Comment by iamnothere

I don't necessarily disagree with the idea that lead has caused a lot of issues in our society including some amount of criminality, but it's worth noting that Bentham coined the idea of the panopticon in the 18th century, and Focault and Deleuze were both talking about it as though it already existed by the 1970s. The panopticon has certainly grown into its paws since then, but the idea of a society where anyone could be under surveillance and therefore where everyone would always act as though they're under surveillance is older than the lead ban. The article you link to even references Levitt and Donohoe attributing some of the crime drop to increased police presence, which is the kind of surveillance that a lower tech society could use to implement the panopticon. You'll get no argument from me that it's several orders of magnitude more efficient now than it was in the 90s, but it was developing before the ban on lead in gasoline if we use that as our arbitrary line in the sand between pre- and post-lead eras.

You did, however, allude to one of my favorite facts about violent crime in America: far from being a cause of violent crime, the rise of violent video games has been correlated with the most dramatic drop in crime in all of recorded history. That's right y'all, it's at least arguable that not only did Doom not inspire violence, it may have actually made us safer.