Wednesday, August 22, 2007
This Just Pisses Me Off
I wrote about lead in products and product safety a few day ago. I came across this today. When I read about stuff like this it makes me angry and wonder what is wrong with us as a society. I am not a nanny state, do anything for the children kind of guy, but come on... Monetizing IQ point? This is seriously screwed up.
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4 comments:
The study cited in the article is generally accepted as a correlation between blood lead concentration and IQ. It is criticized, however, because there is no causal relationship between blood lead concentration and IQ. In other words, we don't know if lead is causing a loss in IQ or if people with lower IQ tend to have higher blood lead concentrations. It wold make sense both ways... lead might be causing a drop in IQ, or you can imagine that poorer folks tend to have a lower IQ and they tend to live in older, possibly lead painted housing.
So, the question is what to do for public policy. I sure don't want to risk lead poisoning my child, but is it responsible to legislate every correlation that gets published in a medical journal? I don't have an answer as to when it's appropriate to legislate a decision like that, but I do know that it's not as simple as lead=bad.
Good point. That same thought crossed my mind as well. Causation is certainly misunderstood and often confused with correlation. I guess the thing that pissed me off was economist monetizing IQ points.
The only place where I would disagree is that there is almost never definitive proof or a definitive causal relationship with this kind of thing. It is kind of like the global warming debate. I think the proper approach is to look at most probable outcome.
I think most scientists would agree that it is very likely that lead is in fact damaging in a variety of ways, even if we cannot prove causality. There are strong relationships between cognitive development and future criminal activity and lead. The potential societal cost is fairly high and probably worth regulating. I would say it is much clearer than say connections between cell phones and brain cancer, where the jury is truly out.
As well always, good comment...
At a minimum, it should be banned from children’s toys and should be labeled whenever it is used in a product...
is there any point that an iq point becomes too expensive?
Somewhere between inspecting everytoy individually and inspecting none there is a sweet spot that is cost effective. I do like the idea of offenders having to pay for inspections for a fixed period of time after they are caught...
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