Posted on 06/11/2015 10:54:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
In the 1970s, crime was soaring, and American policymakers had all sorts of ideas for how to reduce it: longer sentences, more police, prison reform and more. But one of the most potent remedies was not conceived as a way to combat crime.
To clean up the environment and improve public health, the federal government banned lead in paint and gasoline. By diminishing lead, though, it reduced the harm it was doing to young brains -- harm that could push kids into delinquency. Curbing lead exposure was a big reason for the decline in violent crime that began in the 1990s.
Americans regard theirs as the land of opportunity, which makes the persistence of black poverty baffling and even exasperating. After all, the road out of permanent destitution is not hard to identify. Why do so many people refuse to take it?
Rick Santorum made this point when he ran for president in 2012. Experts, he asserted, have documented that as a rule, you have to do just three things to avoid poverty: "work, graduate from high school and get married before you have children."
There's much value in that formula. But putting it to use requires certain capacities. What research has starkly revealed is that poverty and other problems afflicting many black neighborhoods have a way of stunting the attributes needed to overcome them. There is a biology of poverty that is not easy to overcome.
One of the things you need to pull yourself up is a healthy brain. But poor people can't take that as a given. One enemy of sound mental function is lead, which seriously impairs cognitive development.
In 1995, as the Chicago Tribune's Michael Hawthorne recently reported, more than 80 percent of kids in some of Chicago's poorest areas had dangerously high lead levels. If you know the rate of lead poisoning among children younger than 6 in a Chicago neighborhood in 1995, he found, you can predict with uncanny accuracy its current rate of violent crime.
The kids whose brains were attacked by lead back then are now young adults. Many of them show the effects in lower intelligence and less self-control. Even today, poor African-American areas are unusually prone to lead poisoning.
But lead is just one of several hazards. Blacks are far likelier than other groups to live in areas of concentrated poverty. They pay a high price for that luxury.
A study this year in the journal Nature Neuroscience found that poor children, on average, actually have smaller brains than affluent ones. New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey concludes that "the effect of being raised in a family that lives in a poor neighborhood over two consecutive generations is roughly equivalent to missing two to four years of schooling."
Kids raised in these places suffer other problems besides material deprivation. Poor parents are less likely to read to and talk with their children. Violence is far more common than in other places, and violence has invisible but severe consequences -- not just on direct victims but on other residents.
Children who feel unsafe at school, who are disproportionately black, do measurably worse academically. Those who witness shootings or suffer violent attacks may develop post-traumatic stress disorder.
Chronic violence carries hazards for the mind, as well as the body. "Simply put," writes Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey, "people who are exposed to high levels of stress over a prolonged period of time are at risk of having their brains rewired in a way that leaves them with fewer cognitive resources to work."
Having fewer cognitive resources makes it harder to do those three things Santorum recommended. Getting and keeping a job is harder -- and the job you get will pay less than it might otherwise. Completing high school is harder. Exercising self-discipline and using contraception are harder.
It may be said in response that many whites and immigrants managed to overcome humble beginnings. That's true. But most of them didn't have to grow up in places where poverty, environmental contamination and gunplay were as pervasive as they are in many urban black areas.
Some kids can triumph over all these. But the chronic onslaught of adversity ensures that many, if not most, will be tripped up.
When these young people fail, a lot of Americans will blame them for not doing simple, obvious things to improve their lives. In reality, much of their fate is beyond their control.
Protecting children from socialist indoctrination via public schools and buildings posing as, ‘churches’ would’ve gone a LOT farther in preventing poverty than banning lead-based paint.
>>>It may be said in response that many whites and immigrants managed to overcome humble beginnings. That’s true. But most of them didn’t have to grow up in places where poverty, environmental contamination and gunplay were as pervasive as they are in many urban black areas.<<<
Presented as axiomatic, as if this is such an obvious truth that it doesn’t bear close examination. Unfortunately, all it takes is a cursory examination to consider people from India, China, Vietnam, eastern Europe (in the modern world), as well as most immigrants at the start of the 20th Century, where all those issues are present, with gunplay occurring in genocidal form, and it took less than one generation for success.
