One of the fastest-gentrifying parts of Austin is near the site of the former Holly Street power plant, and all the neighborhood soil is almost certainly deeply contaminated with lead as a result. I’ve had to beg friends who moved into the area to avoid planting backyard food gardens. Really, just having easier/more available soil testing would make a massive difference, because it can be a hassle to actually get soil tested for lead right now.
If we learn anything from COVID-19, I hope it's the benefits of cheap/free testing for all things public health! If we have real, *fresh* data, it's so much easier to argue for remediation policy. We're not talking about squishy social science data with embedded value judgements, it's ground truth: "is there COVID/lead or no COVID/lead". More testing!
I also just think from a media perspective if someone does a bunch of testing somewhere, that's "news" that can be reported instead of just general knowledge that lead exists and it's bad.
If it finds lead, that means we need to clean it up. If it doesn't find lead, hey, that place is officially certified lead-safe! Testing lets us put our money where our mouth is.
That's the crazy thing about buying a home in northeast Ohio - all the realtors told us, well, if you test for lead, you'll find it, and then when you sell your house you'll have to disclose that there's lead in it. So pretty much nobody tests for lead.
This is why subsidizing lead cleanup is reasonable American public policy: it helps kickstart a market whose existence is in everybody's best interest.
The flipside of "test for it, find it, have to disclose it, hurting property value" could be: "test for it, find it, *government pays to remove it*, get to disclose you're the only house in town with its lead officially removed, juicing property value."
Go big enough and you can get a flywheel of lead cleanup going - especially if you don't treat the cleanup as a jobs program and meaningfully drive down the costs.
This is the sort of program that Chamber-of-Commerce-type Republicans actually like because they can see it as investing in households - as long as you don't get caught paying $10 for $5 worth of work.
Your readers ask very good questions. Here's one. Exactly how do you extract lead from soil? The short answer is you don't, not on site. What you do is dig up that soil, replace it with uncontaminated fill, and dispose of the contaminated soil in a regulated waste site some place else. You would be surprised how few people want such a site near them. Long term you can extract heavy metals by the same methods used to mine them in the first place. You pile them up and leach them out with chemical agents and recover and treat the leachate. And man is that expensive.
As one of the covid-refugees in Austin this year (though I'm fleeing College Station, rather than San Francisco or New York) this is really helpful to know! We got a place a mile west of there, and often bike past, and have been thinking that the area just a few blocks north of that old power plant seems to be the epicenter of the epicenter of new things happening in Austin. This makes a lot of sense.
Don't hold me to this, but I think Texas has a voluntary type compliance system. If you find the lead and clean it, they will certify you as clean. But if you decide not to clean it, you only get in trouble if it migrates to your neighbors property. Again, not an expert and my understanding comes from business experience that is many years out of date. Check with a legal and/or environmental expert before proceeding.
I mean, for me personally, I'm less worried about any certifications or requirements. I'm just want to be able to have some test results I can show my friends so they can be appropriately cautious. (Austin's population has grown so much since the Holly Street plant was decommissioned in 2007 that a lot of folks don't even know about it.)
Just here to plug the Brooklyn Soils Lab (part of CUNY Brooklyn College), which will test your soil sample for lead for $20. Worth doing if you have kids or like to garden! This is part of a public university research program, not a for-profit venture.
If we could vote for such things... I'd enthusiastically vote to just not do the whole Murray / IQ debate here. They always turn out gross. I'd also vote to not do eugenic-adjacent debates here. If we could vote on such things...
I read this piece as a good reminder of why we should give no quater to the “Human biodiversity” community - they dont want to remove the lead because they prefer the explanation that the racialised poor are genetically inferior.
It really felt like Matt was pulling his punches on Scott Siskind, if Steve Sailer was a commenter in good standing at Slowboring what would that tell you about your work?
(I loved your Vox piece on Charles Murray, why ya gotta be so generous to these IDW useful idiots for conservatism?)
My assessment of Charles Murray is extremely negative because I see his intellectual project as a monomaniacal effort to tear down the American welfare state, which I think is a really bad idea.
I just don't think that characterizes the SSC intellectual project at all. It's true they have some bad takes! Who doesn't?
I think there's an important nuance to add here, and if you agree with Matt's take in that article I think you'll agree (or I'm misrepresenting Matt's argument... I don't think I am though):
From Matt's article on Charles Murray: "***And Harris, for his part, sees himself as exclusively defending The Bell Curve’s empirical claims about IQ, which is fine, but it’s important to consider Murray’s work with a view toward actual American public policy,*** which has been deeply influenced by Murray over the years, and which Donald Trump is looking to take in an even more Murray-esque direction."
You can make arguments about how much the Venn diagram of "interested in human biodiversity" and "bad faith, white-supremacist policy goals" overlap. It's a bit non-falsifiable, because people can see good or bad faith wherever they want to. But, I think acknowledging that those can be two different circles is important.
Said differently, I think I agree 100% with what you intend you premise to be (looking for a genetic explanation for human variance to dunk on minorities and cut off social aid is really bad). But, it's important to call that what it is. The bad faith argumentation around it being about "human diversity" is so effective because opponents are *willing to engage it on those terms*. Then, for everyone that is not sophisticated or thorough enough to see the bad faith, the bar for argumentation gets lowered to a ridiculously low place. Like. all you have to do is show the disparities in sickle-cell anemia and you've proved the "human biodiversity" premise.
I feel like its a subtle, but important point. It's the same reason that the San Francisco Abraham Lincoln school board stuff is such a face palm. It creates such a silly strawman argument that can be made to those that are undecided, but persuadable, on the modern day existence and pervasiveness of institutional racism.
It's like... I wish we as progressives would be more intentional about picking the stronger argument. "The current day impacts of redlining," not "the case for taking Abraham Lincoln's name off a high school." "The moral bankruptcy of racism of all kinds, including any version that tries to find a genetic basis," not "there's a problem with acknowledging human biodiversity exists."
I think the stronger argument than "there's a problem with acknowledging human biodiversity exists" is pointing out human biodiversity has little-to-no alignment with the racial categories that currently exist in our society, which also give you much stronger empirical standing than the racist trying to :biotruths: their way through the debate.
Yeah, I get this point of view, and its probably right from a pragmatic standpoint. I am personally a fan of "EVEN IF it did, that doesn't change anything" and avoid the argumentation on the point entirely. Plus I feel like, again, by engaging on those terms--as if racism would then be OK if anyone every proved a group genetic link--makes it seem like you're conceding that the case against racism is a question of empiricism, not morality. But, I get this point is a bit esoteric, and to the extent politics is about persuasion, its important to engage on the points that will persuade people.
I feel like saying "even if it did, that doesn't change anything" is a much bigger concession, though. If human races were genetically uniform and clearly distinct in the same way that, say, dog breeds are, that would actually be massively important and it would change everything. But they're not, and we can very clearly prove that. So I think it's important to point that out.
Like, think of it this way. Say there were people trying to argue that all women have a 30-point IQ deficit compared to men. Thus, because of that deficit, we need to adopt a Saudi Arabia-style laws removing women's rights. That is clearly insanely misogynist and wrong. But if you started to counter that argument with "EVEN IF women had this IQ deficit, that doesn't change anything" and that the moral wrong of misogyny should prevent us from engaging on those grounds, I feel your argument would be a lot weaker than starting with "no such deficit exists, and we can prove it".
I agree here as it applies to society more broadly. To me, in a hypothetical world where group differences existed, the utilitarian argument for unequal rights on that basis is incredibly unpersuasive. I don't disagree with your instinct that it would be too persuasive to too many people, though to (I wouldn't quite say concede, but) not engage with that argument. Indeed, despite my convictions there, I'd probably adopt your tactics of argumentation with a grumpy, racist grandparent at Thanksgiving (or, to be more precise, I would do that and then text my sibling and eye roll emoji and eat more stuffing). But, I feel like in this setting, with a lot of thoughtful people, I may have some hope of persuading some people of the higher-order moral principle at work here.
"...human biodiversity has little-to-no alignment with the racial categories that currently exist in our society..."
For, like $100 you can get a genetic test that will tell you whether you are white, or black, or mixed. And if you're mixed the test will tell you in what exact proportions you're mixed.
"White", "Black", and "Mixed" are not results you'll get from any of the genetic ancestry tests out there. You can get results tied to regions and/or certain ethnic groups. However, even those results are often far less precise than the companies selling them want to admit. For example, 23andMe uses DNA samples from 45 current population groups for their results. So what you're getting is your similarity to people who were within those 45 groups at the time of the sampling.
"'White', 'Black', and 'Mixed' are not results you'll get from any of the genetic ancestry tests out there. You can get results tied to regions and/or certain ethnic groups."
Skin color and other superficial features vary by region. I hope this does not come as a surprise to you.
Why would an Armenian and Copt be mixed race? Mixed ethnicity, but why mixed race? Would you say a half Italian and Swede were mixed race? Half Lebanese and Russian?
Not an original thought, but "race" doesn't actually make any sense beyond a stupid way of saying skin color, hair texture, eye shape.
According to this article, it seems that SSC is not innocent because he didn't ban Nazis (various bloggers also doesn't ban nazis) and/or that he is right-wing compared to SF politics (which means like most people in the world)?
"the Rationalists seem a bit bifurcated. The Effective Altruism people seem to be liberals (Update: Matt Yglesias has a great post that goes into some of what they want). Yudkowsky and Galef are pretty much just centrists who don’t care that much about politics. And Siskind, though he would likely get mad at me for describing him this way, strikes me as a conservative — or whatever passes for a conservative in this strange new era of politics. He has certainly expressed some skepticism of BLM and (especially) the feminist movement, which in the San Francisco Bay Area will definitely put you on the right of the spectrum. (Update: And as people have pointed out, in private he’s not circumspect about holding some right-wing beliefs.) He and I have clashed on occasion over issues such as women’s labor force participation, school vouchers, and IQ.
But generally, the Rationalists don’t seem very political to me. Instead, they mostly seem absorbed in esoterica of their own creation. Sometimes I find these esoterica quite silly, which has made some Rationalists mad at me. So it goes. But despite what I would describe as Siskind’s conservatism, Rationalism does not strike me as a fascist or wink-wink-secret-fascist movement.
As for Nazis in Scott’s comment section, I personally think he should have banned these people long ago — everything is better without Nazis, full stop. But I haven’t seen evidence that Nazi ideas have taken root among the Rationalists, just as I haven’t seen evidence that Rationalist ideas have been more than a very niche influence in the world of tech."
I thought Will's steel manning was more than generous with regards to the NY Times.
The NYT is not unique other than being the one of, if not the, largest institution of its type and therefore has more power than most. Frustratingly he described what was a painful experience for Cade and his editor without the recognition that this experience is exactly what most private citizens face when the journalists and the media turns its Sauron eye upon you. Sometimes it is critically important to society for the that eye to fall upon people. But its rarely a fun experience and often scars people deeply. Its also the exact thing that SA was concerned about happening to him and people around him. I think media needs to have a specific and profoundly important reason before they pull back the veil on people. And the deeper they dig or more serious accusations they make increases both the rationale needed and evidence found to go public.
We can agree that being a nazi or racist is bad and rightly considered an abhorrent thing. But the more terrible and abhorrent thing we make it, then stronger evidence is needed before making an accusation or even implying it about someone.
I'll take a look at those articles! Although I think its a bit beside the point, and I don't necessarily disagree with you on SSC; everyone seems to have a take, but I don't know enough about SSC writings to feel like I'm a competent judge of intent. I'm just making the broader point on the importance of pushing back directly on the thing that bad, with enough precision to avoid setting up a potential straw man.
I agree that nuance is important, but the claim "I'm just into Charles Murray for his UBI advocacy" is about as credible to me as "I'm just reading playboy for the articles"
And so to me it looks like Matt is going easy on SSC because he of his tribal affiliation to the shitposting/controversial ideas/antiwoke community...
