Lead Does Not Explain Everything

Lead is bad for you. Obviously. But it also doesn’t explain everything. We have, for example, the risible argument in Caroline Fraser’s recent book that lead poisoning in the Northwest explains why the region had so many serial killers. This is ridiculous. It’s not that lead couldn’t have something to do with antisocial behavior. It’s that a) the Northwest was not a massive center of lead poisoning compared to some other parts of the nation, b) there is a long, long, long history of lead poisoning at the workplace with no evidence that it leads to such activities, and c) the other places with significant lead poisoning at the same time did not lead to a bunch of serial killers. As a scholar of the contemporary Northwest and as a scholar of workplace exposure, this claim is flat out absurd.

I was not thrilled today when people in comments today on the polling post kept saying that lead poisoning is the reason Gen X sucks. I’m sorry folks, lead exposure is not why people have asshole politics. That is now how lead exposure works. That’s not what it does to your body. I don’t exactly blame Kevin Drum or Matt Yglesias for popularizing the lead thesis on the internet. It’s not as if there’s not something there. But it is vastly overstated. The real issue here is that people like back of the cocktail napkin theories that they can toss around. But the real answer–for what is going on with Gen X politics and for what was going on with the Pacific Northwest in the 70s and 80s–is complicated. It’s a complicated set of reasons around politics, culture, and economics, with perhaps a touch of public health. We need to analyze these issues as such and not fall for silly things that supposedly explain all but in fact does not explain much at all.