Cause: . . . And How It Doesn't Always Equal Effect by Gregory Smithsimon

Author:Gregory Smithsimon [Smithsimon, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781612196763
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2018-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

Lead levels were related to behavior problems and violence as well. In an era where blood levels of 10 μg/dl were common, Reyes writes that “1 μg/dl of blood lead has approximately the same effect on behavior as a decrease of approximately $5,000 of family income.”151 Higher levels had even stronger effects.

How much does lead contribute to violence? It is important not to overstate the impact of a single variable, blinding us to the role of so many other important factors. Education has a measurable effect, as do better life options. But some of the correlations are astonishing. In 2011, the countries that used leaded gas were Afghanistan, Myanmar, and North Korea; those that used a mix of leaded and unleaded gas were Iraq, Algeria, and Yemen. It cannot be that lead alone causes war; the very repressiveness of some of those countries, and US military incursions into several of these are more a cause than an effect of environmental pollution.152

UNINTENTIONAL SOCIAL FACTORS: ROE V. WADE

If reduced lead levels is an unexpected cause for the decline in pregnancy, another is potentially more problematic: abortion. I don’t mean that birthrates decline because pregnant young women had abortions. In fact, as the frequency of teen pregnancies has declined in the last twenty-five years, so has the rate of abortions: fewer teens are getting pregnant, and fewer of them are having abortions as well.

Around 2001, John Donohue and Steven Levitt found evidence that the legalization of abortion in the United States showed a correlation with a drop in crime: fifteen to twenty-four years after abortion became legal, crime rates began dropping precipitously. The authors argued provocatively that after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion, significant numbers of women who were least able to raise children terminated their pregnancies. Eighteen years after abortion was legalized, crime rates began a sharp and sustained drop. Although the researchers’ claims can and have been widely critiqued, at a minimum the data is strong enough that the contention cannot be dismissed out of hand: states that legalized abortion earlier saw crime drop earlier. States with more abortions saw crime drop more. Crime rates were reduced among young criminals (born during the era of legalized abortion) more than older ones.153

The claim raises difficult questions, and puts people on both sides of the abortion debate in an uncomfortable situation. (One of the researchers, Stephen Levitt, is coauthor of the Freakonomics book series, which celebrates just the kind of social science findings that upend conventional debates.154) If the data is true, law-and-order social conservatives who oppose abortion could be condoning restrictive health policies that will raise the crime rate to the intolerably high levels of the 1990s. Progressives who want abortion to remain legal risk being tagged as eugenicists who condone a brutal form of social control. There are, of course, ways out of these binds: progressives already emphasize that they support women’s choices, not abortion per se, and the data puts additional pressure on abortion opponents

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