Lead 2.0
While I was not expecting lead to still be an ongoing factor in modern society, after a little reading and researching, it seems to be a persisting factor to our social and physical landscapes. We’ve been told that either mayors like Guliani and tough police enforcement (the conservative view) or a reduction of unwanted pregnancies thanks to abortion laws (the liberal view) have brought down crime in New York and most othe major US cities (at least prior to 2021) following peaks in the 1980s. I no longer find either story compelling. We now have a much better explanation.
I am compelled that lead has been one of the single biggest detractors to safety and social progress in much of the world. Unfortunately, lead is not only a historical case study but a significant ongoing concern for those who live with lead in their water, their paint or happen to be located near a smelter. Crime in all areas and at various levels of resolution seems to correlate perfectly with the levels of lead in the blood of infants in that area. The mechanism promoting crime works through developmental impairment and reduced intelligence. The major sources are automobile exhaust and paint, but it seems heavy metal exposure from modern plumbing is still a problem in many cities1.
Industry and industry captured government in the 1920s ignored lead despite some production fatalities from toxicity. The lag effect comes 23 years after developmental exposure from the children who were born and raised within its toxic influence. We’ve passed laws from the early seventies through to the current era to dramatically curtail the use of lead in gasoline. Essentially all of the reductions in crime from the late 1980s flow from the implementation of regulations and technologies that began removing lead in the 1970s2. Unwanted pregnancies rather than being explained by abortion law changes are explained better by lead reductions3. Note that both unwanted pregnancies and abortions have decreased dramatically and consistently with the reductions in lead exposure levels hence the causal direction from lead to decision and behavior4.
“These ecologic correlations are consistent with many controlled studies suggesting that lead-exposed children suffer irreversible brain alterations that make them more likely to commit violent crimes as young adults. If this pattern is true for lead and other contaminants, the most effective way to fight crime may be to prevent exposure to these contaminants.5”
Lagged US Crime Index and Preschool Blood Lead:
Lagged Under-Age-15 Pregnancies and Preschool Blood Lead:
To best reduce abortions we might focus on reducing environmental toxins facilitating high IQs and better decision making.
I’m not sure how this story of lead will hit people’s political priors. To my mind, it seems to shake the world up differently. The core of the thesis faces fundamental opposition from the left because it requires data that shows IQ differences among American populations and suggests that neither race nor racism are the most useful explanations for differential attainment. Rick Nevin, the author of Lucifer Curves, has done a number analyses for other countries as well as other sub-populations of the US. The author repeated and then used and extended the infamous findings from “The Bell Curve” to isolate the mechanistic source of their findings. The beauty of Nevin’s extension is that the supposed genetic or racial basis of IQ is completely false. The IQ deficits were and are real, but are caused by lead-toxic environments. Poverty, is a significant risk factor for lead exposure due to the environments associated with it. The inverse is also true and worth noting: high IQ requires environmental support. The same effects will accrue to any population with the same blood exposure. This thesis undermines the typical absence of “family values” argument. This argument of the right, is in my estimation a veiled suggestion for the superiority of the tribe and religion of those suggesting it. It is sort of true that family values are missing or diminished in the family or communities in question. However, in agreement with the overarching theme for all of these essays, the morality and values of the population are themselves an emergent property of the population's environment. Logically, one might simply ask how well any family, church or community would do if it was exposed to high rates of lead and lead poisoning.
Past lead exposure has strong ripples of impact into our society at large. While some communities were dramatically affected, others are likely to have been undermined, but less obviously exhibit lower than potential IQs. Lead works in a dose dependent manner and is still quite detrimental at what we now consider low doses6. Many Americans alive today would have been exposed prior to the lead regulations fully coming into effect. A recent article describes the spot we were in as recently as 1978 and the unfortunate situation half a million children are still in:
“From 1976-1980 to 2015-2016, the geometric mean blood lead level (BLL) of the US population aged 1 to 74 years dropped from 12.8 to 0.82 μg/dL, a decline of 93.6%. Yet, an estimated 500 000 children aged 1 to 5 years have BLLs at or above the blood lead reference value of 5 μg/dL established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Low levels of exposure can lead to adverse health effects. There is no safe level of lead exposure, and child BLLs less than 10 μg/dL are known to adversely affect IQ and behavior...Despite much progress in reducing exposure to lead in the United States, there are challenges to eliminating exposure.”
Given that the lead levels have dramatically been reduced, the optimistic part of me hopes that lead was and is the major driver of much of the ignorance we are seeing today. I assume other antisocial behaviors beyond flagrant criminality are also tied to lead. Perhaps it even helps explain both the obesity and drug related suicide epidemics as well as the plethora of other social and institutional trends running amuck. IQ and decision making are intimately linked. It seems quite likely, if not self-evident, that a lower IQ populace will vote for lower IQ leaders who will make worse decisions potentially further undermining the populations health and intelligence as occurred in Rome. So if lead is the predominant factor, we would expect a lag effect of poor decision making from the developmentally stunted generations to abate only after the appropriate lag from exposure. We should thus expect that lag to be something like 1978 plus the working life of the leadership class of Americans. If we assume they are working until age 65, that puts us at about 2048 before a generation of leaders will not have come from a generation with an average of 12.8 ug/dL levels of lead or higher. So, optimistically, we might have 25 or so years to go. The decline in lead, I expect and also hope, should show up incrementally as we all increase in age and older generations retire from the workforce.
The effect of lead on society is important beyond its specific effects because it highlights how the material environment can dramatically affect psychological and social outcomes. Lead is not the only environmental factor undermining our collective health and cognition, but one among a few or more categories of factors which are unseen by society at large. While lead exposure is reducing, many of the other physiological disruptors have pervaded our lives. Among the things I’ll be looking further into: plastics are now ubiquitous and the food supply system has shifted to delivering copious proportions of plant based oils disguised as edible food stuff. In future sections I’ll get more into the implications of environmental contaminants beyond lead.
Lucifer Curves: The Legacy oF Lead Poisoning Nevin, Rick 2016
Ibid
ibid