Poisons and prisons.
By: Josh Trevino
10.21.2007 11:38:00 AM
Has environmental regulation led to lower crime? That's the thesis advanced by Jessica Wolpaw Reyes of Amherst College, and featured in today's NYT. (You can find Dr Reyes's original scholarly piece here.) The argument is that leaded gasoline systematically poisoned the minds (and hence the moral capacity) of America's youth: when regulatory action took the lead out of gasoline, average intelligence went up, and crime went down. It's an interesting idea, bolstered mostly by the early-1990s drop in crime, which correlates with the early-1970s elimination of leaded gasoline -- but its flaws go far beyond its inherent unprovability. Just for one example, this spreadsheet (warning: Excel file) from the DOJ on federal and state incarceration from 1982 through 2003 shows major proportional jumps in the incarceration percentages in 1986-1987, and in 1994. Those outliers aside, the year-to-year proportional increases are much higher in the 1990s than in the 1980s. This in turn implies one of two things: that the stricter laws on imprisonment and release in the 1990s had something to do with the drop in crime; or that things in the 1980s (when a "fully-leaded" generation was coming of age) weren't so bad after all. The latter is not, as a comparative condition, true. It shouldn't be denied that life, and urban life in particular, did in fact improve in the 1990s. The point here is to show that an identified correlation may have nothing whatsoever to do with causation, that data sets can be interpreted in massively different ways -- and moreover, that there are many data sets that may be relevant here. It's a good guess that the ones directly related to crime (imprisonment, court records, familial integrity, et al.) are more relevant than the ones not (i.e., lead levels in gasoline). Why is this important? Dr Reyes's work buttresses the case that economic regulation and restriction is a proven net good for society at large. Indeed, the abstract for her research declares that "the social value of the reductions in violent crime far exceeds the cost of the removal of lead from gasoline." It is only in taking refuge in unquantifiable "social value" and unprovable correlations that these assertions may be made: when dealing with quantification and demonstrable causality, we know that costs imposed by state intervention in market mechanisms are almost never offset by any purported gain. Hypothesizing on a connection between leaded gasoline and societal violence is an interesting academic exercise -- but as a guide for policy formulation, it is not merely worthless, but malign. In any case, this isn't the first time we've seen the lead-causes-national-decline thesis. A few academics have made a cottage industry out of the notion that lead poisoning (from pipes, not cars) destroyed the Roman Empire. If we are, as some media figures wish to insist, the new Rome, then it befits us to have the same spurious causes of decline.
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