Kevin Drum, who’s been doing Pulitzer-quality science and policy reporting on the behavioral effects of environmental lead, has yet another item today, once again reporting a new paper by Jessica Wolpaw Reyes of Amherst, who’s been doing the fancy number-crunching on the topic. No real surprise: in addition to greatly increasing rates of criminal behavior, lead exposure also increase the risk of other consequences of poor self-command, such as early pregnancy. Kevin draws one of the right morals of the story: that biology matters, while liberals and conservatives tend to unite in blaming everything on society, economics, and culture:
It’s a funny thing. For years conservatives bemoaned the problem of risky and violent behavior among children and teens of the post-60s era, mostly blaming it on the breakdown of the family and a general decline in discipline. Liberals tended to take this less seriously, and in any case mostly blamed it on societal problems. In the end, though, it turned out that conservatives were right. It wasn’t just a bunch of oldsters complaining about the kids these days. Crime was up, drug use was up, and teen pregnancy was up. It was a genuine phenomenon and a genuine problem.
But liberals were right that it wasn’t related to the disintegration of the family or lower rates of churchgoing or any of that. After all, families didn’t suddenly start getting back together in the 90s and churchgoing didn’t suddenly rise. But teenage crime, drug use, and pregnancy rates all went down. And down. And down. Most likely, there was a real problem, but it was a problem no one had a clue about. We were poisoning our children with a well-known neurotoxin, and this toxin lowered their IQs, made them into fidgety kids, wrecked their educations, and then turned them into juvenile delinquents, teen mothers, and violent criminals. When we got rid of the toxin, all of these problems magically started to decline. This doesn’t mean that lead was 100 percent of the problem. There probably were other things going on too, and we can continue to argue about them. But the volume of the argument really ought to be lowered a lot. Maybe poverty makes a difference, maybe single parenting makes a difference, and maybe evolving societal attitudes toward child-rearing make a difference. But they probably don’t make nearly as much difference as we all thought. In the end, we’ve learned a valuable lesson: don’t poison your kids. That makes more difference than all the other stuff put together.
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in … sordid “dens of crime.” … It is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
The plutocrat majority on the Supreme Court has ruled that, whatever the facts, as a matter of law using money to influence the outcome of elections does not constitute “corruption,” because “there is no such thing as too much speech.” Â Soon it will probably rule that the companies can cut the comedy and make contributions directly from corporate coffers to campaign accounts, but by now the rules are so leaky that it hardly matters anymore. As a result, quiet men (and women) in pleasant offices, who have not only neatly-trimmed fingernails but utterly clear consciences - men and women most of whom would be psychologically incapable of injuring a child with their own hands -Â will continue to poison other people’s children (with environmental toxins, unhealthy foods, alcohol, tobacco, and, shortly, cannabis), call anyone who tries to interfere a socialist, and use everything short of explicit bribery to get their way.
And that, my friends, is what’s at stake this year, and in 2016, and - unless we’re very lucky - in every election for the rest of my lifetime.
Brings to mind one of the best case examples of effective public policy I've ever heard: Federal and California EPAs vs. lead in gasoline and house paint. Many hundreds of thousands of lives saved and made healthy. And don't get me started on the benefit/cost of the regulatory battle against photochemical smog. How do we get these stories told to this and the next generations?
It really is a good reminder of how vile the usual conservative response to environmental problems - "you're making a mountain out of a molehill", "why do you value trees/owls/water over jobs and people?", and so forth - can be.
EDIT: Sorry, to add-
Did you hear about that lawsuit that a group of conservatives are filing, about how it's an unfair abridgment of their free speech that the companies seeking to manage state pension funds or get state pension fund investments can't directly donate to the campaigns of the people involved in overseeing said pension funds? That's even worse than merely allowing them unlimited donations to political campaigns - it's a stab in the heart of any anti-corruption laws involving elected politicians.
Add carbon dioxide to the list. It's the only one that can kill all our grandchildren.
I think Friedman was at least consistent in denying the personality of corporations. His argument depends on the idealization that corporate executives are morally passive agents of the stockholders, so their crimes are simply obeying orders. Once you recognize that executives have autonomous agency, in conspiring to raise their own compensation and lobbying for legislation favourable to corporate interests, the house of cards collapses.
Yet one conclusion jumps out if we make Friedman's assumption. Publicly held corporations have no business making campaign contributions, either directly or indirectly.
Shareholders are perfectly capable of making individual contributions. They do not require an agent to do it for them, and the decision does not need to centralized, unlike a decision to build a new plant, say. In addition, shareholders will of course differ in their political views, so any contribution obviously is contrary to the wishes of some of the principals in the agency relationship. It stifles no one's freedom to simply bar public companies from contributing.
Do you not understand that stopping the poisoning of our children (and ourselves, of course) will cost JOBS?
What are you, some kind of liberal?
"Won't someone please think of the job creators?!?!?"