OT Crime drop attributed to lead-free gasoline

Can those same experts explain why school test scores fell when we removed lead from gasoline?

To many experts spoil the soup.

Best Regards Tom.

Meh...more likely due to the fact that in 40+ states, people who aren't criminals are allowed to carry concealed weapons to deter those who are criminals.

Everybody's got a "theory". Damned dangerous when you pay people to cook up new crackpot theories! (Not that I'm against real scientific research, but people who find a tidbit of "data" and try to fit it to their personal/political/social beliefs usually wind up so far from any discernable cause/effect relationship that it can be laughable. This certainly sounds like one of those. Oh, lead-free gas came in in the 90's, crime went down in the 90's, clearly an un-disputable cause/effect there, oh YEAH!)

Actually, it seems lead-free gas came in well before the 1990's, like maybe mid 1970's, wasn't it?

Jon

Have you read "Where Have All the Criminals Gone?" by Steven Levitt? It's in his book _Freakonomics_. Levitt gained his fame with this one, which shows a close correlation between the high rate of abortion after Roe v. Wade and the reduction in violent crime, which came particularly from the age group that wasn't there -- because it had been aborted. The abortion frequency was sharply skewed toward unwed, low-income mothers, and it's their kids that wind up disporportionally going into a life of crime.

It's an interesting and controversial subject, maybe hotter than gun control.

On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:49:09 -0500, with neither quill nor qualm, Rex quickly quoth:

The only sane answer is to feed the criminals more lead. That will certainly cut crime immediately if sent at the proper velocity.

-- Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling. -- Margaret Lee Runbeck

When they removed the lead from gasoline is when the global warming kicked in, so I think thats the cause.

IIRC, the 1975 model year was the first with catalytic converters (and hence the first to require unleaded gas).

So kids who were born in the late-70's are the first ones to grow up entirely without being exposed to leaded gas... and became teenagers in the early 90's. Still sounds like BS to me.

-snip-

Incorrect.

Unleaded gas appeared in the U.S. in 1975, but leaded gas was not banned as an on-road motor vehicle fuel until 1 Jan 1996.

Lead poisoning can be used to reduce crime- when dispensed 9 ounces at a time.

Dave

I clearly recall seeing ads for "Lead Free Amoco" in the 50s. It might not have been the same formulation, but it was touted as lead free, increased mileage, reduced sludge, etc. etc..

Leaded gas goes 'way back, to the 1920s. There are old hand pumps around that say "Ethyl." That was tetraethyl lead.

-- Ed Huntress

Perhaps I should have said "reappeared." The point I was trying to make is that the disappearance of leaded gasoline lagged more than twenty years behind the widespread use of unleaded gasoline, and thus the first cohort of children to grow up in the U.S. without that particular source of lead exposure was born in the late 1990s, not the late 1970s as incorrectly stated in the post I was responding to.

Got it. I understood. I just remembered those old ads and still wonder a bit why unleaded gas is supposed to be a relatively "new" thing.

Yes, and I remember the signs on them, about 6X6 black on white: "Contains lead. (tetraethyl)" and something, something.

Ed

You beat me to it! I couldn't remember the title of the book until you jogged my memory but Levitt's theory makes much more sense than the unleaded gas one.

Several other good theories on various other topics, Freakonomics, highly recommended.

Paul

A few years ago, before the book was published, I summarized here Levitt's article on guns, kids, and swimming pools. Gunner really took to it as I recall. d8-)

There are critics of the abortion/crime article, which I want to read sometime. Most are anti-abortion volk but there may be some substance in among the partisan crap.

-- Ed Huntress

The problem with this study is that it only covers one source of lead in the environment. I remember that it was common for home gardeners to use red lead to protect vegetables from pests. Notably, the roots of cabbage seedlings were dipped in it prior to planting. In my area they were available as bedding plants. Carrot seeds were also treated, by dribbling red lead along the furrow before covering them with soil.

Steve R.

For perspective, Steve, Britain's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry estimates that the burning of gasoline has accounted for 90 percent of the lead in the atmosphere since the 1920s. Base levels of lead in people in Europe and the US was 300 - 500 times the background level as of the

Levels of lead in children have dropped something like 75% since the mid-80s, when the lead content of gasoline had been cut by 90% or so, in a scaled cutback that ended at zero in 1996.

The story of lead in gasoline is a pretty sordid one, something like the story of tobacco. They were ready to promote ethyl alcohol (which they called "farm alcohol") as an octane booster in the early '20s, but GM's Research Lab was under enormous pressure to come up with something fast or face dissolution. Kettering, who had invented the electric starter and who ran the lab, pushed his staff to jump on the first thing that was cheap and that worked. Tetraethyl lead was one of the most poisonous substances used in labs in those days, with no commercial uses of its own, but nobody cared. The oil industry loved it because it was cheap. So they all swept the health issues under the rug and took off a runnin' with it.

If you noticed, you couldn't sell scrap engine blocks to legitimate iron foundries through the 1980s. The blocks held the lead, which already was being monitored by the EPA. A few engine blocks in a melt would drive them over the limit.

-- Ed Huntress