"I began with the city that was the crime capital of America," Giuliani, now a candidate for president, recently told Fox's Chris Wallace. "When I left, it was the safest large city in America. I reduced homicides by 67 percent. I reduced overall crime by 57 percent."

    Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

    The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

    What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

    "It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin said in an interview. "Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."

[...]
Nevin says his data not only explain the decline in crime in the 1990s, but the rise in crime in the 1980s and other fluctuations going back a century. His data from multiple countries, which have different abortion rates, police strategies, demographics and economic conditions, indicate that lead is the only explanation that can account for international trends.

    Because the countries phased out lead at different points, they provide a rigorous test: In each instance, the violent crime rate tracks lead poisoning levels two decades earlier.

[...]

The centerpiece of Nevin's research is an analysis of crime rates and lead poisoning levels across a century. The United States has had two spikes of lead poisoning: one at the turn of the 20th century, linked to lead in household paint, and one after World War II, when the use of leaded gasoline increased sharply. Both times, the violent crime rate went up and down in concert, with the violent crime peaks coming two decades after the lead poisoning peaks.

    Other evidence has accumulated in recent years that lead is a neurotoxin that causes impulsivity and aggression, but these studies have also drawn little attention. In 2001, sociologist Paul B. Stretesky and criminologist Michael Lynch showed that U.S. counties with high lead levels had four times the murder rate of counties with low lead levels, after controlling for multiple environmental and socioeconomic factors.

    In 2002, Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh, compared lead levels of 194 adolescents arrested in Pittsburgh with lead levels of 146 high school adolescents: The arrested youths had lead levels that were four times higher.

    "Impulsivity means you ignore the consequences of what you do," said Needleman, one of the country's foremost experts on lead poisoning, explaining why Nevin's theory is plausible. Lead decreases the ability to tell yourself, "If I do this, I will go to jail."

    Nevin's work has been published mainly in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research. Within the field of neurotoxicology, Nevin's findings are unsurprising, said Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University and the editor of Environmental Research.

    "There is a strong literature on lead and sociopathic behavior among adolescents and young adults with a previous history of lead exposure," she said.

[...]

Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, for example, were built over the Dan Ryan Expressway, with 150,000 cars going by each day. Eighteen years after the project opened in 1962, one study found that its residents were 22 times more likely to be murderers than people living elsewhere in Chicago.

    Nevin's finding implies a double tragedy for America's inner cities: Thousands of children in these neighborhoods were poisoned by lead in the first three quarters of the last century. Large numbers of them then became the targets, in the last quarter, of Giuliani-style [draconian, zero-tolerance]law enforcement policies.

I'm not specifically endorsing this guy's theory, just pointing out that the effects of just one environmental toxin may take years to manifest, it may take several dispersal and reduction cycles in different environments to provide any convincing correlation, etc.   It would be a lot cheaper -- not to mention socially more just, ethically more sensible -- to conclude that a policy of slow poisoning (allowing industries license to emit toxins so long as they remain below the exposure level where people actually keel over on hour-to-year timescales) is a bad idea.  The precautionary principle, and all that...

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

that's harsh speaking for a guy[?] called 'melo' -- whether it means "mellow" or not...

some days it does, some days it's more of an affirmation, such as when i read this diary!
mostly, it's italian for 'apple tree', but i like the connection to 'melograno' (pomegranate, favourite fruit juice) too, and as perhaps you all have noticed by now, an occasional irascible penchant for melodrama, lol!

working on that...dalai lama, help me attain the supreme calm cheerfulness that is true compassion.

years in california, oregon and hawaii, have given me a deeper understanding of 'mellow' than the average europerson, though.
one person's 'chilled' is another's 'spaced', is another's 'out to pranzo'; next to hawaiians, europe hums along powered by a low-level angst (half guilt, half restless escapism!)

there is a joyful curiosity too of course, principally in the young ...

i am mostly male, btw.

what we do know from an increasing number of studies is that notions of a linear dosage effect are, to say the least, quaint.  the human body is not a simple mechanism, it's a complex living system (like the climate) and has nonlinearities, critical paths, and tipping points.  a toxic exposure that would be nearly harmless at week N of fetal development may be nearly guaranteed to cause serious damage at week N+1.  people can survive higher doses of some toxins than we think, and yet succumb to far lower doses of other toxins than are conventionally held to be "dangerous."  and individuals vary widely.  the world of living things is not reductionist: it is synergistic, symbiotic, complex, entangled, nonlinear.  and we don't have the tools or the knowledge or the political or scientific will to attempt to understand such subtleties and complexities.  we want simple linear rules and one-size-fits-all.

you are some writer, madame...

it is not at all difficult to understand the fundamental meaning of a cancer cluster:  it means we're doing something wrong, something stupid, something that is injuring people -- in a very horrible way.  and we should stop.

it appears to be well above the level of intelligence required to arrest it, though the media's doing its best to ensure our continuing to be dumbed down, egged on by right-wingers, who never met a central-control model they didn't envy and/or abuse.

I think what can be said about the nuke industry is that the consequences of malfeasance and incompetence in their operations has the potential to be far greater, more devastating, more permanent, more irrevocable than most other corporate/industrial actors -- other than the weapons industry to which they are so intimately wedded.  and their operating environment, their institutional culture, is even more conducive to malfeasance, secrecy, the covering-up of incompetence, than most.  and they have a documented track record of living up to that promise.  they are a ripe source of deniable slow poisoning as well as major catastrophe, and they have this perfect institutional culture -- as in Petri dish -- for lying, denying, and taxpayer-subsidised risk displacement.

you can say that again, so i did! 

the nuclear industry does seem well positioned to compete for a gold medal among the great criminal enterprises of this fraught chapter, the endgame of C19 industrial capitalism...  they have what every serious competitor needs:  muscle, will, and Attitude.

..., possibly most important of all, private CONNECTIONS.
 

imho it's way past time to leapfrog -- skip the land lines and leapfrog to cell phones.  skip the nukes and leapfrog to non (or least) toxic power generation, less lethal, more distributed, and more opensource.  ontology doesn't have to recapitulate phylogeny... we could ffwd through the deadends.

maybe we are the mutated generation, turning, singed, to say 'that way be dragons', to those younger and less informed.
if so, and only, then it was worth it.

those 'dragons' are really 'drags'-... on evolution

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Cancer clusters will happen naturally, from basic rules of randomness that simply state that any phenomenon that is caused by random factors will not happen in a neat, regular repartition but will be randomly spread out, which includes apparently unnatural clusters that are in fact statistically normal.

I do think that with onur current entitlement culture, any such cluster, once identified, will be seen as a magnet for damage seeking parasites, and they will waste no time in identifying a credibly dangerous industrial facility nearby to blame for such cluster - there will always be one, whether a power plant, chemical factory, waste treatment facility or other.

It is easy to create the apparence of causality out of purely random factors, and people will leap on it, and the media will lap it up. That does not mean, of course, that all clusters are random, of course, but this should certainly be taken into account whenever cluster do not reach uncontestable order of magnitude of unusual concentration.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes