Giuliani: Another one bites the dust?

This week, Mitt Romney was outed as cruel to animals when he exposed what should have been the beloved family dog to unimaginable stress in a crate on top of his car during a long high-speed road trip.

Today the Post reports more problems for another Republican Presidential hopeful, Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani, still trying to take advantage of being christened "America's mayor" not by New Yorkers but by Time magazine, has already lost momentum due to the troubling stories from the NYFD. Now another story in the Freakonomics vein shows that his claims of reducing crime in NYC are mostly bogus.  Here's a clip below the fold:

Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that  the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

Comments