>Exposure to lead in the environment might, perhaps, be the next best hypothesis. But as we showed in our 2020 paper, when one controls for both environmental lead and abortion, the coefficient on abortion remains large while the coefficient on environmental lead is greatly reduced and loses statistical significance.
Their analysis about lead relies on a single study by Reyes. Far from robust. Additionally, if lead results in more violent people, then it's no wonder that reducing the births of people in lead polluted environments would have an effect on crime. What they would need to do to tease our lead, would be to find places with no to little lead pollution and show that abortions resulted in lower crime, which they do not seem to do.
Studies by Mielke and Zahran (2012), and Feigenbaum and Muller (2016) provide further evidence that lead is the main culprit in crime reduction.
Lead seems to be the reason, not abortion rates. Levitt and Donohue don't engage seriously with the Lead hypothesis as there are many compelling studies supporting Lead. They only engage with the weakest research. I'm not impressed. I worry that Levitt and Donohue are just adding wood to racist fires and their work will be used by bigots, fascists, and racists around the world. It's irresponsible work.
Or the so-called crack wars[1], whose effect on criminal violence is so huge that whatever the effect size of lead or abortions was, it’s absolutely dwarfed to the point where it isn’t practically analyzable.
Between 1984 and 1989, the homicide rate for Black males aged 14 to 17 more than doubled, and the homicide rate for Black males aged 18 to 24 increased nearly as much. During this period, the Black community also experienced a 20–100% increase in fetal death rates, low birth-weight babies, weapons arrests, and the number of children in foster care.
Ideally, we would be able to tease out the effect of abortion, lead-paint, AND the interaction (lead-paint x abortion). If an interaction model better explains the data, then we should be open to not rejecting it.
ziddoap|1 year ago
From the article.
mempko|1 year ago
Studies by Mielke and Zahran (2012), and Feigenbaum and Muller (2016) provide further evidence that lead is the main culprit in crime reduction.
Lead seems to be the reason, not abortion rates. Levitt and Donohue don't engage seriously with the Lead hypothesis as there are many compelling studies supporting Lead. They only engage with the weakest research. I'm not impressed. I worry that Levitt and Donohue are just adding wood to racist fires and their work will be used by bigots, fascists, and racists around the world. It's irresponsible work.
User23|1 year ago
golergka|1 year ago
philodelta|1 year ago
kelseyfrog|1 year ago
LorenPechtel|1 year ago