There’s a Native elder here in my part of Alaska who says it best: “Young people need to raised to have the habit of work.” That is different from having a job. If you have the habit of work, you’ll be productive even in the absence of a paycheck, and when most of the community is acting that way, it creates the foundation for prosperity. Without the habit of work, though, even a job is pretty worthless.
“In 1995, as the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Hawthorne recently reported, more than 80 percent of kids in some of Chicago’s poorest areas had dangerously high lead levels.”
Funny. I work in property management in Chicago. By law, every person who rents an apartment in Chicago receives a pamphlet outlining the dangers of lead and exposure to children (they don’t just give these to white people). So nobody can claim ignorance is why the percentage is higher in black communities. Lack of child supervision perhaps?
Though, the city ordinance does leave a lot to be desired in terms of remediating these hazards. Every old building in the city has lead paint, but as long as the landlord has never tested for it, they can safely check the “I don’t know of any lead-based paint hazards” box on the pamphlet, and they can just paint over the apartment without going through the expensive removal process. It’s kind of a “hear no evil, see no evil” type of compromise that just ensures the hazardous material will always be around.
I mostly agree.
There are two many people who are products of generations of welfare homes. Some girls grow up knowing that they will collect welfare and there is no question about it.
They don’t even want to try. It’s like they cannot see the benefits of improving their lives.
sadly, they are dumbing down even further.....promiscuous sex with other drug addled, low intelligent, low self control individuals, perhaps even a relative, and at young ages is only exponentially increasing their rush to the bottom....
On the other hand, perhaps the abolition of lead paint (and perhaps also DDT) caused global warming.
“generally low intelligence”
Hmm, but do they eat paint chips because they have low intelligence, or do they have low intelligence because they ate paint chips?
I guess it’s a chicken/egg kind of thing.
Sure it does, but only if you are reselling those and not consuming them :)
The bottomline: it's all about babies - babies before wedlock, babies soon after wedlock when little money is coming in and babies to take care of by divorced Moms with a deadbeat Dad.
What we need is: Population Control.
High speed and low speed.
The only correlation to crime is the increase in CCW states. Lead had nothing to do with it.
And yes, whites should have seen the same effect of declining lead levels but they did not.
Before they passed bans on lead in paint and gasoline, EVERYONE was exposed to the same levels of lead.
When I was listening to talk radio once, the guest got into this nonsense about lead. Finally, the host broke in and said, “so what you’re saying is everyone over X years of age is brain-damaged. In fact you are saying I’m brain damaged.” That brought a quick end to that line of argument.
Why work when they see people making more money selling drugs,committing robbery, or just living on welfare?
Socrates said somewhere that every man has a philosophy even if he could not articulate it. That being said the prevailing American philosophy today is: eating, drinking, drugging, copulating, evacuating the bowels and snoring. That philosophy consumes most of the average day leaving little time for productive work of any manner or form.
Our parents and grandparents were poor, lived and worked in places where lead paint was everywhere.
All our close and distant cousins where in families with married parents, my dad never stole anything in his entire life... he never went to jail... etc.
Yes, it was abolished, but in cities, there is a lot of old construction built before those laws passed, and thanks to the EPA regulations, you can’t just scrape off the lead paint on the cheap. If you want to remove it, you have to hire certified workers and go through the whole “environmental hazard remediation” schtick.
So, most landlords (at least in my town) just pretend they have no idea there is lead paint under those 5 layers of latex paint, and get on with their lives.
I'm a metal aged man, I have gold in my teeth, silver in my hair and lead in my a$$.
I think rap music and the “gangsta” culture that flourish in the Black community have far more effect than lead.
Yep, hedonism, the new national religion.
Once you have convinced people that “God is dead”, what else is there? Lefties are fools if they think they can keep people in line for “the greater good”. The only thing that keeps the godless in line is hunger or fear.
Interesting, thanks for the explanation.
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