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| EPA graph of blood lead levels near Smelterville, ID |
An economist named Rick Nevin has been promoting for a number of years the theory that rises and falls in the crime rate are closely tied to lead pollution. In a 2007 post entitled "Lead Poisoning and the Great 1960s Freakout," I looked at the evidence and found it mixed (why, for example, didn't Japan have any substantial loosening of social order?) but intriguing. Blogger Kevin Drum has taken up pushing the theory. (I responded here.)
My suggestion, both from the perspective of disinterested research and as a PR strategy, has been for Drum to focus upon specific locations that were severely polluted by lead due to mining, industry, or dumping. The EPA maintains a handy list of some of the worst lead pollution Superfund sites. What has happened to crime rates in these locales over time? For instance, correlate the EPA graph above with crime rates in Smelterville and see what you get.
To give a literary example, the single most insanely violent novel I've ever read is Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, which is based upon his experiences as a Pinkerton man in Butte, Montana, a center of violent strikes and repression. Butte was the biggest, most polluted mining town in the United States, with substantial lead and gigantic copper mining activities right in the middle of town. Did metal poisoning contribute to the craziness of action described in Hammett's book?
On the other hand, my Uncle Al, an accountant, was born in Butte 90 years ago, and has been just about the sanest guy I've known.
I've tried reading up on lawsuits by residents of lead towns against the big polluters, and crime doesn't seem to come up much in the testimony. Typically, the plaintiffs argue that the energy levels of themselves and their children are depressed.
So, I remain uncertain. But, my point is that there is much data available that nobody seems to have studied carefully.
P.S., An Economist notes:
P.S., An Economist notes:
Butte was primarily a copper mine. Lead was produced. However, copper and zinc were the primary products. The dominant ore in Butte as copper porphyry. By contrast, the ore processed at Bunker Hill was quite different. From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Valley,_Idaho)
“Although miners were originally lured to the general area by the promise of gold, the primary metals mined in the valley were silver, zinc, and lead. The total quantities produced are impressive: over a billion ounces of silver, 3 million tons of zinc, and 8 million tons of lead, totalling over $6 billion in value, ranking the valley among the top ten mining districts in world history. During the 1970s, nearly half of the nation's silver production came from the Silver Valley.”
The bolding is mine. The Bunker Hill ores were not copper porphyry, but Lead-Zinc-Silver. Of course, these ores produce far more lead than those found around Butte.
Modern reports do not show high blood lead levels in the Butte area. See http://books.google.com/books?id=Wb4Du3C_elkC&pg=PA312&lpg=PA312&dq=butte+montana+blood+lead+levels&source=bl&ots=pFEb9eN7lC&sig=KfTTyHvOeSBFeLss5FOb9rfwlUA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=583xUq-1D4KiyAGyyIHoAw&ved=0CEEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=butte%20montana%20blood%20lead%20levels&f=false for one source.
An image from the book follows.
As you see, children in Butte had blood lead levels well below the national average back then. The advantages of a relatively rural location far more than offset lead soil contamination in the area. Note that this was not true near Bunker Hill in the 1970s. See http://books.google.com/books?id=y82Mn6XRJJUC&pg=PT433&lpg=PT433&dq=butte+montana+blood+lead+levels&source=bl&ots=x_EtSEmIA-&sig=E16W-jxhzGaBFaXp9SZYju46SEQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=583xUq-1D4KiyAGyyIHoAw&ved=0CE0Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=butte%20montana%20blood%20lead%20levels&f=false
An image from the book follows.
All of these sources suggest that smelters are (were) the predominant source of mining related lead ingestion. Given that smelters produce airborne lead (somewhat like tailpipe emissions from leaded gasoline) this shouldn’t be too surprising.
Butte did mine some lead and smelters operated in the Butte area for decades. It’s impossible to easily guess blood lead levels in Butte in 1900 or 1920 at this point in time. Digging up skeletons and testing old bones would work, but probably isn’t going to happen.
However, the Bunker Hill smelter complex processed ores much richer in lead and is well documented to have contributed to lead-poisoning (elevated BLLs) in the area well into our own time.
