International data about a connection between lead and crime pdf less technical pdf

The basic point is reasonable, but there are so many things that bother me about that article. Drum's credulity varies a lot in this article. His lowest level is about where I stand. I have to wonder if that actually reflects his beliefs and the rest of it is forcing enthusiasm on himself because to reflect value rather than truth; that is, he is doing an expected value calculation. Certainly, he should be applauded for scope sensitivity. ---------------------------------------- Perhaps the biggest thing that bothers me is that Drum tries to have it both ways: small amounts of lead matter and big amounts of lead matter. It seems rather unlikely that this is true. Maybe 10μg/dL has a huge effect, but if so, I doubt that 20 has double that effect, and this ruins all the analysis of the first half of the article. This is important because there is a logical trade-off between saying that past lead reduction was useful and saying future lead reduction will be useful. In particular, Drum says that Kleiman says that if the US were to eliminate lead, it would reduce crime by 10%. Did he just make up this number, or does it come out of a model? I'd like to see the model because even if he pulled the model out of thin air, it forces him to deal with the logical trade-off. In Kleiman's book, he says that eliminating lead paint would reduce crime by 5% and attributes it to Nevin 2000. On the same page, he misquotes Nevin in a way that makes me not trust Kleiman with models. But that's OK because he has a citation, not model. I cannot find the claim in Nevin's paper. There is a model on p19 that says that 6 points of IQ, applied to the lowest 30% of the population could explain the past decline. And that's at a rate of 2 points of IQ for 10μg/dL, a small enough rate I'm willing to extrapolate linearly. If you assume crime in linear in lead, the 5% number is reasonable, except for the assumption that lead explains all of the past decline. (I'm not sure Nevin actually makes th