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Originally Posted by Austinlee
I have a hard time making such a large connection between lead paint & crime rates even if those graphs line up fairly close.
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It was more leaded gasoline in the later period. In any event, that is really just the introductory correlation--the evidence mounts as you look at more and more countries, and also dig down into sub-national units. Here, for example, is a paper that did a regression analysis and determined that exactly when state lead exposure tracked down was strongly correlated with future crime trends:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13097
And from a recent BBC article:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615
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Since then, the data for the lead theorists has become more and more detailed. Nevin and his supporters predicted that crime would fall in other nations 20 years after the banning of leaded petrol - and their theory appears to have played out in Europe. Leaded petrol was removed from British engines later than in North America - and the crime rate in the UK began to fall later than in the US and Canada. Lead theorists say that data they've collated and calculated from each nation shows the same 20-year trend - the sooner lead is removed from the environment, the sooner crime will begin to fall.
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That is a pretty compelling, and pretty unique, pattern.
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I think the de-industrialization of the US economy along with other things like legalized abortion which was then utilized by many low income people to prevent unwanted babies from becoming neglected children which often times led to a lifetime of crime.
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The abortion hypothesis doesn't pass similar tests. Abortion history varies a lot between different countries and different sub-national units in the United States, and you don't see the same consistent pattern after abortion law changes, nor for that matter can it explain why you do see the same consistent pattern after lead exposure changes.
Industrialization also has an inconsistent correlation with crime. In the 19th Century, people thought industrialization was positively correlated with crime, since the observed crime rate was much higher in cities. But then in the early 20th Century, even as industrialization is continuing, you get this big convergence in rural crime rates.
More recently, industrial employment share peaked around 1950, and has been declining since, and for most of that time there has been a suburbanization trend as well. And for the first part of that period there was in fact a crime rate decline, as many expected. But then in the early 1960s, crime starts increasing, which lasts for the next 30 years or so. But then it turns around and starts decreasing for the next 20+ years to the present. None of that seems easy to explain given a more or less steady de-industrialization process over that 65 or so years.
I should note that the lead hypothesis, although very well-supported scientifically, is often taken as a challenge to many conventional orthodoxies about crime and therefore has gotten a lot of push back. So, for example, some people want to believe that crime increases are all about the moral corruption of society, and crime decreases are about aggressive policing. Others want to believe that crime increases are caused by loss of economic opportunity, and crime decreases by improved public education and other social assistance.
The thing is, those debates are all still relevant even if the lead hypothesis is true, specifically as applied to what I called baseline crime. It is just the increases and decreases associated with these particular crime waves in U.S. history and the history of other countries that might be mostly about lead exposure.
Anyway, although all this is inherently interesting, in the context of this forum, the important point is that it is entirely possible that the big decreases in large city crime rates since the early 1990s are more or less permanent. And if that is true, it lends additional support to the prediction that city living is going to continue to increase in popularity as the generations who grew up with lower-crime cities come of age and start making their own locational decisions.
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