The bottom line is that if you are looking for a BLL – violence linkage, Bunker Hill is more likely to yield results than Butte.
Thank you
An Economist
P.S. Lead smelters have operated in other parts of the United States, notably Missouri.
Correlation does not necessarily mean causation, but it's a pretty good bet. And the correlation between lead and crime is as good as it gets.
ReplyDelete> I looked at the evidence and found it mixed (why, for example, didn't Japan have any substantial loosening of social order?)
ReplyDeleteJapan had huge freakouts in the 1960s - the radical Communist anti-American student movements with occasional terrorism ring a bell? To do a quick WP quote:
> One such event was the Anpo opposition movement, which occurred during 1960, and again in 1968 – 1970, in opposition to Anpo. During the second riots, leftist activists barricaded themselves in Universities, resulting in armed conflict with the Japanese police force. Activists organized in places known as "agitating points".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_activism#Japan
The movements had a huge impact on the people growing up at the time; you still see anime directors like Hideaki Anno or Ikuhara* talking about the student movement and how the renewal of Anpo & the violence disillusioned them and soured them on ideals and revolutions.
* I'm sure they aren't the only ones, it's just I've read mostly interviews with them touching on the student radicals
Didn't stop in the 1960s either, there was some in the '70s to; eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Red_Army which to quote a nice bit I found in google (http://papersiwrote.blogspot.com/2006/09/japanese-student-left-in-1960s.html)
> As in Europe, some of the more radical student groups of the 1960s turned to terrorism in Japan. The most famous of these was the Red Army Faction. The Red Army Faction was responsible for hijacking a Japan Airlines plane to North Korea in March of 1970. The Red Army also hijacked a Japan Airlines plane in Libya in 1973, and in 1974 blew up an oil storage tank in Singapore. Their most famous action was an attack on Lod Airport in Israel, in which 26 people were killed. Yet perhaps the greatest enemy the Red Army Faction ever had was itself. Factional fighting almost tore it apart, and in 1972 fourteen members of the group were killed by more radical elements. These fourteen included five women, and several of them were killed by being tied naked to trees and left to freeze to death.6...Throughout the 1970s, students opposed to the airport constructed forts, towers, tunnels and underground bunkers as they battled the police. In the end two students were killed as well as four riot police. (Three of the riot police were killed by the Red Army Faction, which used Bamboo spears). The airport was completed in 1978.
I'd say it all counts as 'substantial', especially by Japanese standards.
Under this theory, lead poisoning had to get sharply worse for people born around 1950. Maybe. Cars? But worse that sharply? And LA was not especially crime prone that I've heard, compared to, e.g. Detroit.
ReplyDeleteIt's BS. Pirate communities have very high rates of violent crime. Does that mean salt water causes violence?
ReplyDeleteHow about sealers? They were the most notoriously violent workers some 120 years ago. Yep, must be the ocean that does it...
But wait a minute. How does that explain the Mongols? Or the Bedouin?
This is all just grasping at straws. Desperadoes go where being a desperado pays off for one reason or another. From the Klondike to the high seas to the Central Asian steppes. It's all the same story, and lead doesn't have much to do with it.
Gold, liquor and whores, on the other hand...
Giving Africanus Bellcurvius civil rights caused the crime boom.
ReplyDeleteMr. Nevin's education was had at the business school at Northwestern University. He is not an economist.
ReplyDeleteNevin finds incarceration distasteful and has had a co-operative association with the Sentencing Project.
This sort of speculative mess is attractive to people who are antagonistic to law enforcement and fixed standards of conduct.
I wonder if some genotypes are more vulnerable to lead than others? Trouble is that, if so, it will make the analysis very complicated since exposure to lead will be correlated with poverty, etc.
ReplyDeleteBut maybe, for example, working blacks and working whites might be equally exposed in some of these sites.
Thanks for continuing to think about this, Steve.
Robert Hume
I'd say it all counts as 'substantial', especially by Japanese standards.
ReplyDeleteAnd you would be wrong. A few score people in the Japanese Red Army in a country with 120 million people resident counts for little.
"Red Harvest" is my favorite Hammett novel. "The Dain Curse" by far the weakest, and "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Glass Key" fight it out for second and third places.
