I am WILDLY late to this but I studied the Flint Water Crisis a bit for a previous project and I think the story is almost comical so I figure I'd share the whole thing. It's a long story so buckle up. So Michigan has this thing called Emergency Financial Management. EFM allows the governor to appoint a financial manager in fiscally distressed cities. These managers have VAST power, essentially usurping the powers of all elected officials in the city. Enter Darnell Earley. Darnell was the former mayor of Flint who was selected as EFM. Flint had long received water from the Detroit Water and Sewer Authority, however they had recently joined on a plan for an alternate water source. The city had a water purification plant in its own control but used it only for emergencies. Detroit charged Flint a lot for water, so Darnell decided to re-activate the plant and use it until the new source was available. This saved the city a ton of money by removing payments to DWSA. However, the Flint river is highly corrosive and Flint had many Lead Service Lines. The standard practice would then be to use corrosion control on the water to prevent lead leeching. That's where the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality comes in. The DEQ allowed Flint to not use corrosion control as long as lead levels measured by DEQ stayed below a certain point. The issue? DEQ measured the leas levels wrong! The public continually complained about water quality, but Darnell Earley was a state employee - not a local elected - who was repeatedly advised by the state water quality agency that the water was fine. The incompetent led the blind all while the public complained to a government stripped of all its power. It's ab absolute mess and I think the DEQ has not gotten NEARLY enough flak for being the chief failure point.
the incompetent left hand of a local government not knowing what the incompetent right hand is doing? Couldn't happen here. Now, just back to dealing with the 500 different branches of Haringey Council I need to convince to allow me to build a bog-standard loft extension.
I am not surprised that lead exposure seemed to affect reading but not math scores in poor neighborhoods. Basic math achievement more often reflects the quality of the teacher rather than the student. In low-resource environments, the quality of math education seems to be especially bad because there are already shortages of good math teachers for a variety of reasons. I have been to public schools where math was effectively not taught at all for years at a time. In those poor education environments, smart kids tend to eventually learn to read nonetheless, while math ability seems to simply correlate with the quality (or lack) of teaching and have little to do with individual aptitude.
My experience is supported by studies of homeschooled children—their reading skills are often developed to a level that correlates with their interest and ability, while even smart homeschooled children tend to fall behind in math due to lack of quality instruction.
What would the large difference in rates of criminality between men and women say about this hypothesis? Wouldn't we all be exposed to led as children at about the same rate, living in certain areas? And yet, there has always been a large discrepancy, especially in crimes of aggression. That seems to me to cast doubt on the whole idea.
I'm not sure that's evidence either way - by analogy, if lead stunted growth, and men and women were equally exposed to it, then we wouldn't expect men and women to be the same height. That would only be true if lead were the ONLY factor affecting height (or crime), but we know men are on average taller than women (and on average more violent than women) to begin with.
But this is specifically about how lead effects brain development and behavior - including the social, emotional and executive functioning skills that you and Stuart were calling “personality” in the podcast. Both men and women have frontal lobes which govern these functions, and I don’t think lead would discriminate in the damage it would do. So high levels of childhood lead exposure does not cause aggression in women and girls? It should of at least have been addressed. Do you or Stuart know if there is reliable sex-disaggregated data on this question?
I thought the drop in crime was due to Roe V Wade. Isn't that what Levitt showed? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect#:~:text=According%20to%20Donohue%20and%20Levitt,for%20factors%20like%20average%20income.
I am WILDLY late to this but I studied the Flint Water Crisis a bit for a previous project and I think the story is almost comical so I figure I'd share the whole thing. It's a long story so buckle up. So Michigan has this thing called Emergency Financial Management. EFM allows the governor to appoint a financial manager in fiscally distressed cities. These managers have VAST power, essentially usurping the powers of all elected officials in the city. Enter Darnell Earley. Darnell was the former mayor of Flint who was selected as EFM. Flint had long received water from the Detroit Water and Sewer Authority, however they had recently joined on a plan for an alternate water source. The city had a water purification plant in its own control but used it only for emergencies. Detroit charged Flint a lot for water, so Darnell decided to re-activate the plant and use it until the new source was available. This saved the city a ton of money by removing payments to DWSA. However, the Flint river is highly corrosive and Flint had many Lead Service Lines. The standard practice would then be to use corrosion control on the water to prevent lead leeching. That's where the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality comes in. The DEQ allowed Flint to not use corrosion control as long as lead levels measured by DEQ stayed below a certain point. The issue? DEQ measured the leas levels wrong! The public continually complained about water quality, but Darnell Earley was a state employee - not a local elected - who was repeatedly advised by the state water quality agency that the water was fine. The incompetent led the blind all while the public complained to a government stripped of all its power. It's ab absolute mess and I think the DEQ has not gotten NEARLY enough flak for being the chief failure point.
the incompetent left hand of a local government not knowing what the incompetent right hand is doing? Couldn't happen here. Now, just back to dealing with the 500 different branches of Haringey Council I need to convince to allow me to build a bog-standard loft extension.
I am not surprised that lead exposure seemed to affect reading but not math scores in poor neighborhoods. Basic math achievement more often reflects the quality of the teacher rather than the student. In low-resource environments, the quality of math education seems to be especially bad because there are already shortages of good math teachers for a variety of reasons. I have been to public schools where math was effectively not taught at all for years at a time. In those poor education environments, smart kids tend to eventually learn to read nonetheless, while math ability seems to simply correlate with the quality (or lack) of teaching and have little to do with individual aptitude.
My experience is supported by studies of homeschooled children—their reading skills are often developed to a level that correlates with their interest and ability, while even smart homeschooled children tend to fall behind in math due to lack of quality instruction.
What would the large difference in rates of criminality between men and women say about this hypothesis? Wouldn't we all be exposed to led as children at about the same rate, living in certain areas? And yet, there has always been a large discrepancy, especially in crimes of aggression. That seems to me to cast doubt on the whole idea.
I'm not sure that's evidence either way - by analogy, if lead stunted growth, and men and women were equally exposed to it, then we wouldn't expect men and women to be the same height. That would only be true if lead were the ONLY factor affecting height (or crime), but we know men are on average taller than women (and on average more violent than women) to begin with.
But this is specifically about how lead effects brain development and behavior - including the social, emotional and executive functioning skills that you and Stuart were calling “personality” in the podcast. Both men and women have frontal lobes which govern these functions, and I don’t think lead would discriminate in the damage it would do. So high levels of childhood lead exposure does not cause aggression in women and girls? It should of at least have been addressed. Do you or Stuart know if there is reliable sex-disaggregated data on this question?