I was listening to a podcast from the economist Tim Harford (who you should really check out if this is the first time you’re hearing of him) the other day when he said something that particularly piqued my interest. Harford said that he and everyone else his age is about five IQ points lower than they otherwise would be due to the effects of leaded gasoline on brain development in childhood.
Harford is 52. I trust his reporting, but I still wanted to look into this a bit more myself.
Keeping Law School Accessible When Federal Loans Fall Short
As federal borrowing caps tighten financing options for law students, one organization is stepping in to negotiate the terms they can't secure alone.
According to a large study published several years ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in the United States the issue is most pronounced in people who were children in the 1960s and 1970s, when leaded gas use peaked. Narrowing in even further, the research demonstrated that those born in the mid-to-late 1960s suffered worst of all, losing on average six IQ points due to constantly inhaling lead-laced auto exhaust.
Today, these most-affected folks are in their late 50s and early 60s. Though its use started to taper off after the advent of new environmental regulations, lead was only banned completely as a gasoline additive in 1996 (it was first used as early as 1923) so plenty of other generations do also suffer from lead-related impairment at lower levels.
I was born in 1985, about a decade too early to completely avoid toxic lead exposure in the air. However, my generation was the last to have a significant advantage in cognitive development that no kids will ever have again: being raised and educated without the toxic effects of smartphones.
There are all kinds of studies on the negative impacts of what today’s parents refer to as “screen time.” Although under certain conditions shoving a tablet in front of your toddler can have certain educational benefits, for the most part, “[c]hildren’s heavy reliance on screen media” has been found to fairly drastically impair cognitive development.
What Biglaw Can Learn From Personal Injury Firms
How a former insurance agent built a Houston injury practice around systems, empathy, and disciplined advocacy.
This is just going to get worse as artificial intelligence not only gets increasingly better at addicting us to our screens but also starts doing even more of our thinking for us. I always told my legal-writing students that most of them were never going to do the kind of litigation-orientated writing they were learning during their legal careers, but it was still important to learn anyway, because what it was really teaching them was how to think like a lawyer.
It might be easier to have ChatGPT write half your legal brief, and it does seem that heavy reliance on AI is already inextricably part of the legal profession. Yet, that’s not going to make for smarter lawyers coming out of law school.
We do not have a complete picture yet of how exactly the machines are interfering with the cognitive development of our young people. But we do know that kids’ math and reading scores started on a steady decline in 2013, right around the time smartphones and social media began to embed themselves in our daily lives.
There seems to be a sweet spot there in being born late enough not to have inhaled too much lead, but early enough to have been done with brain development before smartphones and monetized algorithmic social media took over. It lines up pretty well with being a Millennial.
Of course, it wasn’t inevitable that Millennials became probably the smartest living generation. Two years after leaded gasoline was first introduced, in 1925, the surgeon general temporarily suspended its production and sale. Journalists were calling it “loony gas” for the madness and death it caused in the workers producing it. Then, after a little token handwringing, we just kept using it anyway.
We knew better. The full, peer-reviewed research didn’t come out for a while, but it was well-known as soon as leaded gasoline hit the market that it couldn’t possibly be good for children’s health for our cars to be constantly spewing lead-based poison into the air.
Now we’re doing more or less the same thing all over again. Even though we don’t have all the data yet, we know enough to be certain that unregulated, unrestricted, profit-driven screen and social media use is awful for children, particularly when machine learning makes it far more addictive than humans could make it on our own.
We could do something about this. On the one hand, we have the cognitive health of every future generation to consider, and on the other we have the profits of a handful of hated billionaires. It does not seem like this should be a difficult balancing of priorities.
Yet, here in the United States, we seem to have landed on doing nothing. Maybe it’s all the lead coursing through the brains of our aging leaders.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].