ReplyDeleteAm I the only person to notice that the Coen Brothers' "Miller's Crossing" was a somewhat prettied up "Red Harvest"?
Does it go without saying that I prefer "Miller's Crossing" to "Fargo," "Blood Simple" or even the great "The Big Lebowski"?
Verna: What're you chewin' over?
Tom Reagan: Dream I had once. I was walkin' in the woods, I don't know why. Wind came up and blew me hat off.
Verna: And you chased it, right? You ran and ran, finally caught up to it and you picked it up. But it wasn't a hat anymore and it changed into something else, something wonderful.
Tom Reagan: Nah, it stayed a hat and no, I didn't chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasin' his hat.
>>>Steve Sailer Wrote:
ReplyDelete"""To give a literary example, the single most insanely violent novel I've ever read is Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, which is based upon his experiences as a Pinkerton man in Butte, Montana, a center of violent strikes and repression. Butte was the biggest, most polluted mining town in the United States, with substantial lead and gigantic copper mining activities right in the middle of town. Did metal poisoning contribute to the craziness of action described in Hammett's book?"""
Red Harvest is the direct influence for two classics (one, perhaps both are masterpieces) Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Clint Eastwood's real cinema debut, A Fistful of Dollars.
Interesting is that in the ending before he goes off to singlehandedly destroy the bad guys, Eastwood target practices in a copper mine. There he also hides out for a spell of time and recuperates from having had the stuffing kicked out of him. So the mine, in a sense, was a place of rejuvenation and restoration for his man with no name character.
Yojimbo, a masterpiece, was very much directly influenced by Red Harvest (and about 95% of A Fistful of Dollars copied Yojimbo nearly scene for scene so that Sergio Leone was later sued by Kurosawa for plagiarism).
Unfortunately, the Samurai does not hide out in a copper or any type of mine but in a small temple.
> And you would be wrong. A few score people in the Japanese Red Army in a country with 120 million people resident counts for little.
ReplyDeleteI would, huh? So how many millions of people were in the Weather Underground? (You're also off by about 20 million people.)
The union violence [http://www.amazon.com/Big-Trouble-Western-Struggle-America/dp/0684846179] that brought the army into North Idaho preceded the construction of the lead smelter. As I mentioned on another thread that you joined, I grew up there long after the lead smelter began operating and when lead levels were very high but crime very low. From personal experience I have very sincere doubts that there is any correlation between environmental lead and rates of delinquency. It baffles me that people who claim to be interested in this subject avoid crime data from regions known to have high levels of lead. Unless, of course, they really don't want the answer.
ReplyDeleteIn my experience, mining is miserable work and, in First World countries, where there are far better opportunities for most, mining towns tend to be some of the more miserable places. The people they attract (or retain) tend to have more issues than most, like higher drug use. As more and more executive functions shift away from such places - which used to have local banks, local retail stores, etc., run by people of ability, the worse off they get.
ReplyDeleteHammett was a real-life tough guy and detective; and its clear the motivation of the nameless Continental Op was that the corruption offended him. Not just a murder attempt, but senseless killing of a decent guy (the billionaire's son) and a social order rotten in every respect. Even if the Op is not honest with himself that motivation comes through quite clear to the reader.
ReplyDeleteWhat is equally ironic is how Hammett's adopted hometown of San Francisco, in the 1920's short stories featuring the Op, is a tough working man's town. When today it is SWPL central.
Blame watermelons and fried chickens.
ReplyDeleteIn 1957, I tried a wrongful death case arising from a faulty scaffolding in a mine maintained by the Phelps Dodge corporation near Winnemucca Nevada. The deceased, my client's husband, was a 24-year old father of three young children. Liability was admitted, and the case went to the jury on the issue of damages. The award? $4,000. Cheap SOB's. Last case I ever accepted in Nevada.
ReplyDeleteIve been skimming through the (annoying) comments at Mother Jones. It would be delicious to catch some of those commenters claiming lead-caused-crime there and elsewhere claiming abortion-cut-crime.
ReplyDeleteSo how many millions of people were in the Weather Underground?
