To clean up the environment and improve public health, the federal government banned lead in paint and gasoline. By diminishing lead, though, it reduced the harm it was doing to young brains – harm that could push kids into delinquency. Curbing lead exposure was a big reason for the decline in violent crime that began in the 1990s.
After all, the road out of permanent destitution is not hard to identify. Why do so many people refuse to take it? Rick Santorum made this point when he ran for president in 2012. Experts, he asserted, have documented that as a rule, you have to do just three things to avoid poverty: “work, graduate from high school and get married before you have children.”
There’s much value in that formula. But putting it to use requires certain capacities. What research has starkly revealed is that poverty and other problems afflicting many black neighborhoods have a way of stunting the attributes needed to overcome them. There is a biology of poverty that is not easy to overcome.