New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind
violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the
problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing.
—By Kevin Drum
When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of
New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down
crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a
former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy image, but it was more than
mere posturing. Since 1960, rape rates had nearly quadrupled, murder had
quintupled, and robbery had grown fourteenfold. New Yorkers felt like
they lived in a city under siege.
Throughout the campaign, Giuliani embraced a theory of crime fighting
called "broken windows," popularized a decade earlier by James Q. Wilson
and George L. Kelling in
an influential article in The Atlantic.
"If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired," they
observed, "all the rest of the windows will soon be broken." So too,
tolerance of small crimes would create a vicious cycle ending with
entire neighborhoods turning into war zones. But if you cracked down on
small crimes, bigger crimes would drop as well.
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