It seemed, at first, preposterous. The hypothesis was so exotic that I laughed. The rise and fall of violent crime during the second half of the 20th century and first years of the 21st were caused, it proposed, not by changes in policing or imprisonment, single parenthood, recession, crack cocaine or the legalisation of abortion, but mainly by … lead.
I don’t mean bullets. The crime waves that afflicted many
parts of the world and then, against all predictions, collapsed, were
ascribed, in an article published by Mother Jones last week, to the rise
and fall in the use of lead-based paint and leaded petrol(1).
It’s ridiculous – until you see the evidence. Studies
between cities, states and nations show that the rise and fall in crime
follows, with a roughly 20-year lag, the rise and fall in the exposure
of infants to trace quantities of lead(2,3,4). But all that gives us is
correlation: an association that could be coincidental. The Mother Jones
article, based on several scientific papers, claimed causation.
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