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It all makes sense now:
Climate Change Denialism. The American Health Care System. Trickle Down Economics. The Student Loan Crisis. Criminalization of Gender Affirming Care for Children by State Legislatures. For Profit Prisons. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Ayn Rand. Sean Hannity. The Clintons. The Magic Bullet Theory. Glenn Youngkin. Q. Dancing with the Stars.
Let me face it: My Own Sad Life.
It comes down to 2 letters: Pb. Not peanut butter, Fool! Plumbum! For you non-Latin speakers, that's Lead! Civilization tumbling, intelligence sapping Lead.
From the 1920s to 1996 in the US (slightly earlier or later elsewhere across the planet), lead was a common ingredient in gasoline in the form of Tetraethyllead, an anti-knock and performance enhancing additive whose utility, ready availability and cheapness was discovered, patented, produced and promoted originally by a joint venture of Standard Oil and General Motors but adopted universally by the automotive industry across the globe. Despite health warnings raised from the very start, its use became standard in fuels around the world. Regular leaded gasoline was cheaper than unleaded, and as its use in cars and aircraft (above and beyond its use in paint and in plumbing) proliferated, the concentration of lead in the air and soil increased. Encountering it in the environment became in many parts of the country for an extended period of time inevitable.
Every schoolchild of the time learned that the downfall of Rome could be attributed to the lead pipes that carried its water, but there's apparently a reason we were too stupid to draw a parallel between Rome and what was happening in our own atmosphere due to the automotive explosion of the last century. Per a recent study published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) website:
During the peak era of leaded gasoline in the United States, which ran from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the average blood–lead level (BLL) for the general US population was routinely three to five times higher than the current reference value for clinical concern and case management referral (3.5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood). Consequently, millions of adults alive today were exposed to high levels of lead as children. While these exposures were deemed harmless at the time, animal studies and epidemiological evidence accrued in the intervening years reveal that such exposures likely disrupted healthy development across multiple organ systems (particularly the brain, bone, and cardiovascular systems), resulting in subtle deficits to important outcomes, such as cognitive ability, fine motor skills, and emotional regulation, that may influence the trajectory of a person’s life (e.g., their educational attainment, health, wealth, and happiness). These deficits largely persist across time and, in some cases, worsen and are now hypothesized to put individuals at risk for difficult-to-treat chronic and age-related diseases, including cardiovascular disease and dementia.
The upshot:
A total of 824,097,690 million IQ points were lost because of childhood lead exposure among the US population by 2015. This number equates to an average of 2.6 IQ point deficit per person.
According to the study, "More than 90% of those born between 1950 and 1980 experienced BLLs in excess of 5 µg/dL, the threshold considered “safe” for children. The legacy of early life lead exposure will stay in the United States for decades to come."
I don't put much stock in IQ. Then again I'm one of those idiots born during the era of peak lead emissions during which an average of as many as 5.9 IQ points per person were lost. Because of its ubiquity in the air, in the soil, in the infrastructure upon which the nation was built, the banning of lead from gasoline alone was not enough to eradicate its predicted effects for generations of Americans to come. As demonstrated by the water crisis of Flint, Michigan* that started in 2014 and is not yet fully resolved, in which austerity impositions on a public works project resulted in lead from ancient piping leaching into the water supply of over 100,000 mostly poor residents causing demonstrable health and cognitive issues in children, we have not learned anything. But maybe now we know why we have not learned anything.
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* The most famous of the many lead incidents since 2000 that have been and will continue to be repeated elsewhere.
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