From Wills article "And there really was/is some pretty untoward stuff on there. A bunch of people in the community, Scott included, really are interested in neoreactionary thinking. In a recently leaked email exchange, Siskind admits to finding a lot worthwhile in it and confesses that he’s hard on neo-reactionaries in public in part to throw people off the scent. Curtis Yarvin/Mencius Moldbug really is familiar and known quantity who does hang around the community, even if he’s not a central figure. Peter Theil gives him money."
I'd push back on this point though. I think the "some people in a community" argument is not black and white as it relates to the responsibility of the leader. Clearly there is an extreme version of this where I 100% agree, where Trump should not be pretending to be aloof about the Proud Boys, then telling them to stand by, then stoking insurrection, etc. But I am generally skeptical of a "call it like you see it" standard applying to this type of stuff. Like I said, I don't read SSC, and the SSC community moderation shortcomings may well be closer to the Trump end of the spectrum of malicious intent. But its a really hard case to build to the uninitiated. You'd have to show me countless examples of such inappropriate comments to show me not just their absolute prevalence, but depending on how borderline they are, their relevant prevalence as well. Then you'd have to prove SSC had a reasonable mechanism by which to dispense with what he considered fair moderation, and it was a reasonable request to have him use his time or resources to do so. Then, if he didn't, you'd have to provide evidence on whether it was negligence or there was malicious intent (to help me decide how strongly to judge him). If that's the best argument, I'm not saying it can't be proven. It's just really hard to prove to someone like me that's uninitiated, and doesn't know you well enough to rely on your reputation, and also sees smart/ sophisticated people sometimes push for coordinated ostracization of semi-public figures on very shaky grounds.
hahaha fair enough, I think we can find some agreement. If someone has chosen Charles Murray as your standard bearer for UBI, and continues to do so after being presented with his more harmful statements... I would make a rare concession that it is fair game for unmitigated dunking.
Yup! And for all you IDW nerds the fun but is you get to criticise racial affirmative action programs and insist on moving to a class based model. Anyone who opposes affirmative action AND believes in biological racial difference sets off my Swastika alarm bells
For what it's worth, Scott Alexander himself is strongly pro-lead-abatement. From one of his old pre-SSC articles (https://expost.padm.us/biodet):
“I hate statements like ‘It is impossible to overstate the importance of lead poisoning on a population basis.’ It is totally possible to overstate the importance of lead poisoning on a population basis. If I said that lead poisoning caused the September 11 terrorist attacks and the fall of the Soviet Union, that would be overstating its importance (terrorism, you’ll recall, is more linked to iodine deficiency, and lead did not cause the fall of the USSR although some historians do speculate it caused the fall of the Roman Empire)
Aside from that, though, it’s pretty hard to overstate the importance of lead poisoning on a population basis.”
Can you or another commenter provide some context to this human biodiversity thing? I’ve not come across this phrase before and don’t know what it means or how it is being deployed by its advocates.
Reading the comments here it seems to be an amalgamation of classic racist tropes laundered through, what? Test scores?
Basically the idea is the IQ test scores, when clustered by race, show that certain groups of people as a whole have differing intelligence levels. Theres a chapter in the Bell Curve by George Murray that is really the popular epicenter of this conflict. I like many people feel that there are too many confounds to quantify the variation properly. Also Im not sure I see the utility of this line of inquiry since variation among individuals is much greater than within groups and the information will more than likely fuel racist ideology than anything else.
There is a strong overlap between the scientific racism community and the IDW/Anti-Woke community because the scientific racists deserve cancellation more than anyone ;-)
When I read "human biodiversity" the first thing I thought of was the people who advocate for "viewpoint diversity" in universities. They seem to largely array themselves around the political cause of letting Charles Murray give speeches on college campuses. I guess my sniff test was right with this one. ssdd
Dont delete your comments Marie! have the courage of your convictions no one is going to cancel you ;-)
I actually really like and really agree with a lot of what you put into this comment - its something that I apply in my personal life - the assumption of good faith is key to communication in a relationship.
What I disagree with is the cultural relativism - some people !!!aren't!!! trying to make the world a better place - sometimes they have objectionable terrible values that YES, could be fairly described as evil - for example the Segregationists who tried to uphold racial apartheid.
I also disagree that we should always assume good faith - that's just going to be abused by trolls and propagandists.
Marie Kennedy replied to your comment
Finn, you strike me as a smart, passionate person who deeply cares about making a positive impact on the world. I also think I see a tendency that I know well because I was trapped by it for so long. It is the tendency to try to bucketize people into “good” and “bad” teams in order to assume what their motivations are and read deeper, nefarious meanings into their arguments. For me, the blinders fell off when I decided to try just _pretending_ like the person I was reading was no more evil than I was, and to assume they were motivated by trying to have a positive impact just like I was. I realized that bad ideas were still clearly bad ideas--I could confront them on the merits instead of assuming they were maliciously motivated. But I also realized that most of the time, people I disagreed with were just seeing things from a dramatically different perspective. And sometimes, often!, they were seeing things I was not, and I was seeing things they were not. The world is just a much more interesting place when you start from an assumption that most people and their ideas are no more or less flawed or evil than you are. https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/how-to-star-man-arguing-from-compassion/
Hey Finn, I only deleted it because I knew it would go to your inbox but I didn't want to seem like I was publicly dunking on you or make you the unwitting object of a group therapy session :) I am not arguing for universal, permanent assumptions of good faith. Just initial engagement with the ideas being proposed under the assumption of good faith *until clearly proven otherwise.* Nazis and avowed racists exist, but are not all that common, and it's not as contagious as you might fear. The "give no quarters" philosophy plus six degrees of guilt by association only sends people into "dark" corners of the internet where they do not encounter alternative perspectives offered up in good faith. This is the same beef I have with the anti-woke community.
I know this is how all the cool kids do it on twitter, and maybe I'm alone in thinking this, but reposting someone's deleted comment seems a bit uncharitable and unkind to me.
Does anyone actually “not want to remove the lead”? I doubt it. I’m pretty sure anyone who has thought about it has concluded that widespread lead poisoning is extremely bad.
I'll take a look at Manzi's claims, although if he's the same mendacious (or was it merely idiotic?) hack who ignored Europe's lower population growth when he attacked their safety net spending (the former obviously impacts economic growth), I'll lower my expectations.
Also: in a $20 trillion economy, even a very modest decrease in crime is likely to yield a staggering return over time, whereas lead abatement is a one-time expenditure.
Fair enough. Interesting that the author concedes the link between lead and brain damage, but remains skeptical of the program. He’s probably right that the link to crime is more tenuous...but surely widespread brain damage is already a problem worth solving!
Worth solving at some price points - but at the multi billion or tens of billions price point, lots of people start to get (understandably) skeptical about whether particular projects are actually worth it.
I feel like those people have not internalized how bad widespread lead poisoning is. Higher spending on education to make kids smarter is very popular; this is like that except it actually works.
Matt doesn't really argue in the post whether spending on lead abatement would actually be cost-effective, but my impression is that it would be because we haven't tried very hard yet to clean it up yet (mostly just stopped adding new lead), so there's probably a lot of low-hanging fruits. Certainly the benefits of not inflicting widespread brain damage would be very large (as Matt does argue in the post).
The "lead is bad at any level" research that Matt cites is not as convincing as he makes it out to be because there are always questions of confounding and publication bias.
I've seen and continue to see a lot of resistance to the link between environmental lead and crime. For whatever reason this (from what I can tell extremely strong and convincing) explanation for elevated mid/late 20th century crimes rates (and subsequent decline) cheeses off a lot of people. I believe may such folks are represented among the ranks of those opposed to spending money on this project. Add to that general anti-public sector glibertarian types...
The biggest skepticism I see, which I also share, is that it seems to try to tie too much into a single cause. I suppose it's possible that there really is something as simple as this to explain all of the 20th century. But it seems way too easy.
I don't think anybody credible (including Drum) is saying lead literally explains "all" of the rise (and decline) in the trendline in crime. And yet to me the particular pattern of the rise (in the US basically 1945-1990) and decline (since then) is more consistent with the hypothesis that there's a single, dominant factor* than multiple, comparably important factors. I think the rise in lead emissions is well understood (post-war boom in cars, suburbs, highways, suburbia), as is the toxic effect of lead on the central nervous system. Once lead emissions peaked (early 70s) you'd expect crime in America to crest 20-odd years later, when all those brain damaged people reached the age of maximum propensity to criminal activity. Which is exactly what happened.
For me the clincher, though, is that this pattern has played out in country after country, adjusted for the years when the countries in question phased out leaded gasoline.
*I'm not suggesting the following describes you, but I think a lot of people mistakenly allow "complexity bias" tp cloud their judgment on this. In other words, they mistrust simple explanations. But sometimes simple explanations fit the data, and offer the most logical explanation! In the case of lead and crime, I believe that's the case. To put it another way, if we pumped gargantuan quantities of a known, potent environmental neurotoxin into the air, why *wouldn't* we expect to see a spike in sundry bad things associated with compromised brain health, such as anti-social behavior and crime?
I think the answer to your last paragraph is, "crime is complicated, so we don't expect a simple biological explanation." There isn't a dial in your brain that goes from no crime to lots of crime, or indeed from no anti-social behavior to lots of anti-social behavior, crime (and anti-social behavior) are emergent phenomena with lots and lots of inputs that probably, implicitly, include positive and negative feedback loops.
If a lot of people just, like, fell convulsively on the ground and twitched, that's a simple behavior that we expect to see have a simple singular cause (like toxins in the environment). If a lot of people have fairly subtle behavioral changes, that intuitively feels like a multi-causal thing.
I'm not wholly endorsing this explanation -- I don't have a strong opinion on the lead-crime hypothesis and haven't read a ton about it -- just saying that I think your question elides an important point. You have "one cause, one effect" as your main implicit point there. But that reasoning works best when the one cause and one effect seem like they're at similar levels of complexity.
I don't think spewing vast quantities of a potent neurotoxin (associated with attention deficit disorder, impulse control, anti-social behavior and criminality) into the atmosphere was the *sole* cause of the crime wave in America and other countries in the post-war period, no (and I agree various feedback mechanisms were operating both during the rise and during the decline*). But I am convinced the data indicate environmental lead plausibly explains the -bulk- of the phenomenon. (It would appear you're not sold on the hypothesis).
*For instance, it seems pretty likely that one of society's responses to the post-war crime wage - a large increase in police and prison budgets and a lengthening of sentences - must have had exerted downward pressure on crime.
Lead, though, isn't a sufficient explanation for the various test score gaps. It seems to make sense if you think of black people as consistently *physically* segregated, but that's often not the case. Take Kevin Drum's discussion of the effects of desegregation in the South (https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/07/a-couple-of-things-about-busing/):
"the black-white gap narrowed most strongly in the ’70s and ’80s, just when integration efforts were at their strongest. Second, the gaps narrowed solely because black kids did better. The scores of white kids were consistently either flat or up, not down. This is national data, but it’s still a very strong indicator that integration really did improve black test scores while doing no harm to whites."
Here are some things to note about what Kevin Drum is talking about:
First, here blacks and whites were largely in the *same* environment, both before and after integration. Segregation obviously affected where blacks were allowed to go within that environment, but blacks and whites were still physically in proximity to each other, and thus largely subject to the same problems with regard to lead.
Second, even with roughly the same background risk for lead poisoning, there's still a gap, so it's probably not attributable to lead.
Third, an intervention besides removal of lead helped black test scores rise.
"blacks and whites were largely in the *same* environment, both before and after integration"
That just seems completely false though. Even if there were black neighborhoods near white neighborhoods, we know that with airborne pollutants, a few hundred feet can easily make a significant difference.