ReplyDeleteA two digit number, and they counted for little.
--
The Japanese Red Army was nominally in existence for thirty years, or fifteen years either side of 1985. Japan's population in 1985 was...121 million.
If lead poisoning did cause it then there won't be a huge spike coming up now the prison building program has peaked.
ReplyDelete.
This happens in every US city and has done since West Side Story.
No lead.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/nov/26/gangs-sexual-violence-warzones
What happened to the abortion + AIDS theory of the drop in crime?
ReplyDelete@gwern re Japan instability in the 60s
ReplyDeleteJapan isn't really an example of loosened social order - The 60s instability in Japan was quite narrow, confined to a few universities. Factory workers or office workers generally lived the same peaceful, orderly lives they lived in the 50s, 70s, and 80s.
And while the rioting in Japan in the late 60s is a contrast with the generally orderly nature of Japanese society, there is an undercurrent of mass disorder that periodically pops up in Japan - the rice riots in 1918, the riots after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, and the terrorist campaigns in the 20s and 30s, none of which had any link to lead and all were far more wide spread than the disorder in the 60s. There were a number of other odd breakdowns in order before and during the opening of Japan to the West in the 1860s.
An interesting way to validate the theory would be to look at industrial sites from the East Bloc and China.
ReplyDeleteUnlike in the US, where lead smelters are in small towns and so create statistical problems due to small population size and people moving in and out, the Soviet industrial model often stuck them in large cities with a captive workforce that stayed there for several decades, making any impacts much easier to track.
You'd also get controls for better testing because the dynamics of Soviet and Chinese society were different enough that you wouldn't see the same broader social trends affecting violence.
Inbreeding is probably a much bigger factor than lead paint. But then we'd bave to notice serial sperm-donor fathers, slutty mothers, tribal customs and religious decrees.
ReplyDeleteDon't go local. Go international.
ReplyDeleteThere are many places abroad to look for high levels of lead poisoning other than Japan.
Try Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc., and my bet is that you'll find relatively high levels of lead poisoning in hard-charging developing countries with populations that were crime-free compared to what we would find in the West at the same time.
What happened to the abortion + AIDS theory of the drop in crime?
ReplyDelete2/5/14, 4:57 AM
A little thing called Steve sailer and his trusty hobby horse.
What happened to the abortion + AIDS theory of the drop in crime?
ReplyDeleteIIRC, The timing of the crime drop was off by about five years and the theory supposed that the effects would be manifest in a particular set of birth cohorts (1973-79) when the behavior changes were concentrated in earlier and later cohorts.
> The 60s instability in Japan was quite narrow, confined to a few universities. Factory workers or office workers generally lived the same peaceful, orderly lives they lived in the 50s, 70s, and 80s.
ReplyDeleteAnd most people in other countries like the USA did not live peaceful orderly lives during that period...?
> And while the rioting in Japan in the late 60s is a contrast with the generally orderly nature of Japanese society, there is an undercurrent of mass disorder that periodically pops up in Japan - the rice riots in 1918, the riots after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, and the terrorist campaigns in the 20s and 30s, none of which had any link to lead and all were far more wide spread than the disorder in the 60s. There were a number of other odd breakdowns in order before and during the opening of Japan to the West in the 1860s.
Goalpost moving. One can point to plenty of serious non-1960s disturbances in the USA as well - for example, how about the Bonus Army?
from what i've read and seen, slow lead poisoning tends to drive people crazy, not violent. although they may get randomly violent as the poisoning enters the terminal stretch. by the way, the last lead smelter in the entire US, some place in missouri which has been there for over 100 years, was just shut down by the EPA.
ReplyDeletethe US will now only produce recycled lead. i'm not clear on how much of a long term issue this will be. most lead in use is recycled, so it won't have much of an effect at first. but long term, i wonder.
the US moved away from leaded gasoline so long ago that now most pumps seem to not even specify 'unleaded' anymore. which was universal when i grew up. back in 2000 when i started buying and wrenching on 1970s corvettes, i would bump into old guys who owned even older classic cars which still had their original engine that ran on leaded gasoline. depending on the state, i think most of these were exempt from emissions laws if they were more than, oh, 30 years old or something.
which is funny, because if that was the rule now, cars from 1984 would be exempt. i call this the 'back to the future' rule. in the movie, marty goes back 30 years all the way to 1955. which was a huge departure from 1985. but if he took the same trip today he'd go all the way back to the antiquated time period of IBM PC computers, nintendo entertainment systems, and brick size cell phones. not exactly a step into ancient times.
