There's also a fascinating, depressing, unhappy kind of long-term issue here. And something worth connecting it back to is that this isn't the first recent story that in some fundamental way had lead as a big part of it. If people remember the death of Freddy Gray in Baltimore which was a really big story in 2015. This was a young guy and he was arrested by police and then put in a police van and appears to have been unrestrained in that van and handcuffed and shackled. They drove the van in such a way that he ended up snapping his spine and dying and it was a really terrible story. But something that was a terrible part of the backstory was that Freddie Gray had had very high levels of lead poisoning as a child. So high in fact that his family had been in lawsuits with — I don't remember if it's the developers or the city — but there were lawsuits around the amount of lead that that family was exposed to. And one thing that high levels of early lead exposure will do, as Matt said, is lead to reduced IQ, high levels of Attention Defecit Disorder, less executive function in controlling your behavior. So it will lead to kids in many ways having a much harder time doing well in school and staying out of trouble, especially in their teenage years. There have been arguments about this data, but there's a lot of correlational data connecting lead to crime rates. There's more recent studies casting doubt on some of it, but there seems to be something there.
One thing we do in American life that I think is a very tough thing — and you see it whenever we have debates about a young kid who ends up in some kind of really terrible police altercation — is that we get into this conversation about "angels vs not angels", like the kind of Michael Brown, "he was no angel" line in the New York Times. Or, with Freddie Gray, here was a kid who'd been in trouble with the police a number of times. We have this really deep sympathy for the child who is at a crappy urban school and does really well at that school and stays out of trouble but still doesn't have great outcomes in life. We really feel that. That's somebody who did their job in the American meritocracy and then didn't get where we should have put them and we worry about that social mobility and we worry about it a lot. It's something Republicans talk a lot about; it's something Democrats talk a lot about. But we'll also allow things to happen in American life like kids get exposed to lead a lot when they're young and then when they are in high school they don't get good grades and they don't stay out of trouble. And then we're more willing to write them off. We're more willing to say 'ok well these kids did not do their job in the meritocracy'. They're kind of getting, if not what's coming to them, at least they're not where our real concern should be. But often times the ability to work hard, the ability to be disciplined, the ability to latch onto what your teachers are telling you and understand it quickly so that you can get those positive feedback loops in school, those are traits that are driven by all kinds of natural and genetic and environmental factors. And one thing that we often don't do, particularly for poor children, is they have much much worse ecosystems that they grow up in for all kinds of reasons. There's more crime, there's more environmental toxins, there's less safety, there's less regularity, they're not spoken to as much. And then we are very comfortable completely blaming them for their outcomes in life. And we comfort ourselves, particularly those of us who grew up in more stable circumstances, that our success is meritted and their failures are also merited, that we worked hard and they didn't. But I do think that one part of the lead story, and particularly the lead story from urban inner cities, is that it is a contributor to long term inequality and lack of mobility in America. But it's a contributor in a way that even though we know it, we don't like to think about it very much because there's not a lot we can do about it on the backend. There's something we could do to do lead abatement now but we can't go back. And it really is in sharp tension, it's the kind of thing that should make us question ways in which America is and is not a meritocracy and the ways in which we are and aren't comfortable blaming people for their ultimate outcomes in life because it really does have these effects which are deeply insidious and end up coming out in things like acadmic acheivement or staying out of trouble that we tend to judge in isolation but are heavily affected by the childhood environment that is not anything under that kid's control.