Everything I've read about airborne pollution from automobiles suggests that it makes a huge difference whether you're right next to a major highway or a thousand feet away, and whether you're right on an arterial street, or on the side street one block over from it. For instance, look at the figures in this paper:
But in the context that Kevin Drum was talking about, that doesn't matter. Blacks and whites were either on the same buses or in proximity to those that were. It's not a white flight situation, with whites leaving the city behind for the suburbs while blacks become relatively more concentrated in urban areas.
Consider: what if the black-only schools had significantly more lead poisoning issues than the white-only schools, and desegregation lead to reduced levels of lead poisoning among black students?
The lead issues in Philadelphia public schools in the present day make me think this is quite possible.
I don't think that quite works for the circumstances that Kevin Drum describes. The effect of lead from vehicle exhaust would probably far outweigh that of paint, and that would be something that both black and white children would have been exposed to.
That's not to say that lead isn't a contributor to test score gaps, but other environmental influences (educational quality, poverty, etc.) are probably more dominant.
This brings me to a hobby-horse of mine: Shooting guns w/ in indoor ranges causes lead exposure! And cops do it frequently. And cops are just about the worst people I can imagine to give lead exposure to.
At least on the federal level, there is regular blood testing available, and it's actually required for firearm instructors and others working at range facilities (I believe a friend had to participate when on an FBI SWAT team that shot weekly).
Read Kevin Drum's article... so if violent crime peaked in the 90s when the peak lead-poisened children were reaching prime crime age in their early 20s, are we now seeing the cresting wave of authoritarian populism, as that same cohort starts to reach retirement and peak Tucker Carlson rage-watching age? Lead poisoning + free time - distraction = aggressive anti-social behavior? One can dream...
The idea that "lead-poisoned boomers*" are responsible for the particularly harmful forms of Trumpian conservatism out there is certainly a popular idea in certain crowds. They believe that we just need to wait for them to die out and things will automatically start to get better. And while the findings on lead contamination and its effect are clearly super-important, I do think that we can end up pushing them a bit too far in thinking they can solve everything. Clearly lead abatement itself is worthwhile and will have massive benefits, but we should be careful to avoid trying to place lead at the center of every social ill (lest we become like the teetotaler who were closing down prisons once prohibition passed, thinking they would no longer be needed).
* "Boomer" now meaning anyone over 40, of course. The great irony of Gen X is that they spent so much of their youth ripping on the Baby Boomers only to end up lumped in with them to all subsequent generations.
As a GenXr I was initially thrilled to hear “ok boomer” as a meme because boomers were the bane of my youth and sucked up all the cultural oxygen with their refusal to accept their own aging. So I was pretty annoyed when my GenZ children explained that I was included in that formulation of Boomer. I still maintain that it is unfair because in my experience while GenX can be cranky like any aging demographic, we are not in denial about our own mortality and fading relevance and don’t go around saying ridiculous things like “age is just a number.” So call me old and out of touch and neoliberal or whatever but don’t lump me in with Baby Boomers!
I'm curious how big the Zoomers' anti-Millennial backlash will be. On the one hand, Millennials definitely have the same sense of cultural myopia and self-centered-ness that the Boomers displayed. On the other hand, there isn't the same kind of unified media landscape that will force every Zoomer to sit through the thousands of hours of self-congratulatory Millennial media the same way Gen X had to deal with the onslaught of "the 60s were the greatest time in human history" media when they were growing up.
As someone born in 1980, I like to identify as a Millennial, and I have definitely been identified as an "ok, boomer" during the weeks when that was a really big thing.
OK, Boomer is just such a great retort to anyone griping about anything, that I soooo badly wanted to type it as a reply, even though I am an Xer who COMPLETELY AGREES with you. 😂 How messed up is that? It's just such a fun reply, that it will transcend context. It's the "talk to the hand" of our time.
I don't exactly remember this, but my teenager claims that I offered him $100 if during Thanksgiving Dinner (pre-pandemic) he would respond "Ok boomer" to everything my boomer Mother said that was annoying (and just to note that she is annoying in the leftier than thou way of someone who complains about rich people incessantly and lives a block from the beach in California and lives a lifestyle that is more 1% than not).
There is an amazing review/essay from 2010 by A.O. Scott on the Sam Lipsyte novel The Ask about GenX hitting midlife that contains one of my favorite paragraphs ever printed in the NYT:
"We grew up in the shadow of the baby boomers, who still manage, in their dotage, to commandeer disproportionate attention. Every time they hit a life cycle milestone it’s worth 10 magazine covers. When they retire, the Social Security system will go under! When they die, narcissism will be so much lonelier." https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/weekinreview/09aoscott.html
Interesting. I was saying that very tongue-in-cheek...didn't realize that was a more serious, widely held premise. I agree, it certainly would seem to break down in a lot of ways on further analysis... for example, it doesn't seem like we see a similar social aggression for that age-cohort of demographics on the left. All the points about the lead hypothesis having had an outsized impact on black communities cuts the other way on the *lead-poised boomers* point, because black voters (especially in that age cohort) vote so heavily Democratic. But I guess you could argue there is a latent aggressive boomer energy on the left, just waiting for their favorite reality-star-turned-authoritarian to fire them all up.
Because lead exposure correlates with poverty it's unsurprising that academics have found associations with basically every social ill. I'm all for abatement, but some of these suggested benefits would probably not materialize because the residual levels are now simply correlational not causal.
Let's clean it up. But will anyone be surprised if some of the measures like teen pregnancy or high school completion rates don't change?
Now that the low hanging fruit of lead reduction is done, I'm skeptical these parts per million reductions will genuinely alter life trajectories. So I'd rather see the money as direct antipoverty services or cash redistribution.
I'm probably taking this too seriously and responding to a tongue-in-cheek comment, but this theory (and the one below about terrorism from the Gulf) almost as bad as racist biodiversity theories because their built on nearly the same logic. And maybe a little offensive, too, to suggest boomers are a brain-damaged generation?
Maybe so, and it definitely promotes discrimination, but the difference is that you can actually fix it (by repainting bedrooms and chelation therapy, maybe actual therapy) without resorting to eugenics and castrating everyone you don’t like.
No. Peak exposure would be to GenXers in the US. The effects of environmental lead on brain development fall off rapidly after infancy. Children born in the late 60s would have spent their entire early childhoods during the era of peak lead emissions (which finally began to drop in mid 70s with the introduction of unleaded gasoline).
Baby boomers were all born during the era *rising* (and not yet peak) lead emissions.
Nope. Once catalytic converters came into use, and they are destroyed by leaded gasoline, the percentage of gasoline sold with lead dropped like some sort of balloon. A lead one I believe. It became a legacy fuel. All the gasoline sold when boomers were children was leaded. Furthermore the other sources of lead were not controlled at all for Boomers. Depending on where you were born and lived subsequent generations had little exposure. Still waiting for the explanation of why IQ measurements did not surge after lead was abandoned.
^^^Once catalytic converters came into use, and they are destroyed by leaded gasoline, the percentage of gasoline sold with lead dropped like some sort of balloon^^^
Very true.
Catalytic converters were mandated in US autos starting in 1975. You'd expect lead emissions from autos to peak at this point (and yes, decline precipitously afterwards), meaning children born in the early 1970s would represent the cohort maximally exposed to this source of central nervous system toxicity. Add in 15-20 years and you should be at peak crime. Which of course describes the United States of America in circa 1990.
And the pattern fits myriad other nations, too, as they likewise phased out leaded gasoline.
Yes and also the avg. lifetime of cars in those days was shorter, so the phaseout was quicker than you might have expected if you tried something similar now.
That's my thought as well. Peak exposure to lead would be late Boomers and early Gen X under this account, though some people might say they're all Gen X. I don't think anyone would say they're all Boomers, but maybe Peter G has a later end date for Boomers.
Policy can surely have some effect. But if you're talking about an effect that is visible over a six month span in the year 2020, you might want to wait a little bit before being confident that you can attribute precisely *which* of the distinctive events of that year is the trigger (if there even is just one) before you blame it all on "policy".
Matt does not mention ongoing atmospheric sources for lead, other than perhaps inferring lead sequestered in soils and house paint may be released as dust when disturbed. General aviation (GA) aircraft are the largest ongoing source of atmospheric lead. While lead as an anti-knock compound was finally eliminated from auto fuel in the US in the 1990’s, most folks don’t realize that aviation gasoline (avgas) continues to contain tetraethyl lead (TEL). Avgas is used in the GA piston-engine driven fleet, consisting of about 200,000 registered aircraft in the US. In 2019, GA aircraft consumed 200 million gallons of leaded gasoline. To put that into perspective, this annual total is but half what the US automobile fleet consumed in a single day in 2019. Still, given the concentration of TEL in avgas is ~2 grams per gallon, I calculate that over 900,000 lbs of TEL was injected into the atmosphere in 2019 by GA aircraft. There’s no reason to believe this will decrease in the near term, as efforts to replace leaded avgas have been underway for decades, but have yet to yield a viable product.
It’s worth noting that about half the GA fleet is powered by lower-compression engines that don’t require the TEL anti-knock properties. Regulatory approval is available for these aircraft to use unleaded, ethanol-free automobile gas (mogas) of at least 91 octane. However, as leaded avgas (100LL) is the only gasoline routinely available at most airports and many pilots are resistant to change, only a small percentage of the eligible aircraft actually use ethanol-free mogas. (See Options for Reducing Lead Emissions from Piston-Engine Aircraft (https://www.nap.edu/download/26050)
You beat me to it. I own a '76 Cardinal RG, for which no alternative to 100LL is currently available. I hate the fact that I'm spewing lead over the suburb where my plane is based every time I take off. At least, for noise reasons, schools and houses generally aren't built near GA airports any more.
What needs to happen first is for the EPA to issue a Finding of Endangerment, which will put everyone on notice that the clock is ticking. Then there are basically two paths:
(a) someone comes up with an unleaded drop-in replacement that can serve ~100% of the fleet with no modifications, or some very simple and cheap mods to planes' fuel systems; or
(b) we decide that's not feasible, and take an incremental approach, progressively phasing out 100LL, by installing infrastructure for mogas or 94UL at public-use airports that sell appreciable amounts of 100LL.
There's also supposedly a "100VLL" spec fuel with 20% less lead coming down the pike, that would be a drop in replacement. But 20% is a long way from 100%.
Option (b) isn't hard in principle. The FAA gives out grants to small airports all the time for paving/lighting/state-of-good-repair purposes. We could just add new tankage/new trucks for unleaded gas to the list of eligible purposes, and have congress put a bit more money into those grants programs, earmarked for this purpose.
I am a boomer with a '46 Taylorcraft with an 85-hp engine for which a autogas STC is available. I burn 93-octane, unleaded, ethanol-free autogas for all local flights, only burning 100LL when on cross-country flights. As there is no autogas available on the field, like most airports, I have to transport autogas from miles away in 5-gallon containers. It's well worth the effort and a small price to pay. (Burning autogas is better for the engine, but that's a minor consideration.) It bothers me greatly that the owners of over half the GA fleet can legally burn autogas with few or no adverse consequences, but choose not to deal with the hassle or believe the hoary tales from other pilots (and mechanics) that they will ruin their expensive engines. The FAA is a big part of the problem, but explaining the myriad reasons for their intransigence on this and many issues would take hours. I agree that migrating to 100VL is hardly satisfactory, as it doesn't come close to eliminating lead. As GA fuel represents 0.13% of overall US gasoline production, there's little economic incentive for the petroleum industry to address it. It will take aggressive action by the EPA, FAA, probably instigated by Congress. It is not likely to be high on the Biden administrations to-do list.
I hadn't realized this! Does this mean that there's higher lead concentration in the air around general aviation airports? Do lead emissions at aviation altitudes sink to create patches of high concentration under popular flight routes, or is there sufficient mixing that there's tiny bits everywhere?
