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Lead Poisoning Responsible for Crime Trends?

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Dave_LF
Post subject: Lead Poisoning Responsible for Crime Trends?
Posted: Tue 10 Jul , 2007 3:25 am
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Very interesting:
Washington Post
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The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin said in an interview. "Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."
(and may I add that I love how they try to use the by-line to spin it into an election issue)


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Axordil
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Posted: Tue 10 Jul , 2007 4:09 am
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Very interesting article. It's a great irony that the majority of new prisons in Missouri have been built in the area formerly dominated economically by...you guessed it...lead mining.

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Lily Rose
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Posted: Tue 10 Jul , 2007 12:05 pm
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I'm not really sure about this. It sounds to me like the writer wants to discredit Rudy Guliani. You can make statistics say anything that you want them to, so I don't place a whole lot of value in the numbers that they are throwing around.

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Dawnnamira
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Posted: Tue 10 Jul , 2007 7:18 pm
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I'd like to see the statistics that tell who was doing the crimes in the "peak" two decades after the hike in lead exposure.

Might be adults too...therefore, some of their assertions could be wrong.

It would be interesting to see why they felt the need to get this out now.

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Ara-anna
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Posted: Tue 10 Jul , 2007 7:56 pm
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Um....except for one thing. Lead was used hundreds of years before it was found to be bad. What were the crime rates then? I ask this because humans were exposed to much more lead. They made dishes out of lead, where they more violent?

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Dave_LF
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Posted: Tue 10 Jul , 2007 10:21 pm
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The reporter is responsible for the annoying anti-Guliani spin. The researcher was just looking at crime data. For the trend to hold so strongly in nine different countries at nine different times is very strong evidence that the effect is real.


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Axordil
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Posted: Wed 11 Jul , 2007 12:10 am
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Quote:
I ask this because humans were exposed to much more lead.
Exposure wasn't that widespread before the Industrial revolution. While lead was used in pipes, paints, and makeup, most of the preindustrial rural population had no plumbing, used whitewash if anything, and couldn't afford makeup. :)

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