tags
feeds
- rss
- atom
- what is a feed?
search
search
popular
archive
- December 2005
- January 2006
- February 2006
- March 2006
- April 2006
- May 2006
- June 2006
- July 2006
- August 2006
- September 2006
- October 2006
- November 2006
- December 2006
- January 2007
- February 2007
- March 2007
- April 2007
- May 2007
- June 2007
- July 2007
- August 2007
- September 2007
- October 2007
- November 2007
- December 2007
- January 2008
- February 2008
- March 2008
- April 2008
- May 2008
- June 2008
- July 2008
- August 2008
- September 2008
- October 2008
- November 2008
- December 2008
- January 2009
Did the Clean Air Act Also Lower Crime Rates?
July 29, 2008
Posted by: Sheila
We just came upon this interesting New York Times piece from last October that reports on a plausible link between high levels of lead and crime. Because of a surge in the number of teenagers in the 1990s, people were predicting a spike in crime. But it never happened. In fact, crime rates steadily decreased.
This phenomenon baffled experts, but economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes discovered a possible answer: lead, or lack thereof.
Reyes, who knew that even small amounts of lead in the blood of children was linked to brain damage and aggressive behavior, found that "the rise and fall of lead-exposure rates seemed to match the arc of violent crime, but with a 20-year lag - just long enough for children exposed to the highest levels of lead in 1973 to reach their most violence-prone years in the early '90s, when crime rates hit their peak."
It seems that the switch to unleaded gasoline in the U.S. in the 1970s, promtped by regulations from the Clean Air Act, dramatically lowered the levels of the toxin in this generation of children, and unintentionally made our communities safer.
Add that to the growing list of reasons to go green.

There are no comments for this entry.