"...the single most insanely violent novel I've ever read ..."
ReplyDeleteHaven't read Red Harvest so I cant say for sure but if you're looking for a challenger to your statement above try "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy. Yikes.
"Giving Africanus Bellcurvius civil rights caused the crime boom."
ReplyDeleteLargescale bluecollar immigration - whether international or *internal* always has the same effect because when you have a very large-scale bluecollar migration of any kind the leading edge is always disproportionately young men.
So what happens?
1) As a lot of crime is generated by young men that will increase crime in the receiving areas more or less in proportion (which crimes varies a bit by culture but not the amount).
2) Massively increasing the numbers of young men in a district shifts the ratio of young males to young females from 1:1 to 2:1 or more which creates massive competition for the available females. This leads to a massive increase in violence, gangs, sexual violence, forced prostitution etc mostly among the 11-24 age group.
The same process happens everywhere, every time it happens, from South Africa to Berlin to Paris to the West Side of New York.
**Every single time.**
.
Miners are tough. Mining communities generally have extremely strong communal bonds. Breaking miners' strikes always involves more violence than any other.
If the internal immigration argument is correct then while crime spiked in the receiving areas it should have dropped in the exporting areas which i imagine would be the southern rural black areas?
ReplyDeleteIt seems possible that different racial communities could be affected by lead in different ways (or to different degrees), both because of genetic and cultural differences. So it may be that lead was a large cause of the increase in black crime in the U.S. but that it doesn't have much of an effect on Japanese people.
ReplyDelete"Largescale bluecollar immigration - whether international or *internal* always has the same effect because when you have a very large-scale bluecollar migration of any kind the leading edge is always disproportionately young men.
ReplyDeleteThe same process happens everywhere, every time it happens, from South Africa to Berlin to Paris to the West Side of New York.
**Every single time.**
Not true. In the last few decades hundreds of millions of rural Chinese moved to cities, mostly coastal ones, to work in factories and construction. Violent crime is extremely low in China.
"Violent crime is extremely low in China."
ReplyDeleteBut is it higher.
It could be both of course.
ReplyDelete+10% global increase due to lead modified by -5% drop in the young male exporting regions and a +10% increase in the receiving regions so +5% vs +20%.
Also a +10% increase in Japan would probably look a lot different than +10% in New York.
If you look at the state of Missouri crime rates over time, I think there is evidence to support the crime/lead correlation.
ReplyDeleteProduction was basically around Joplin (SE Mo) and south if St. Louis.
There are waves of more more violent crime around 1970, 1980 and 1990. The trend of the waves of violence peaking seems to break in 2000 and 2010.
They just shut the big Doe Run Co. Smelter a year or so ago.
Missouri has always had a lot if violent crime and negative behavior for a state that is so rural, religious and well armed.
KC and St. Louis of course have large populations of blacks, as do many of the mid sized cities. Cities like Joplin and Columbia (a college town) historically had unusual amounts of violent crime.
I would assume you could control somehow for the crime rate that occurs from having large populations of blacks. But I don't think that completely accounts for it.
There was a lot of lead production in missouri.
It is more logical that lead levels increase stupidity more than crime. However smart criminals tend to smart enough to avoid violence. And are less likely to get caught.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if reductions in lead levels have something to do with the Flynn Effect.
@ Dane Jamall
ReplyDeleteMissouri's not that simple. It's "rural", but it's a southern kind of rural: Lots of smallish towns of a few hundred or thousand people in very close proximity. It's not just St. Louis and Kansas City that had large numbers of blacks: Any town large enough to have a population in the tens of thousands had/has a substantial black population. Most towns had or have some form of industry beyond agriculture, many of which got shut down or automated in the time period you describe.