In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson signed a series of historic bills to address poverty, racism, and the legacy of slavery. This was soon followed by an explosion in crime and dysfunction with no parallel in American history. Liberals today blame lead poisoning. Of course they do, since the only alternative theories for what happened imply that liberals are wrong with regards to everything they believe about the causes of social problems.
A 2021 paper conducted a meta-analysis and found that popular claims about lead poisoning are probably exaggerated. You can blame all the usual suspects, including publication bias. When the authors eliminated the studies that have an endogeneity problem, they found the effect of lead can only be at most a very small part of the story in explaining homicide trends, and may in fact have no impact at all. Regardless of whether liberals are correct, we eventually removed lead from the atmosphere, and yet never went back to the low rates of divorce, illegitimacy, drug use, and crime that we saw before the Great Society and the left-wing takeover of institutions.
This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers of the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.
I want to be part of the higher status tribe but
1 I can't bring myself to pretend to believe in their low IQ ideas about race and sex and
2 the liberal philosophy is all about hating white men and I'm a white man.
What are we supposed to do?
Richard, have you ever given the question of gerrymandering any intellectual honesty? Lines based on population density rather than lines based on voter history is the dichotomy; non-gerrymandered lines are still “squiggly”.