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comment by johnnyFive
johnnyFive  ·  2583 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Clean Air Act: the best regulation

Great post, seriously #bestof material.

Out of curiosity, have you read Scott's Seeing Like a State?





wasoxygen  ·  2583 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks! I hope there are not too many errors, but some probably slipped in. I wasn't able to corroborate all the facts and relied on the magazine article more than I would like.

I also feel like I left half of the best material out. Herbert Needleman is a pediatrician and might be considered something of an activist. He told some great stories to an interviewer, starting with his own experience working at DuPont's Deepwater plant. He saw workers who worked with TEL, they just sat and stared into space. When he said he carried his cigarettes in a plastic case, my sense of irony wanted him to say it was to keep them free of lead, but it was to keep them dry from "like 13 pounds" of sweat he lost daily. He said "anything with a nervous system" should not work in such a place.

Later, he measured lead in children by having kids contribute teeth they had lost. They were to receive a solid silver half dollar in exchange.

    I discovered that some of the dentists were giving the kids two quarters and keeping the half dollars. I spoke at a community meeting and I said, “How’d you like that Kennedy half dollar?” And [the kids] said, “What do you mean? I got two quarters.” This was my first experience with the corrupting power of cash in science.

Seeing Like a State looks quite interesting after reading Scott Alexander's review.

johnnyFive  ·  2582 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I think you'd like it, although I had less of a conundrum with it than he did (it was one of many books I cited for my undergrad history thesis, which was on urban planning as a tool of The Man).