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B) a warning about potentially dangerous conomic trends.

A) a controversial sociological hypothesis.

In the first paragraph, Karl Smith’s work is presented primarily as It may be that violent crime isn’t an inevitable consequence of being a big city after all. Today, homicide rates are similar in cities of all sizes. And guess (95) what? The difference in murder rates went away too. But as lead levels in gasoline decreased, the differences between big and small cities largely went away. Nevin suggests that, (90) because big cities have lots of cars in a small area, they also had high densities of atmospheric lead during the postwar era.

For example, murder rates have always been higher in big cities than in towns and small cities. (85) The gasoline lead hypothesis helps explain some things we might not have realized even needed explaining. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. So in 2007, Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Finland, France, Italy, New Zealand and West Germany. You need to do something more to establish causality. No matter how good the fit, if you only have a single correlation it might just be coincidence. Sales of vinyl LPs rose (75) in the postwar period too, and then declined in the ’80s and ’90s. What’s more, a single correlation between two curves isn’t all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Nevin’s paper was almost completely ignored, and in one sense it’s easy to see why-Nevin is an economist, not a criminologist, and his paper (70) was published in Environmental Research, not a journal with a big readership in the criminology community. (65) It was an exciting conjecture, and it prompted an immediate wave of.

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As (60) auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to “fill ’er up with ethyl,” they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later. And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the ’40s and ’50s really were more likely to become violent (55) criminals in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. In a 2000 paper he concluded (50) that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. So Nevin dug up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. The two curves looked eerily (45) identical, but were offset by about 20 years. Crime rates rose dramatically in the ’60s through the ’80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early ’90s. The only thing different was the time period.

Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the (40) same upside-down U pattern (see the graph). Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted. Lead emissions from (35) tailpipes rose steadily from the early ’40s through the early ’70s, nearly quadrupling over that period.

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If you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get an upside-down U. The (30) biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn’t paint, but leaded gasoline. That tip took Nevin in a different direction. Maybe reducing lead exposure had an effect on violent crime too? (25) A recent study had also suggested a link between childhood lead exposure and juvenile delinquency later on. A growing body of research had linked lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities. In 1994, Rick Nevin was a consultant working for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on the costs and benefits of (20) removing lead paint from old houses. Well, here’s one possibility: Pb(CH2CH3)4. What molecule could be responsible for a steep and (15) sudden decline in violent crime? But (10) if it’s everywhere, all at once-as both the rise of crime in the ’60s and ’70s and the fall of crime in the ’90s seemed to be-the cause is a molecule.Ī molecule? That sounds crazy. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think Bieber Fever.1 If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. But what kind? Economics professor Karl Smith has a good rule of thumb for categorizing epidemics: If it spreads along (5) lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Experts often suggest that crime resembles an epidemic.