EA - Lead exposure: a shallow cause exploration by JoelMcGuire

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Lead exposure: a shallow cause exploration, published by JoelMcGuire on April 11, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryThis shallow cause area report explores the impact of lead exposure in childhood on subjective wellbeing (SWB) in adulthood. It was completed in two weeks. We performed non-systematic searches to estimate the impact of lead exposure on SWB and to find potential cost-effective interventions.We found studies investigating two correlational longitudinal cohorts (following children to adulthood) from New Zealand and Australia analysing the relationship between childhood blood lead levels (BLLs) and adult affective mental health (MHa). Based on this data, our best guess estimate is that an additional microgram of lead per deciliter of blood for each year for ten years of childhood, leads to a total lifelong (62 years) loss of 1.5 WELLBYs, and a larger overall 3.8 WELLBYs loss when we include some guesses about household spillovers. Hence, we estimate that a modest amount of lead exposure severely impacts on wellbeing across the lifespan.From several back of the envelope calculations, we tentatively conclude that lead-reducing interventions would be 1 to 107 times more cost-effective than cash transfers. Advocacy against lead in paint, food, cookware, and cosmetics seems particularly promising.The scarcity of causal and context relevant data means that we are very uncertain about the effect and cost-effectiveness of these interventions. But, given the potentially high cost-effectiveness, we think this is a promising area for additional research. We especially encourage further research into the causal relationship between lead exposure and SWB and the most common sources of lead exposure to reduce uncertainty about the cost-effectiveness of lead interventions.It’s unclear if the top organisations working to reduce lead exposure, like Pure Earth or the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP), have sizable funding gaps. Therefore, we’re unsure how much more work should be done to evaluate funding opportunities related to reducing lead exposure for philanthropists aiming to maximise their impact.NotesThis report focuses on the impact of lead exposure in terms of WELLBYs. One WELLBY is a 1 life satisfaction point change for one year (or any equivalent combination of change in life satisfaction and time). In some cases, we convert results in standard deviations of SWB to WELLBYs using a 2 point standard deviation on 0-10 life satisfaction scales (i.e., 1 SD change is the equivalent of 2 point changes on a 0-10 life satisfaction scale). We consider the limitations of converting from affective mental health measures to WELLBYs in Appendix A4. This naive conversion is based on estimates from large scale data sets like the World Happiness Reports. See our post on the WELLBY method for more details.Our calculations and data extraction can be found in this Google Spreadsheet and this GitHub repository.The shallowness of this investigation means (1) we include more guesses and uncertainty in our models, (2) we couldn’t always conduct the most detailed or complex analyses, (3) we might have missed some data, and (4) we take some findings at face value.Clare Donaldson was co-director of HLI before becoming the current co-director of the Lead Exposure Elimination Project. We do not think this influenced our choices or analysis.OutlineIn Section 1 we introduce the issue of lead exposure and define some key terms we will use throughout the rest of this report.In Section 2 we explain the mechanisms for how lead exposure could affect wellbeing.In Section 3 we model the harm of lead exposure on subjective wellbeing using studies of two datasets from New Zealand and Australia (n = 789) relating childhood lead exposure to their adult affective mental heal...