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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Lead Poisoning and the Great 1960s Freakout:"

11 Comments -

1 – 11 of 11
Anonymous Mallard said...

There's too much concern here with changes in crime rates, and not enough with the actual levels themselves.

7/12/07, 6:33 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It isn't lead. It's idealism. Goofy unworkable ideals - for instance, "flat-earthism" on race - bobbed up in the wake of our WWII victory, and we had the wherewithal to put them into practice. One trillion on social programs, anyone?

I would trace the crime wave of the 1960s-1990s to the Civil Right Act of 1964 and other "Great Society" legislation; more deeply, the underlying enthusiastic willful ignorance (aka idealism). It's reflected like the sun in the pieces of a shattered lightbulb, all over the culture: more lenient criminal law philosophies, Boazian anthro come to fruition, the whole set of attitudes labeled "liberalism" label. There is a physical, racial explanation of these poisonous ideas, but I find K. MacDonald a little farfetched (though not QUITE as farfetched as Jack D. Ripper's theories).

7/12/07, 7:23 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Does Wolpaw Reyes only look at the lead levels at birth? What happens if you try to estimate the total amount of lead
people were exposed to while growing up (and also as fetuses)?

7/12/07, 7:32 AM

Anonymous Josh said...

Note to self: When sniffing gasoline,make sure its unleaded!

7/12/07, 10:25 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Steve --

Two things stand out.

1. "Freak outs" are not unique to say 1965-75. For example 18th Century London was even worse, with Gin consumption rampant, most people drunk out of their minds, due to medicating themselves to stand deplorable conditions. The solution was the Victorian promotion of "virtue" which entailed fixing the worst of the conditions and pushing beer and pubs in "moderation" to the gin joints.

2. Your comments on the lack of a great social gulf in Heinlein's America between Cops and Doctors.

Taking these two into consideration, perhaps the explanation for the freak out was:

A. Social gulf developed as the elite grew very rich, moved to exclusive neighborhoods. Effect most pronounced with the end of Jim Crow segregation and Black elites moving out from say South Central to Baldwin Hills. But still in effect in say Culver City where elites moved to say, Santa Monica or Bel Air.

B. As a result of elites no longer being invested personally in owning property, public safety and Victorian-style "public morality" was let go as elites didn't care: they didn't live in those areas.

C. As in the case of Karen Toshima in LA, social decay pushed outward from poor/working-class areas to threaten elites property values in West LA or the East-side. Hence Mayor Rudy in NYC or various anti-gang/crime initiatives in LA. Which stabilized the crime rates.

I'm sure there are other factors involved. But this might be a partial explanation.

7/12/07, 12:54 PM

Anonymous Mark Seecof said...

Another question: did/does lead poisoning help drive the "demographic transition?"

Some historians have speculated that lead poisoning (from lead-alloy tableware, lead water pipes, leaded wine, etc.) explains both the low fertility and the apparent goofiness of upper-class Ancient Romans.

My day job really doesn't permit me to do any research on this right now, but from at least the Roman era through the Renaissance upper- (chivalric-) class folk were famously violent and impetuous--and they tended to eat off metal tableware alloyed with lead, wear and handle objects decorated with leaded pigments, etc.

There is still debate around the proposition that the medieval rich were more fecund, in part because it's hard to disentangle all the influences on multi-generational fertility. (For example, the Black Death in the 1300's killed a smaller proportion of rich than poor--so afterwards the rich made up a larger fraction of the population, but without necessarily producing more babies.)

From the early industrial period until quite recently the story of economic progress was also, for many people, the story of increased lead exposure.

Consider the example which attracted Mr. Sailer--leaded gasoline fumes, which from 1930-ish to as late as 2000 was effectively a proxy for automobility, which in turn was a proxy for industrialization.

Perhaps the demographic transition would have been less dramatic if lead poisoning had not degraded fertility (either directly, or by making potential mates more quarrelsome).

Of course, we're back to the correlation/ causation problem here...

7/12/07, 3:12 PM

Anonymous fifi said...

I think this is why people try to provide anecdotal evidence when confronted with charts and graphs. Low IQ isn't descriptive enough. Do people suffering from lead poisoning end up with pervasive developmental disorder or do they resemble someone who has frontal lobe damage from being in a car wreck?

Anyone who has spent time around the mentally retarded (and they are very nice people to be around, generally very pleasant) knows that even if on the off chance they built up a murderous rage, they're often too fragile or uncoordinated to cause much harm before being stopped.

I think this is a case of garbage in/garbage out. Yes the researchers have beautiful coefficients and are referring to to prior statistical analyses that were considered valid but they're calculating abstractions of abstractions.

Math brains!

7/12/07, 3:34 PM

Anonymous Kevin said...

Japan has a phenomenal abortion rate, for several reasons, one being the unavailability of birth control besides condoms for many years, and the lack of Christian anti-abortion howling.

What have the effects of that been on the Japanese?

7/12/07, 7:58 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I thought most childhood lead poisoning was caused by eating old paint chips that had flaked off old buildings. Never heard of kids huffing gasoline.

7/13/07, 10:33 AM

Anonymous Tom T. said...

Reyes notes, "This means that two children who are otherwise identical but whose lead levels differ by 15 μg/dL (approximately the decline in lead levels between 1976 and 1990) would exhibit an average IQ difference of 7.5 points."

Has such an increase in IQ been noted over that timespan?

1/10/13, 2:53 AM

Anonymous Tom T. said...

Sorry; followed a link here and didn't see how old this post was. Disregard me.

1/10/13, 2:54 AM

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