited in its application.

so how does that explain the higher crime ratesfrom before we used leaded fuel?

At least my tiger proof rock is working perfectly, ever since I bought it from that nice man in the alley, not one single tiger!


OFC, increasing the general health (mental and physical) of the population in general, will generally produce good results, in general.

well, unless they use their newfound strength and smarts to just be smarter/stronger criminals, because the link between health and morality isnt an absolute one.

Much more of a link between scarcity/desparation and criminality.

Well, as crime rates decrease, pre-crime detection WOULD give us a source of fuel for that industrial prison complex.

What causes crime is a many fold subject and I can't really see how you can connect it to just one factor. I've sen so many reports on why crime went down, and I'm sure each has something to do with it, but I don't think you can point to one deciding factor.

The more controversial study is that abortion brought down the rate of crime, by lowing the rate of low income children and families. On its merits I find this argument more compelling than the leaded Gas argument, I also find it just too radioactive to even discuss.

http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/

 Andrew1975 wrote:
What causes crime is a many fold subject and I can't really see how you can connect it to just one factor. I've sen so many reports on why crime went down, and I'm sure each has something to do with it, but I don't think you can point to one deciding factor.

The more controversial study is that abortion brought down the rate of crime, by lowing the rate of low income children and families. On its merits I find this argument more compelling than the leaded Gas argument, I also find it just too radioactive to even discuss.

http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/

I've heard that one. I actually think it could be. I mean its crazy, but it works.

 easysauce wrote:
so how does that explain the higher crime ratesfrom before we used leaded fuel?

At least my tiger proof rock is working perfectly, ever since I bought it from that nice man in the alley, not one single tiger!

Did you look at the crime rates? It would be interesting if you could find crime rates from 1880 or prior for us to look at, but here is what we have to work with:

Some looking around found crime rates going back to the 60's, looking through those years we get the following crime numbers per 100,000 people:

1960: 1,887.2
1965: 2,449.0
1970: 3984.5
1975: 5,298.5
1980: 5,950.0
1985: 5,207.1
1990: 5,820.3
1995: 5,274.9

The numbers stayed pretty consistently between 5,000 and 6,000 from 1980 through 1995. In 1997 they dropped below 5,000 for the first time since 1974 and they have dropped consistently since then to the current number of 3,246.1.

Now we have been using lead in gasoline since the 1920s, so then you have to ask the question of "why didn't crime rise until after 1960" although it may have risen before then and we may just be lacking the data. Then we might have to look at car ownership rates over the years. If we have always pumped lead into the air via cars, then maybe we just pumped more lead into the air in those decades. Cars owned in the US (taking the ownership rate for that year and multiplying it by the census of that year):

1940: 32,453,236
1945: 31,036,067
1950: 49,291,780
1955: 63,015,693
1960: 74,142,023
1965: 90,720,053
1970: 111,825,203
1975: 138,237,965
1980: 161,490,853
1985: 177,134,265
1990: 192,915,900

So even though we had leaded gas since the 1920's, we obviously had more environmental lead caused by leaded gasoline as the number of cars in the United States increased. The outlier is '40-. '

So since statistics are a wonderful inaccurate science, and since we are only looking at correlation I'll just assume that criminals will reach peak criminal activity at age 20, so if there is any potential relationship between the effect of environmental lead on brain development and criminal activity in adult hood we should be able to see some effect 20 years later . So looking at total numbers of cars and total number of crimes gives us the following:

Correlation efficient from 1960-1975 (years of leaded gasoline): 0.89
Correlation efficient from 1975-1990 (years of unleaded gasoline): -0.96

Now we all know that correlation doesn't imply causation, but it's an interesting statistic. We can always look at the whole "tough on crime" influence on our criminal rates, but it would be an interesting coincidence if we stopped being tough on crime exactly 20 years after we stopped putting lead in our cars.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Asherian Command wrote:

 Andrew1975 wrote:
What causes crime is a many fold subject and I can't really see how you can connect it to just one factor. I've sen so many reports on why crime went down, and I'm sure each has something to do with it, but I don't think you can point to one deciding factor.

The more controversial study is that abortion brought down the rate of crime, by lowing the rate of low income children and families. On its merits I find this argument more compelling than the leaded Gas argument, I also find it just too radioactive to even discuss.

http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/

I've heard that one. I actually think it could be. I mean its crazy, but it works.

The main problem I can see with this theory is that abortion has remained practically unchanged since the 1980, and the crime rate continued to drop after abortion leveled out. We also don't know what the abortion rate was prior to legalization since it was not reported.

So it's difficult to determine.

 d-usa wrote:

 easysauce wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Asherian Command wrote:

 Andrew1975 wrote:
What causes crime is a many fold subject and I can't really see how you can connect it to just one factor. I've sen so many reports on why crime went down, and I'm sure each has something to do with it, but I don't think you can point to one deciding factor.