Yes, the highest TEL-related lead particulate concentrations are near GA airports, especially near where engines are operated at high power output, including during run-up checks, takeoff, and climbout. At altitude, the particulates are widely dispersed, but may become cloud condensation nuclei and wash out over a wide area, albeit at very low concentration.
Diving into the numbers of, say, the New Zealand study cited makes me (very gently!) question the actual significance of the effect. There, the mean lead level was 10.99+/-4.63 µg/dL (overall range 4-31, so already pretty high!). They conclude, among other things, that "each 5-µg/dL higher level of blood lead in childhood was associated with a 1.61-point lower score in adult IQ". I doubt anyone claims that an IQ test is accurate to within 1-2 points, so this is something that can only be teased out in large samples under the assumption that errors are evenly distributed. Finally, they didn't use raw IQ numbers but rather ones "adjust[ed] for maternal IQ, childhood IQ, and childhood socioeconomic status". How reliable are these adjustments?
I hope no one thinks I'm trying to claim ingesting lead is fine! I've just become skeptical of studies such as this that try to claim a huge effect requiring many billions of dollars based on aggregation of tiny effects, where each was already adjusted through an opaque formula. Then again, maybe a lot of what we choose to spend money ultimately comes down to the same imprecise analysis anyway?
Yes, I was wondering that also. I don't think I'm going to get around to actually reading the papers and doing the hard work of being skeptical myself anytime soon, so I'm glad at least one other person did. That's the kind of question I would like to ask and the kind of thing I wondered about when I read MY's post. There would have to be big confounding variable problems that are very hard to control for
Indeed, I just started looking at the papers on brain structure alteration (also cited in MY's post) that, at first glance, look more convincing of a real, measurable effect, although still subject to the same confounding variables unfortunately.
I get nervous when I read an article about environmental exposure where there is no consideration of relative risk and potential risk reduction (and relative cost of risk reduction). Maybe I missed it in my quick read. Lead exposure is clearly important, however exposure to other heavy metals, organic pollutants, pathogens, particulates in general, ... have significant health effects. How does the effect of exposure to lead compare to exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals, to cadmium or arsenic. Where is our effort and money best spent. I expect lead is important, but be careful signaling out one exposure without acknowledging others and considering relative risk.
I think the biggest difference is that lead was actually *incredibly* prevalent in a way that no other heavy metal was. Lead oxide was the default white pigment until zinc oxide and titanium dioxide replaced it, and that's why it's in paint. Gasoline was also thoroughly prevalent everywhere people were in the developed world in the mid to late 20th century. Cadmium, chromium, and nickel definitely had niche uses in that period, but probably nowhere near as prevalent. Arsenic and mercury have probably been more prevalent than those - my suspicion is that even they were less prominent than lead (except in places where groundwater is high in arsenic).
So I am going to stand up for highways as a form of transportation. Women get sexually assaulted on public transportation more than in their own cars. Wen the public discusses public transportation vs driving and parking we don't talk about this. personal safety from crime is always worse on public transit than in cars. Yes I have read the stories that adding more highways doesn't help traffic because it just encourages more economic activity by allowing people do things when they want to do then rather than after 7 pm. Highways increase economic activity. And with electric cars it is entirely possible that they will as green as public transportation.
Fair but the experience on public transportation sucks. You get your stuff stolen, if your a woman you get sexual assault. I am not saying it is better in all circumstances. I am
Just standing up for it as a legitimate infrastructure to be invested in. Highways are really the only way to connect rural areas. Where housing costs are low.
There are negative externalities associated with sprawl and highways (long commute times, pollution, crashes, etc.). There are are positive externalities associated with density. If your main concern is housing costs, making dense areas cheaper is much better than making rural areas more accessible.
Yes but I think critics of all that overstate their point.
I often hear things like "it's a failed model".
Given that driving is the way most Americans (and even, contra to what most Americans believe, most Europeans) get around, it's not really clear what they mean.
Cars are the way most people in the developed world (even Japan I believe) make a majority of a plurality of their journeys, and the way they travel a majority of their miles / kms.
If it didn't work, people wouldn't get to work, to the supermarket, or whatever.
Yea but those are getting better, electric cars better podcasts. Frankly I have not seen US public transportation get better crime is up service is as unreliable as ever. I don’t know local governments are incapable of making the trains nice but can keep the roads clear of debris but that is our life.
So I assume you're plumping for replacing all rail with aircraft? ;)
Safety in automobiles has increased radically over my lifetime, and seems likely to continue to improve in the future. At what point do we call cars "safe enough"?
Not at all! Cars, mass transit and planes all have their pros and cons, I was just pointing out that personal safety concerns on public transit are at least partly offset by lower risk of injury/death in an accident. Given current development patterns and limited housing supply/high prices in areas well-served by transit, cars and the roads to support them are essential. Even in cities with serious rail transit, the "funnel everyone to downtown and back" setup of rail lines still makes commuting and other activities really really hard without a car.
I think this just means that we should make public transportation safer and more enjoyable. You're right, people aren't going to take public transportation if it's an unpleasant experience. That probably means more police and safety workers on public transit, especially at night, and also better lighting, etc.
Yeah but we are not. No one in SF will say BART has gotten better over the last 30 years. The Bay Area has gotten richer extra taxes have been passed for Bart but the experience still sucks.
The new trains are better and so are the new stations! BART sucks if you’re in SF but the rest of the network is better. And I mean, the rest of SF not having BART is worse.
You can have density without subways. San Francisco is the second most densely populated city. And we had a BART strike and the Bay Area still functioned with worse traffic. I was commuting from Walnut Creek to Palo Alto at the time.
I agree that subways are overrated relative to dedicated bus lanes, and raising bus speeds and route density. But whatever the form, the payoff comes from lower congestion/higher density of development.
I think road building is a lot like taxation - it doesn't make sense to be generically in favour of more or less of it, rather, it's more a case of - what is the right amount of high quality roads (Freeways / expressways) relative to area and population.
America, Germany and Spain probably have enough high-quality roads. The UK, for example, definitely doesn't, to the point where it probably harms the economy.
Guns. Gun powder. Bullets. Shot. Gun ranges. Popular hunting lands. Lead. Lead. Lead. Sorry to be the wet blanket but getting lead out of soil is a bigger fight than I think you realize. Old gun ranges have lead in the soils not measured in micrograms but in dumptrucks. There have been huge fights in CA over this where remediation laws are already strict. Just saying, NRA will get involved.
(Though, granted, this is a situation in which you can lose profit without anyone else's gaining profit. Monetary profit, that is -- the intellectual profit that they gain will be incalculable. And what profiteth it a man, if he gain the whole world, but lose his access to spicy takes?)
Yup. The internet is simultaneously a paradise for content-consumers, and a hell for content-producers.
This is why MY is cunningly forcing his content-consumers to work as content-producers on his comments pages. And then the excellence of his comment-section becomes part of the value-proposition that he offers to new subscribers. We've been suckered into a pyramid scheme, is what it is.
If he's really clever, he'll pay an intern for a week to write a program analyzing the comments to optimize future posts for engagement. Then we're all good and addicted, comes the sponsored content.
Sadly enough, the comments to this post form a good demonstration of what the optimization would look like.
People are sorta interested in worthwhile Canadian initiatives, but what really gets their blood up is the umpteenth round of culture-war fighting over the IDW, IQ, wokeness, Murray, SSC, and on and on.
It may be the death of this blog, if too many of the readers have a "squirrel!" - like reaction to any topic that bears peripherally on IQ. That's why I agreed with David Rye that we should just be able to vote it down. This post is worth discussing without reference to the culture wars.
This is kind of goofy, but as the college drop out in a family of people with masters degrees, I’m convinced I have a mild case of lead poisoning. I always had poor impulse control and an attention deficit as a kid, and as the youngest when we moved into our new house, also spent the longest chunk of my formative years drinking water from lead pipes. I’m fine with it, I just think it’s kind of funny.
Don't ignore the international angle to this: the US phased out leaded gasoline in the 70's, but other nations continued using it for decades. Dupont Mexico was still making TEL for leaded gasoline sales in the early 90's.
A US AID program did good work in the late 90's persuading other countries to phase it out, but Algeria was still using it in 2017.
All of this makes me wonder: would there be a better ROI on abatement efforts in countries where the lead is more recent, and closer to the surface?
Keep in mind that with any purification or extraction process, getting 90% of the X out of the Y is easy, getting the next 9% out is much harder, getting the next 0.9% out costs just as much as the first 90%, and getting the successive 0.09% and so on get more and more difficult and costly. Yes, the US would get some benefit from getting out the last micrograms, but if there are countries around with kilograms, that may be the place to start.
But would that effort count as infrastructure spending, here in the US of A? Depends on how global the circulation of lead is. When we were all burning it in gas, it was highly global: it showed up in ice-cores world wide. But if the current lead in (e.g.) Mexico is not being burned, but is in the soil, then is it still a threat to US neurons? I simply don't know.
Point remains: if the US is *relatively* clean, then the same dollars will clean up a *lot* more lead in a dirtier country.
And the Senator from Dupont, as well as his fellow citizens, may have a moral duty to help clean up messes that we helped to make.
This seems like a good moment for the tech rationalists and Effective Altruism. Elon could push money here instead of his car tubes, alongside Zuck and Bezos. They could start by investing in regions dear to them - if those exist -.
One of the fastest-gentrifying parts of Austin is near the site of the former Holly Street power plant, and all the neighborhood soil is almost certainly deeply contaminated with lead as a result. I’ve had to beg friends who moved into the area to avoid planting backyard food gardens. Really, just having easier/more available soil testing would make a massive difference, because it can be a hassle to actually get soil tested for lead right now.
If we learn anything from COVID-19, I hope it's the benefits of cheap/free testing for all things public health! If we have real, *fresh* data, it's so much easier to argue for remediation policy. We're not talking about squishy social science data with embedded value judgements, it's ground truth: "is there COVID/lead or no COVID/lead". More testing!
I also just think from a media perspective if someone does a bunch of testing somewhere, that's "news" that can be reported instead of just general knowledge that lead exists and it's bad.
If it finds lead, that means we need to clean it up. If it doesn't find lead, hey, that place is officially certified lead-safe! Testing lets us put our money where our mouth is.
That's the crazy thing about buying a home in northeast Ohio - all the realtors told us, well, if you test for lead, you'll find it, and then when you sell your house you'll have to disclose that there's lead in it. So pretty much nobody tests for lead.
This is why subsidizing lead cleanup is reasonable American public policy: it helps kickstart a market whose existence is in everybody's best interest.
The flipside of "test for it, find it, have to disclose it, hurting property value" could be: "test for it, find it, *government pays to remove it*, get to disclose you're the only house in town with its lead officially removed, juicing property value."
Go big enough and you can get a flywheel of lead cleanup going - especially if you don't treat the cleanup as a jobs program and meaningfully drive down the costs.
This is the sort of program that Chamber-of-Commerce-type Republicans actually like because they can see it as investing in households - as long as you don't get caught paying $10 for $5 worth of work.
Your readers ask very good questions. Here's one. Exactly how do you extract lead from soil? The short answer is you don't, not on site. What you do is dig up that soil, replace it with uncontaminated fill, and dispose of the contaminated soil in a regulated waste site some place else. You would be surprised how few people want such a site near them. Long term you can extract heavy metals by the same methods used to mine them in the first place. You pile them up and leach them out with chemical agents and recover and treat the leachate. And man is that expensive.
Can't you just have soil disposal sites away from populated areas?
As one of the covid-refugees in Austin this year (though I'm fleeing College Station, rather than San Francisco or New York) this is really helpful to know! We got a place a mile west of there, and often bike past, and have been thinking that the area just a few blocks north of that old power plant seems to be the epicenter of the epicenter of new things happening in Austin. This makes a lot of sense.
