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Originally Posted by NLVgal
Lead would not account for the recent spike in crime all over the country. More kids being born in unfortunate situations over the last twenty years would. Abortion rates have been falling for twenty years.
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Forgot to mention that other lead studies were done that also corroborate the fact that once cities, starting in the late 19th century began to use leaded pipes for their water supplies (think of Flint, MI) that homicide rates increased within a 20 year period as well.
Lead in various populations and circumstances across eras have been studied and all show that lead exposure of a population of an urban area increases the violent crime rates. Reducing lead exposure, reduces crime rates. In some instances, many attribute 50% of violent crimes like assault and murder specifically to lead exposure.
Due to this being such an expensive thing to fix and because it is an issue in nearly every major urban area in America, people like to deny it or to not speak of it.
A Harvard study about leaded pipes used in the 19th century and how homicide rates increased and specific health ailments increased in those cities:
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jfe...lead_crime.pdf From the link:
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In this paper, we draw on variation in the use of lead service pipes in the late nineteenth
century to estimate the effect of lead exposure from water on city-level homicide rates from
1921 to 1936. Our baseline negative binomial estimates imply that cities that used lead
water pipes had homicide rates that were twenty-four percent higher than cities that did
not. These results are robust to instrumenting a city’s use of lead pipes with its rail distance
from the nearest lead refinery. We found evidence broadly consistent with the prediction
that more lead will leach into more acidic water and increase the homicide rates of cities
with low-pH water and lead service pipes. We also found that, with two exceptions, cities
that used lead pipes had higher rates of death only from causes known to be related to lead
exposure and not from causes associated with poverty. Although the size and precision of
our estimates vary across identification strategies, the weight of the evidence suggests that
cities’ use of lead water pipes considerably increased their homicide rates.
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