Ronald Bailey finds Kevin Drum's article on crime's connection to lead incomplete:
Drum is right that exposure to lead increases the chances that a person will suffer the sorts of neurological damage that lowers their intelligence and lower intelligence is well-known to correlate with increased criminality. Reducing such exposures has no doubt contributed to our happily falling crime rates. But it is likely that other factors including more policing, more incarceration, less crack, increased concealed carry, and other such efforts to control crime have contributed as well.
Deborah Blum makes related points. Drum clarifies:
It's true that one researcher has suggested that lead can explain 90 percent of the rise and fall of crime, but that's very much the high end of the estimates in the field. I'm a lot more comfortable with an estimate of around 50 percent, something I should have made clearer in the text of my piece. In other words, lead probably explains a very big chunk of the rise and fall of postwar crime in America, but it doesn't trump everything else. Drugs, poverty, urban gang warfare, education, policing tactics, and other things also play a role.
The Dish 