Don't hold me to this, but I think Texas has a voluntary type compliance system. If you find the lead and clean it, they will certify you as clean. But if you decide not to clean it, you only get in trouble if it migrates to your neighbors property. Again, not an expert and my understanding comes from business experience that is many years out of date. Check with a legal and/or environmental expert before proceeding.
I mean, for me personally, I'm less worried about any certifications or requirements. I'm just want to be able to have some test results I can show my friends so they can be appropriately cautious. (Austin's population has grown so much since the Holly Street plant was decommissioned in 2007 that a lot of folks don't even know about it.)
I understand. And your thoughts make sense. Worrying about things like that were part of my job - and old habits die hard. Lol
Some pollutants get absorbed by the plants and some don't. I don't know what lead does.
That said, if I wanted a garden, I'd put in raised beds and bring in clean soil.
Just here to plug the Brooklyn Soils Lab (part of CUNY Brooklyn College), which will test your soil sample for lead for $20. Worth doing if you have kids or like to garden! This is part of a public university research program, not a for-profit venture.
https://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/centers/esac/services/soil.php
Awesome!
If we could vote for such things... I'd enthusiastically vote to just not do the whole Murray / IQ debate here. They always turn out gross. I'd also vote to not do eugenic-adjacent debates here. If we could vote on such things...
If we could vote on such things, you would have my vote.
Really not a useful digression from this topic, which deserves its own discussion.
I read this piece as a good reminder of why we should give no quater to the “Human biodiversity” community - they dont want to remove the lead because they prefer the explanation that the racialised poor are genetically inferior.
It really felt like Matt was pulling his punches on Scott Siskind, if Steve Sailer was a commenter in good standing at Slowboring what would that tell you about your work?
(I loved your Vox piece on Charles Murray, why ya gotta be so generous to these IDW useful idiots for conservatism?)
My assessment of Charles Murray is extremely negative because I see his intellectual project as a monomaniacal effort to tear down the American welfare state, which I think is a really bad idea.
I just don't think that characterizes the SSC intellectual project at all. It's true they have some bad takes! Who doesn't?
And the parallel intellectual project of scientific racism? a little bit more dangerous than just a spicy bad take I reckon
SSC doesn't support scientific racism
I think there's an important nuance to add here, and if you agree with Matt's take in that article I think you'll agree (or I'm misrepresenting Matt's argument... I don't think I am though):
From Matt's article on Charles Murray: "***And Harris, for his part, sees himself as exclusively defending The Bell Curve’s empirical claims about IQ, which is fine, but it’s important to consider Murray’s work with a view toward actual American public policy,*** which has been deeply influenced by Murray over the years, and which Donald Trump is looking to take in an even more Murray-esque direction."
You can make arguments about how much the Venn diagram of "interested in human biodiversity" and "bad faith, white-supremacist policy goals" overlap. It's a bit non-falsifiable, because people can see good or bad faith wherever they want to. But, I think acknowledging that those can be two different circles is important.
Said differently, I think I agree 100% with what you intend you premise to be (looking for a genetic explanation for human variance to dunk on minorities and cut off social aid is really bad). But, it's important to call that what it is. The bad faith argumentation around it being about "human diversity" is so effective because opponents are *willing to engage it on those terms*. Then, for everyone that is not sophisticated or thorough enough to see the bad faith, the bar for argumentation gets lowered to a ridiculously low place. Like. all you have to do is show the disparities in sickle-cell anemia and you've proved the "human biodiversity" premise.
I feel like its a subtle, but important point. It's the same reason that the San Francisco Abraham Lincoln school board stuff is such a face palm. It creates such a silly strawman argument that can be made to those that are undecided, but persuadable, on the modern day existence and pervasiveness of institutional racism.
It's like... I wish we as progressives would be more intentional about picking the stronger argument. "The current day impacts of redlining," not "the case for taking Abraham Lincoln's name off a high school." "The moral bankruptcy of racism of all kinds, including any version that tries to find a genetic basis," not "there's a problem with acknowledging human biodiversity exists."
I think the stronger argument than "there's a problem with acknowledging human biodiversity exists" is pointing out human biodiversity has little-to-no alignment with the racial categories that currently exist in our society, which also give you much stronger empirical standing than the racist trying to :biotruths: their way through the debate.
Yeah, I get this point of view, and its probably right from a pragmatic standpoint. I am personally a fan of "EVEN IF it did, that doesn't change anything" and avoid the argumentation on the point entirely. Plus I feel like, again, by engaging on those terms--as if racism would then be OK if anyone every proved a group genetic link--makes it seem like you're conceding that the case against racism is a question of empiricism, not morality. But, I get this point is a bit esoteric, and to the extent politics is about persuasion, its important to engage on the points that will persuade people.
I feel like saying "even if it did, that doesn't change anything" is a much bigger concession, though. If human races were genetically uniform and clearly distinct in the same way that, say, dog breeds are, that would actually be massively important and it would change everything. But they're not, and we can very clearly prove that. So I think it's important to point that out.
Like, think of it this way. Say there were people trying to argue that all women have a 30-point IQ deficit compared to men. Thus, because of that deficit, we need to adopt a Saudi Arabia-style laws removing women's rights. That is clearly insanely misogynist and wrong. But if you started to counter that argument with "EVEN IF women had this IQ deficit, that doesn't change anything" and that the moral wrong of misogyny should prevent us from engaging on those grounds, I feel your argument would be a lot weaker than starting with "no such deficit exists, and we can prove it".
I agree here as it applies to society more broadly. To me, in a hypothetical world where group differences existed, the utilitarian argument for unequal rights on that basis is incredibly unpersuasive. I don't disagree with your instinct that it would be too persuasive to too many people, though to (I wouldn't quite say concede, but) not engage with that argument. Indeed, despite my convictions there, I'd probably adopt your tactics of argumentation with a grumpy, racist grandparent at Thanksgiving (or, to be more precise, I would do that and then text my sibling and eye roll emoji and eat more stuffing). But, I feel like in this setting, with a lot of thoughtful people, I may have some hope of persuading some people of the higher-order moral principle at work here.
"...human biodiversity has little-to-no alignment with the racial categories that currently exist in our society..."
For, like $100 you can get a genetic test that will tell you whether you are white, or black, or mixed. And if you're mixed the test will tell you in what exact proportions you're mixed.
"White", "Black", and "Mixed" are not results you'll get from any of the genetic ancestry tests out there. You can get results tied to regions and/or certain ethnic groups. However, even those results are often far less precise than the companies selling them want to admit. For example, 23andMe uses DNA samples from 45 current population groups for their results. So what you're getting is your similarity to people who were within those 45 groups at the time of the sampling.
In fact, there's a good piece on Vox specifically about the ambiguity in these genetic results: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/1/28/18194560/ancestry-dna-23-me-myheritage-science-explainer
The technology is still new. They'll get Webber and better as they add more SNPs to their database.
"'White', 'Black', and 'Mixed' are not results you'll get from any of the genetic ancestry tests out there. You can get results tied to regions and/or certain ethnic groups."
Skin color and other superficial features vary by region. I hope this does not come as a surprise to you.
What does it actually mean though? If it shows half Hausa and Half Swede ancestry, what's your race versus if it showed half Armenian and half Copt?
Mixed race.
Why would an Armenian and Copt be mixed race? Mixed ethnicity, but why mixed race? Would you say a half Italian and Swede were mixed race? Half Lebanese and Russian?
Not an original thought, but "race" doesn't actually make any sense beyond a stupid way of saying skin color, hair texture, eye shape.
SSC is not as innocent as Matt's defence makes him out to be. Read Noah's slightly tougher take and Wills excellent Steel Manning the Grey Lady
According to this article, it seems that SSC is not innocent because he didn't ban Nazis (various bloggers also doesn't ban nazis) and/or that he is right-wing compared to SF politics (which means like most people in the world)?
"the Rationalists seem a bit bifurcated. The Effective Altruism people seem to be liberals (Update: Matt Yglesias has a great post that goes into some of what they want). Yudkowsky and Galef are pretty much just centrists who don’t care that much about politics. And Siskind, though he would likely get mad at me for describing him this way, strikes me as a conservative — or whatever passes for a conservative in this strange new era of politics. He has certainly expressed some skepticism of BLM and (especially) the feminist movement, which in the San Francisco Bay Area will definitely put you on the right of the spectrum. (Update: And as people have pointed out, in private he’s not circumspect about holding some right-wing beliefs.) He and I have clashed on occasion over issues such as women’s labor force participation, school vouchers, and IQ.
But generally, the Rationalists don’t seem very political to me. Instead, they mostly seem absorbed in esoterica of their own creation. Sometimes I find these esoterica quite silly, which has made some Rationalists mad at me. So it goes. But despite what I would describe as Siskind’s conservatism, Rationalism does not strike me as a fascist or wink-wink-secret-fascist movement.
As for Nazis in Scott’s comment section, I personally think he should have banned these people long ago — everything is better without Nazis, full stop. But I haven’t seen evidence that Nazi ideas have taken root among the Rationalists, just as I haven’t seen evidence that Rationalist ideas have been more than a very niche influence in the world of tech."
I thought Will's steel manning was more than generous with regards to the NY Times.
The NYT is not unique other than being the one of, if not the, largest institution of its type and therefore has more power than most. Frustratingly he described what was a painful experience for Cade and his editor without the recognition that this experience is exactly what most private citizens face when the journalists and the media turns its Sauron eye upon you. Sometimes it is critically important to society for the that eye to fall upon people. But its rarely a fun experience and often scars people deeply. Its also the exact thing that SA was concerned about happening to him and people around him. I think media needs to have a specific and profoundly important reason before they pull back the veil on people. And the deeper they dig or more serious accusations they make increases both the rationale needed and evidence found to go public.
We can agree that being a nazi or racist is bad and rightly considered an abhorrent thing. But the more terrible and abhorrent thing we make it, then stronger evidence is needed before making an accusation or even implying it about someone.
I'll take a look at those articles! Although I think its a bit beside the point, and I don't necessarily disagree with you on SSC; everyone seems to have a take, but I don't know enough about SSC writings to feel like I'm a competent judge of intent. I'm just making the broader point on the importance of pushing back directly on the thing that bad, with enough precision to avoid setting up a potential straw man.
I agree that nuance is important, but the claim "I'm just into Charles Murray for his UBI advocacy" is about as credible to me as "I'm just reading playboy for the articles"
And so to me it looks like Matt is going easy on SSC because he of his tribal affiliation to the shitposting/controversial ideas/antiwoke community...
From Wills article "And there really was/is some pretty untoward stuff on there. A bunch of people in the community, Scott included, really are interested in neoreactionary thinking. In a recently leaked email exchange, Siskind admits to finding a lot worthwhile in it and confesses that he’s hard on neo-reactionaries in public in part to throw people off the scent. Curtis Yarvin/Mencius Moldbug really is familiar and known quantity who does hang around the community, even if he’s not a central figure. Peter Theil gives him money."
https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857
I'd push back on this point though. I think the "some people in a community" argument is not black and white as it relates to the responsibility of the leader. Clearly there is an extreme version of this where I 100% agree, where Trump should not be pretending to be aloof about the Proud Boys, then telling them to stand by, then stoking insurrection, etc. But I am generally skeptical of a "call it like you see it" standard applying to this type of stuff. Like I said, I don't read SSC, and the SSC community moderation shortcomings may well be closer to the Trump end of the spectrum of malicious intent. But its a really hard case to build to the uninitiated. You'd have to show me countless examples of such inappropriate comments to show me not just their absolute prevalence, but depending on how borderline they are, their relevant prevalence as well. Then you'd have to prove SSC had a reasonable mechanism by which to dispense with what he considered fair moderation, and it was a reasonable request to have him use his time or resources to do so. Then, if he didn't, you'd have to provide evidence on whether it was negligence or there was malicious intent (to help me decide how strongly to judge him). If that's the best argument, I'm not saying it can't be proven. It's just really hard to prove to someone like me that's uninitiated, and doesn't know you well enough to rely on your reputation, and also sees smart/ sophisticated people sometimes push for coordinated ostracization of semi-public figures on very shaky grounds.
hahaha fair enough, I think we can find some agreement. If someone has chosen Charles Murray as your standard bearer for UBI, and continues to do so after being presented with his more harmful statements... I would make a rare concession that it is fair game for unmitigated dunking.
