My Talk About Lead

A recent presentation

Yesterday, I gave a talk about lead poisoning at the University of Stirling. 

This saga began when an economics professor there who reads my site The Fitzwilliam invited me to come speak to his MSc class. It took a while for the timing to work out, but I’m glad we persisted. I had free rein to talk about almost anything I wanted, so I thought a good fit would be lead poisoning. Lead combines many of my interests: global health, causal inference, amusing historical anecdotes, and the general idea that there is low-hanging fruit to improve the world if you are high-agency. 

You can view my slides here; I talked for a bit under an hour. I couldn’t resist going on a tangent about the grimly ironic life of Thomas Midgley Jr., featuring a cameo from Albert Einstein’s alternate fridge design.

The co-author of one of the two meta-analyses about whether lead caused the 1960s crime wave also happens to be a professor at Stirling, and I bumped into him after the talk.  

I can’t emphasise enough that I have no actual expertise in this topic. The vibe was an informal discussion about some of my interests with a small group. This is also why it wasn’t recorded. 

The end of my slides contains a list of links I found helpful in reading about lead. If you want me to give a talk to your students/society/friends about any of my random side interests, you can email sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com. 

Many thanks to the University of Stirling for having me! And before you ask: Yes, several people have already asked me whether my talk went down better than a lead balloon. Your dad jokes need work.