Get the Lead Out, Part 2

Part 1 of this post concerns the relationship between lead in the environment and the rate of violent crime. Please read it before continuing.

The lead hypothesis helps us to understand additional facts about violent crime. For example, the crime rate has been higher in urban areas, probably due to the greater concentration of motor vehicles in large cities. Now that lead has been removed from gasoline, the crime rates in big and small cities have converged. The lead hypothesis also sheds light on black-white differences in crime. Black children have blood lead levels that are on average 50% higher than white children, since African-Americans typically live in inner-city locations where traffic is dense and there is less pressure on slumlords to clean up the lead in their buildings.

Of course, there will be resistance to the lead hypothesis from the criminologists, who think of crime as a sociological rather than an ecological problem. The law enforcement establishment would like to claim that police procedures, such as those that follow from the broken windows hypothesis, or the fact that we are putting more people in jail for longer times are responsible for the change.

Although the amount of lead in the environment has dropped, we are far from rid of this toxic element. Lead paint can still be found around the windows of older homes. Where it is highly concentrated in the soil, it must be removed. Prevention is always superior to remediation, especially when the behavior in question causes significant human suffering. However, lead abatement is worth doing on economic grounds alone. Drum cites estimates that replacing old windows and cleaning up lead saturated soil would cost $20 billion per year for 20 years. He assumes that this would reduce crime an additional 10%, which would save $150 billion per year. He also adds $60 billion per year for the higher income children would have had their intelligence not been reduced by lead. These figures are speculative, but if correct, that's a net savings of almost $200 billion per year. To put that in perspective, President Obama's proposal to increase the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 would save the government $24 billion per year—although it would cost seniors at lot more, since they would have to buy private insurance.

As David Roberts has pointed out, the history of lead abatement is typical of how we deal with many other environmental pollutants. In this country, corporations are permitted to introduce potentially toxic substances into the environment without first proving that they are safe. In other words, we ignore the precautionary principle. Once the substance is in use, it is up to the public to prove that it is harmful in order to have it banned. The university scientists and public interest groups that might do the necessary research are typically underfunded, and the burden of proof that they must meet is extraordinarily high. Corporate polluters generate as much confusion as they can about the scientific evidence in order to forestall regulation, and exaggerate the economic costs of making necessary changes. Meanwhile, people are getting sick and dying. If the corporations are finally forced to remove the pollutant, the costs almost always turn out to be much lower than predicted, and the benefits much greater. As a final step, the corporations responsible for the pollution take out television ads congratulating themselves for making the changes that they so strongly resisted.