Can you link?
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/silicon-valley-isnt-full-of-fascists
https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/grey-lady-steel-man
Yup! And for all you IDW nerds the fun but is you get to criticise racial affirmative action programs and insist on moving to a class based model. Anyone who opposes affirmative action AND believes in biological racial difference sets off my Swastika alarm bells
Oops, deleted my comment to slightly rephrase-and-repost, and apparently this is how Substack deals with a reply coming in to a deleted post...
:-(
so now I have to go back and re-like your comment!
For what it's worth, Scott Alexander himself is strongly pro-lead-abatement. From one of his old pre-SSC articles (https://expost.padm.us/biodet):
“I hate statements like ‘It is impossible to overstate the importance of lead poisoning on a population basis.’ It is totally possible to overstate the importance of lead poisoning on a population basis. If I said that lead poisoning caused the September 11 terrorist attacks and the fall of the Soviet Union, that would be overstating its importance (terrorism, you’ll recall, is more linked to iodine deficiency, and lead did not cause the fall of the USSR although some historians do speculate it caused the fall of the Roman Empire)
Aside from that, though, it’s pretty hard to overstate the importance of lead poisoning on a population basis.”
Can you or another commenter provide some context to this human biodiversity thing? I’ve not come across this phrase before and don’t know what it means or how it is being deployed by its advocates.
Reading the comments here it seems to be an amalgamation of classic racist tropes laundered through, what? Test scores?
Basically the idea is the IQ test scores, when clustered by race, show that certain groups of people as a whole have differing intelligence levels. Theres a chapter in the Bell Curve by George Murray that is really the popular epicenter of this conflict. I like many people feel that there are too many confounds to quantify the variation properly. Also Im not sure I see the utility of this line of inquiry since variation among individuals is much greater than within groups and the information will more than likely fuel racist ideology than anything else.
Okay, so it's rebranding the same old shit.
There is a strong overlap between the scientific racism community and the IDW/Anti-Woke community because the scientific racists deserve cancellation more than anyone ;-)
When I read "human biodiversity" the first thing I thought of was the people who advocate for "viewpoint diversity" in universities. They seem to largely array themselves around the political cause of letting Charles Murray give speeches on college campuses. I guess my sniff test was right with this one. ssdd
Dont delete your comments Marie! have the courage of your convictions no one is going to cancel you ;-)
I actually really like and really agree with a lot of what you put into this comment - its something that I apply in my personal life - the assumption of good faith is key to communication in a relationship.
What I disagree with is the cultural relativism - some people !!!aren't!!! trying to make the world a better place - sometimes they have objectionable terrible values that YES, could be fairly described as evil - for example the Segregationists who tried to uphold racial apartheid.
I also disagree that we should always assume good faith - that's just going to be abused by trolls and propagandists.
Marie Kennedy replied to your comment
Finn, you strike me as a smart, passionate person who deeply cares about making a positive impact on the world. I also think I see a tendency that I know well because I was trapped by it for so long. It is the tendency to try to bucketize people into “good” and “bad” teams in order to assume what their motivations are and read deeper, nefarious meanings into their arguments. For me, the blinders fell off when I decided to try just _pretending_ like the person I was reading was no more evil than I was, and to assume they were motivated by trying to have a positive impact just like I was. I realized that bad ideas were still clearly bad ideas--I could confront them on the merits instead of assuming they were maliciously motivated. But I also realized that most of the time, people I disagreed with were just seeing things from a dramatically different perspective. And sometimes, often!, they were seeing things I was not, and I was seeing things they were not. The world is just a much more interesting place when you start from an assumption that most people and their ideas are no more or less flawed or evil than you are. https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/how-to-star-man-arguing-from-compassion/
Hey Finn, I only deleted it because I knew it would go to your inbox but I didn't want to seem like I was publicly dunking on you or make you the unwitting object of a group therapy session :) I am not arguing for universal, permanent assumptions of good faith. Just initial engagement with the ideas being proposed under the assumption of good faith *until clearly proven otherwise.* Nazis and avowed racists exist, but are not all that common, and it's not as contagious as you might fear. The "give no quarters" philosophy plus six degrees of guilt by association only sends people into "dark" corners of the internet where they do not encounter alternative perspectives offered up in good faith. This is the same beef I have with the anti-woke community.
Yeah, an excess of charity comes perilously close to telling us that there are very fine people on both sides.
When you are arguing with nazis and racists, there are *not* very fine people on both sides.
When you are trying to convert Nazis into former Nazis, it helps to start from a position that they are capable of being fine people.
I know this is how all the cool kids do it on twitter, and maybe I'm alone in thinking this, but reposting someone's deleted comment seems a bit uncharitable and unkind to me.
Does anyone actually “not want to remove the lead”? I doubt it. I’m pretty sure anyone who has thought about it has concluded that widespread lead poisoning is extremely bad.
There are people who think the cost-benefit analysis is at best unproven. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/more-lead-and-crime-really-how-make-decisions-jim-manzi/
I'll take a look at Manzi's claims, although if he's the same mendacious (or was it merely idiotic?) hack who ignored Europe's lower population growth when he attacked their safety net spending (the former obviously impacts economic growth), I'll lower my expectations.
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2010/01/07/manzis-error
Also: in a $20 trillion economy, even a very modest decrease in crime is likely to yield a staggering return over time, whereas lead abatement is a one-time expenditure.
Fair enough. Interesting that the author concedes the link between lead and brain damage, but remains skeptical of the program. He’s probably right that the link to crime is more tenuous...but surely widespread brain damage is already a problem worth solving!
Worth solving at some price points - but at the multi billion or tens of billions price point, lots of people start to get (understandably) skeptical about whether particular projects are actually worth it.
I feel like those people have not internalized how bad widespread lead poisoning is. Higher spending on education to make kids smarter is very popular; this is like that except it actually works.
Alternate explanation - lots of people just don't care, they know/assume their kids are safe from it and so it's other people's problem, not theirs.
It's very tempting, but very pernicious, for people to analyze just costs, or just benefits, instead of costs/benefits.
Matt doesn't really argue in the post whether spending on lead abatement would actually be cost-effective, but my impression is that it would be because we haven't tried very hard yet to clean it up yet (mostly just stopped adding new lead), so there's probably a lot of low-hanging fruits. Certainly the benefits of not inflicting widespread brain damage would be very large (as Matt does argue in the post).
The "lead is bad at any level" research that Matt cites is not as convincing as he makes it out to be because there are always questions of confounding and publication bias.
I've seen and continue to see a lot of resistance to the link between environmental lead and crime. For whatever reason this (from what I can tell extremely strong and convincing) explanation for elevated mid/late 20th century crimes rates (and subsequent decline) cheeses off a lot of people. I believe may such folks are represented among the ranks of those opposed to spending money on this project. Add to that general anti-public sector glibertarian types...
The biggest skepticism I see, which I also share, is that it seems to try to tie too much into a single cause. I suppose it's possible that there really is something as simple as this to explain all of the 20th century. But it seems way too easy.
I don't think anybody credible (including Drum) is saying lead literally explains "all" of the rise (and decline) in the trendline in crime. And yet to me the particular pattern of the rise (in the US basically 1945-1990) and decline (since then) is more consistent with the hypothesis that there's a single, dominant factor* than multiple, comparably important factors. I think the rise in lead emissions is well understood (post-war boom in cars, suburbs, highways, suburbia), as is the toxic effect of lead on the central nervous system. Once lead emissions peaked (early 70s) you'd expect crime in America to crest 20-odd years later, when all those brain damaged people reached the age of maximum propensity to criminal activity. Which is exactly what happened.
For me the clincher, though, is that this pattern has played out in country after country, adjusted for the years when the countries in question phased out leaded gasoline.
*I'm not suggesting the following describes you, but I think a lot of people mistakenly allow "complexity bias" tp cloud their judgment on this. In other words, they mistrust simple explanations. But sometimes simple explanations fit the data, and offer the most logical explanation! In the case of lead and crime, I believe that's the case. To put it another way, if we pumped gargantuan quantities of a known, potent environmental neurotoxin into the air, why *wouldn't* we expect to see a spike in sundry bad things associated with compromised brain health, such as anti-social behavior and crime?
I think the answer to your last paragraph is, "crime is complicated, so we don't expect a simple biological explanation." There isn't a dial in your brain that goes from no crime to lots of crime, or indeed from no anti-social behavior to lots of anti-social behavior, crime (and anti-social behavior) are emergent phenomena with lots and lots of inputs that probably, implicitly, include positive and negative feedback loops.
If a lot of people just, like, fell convulsively on the ground and twitched, that's a simple behavior that we expect to see have a simple singular cause (like toxins in the environment). If a lot of people have fairly subtle behavioral changes, that intuitively feels like a multi-causal thing.
I'm not wholly endorsing this explanation -- I don't have a strong opinion on the lead-crime hypothesis and haven't read a ton about it -- just saying that I think your question elides an important point. You have "one cause, one effect" as your main implicit point there. But that reasoning works best when the one cause and one effect seem like they're at similar levels of complexity.
I don't think spewing vast quantities of a potent neurotoxin (associated with attention deficit disorder, impulse control, anti-social behavior and criminality) into the atmosphere was the *sole* cause of the crime wave in America and other countries in the post-war period, no (and I agree various feedback mechanisms were operating both during the rise and during the decline*). But I am convinced the data indicate environmental lead plausibly explains the -bulk- of the phenomenon. (It would appear you're not sold on the hypothesis).
*For instance, it seems pretty likely that one of society's responses to the post-war crime wage - a large increase in police and prison budgets and a lengthening of sentences - must have had exerted downward pressure on crime.
Lead, though, isn't a sufficient explanation for the various test score gaps. It seems to make sense if you think of black people as consistently *physically* segregated, but that's often not the case. Take Kevin Drum's discussion of the effects of desegregation in the South (https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/07/a-couple-of-things-about-busing/):
"the black-white gap narrowed most strongly in the ’70s and ’80s, just when integration efforts were at their strongest. Second, the gaps narrowed solely because black kids did better. The scores of white kids were consistently either flat or up, not down. This is national data, but it’s still a very strong indicator that integration really did improve black test scores while doing no harm to whites."
Here are some things to note about what Kevin Drum is talking about:
First, here blacks and whites were largely in the *same* environment, both before and after integration. Segregation obviously affected where blacks were allowed to go within that environment, but blacks and whites were still physically in proximity to each other, and thus largely subject to the same problems with regard to lead.
Second, even with roughly the same background risk for lead poisoning, there's still a gap, so it's probably not attributable to lead.
Third, an intervention besides removal of lead helped black test scores rise.
"blacks and whites were largely in the *same* environment, both before and after integration"
That just seems completely false though. Even if there were black neighborhoods near white neighborhoods, we know that with airborne pollutants, a few hundred feet can easily make a significant difference.
But we're talking about airborne pollution from automobiles, which were in both black and white neighborhoods.
Everything I've read about airborne pollution from automobiles suggests that it makes a huge difference whether you're right next to a major highway or a thousand feet away, and whether you're right on an arterial street, or on the side street one block over from it. For instance, look at the figures in this paper:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b00891
But in the context that Kevin Drum was talking about, that doesn't matter. Blacks and whites were either on the same buses or in proximity to those that were. It's not a white flight situation, with whites leaving the city behind for the suburbs while blacks become relatively more concentrated in urban areas.
If they're living two or three blocks apart, that's all it takes for there to be significant differences in automotive emissions exposure.