The more controversial study is that abortion brought down the rate of crime, by lowing the rate of low income children and families. On its merits I find this argument more compelling than the leaded Gas argument, I also find it just too radioactive to even discuss.

http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/

I've heard that one. I actually think it could be. I mean its crazy, but it works.

The main problem I can see with this theory is that abortion has remained practically unchanged since the 1980, and the crime rate continued to drop after abortion leveled out. We also don't know what the abortion rate was prior to legalization since it was not reported.

So it's difficult to determine.

Before this supreme court decision (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade)
This is when the abortion thing came out, before that it was illegal to have an abortion. It could be correlated with abortion rates and crime drop. But there was also the rise of video games and literacy increase.

Plus the theory where each generation just gets smarter and smarter.

But that is alot of assumption and not enough facts and proof.

 Asherian Command wrote:

Before this supreme court decision (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade)
This is when the abortion thing came out, before that it was illegal to have an abortion

But lots of people still had abortions. Illegal to have abortion =/= people didn't have abortions. That's what makes it hard to really track abortion in relationship to crime rates and get a complete picture.

1) We don't know the abortion rates pre-RvW.
2) Crime continues to decline even though abortion rates have no longer increased significantly.

 d-usa wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:

Before this supreme court decision (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade)
This is when the abortion thing came out, before that it was illegal to have an abortion

But lots of people still had abortions. Illegal to have abortion =/= people didn't have abortions. That's what makes it hard to really track abortion in relationship to crime rates and get a complete picture.

1) We don't know the abortion rates pre-RvW.
2) Crime continues to decline even though abortion rates have no longer increased significantly.

I agree its merely just a theory. Now we have the numbers before the 70s and that court decision we have no idea what the numbers were.

 Asherian Command wrote:

 d-usa wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:

Before this supreme court decision (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade)
This is when the abortion thing came out, before that it was illegal to have an abortion

But lots of people still had abortions. Illegal to have abortion =/= people didn't have abortions. That's what makes it hard to really track abortion in relationship to crime rates and get a complete picture.

1) We don't know the abortion rates pre-RvW.
2) Crime continues to decline even though abortion rates have no longer increased significantly.

I agree its merely just a theory. Now we have the numbers before the 70s and that court decision we have no idea what the numbers were.

Yeah, the lack of date is the biggest problem. Since nobody would report "hey, I committed this many criminal abortions this year" it makes it hard to get data. There could be something there, but it's hard to tell without those numbers.

This feels like it belongs here.

 Ahtman wrote:
This feels like it belongs here.

Brilliant. That must be from a scientific journal!

It doesn't have the data pre-piracy, it's useless!

 Andrew1975 wrote:
The more controversial study is that abortion brought down the rate of crime, by lowing the rate of low income children and families. On its merits I find this argument more compelling than the leaded Gas argument, I also find it just too radioactive to even discuss.

http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/

That freakonomics piece has a lot of problems. I think there's something to the theory, but the strength that Levitt and that other guy give the argument is way overstated, and the method they used is really simplistic (fairly typical for freakonomics). There's been a few economists who've countered the argument, and response from the freakonomics people, and to be honest figuring out what's right in that lump of numbers and tables is way beyond my patience. Ultimately, the best and simplest argument against the theory is that when the pill was introduced we saw a massive drop in births, especially unwanted births, but 18 years later there was no sudden drop in crime. So for the freakonomics theory to work then you'd have to believe that unwanted births prevented by the pill were somehow not likely to grow up to be massively over-represented in crime in the way that unwanted births prevented by abortion were destined to be massively over-represented in crime.

I think the best explanation for the sudden and dramatic drop in crime is that a whole bunch of factors coincided at one time to form a critical mass, and maybe abortion was one factor on that list. Major city centres saw massive increases in police numbers in the early 90s and a spike in incarceration followed that, and you can add in urban renewal and the broken window theory leading to less crime as well. Add in other factors at the same time (like abortion and maybe even leaded petrol) and you get a tipping point, where crime starts to drop it starts to spiral down (once it drops you get more police resources per crime, which leads to greater rates of likely arrest and conviction, which leads to reduced willingness of people to commit crime, leading to another reduction in crime and so on).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Asherian Command wrote:
Before this supreme court decision (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade)
This is when the abortion thing came out, before that it was illegal to have an abortion.

Actually prior to Roe v Wade abortion was legal in some states, and legal under certain conditions in many others.

Part of the strength of the freakonomics argument is that the decline in crime in the early 90s was less in states that already had some form of legal abortion, but then there are apparently issues with that data that I don't really claim to understand completely.