Consider: what if the black-only schools had significantly more lead poisoning issues than the white-only schools, and desegregation lead to reduced levels of lead poisoning among black students?
The lead issues in Philadelphia public schools in the present day make me think this is quite possible.
I don't think that quite works for the circumstances that Kevin Drum describes. The effect of lead from vehicle exhaust would probably far outweigh that of paint, and that would be something that both black and white children would have been exposed to.
That's not to say that lead isn't a contributor to test score gaps, but other environmental influences (educational quality, poverty, etc.) are probably more dominant.
This brings me to a hobby-horse of mine: Shooting guns w/ in indoor ranges causes lead exposure! And cops do it frequently. And cops are just about the worst people I can imagine to give lead exposure to.
I don't know why I don't see this covered, ever.
(This can obviously be avoided if no one is using bullets with lead, but that's not how it be)
At least on the federal level, there is regular blood testing available, and it's actually required for firearm instructors and others working at range facilities (I believe a friend had to participate when on an FBI SWAT team that shot weekly).
Read Kevin Drum's article... so if violent crime peaked in the 90s when the peak lead-poisened children were reaching prime crime age in their early 20s, are we now seeing the cresting wave of authoritarian populism, as that same cohort starts to reach retirement and peak Tucker Carlson rage-watching age? Lead poisoning + free time - distraction = aggressive anti-social behavior? One can dream...
The idea that "lead-poisoned boomers*" are responsible for the particularly harmful forms of Trumpian conservatism out there is certainly a popular idea in certain crowds. They believe that we just need to wait for them to die out and things will automatically start to get better. And while the findings on lead contamination and its effect are clearly super-important, I do think that we can end up pushing them a bit too far in thinking they can solve everything. Clearly lead abatement itself is worthwhile and will have massive benefits, but we should be careful to avoid trying to place lead at the center of every social ill (lest we become like the teetotaler who were closing down prisons once prohibition passed, thinking they would no longer be needed).
* "Boomer" now meaning anyone over 40, of course. The great irony of Gen X is that they spent so much of their youth ripping on the Baby Boomers only to end up lumped in with them to all subsequent generations.
As a GenXr I was initially thrilled to hear “ok boomer” as a meme because boomers were the bane of my youth and sucked up all the cultural oxygen with their refusal to accept their own aging. So I was pretty annoyed when my GenZ children explained that I was included in that formulation of Boomer. I still maintain that it is unfair because in my experience while GenX can be cranky like any aging demographic, we are not in denial about our own mortality and fading relevance and don’t go around saying ridiculous things like “age is just a number.” So call me old and out of touch and neoliberal or whatever but don’t lump me in with Baby Boomers!
The good news is that soon, Zoomers will start referring to Millennials as "Boomers" as well.
I'm curious how big the Zoomers' anti-Millennial backlash will be. On the one hand, Millennials definitely have the same sense of cultural myopia and self-centered-ness that the Boomers displayed. On the other hand, there isn't the same kind of unified media landscape that will force every Zoomer to sit through the thousands of hours of self-congratulatory Millennial media the same way Gen X had to deal with the onslaught of "the 60s were the greatest time in human history" media when they were growing up.
As someone born in 1980, I like to identify as a Millennial, and I have definitely been identified as an "ok, boomer" during the weeks when that was a really big thing.
OK, Boomer is just such a great retort to anyone griping about anything, that I soooo badly wanted to type it as a reply, even though I am an Xer who COMPLETELY AGREES with you. 😂 How messed up is that? It's just such a fun reply, that it will transcend context. It's the "talk to the hand" of our time.
I don't exactly remember this, but my teenager claims that I offered him $100 if during Thanksgiving Dinner (pre-pandemic) he would respond "Ok boomer" to everything my boomer Mother said that was annoying (and just to note that she is annoying in the leftier than thou way of someone who complains about rich people incessantly and lives a block from the beach in California and lives a lifestyle that is more 1% than not).
I hear you. I take such glee when my kids land a gentle OK Boomer on my Boomer dad.
There is an amazing review/essay from 2010 by A.O. Scott on the Sam Lipsyte novel The Ask about GenX hitting midlife that contains one of my favorite paragraphs ever printed in the NYT:
"We grew up in the shadow of the baby boomers, who still manage, in their dotage, to commandeer disproportionate attention. Every time they hit a life cycle milestone it’s worth 10 magazine covers. When they retire, the Social Security system will go under! When they die, narcissism will be so much lonelier." https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/weekinreview/09aoscott.html
Interesting. I was saying that very tongue-in-cheek...didn't realize that was a more serious, widely held premise. I agree, it certainly would seem to break down in a lot of ways on further analysis... for example, it doesn't seem like we see a similar social aggression for that age-cohort of demographics on the left. All the points about the lead hypothesis having had an outsized impact on black communities cuts the other way on the *lead-poised boomers* point, because black voters (especially in that age cohort) vote so heavily Democratic. But I guess you could argue there is a latent aggressive boomer energy on the left, just waiting for their favorite reality-star-turned-authoritarian to fire them all up.
One person's joke is another person's entire subculture.
"So, a guy walks into a bar..." :)
Because lead exposure correlates with poverty it's unsurprising that academics have found associations with basically every social ill. I'm all for abatement, but some of these suggested benefits would probably not materialize because the residual levels are now simply correlational not causal.
Let's clean it up. But will anyone be surprised if some of the measures like teen pregnancy or high school completion rates don't change?
Now that the low hanging fruit of lead reduction is done, I'm skeptical these parts per million reductions will genuinely alter life trajectories. So I'd rather see the money as direct antipoverty services or cash redistribution.
But I certainly wouldn't vote against this bill.
The crazier thing to think about is that leaded gasoline was only banned in most arab states about 10-15 years ago.
We may have passed peak terrorism, too.
Old enough to remember an American Left brave enough to argue that terrorism can count American imperialism among its root causes.
Young enough to watch the American Left settle for arguing lead cleanup will solve our biggest problems.
What a time to be alive.
I'm probably taking this too seriously and responding to a tongue-in-cheek comment, but this theory (and the one below about terrorism from the Gulf) almost as bad as racist biodiversity theories because their built on nearly the same logic. And maybe a little offensive, too, to suggest boomers are a brain-damaged generation?
Maybe so, and it definitely promotes discrimination, but the difference is that you can actually fix it (by repainting bedrooms and chelation therapy, maybe actual therapy) without resorting to eugenics and castrating everyone you don’t like.
Kevin is completely wrong about that. The timing does not work. The peak exposure was all to Boomers.
No. Peak exposure would be to GenXers in the US. The effects of environmental lead on brain development fall off rapidly after infancy. Children born in the late 60s would have spent their entire early childhoods during the era of peak lead emissions (which finally began to drop in mid 70s with the introduction of unleaded gasoline).
Baby boomers were all born during the era *rising* (and not yet peak) lead emissions.
Nope. Once catalytic converters came into use, and they are destroyed by leaded gasoline, the percentage of gasoline sold with lead dropped like some sort of balloon. A lead one I believe. It became a legacy fuel. All the gasoline sold when boomers were children was leaded. Furthermore the other sources of lead were not controlled at all for Boomers. Depending on where you were born and lived subsequent generations had little exposure. Still waiting for the explanation of why IQ measurements did not surge after lead was abandoned.
^^^Once catalytic converters came into use, and they are destroyed by leaded gasoline, the percentage of gasoline sold with lead dropped like some sort of balloon^^^
Very true.
Catalytic converters were mandated in US autos starting in 1975. You'd expect lead emissions from autos to peak at this point (and yes, decline precipitously afterwards), meaning children born in the early 1970s would represent the cohort maximally exposed to this source of central nervous system toxicity. Add in 15-20 years and you should be at peak crime. Which of course describes the United States of America in circa 1990.
And the pattern fits myriad other nations, too, as they likewise phased out leaded gasoline.
Yes and also the avg. lifetime of cars in those days was shorter, so the phaseout was quicker than you might have expected if you tried something similar now.
Wouldn't peak exposure be for people born between 1960 and 1970?
Yep. It would.
So I guess the only disagreement here is whether people born between 1960 and 1970 are Boomers or Gen X?
I think 1946 to 1964 is usually the range for the boomer cohort, but I could be wrong.
That's my thought as well. Peak exposure to lead would be late Boomers and early Gen X under this account, though some people might say they're all Gen X. I don't think anyone would say they're all Boomers, but maybe Peter G has a later end date for Boomers.
Policy can surely have some effect. But if you're talking about an effect that is visible over a six month span in the year 2020, you might want to wait a little bit before being confident that you can attribute precisely *which* of the distinctive events of that year is the trigger (if there even is just one) before you blame it all on "policy".
Matt does not mention ongoing atmospheric sources for lead, other than perhaps inferring lead sequestered in soils and house paint may be released as dust when disturbed. General aviation (GA) aircraft are the largest ongoing source of atmospheric lead. While lead as an anti-knock compound was finally eliminated from auto fuel in the US in the 1990’s, most folks don’t realize that aviation gasoline (avgas) continues to contain tetraethyl lead (TEL). Avgas is used in the GA piston-engine driven fleet, consisting of about 200,000 registered aircraft in the US. In 2019, GA aircraft consumed 200 million gallons of leaded gasoline. To put that into perspective, this annual total is but half what the US automobile fleet consumed in a single day in 2019. Still, given the concentration of TEL in avgas is ~2 grams per gallon, I calculate that over 900,000 lbs of TEL was injected into the atmosphere in 2019 by GA aircraft. There’s no reason to believe this will decrease in the near term, as efforts to replace leaded avgas have been underway for decades, but have yet to yield a viable product.
It’s worth noting that about half the GA fleet is powered by lower-compression engines that don’t require the TEL anti-knock properties. Regulatory approval is available for these aircraft to use unleaded, ethanol-free automobile gas (mogas) of at least 91 octane. However, as leaded avgas (100LL) is the only gasoline routinely available at most airports and many pilots are resistant to change, only a small percentage of the eligible aircraft actually use ethanol-free mogas. (See Options for Reducing Lead Emissions from Piston-Engine Aircraft (https://www.nap.edu/download/26050)
You beat me to it. I own a '76 Cardinal RG, for which no alternative to 100LL is currently available. I hate the fact that I'm spewing lead over the suburb where my plane is based every time I take off. At least, for noise reasons, schools and houses generally aren't built near GA airports any more.
As this article discusses, https://www.avweb.com/insider/going-to-the-moon-was-easy-compared-to-100ul/, the response from the FAA and industry has been dithering and sclerotic. The GA owner demographic is wildly skewed towards boomers who don't seem to understand or care much about the issue.
What needs to happen first is for the EPA to issue a Finding of Endangerment, which will put everyone on notice that the clock is ticking. Then there are basically two paths:
(a) someone comes up with an unleaded drop-in replacement that can serve ~100% of the fleet with no modifications, or some very simple and cheap mods to planes' fuel systems; or
(b) we decide that's not feasible, and take an incremental approach, progressively phasing out 100LL, by installing infrastructure for mogas or 94UL at public-use airports that sell appreciable amounts of 100LL.
There's also supposedly a "100VLL" spec fuel with 20% less lead coming down the pike, that would be a drop in replacement. But 20% is a long way from 100%.
Option (b) isn't hard in principle. The FAA gives out grants to small airports all the time for paving/lighting/state-of-good-repair purposes. We could just add new tankage/new trucks for unleaded gas to the list of eligible purposes, and have congress put a bit more money into those grants programs, earmarked for this purpose.
I am a boomer with a '46 Taylorcraft with an 85-hp engine for which a autogas STC is available. I burn 93-octane, unleaded, ethanol-free autogas for all local flights, only burning 100LL when on cross-country flights. As there is no autogas available on the field, like most airports, I have to transport autogas from miles away in 5-gallon containers. It's well worth the effort and a small price to pay. (Burning autogas is better for the engine, but that's a minor consideration.) It bothers me greatly that the owners of over half the GA fleet can legally burn autogas with few or no adverse consequences, but choose not to deal with the hassle or believe the hoary tales from other pilots (and mechanics) that they will ruin their expensive engines. The FAA is a big part of the problem, but explaining the myriad reasons for their intransigence on this and many issues would take hours. I agree that migrating to 100VL is hardly satisfactory, as it doesn't come close to eliminating lead. As GA fuel represents 0.13% of overall US gasoline production, there's little economic incentive for the petroleum industry to address it. It will take aggressive action by the EPA, FAA, probably instigated by Congress. It is not likely to be high on the Biden administrations to-do list.
I hadn't realized this! Does this mean that there's higher lead concentration in the air around general aviation airports? Do lead emissions at aviation altitudes sink to create patches of high concentration under popular flight routes, or is there sufficient mixing that there's tiny bits everywhere?
Yes, the highest TEL-related lead particulate concentrations are near GA airports, especially near where engines are operated at high power output, including during run-up checks, takeoff, and climbout. At altitude, the particulates are widely dispersed, but may become cloud condensation nuclei and wash out over a wide area, albeit at very low concentration.
Diving into the numbers of, say, the New Zealand study cited makes me (very gently!) question the actual significance of the effect. There, the mean lead level was 10.99+/-4.63 µg/dL (overall range 4-31, so already pretty high!). They conclude, among other things, that "each 5-µg/dL higher level of blood lead in childhood was associated with a 1.61-point lower score in adult IQ". I doubt anyone claims that an IQ test is accurate to within 1-2 points, so this is something that can only be teased out in large samples under the assumption that errors are evenly distributed. Finally, they didn't use raw IQ numbers but rather ones "adjust[ed] for maternal IQ, childhood IQ, and childhood socioeconomic status". How reliable are these adjustments?
I hope no one thinks I'm trying to claim ingesting lead is fine! I've just become skeptical of studies such as this that try to claim a huge effect requiring many billions of dollars based on aggregation of tiny effects, where each was already adjusted through an opaque formula. Then again, maybe a lot of what we choose to spend money ultimately comes down to the same imprecise analysis anyway?
Yes, I was wondering that also. I don't think I'm going to get around to actually reading the papers and doing the hard work of being skeptical myself anytime soon, so I'm glad at least one other person did. That's the kind of question I would like to ask and the kind of thing I wondered about when I read MY's post. There would have to be big confounding variable problems that are very hard to control for
Indeed, I just started looking at the papers on brain structure alteration (also cited in MY's post) that, at first glance, look more convincing of a real, measurable effect, although still subject to the same confounding variables unfortunately.
I get nervous when I read an article about environmental exposure where there is no consideration of relative risk and potential risk reduction (and relative cost of risk reduction). Maybe I missed it in my quick read. Lead exposure is clearly important, however exposure to other heavy metals, organic pollutants, pathogens, particulates in general, ... have significant health effects. How does the effect of exposure to lead compare to exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals, to cadmium or arsenic. Where is our effort and money best spent. I expect lead is important, but be careful signaling out one exposure without acknowledging others and considering relative risk.
I think the biggest difference is that lead was actually *incredibly* prevalent in a way that no other heavy metal was. Lead oxide was the default white pigment until zinc oxide and titanium dioxide replaced it, and that's why it's in paint. Gasoline was also thoroughly prevalent everywhere people were in the developed world in the mid to late 20th century. Cadmium, chromium, and nickel definitely had niche uses in that period, but probably nowhere near as prevalent. Arsenic and mercury have probably been more prevalent than those - my suspicion is that even they were less prominent than lead (except in places where groundwater is high in arsenic).
Didn’t Hillary have an ambitious lead plan? Any chance of that being revived?
Didn't Hillary have an ambitious X plan? I'd like that revived for nearly *all* values of X!
So I am going to stand up for highways as a form of transportation. Women get sexually assaulted on public transportation more than in their own cars. Wen the public discusses public transportation vs driving and parking we don't talk about this. personal safety from crime is always worse on public transit than in cars. Yes I have read the stories that adding more highways doesn't help traffic because it just encourages more economic activity by allowing people do things when they want to do then rather than after 7 pm. Highways increase economic activity. And with electric cars it is entirely possible that they will as green as public transportation.
15 times as many people die per mile traveled in passenger vehicles vs. public transportation, that's a big safety issue. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/
Fair but the experience on public transportation sucks. You get your stuff stolen, if your a woman you get sexual assault. I am not saying it is better in all circumstances. I am
Just standing up for it as a legitimate infrastructure to be invested in. Highways are really the only way to connect rural areas. Where housing costs are low.
Are there people with ideas about how to make housing in dense areas cheaper? Maybe there's a substack from someone who writes about that a lot
I think that is part of the solution but better highways does allow for more affordable housing
There are negative externalities associated with sprawl and highways (long commute times, pollution, crashes, etc.). There are are positive externalities associated with density. If your main concern is housing costs, making dense areas cheaper is much better than making rural areas more accessible.
Yes but I think critics of all that overstate their point.
I often hear things like "it's a failed model".
Given that driving is the way most Americans (and even, contra to what most Americans believe, most Europeans) get around, it's not really clear what they mean.
Cars are the way most people in the developed world (even Japan I believe) make a majority of a plurality of their journeys, and the way they travel a majority of their miles / kms.
If it didn't work, people wouldn't get to work, to the supermarket, or whatever.
Yea but those are getting better, electric cars better podcasts. Frankly I have not seen US public transportation get better crime is up service is as unreliable as ever. I don’t know local governments are incapable of making the trains nice but can keep the roads clear of debris but that is our life.
So I assume you're plumping for replacing all rail with aircraft? ;)
Safety in automobiles has increased radically over my lifetime, and seems likely to continue to improve in the future. At what point do we call cars "safe enough"?
Not at all! Cars, mass transit and planes all have their pros and cons, I was just pointing out that personal safety concerns on public transit are at least partly offset by lower risk of injury/death in an accident. Given current development patterns and limited housing supply/high prices in areas well-served by transit, cars and the roads to support them are essential. Even in cities with serious rail transit, the "funnel everyone to downtown and back" setup of rail lines still makes commuting and other activities really really hard without a car.
I think this just means that we should make public transportation safer and more enjoyable. You're right, people aren't going to take public transportation if it's an unpleasant experience. That probably means more police and safety workers on public transit, especially at night, and also better lighting, etc.
Yeah but we are not. No one in SF will say BART has gotten better over the last 30 years. The Bay Area has gotten richer extra taxes have been passed for Bart but the experience still sucks.
The new trains are better and so are the new stations! BART sucks if you’re in SF but the rest of the network is better. And I mean, the rest of SF not having BART is worse.
By better i me a lower crime rate fewer people yelling. the trains are better but still just as unsafe.
The argument for "public transportation" is to reduce congestion costs and permit much more dense city cores.
You can have density without subways. San Francisco is the second most densely populated city. And we had a BART strike and the Bay Area still functioned with worse traffic. I was commuting from Walnut Creek to Palo Alto at the time.
I agree that subways are overrated relative to dedicated bus lanes, and raising bus speeds and route density. But whatever the form, the payoff comes from lower congestion/higher density of development.
I think road building is a lot like taxation - it doesn't make sense to be generically in favour of more or less of it, rather, it's more a case of - what is the right amount of high quality roads (Freeways / expressways) relative to area and population.
America, Germany and Spain probably have enough high-quality roads. The UK, for example, definitely doesn't, to the point where it probably harms the economy.
Guns. Gun powder. Bullets. Shot. Gun ranges. Popular hunting lands. Lead. Lead. Lead. Sorry to be the wet blanket but getting lead out of soil is a bigger fight than I think you realize. Old gun ranges have lead in the soils not measured in micrograms but in dumptrucks. There have been huge fights in CA over this where remediation laws are already strict. Just saying, NRA will get involved.
Man, you're not kidding. From the Fort Ord Dunes State Park website:
"The Army removed 162,800 yards of lead-contaminated soil, and 719,000 pounds of spent ammunition were recovered."
And that's just a small portion of the problem at the former Fort Ord - there is a much larger impact area ringed with old ranges a little inland.
Another post I would love to share! Maybe subscribers can get 3 "free share rights" or something per month?
Always feel free to forward a newsletter to a few people you think might be interested. I trust everyone to not just become routine bulk-forwarders.
Step 1: bulk-forward Slow Boring posts
Step 2: ...
Step 3: profit!
(Though, granted, this is a situation in which you can lose profit without anyone else's gaining profit. Monetary profit, that is -- the intellectual profit that they gain will be incalculable. And what profiteth it a man, if he gain the whole world, but lose his access to spicy takes?)
What you've just described is not that far off from why the Internet exerts a deflationary economic force.
Yup. The internet is simultaneously a paradise for content-consumers, and a hell for content-producers.
This is why MY is cunningly forcing his content-consumers to work as content-producers on his comments pages. And then the excellence of his comment-section becomes part of the value-proposition that he offers to new subscribers. We've been suckered into a pyramid scheme, is what it is.
If he's really clever, he'll pay an intern for a week to write a program analyzing the comments to optimize future posts for engagement. Then we're all good and addicted, comes the sponsored content.
Sadly enough, the comments to this post form a good demonstration of what the optimization would look like.
People are sorta interested in worthwhile Canadian initiatives, but what really gets their blood up is the umpteenth round of culture-war fighting over the IDW, IQ, wokeness, Murray, SSC, and on and on.
It may be the death of this blog, if too many of the readers have a "squirrel!" - like reaction to any topic that bears peripherally on IQ. That's why I agreed with David Rye that we should just be able to vote it down. This post is worth discussing without reference to the culture wars.
One of the big problems I see with this is that the intern happens to have no idea how to webscrape
Thanks!! But don't we need some complicated tracking system? ;-) Lol
This is kind of goofy, but as the college drop out in a family of people with masters degrees, I’m convinced I have a mild case of lead poisoning. I always had poor impulse control and an attention deficit as a kid, and as the youngest when we moved into our new house, also spent the longest chunk of my formative years drinking water from lead pipes. I’m fine with it, I just think it’s kind of funny.
Don't ignore the international angle to this: the US phased out leaded gasoline in the 70's, but other nations continued using it for decades. Dupont Mexico was still making TEL for leaded gasoline sales in the early 90's.
A US AID program did good work in the late 90's persuading other countries to phase it out, but Algeria was still using it in 2017.
All of this makes me wonder: would there be a better ROI on abatement efforts in countries where the lead is more recent, and closer to the surface?
Keep in mind that with any purification or extraction process, getting 90% of the X out of the Y is easy, getting the next 9% out is much harder, getting the next 0.9% out costs just as much as the first 90%, and getting the successive 0.09% and so on get more and more difficult and costly. Yes, the US would get some benefit from getting out the last micrograms, but if there are countries around with kilograms, that may be the place to start.
But would that effort count as infrastructure spending, here in the US of A? Depends on how global the circulation of lead is. When we were all burning it in gas, it was highly global: it showed up in ice-cores world wide. But if the current lead in (e.g.) Mexico is not being burned, but is in the soil, then is it still a threat to US neurons? I simply don't know.
Point remains: if the US is *relatively* clean, then the same dollars will clean up a *lot* more lead in a dirtier country.
And the Senator from Dupont, as well as his fellow citizens, may have a moral duty to help clean up messes that we helped to make.
I would say that's a good argument do look internationally *and* at home.
Not just countries like Mexico. I don't believe even Europe started phasing out leaded Gasoline until the 90's.
This seems like a good moment for the tech rationalists and Effective Altruism. Elon could push money here instead of his car tubes, alongside Zuck and Bezos. They could start by investing in regions dear to them - if those exist -.
At one point Elon donated a bunch of Brita pitchers to Flint because people were yelling at him on Twitter. Or at least, he said he did.