[holidayacct]

I'm from a family that has been in real estate since the 80s. Lead remediation was a mandatory requirement in the late 70s. There is almost no lead anywhere in the country except for cities where there were old industrial manufacturing plants or places where there was illegal dumping of materials.

You literally can't sell a home or purchase a home with lead issues because no one will purchase the property. There are exceptions where people are gaming the system by controlling the property and town inspection departments but largely lead paint poisoning is an old problem that was solved a long time ago.

The only reason children would have a drastic decreae in IQ is going to be a combination of Television and internet usage at extremely young ages which has deleterious affects on will-power, attentional focus, judgement, memory and visuo-spatial analysis. The lead argument really needs to go away it keeps popping up and it is literally impossible in most of the country.

[monocasa]

I can tell you that lots of houses weren't remediated like you'd expect. An extra layer of paint, and now 50 years on since the 70s both are chipping sort of thing.

[mikeyouse]

Yeah OP is completely wrong. There is tons of lead paint on the walls in just about every city in the US. Remediation has been completely ad hoc and the restrictions on selling a house with lead paint are almost always a single sheet o paper that says “Sign here to acknowledge that there may be lead paint.”

[astura]

According to the EPA

>Many homes, including private, federally-assisted, federally- owned housing, and childcare facilities built before 1978 have lead-based paint

https://www.epa.gov/lead/protect-your-family-lead-your-home-...

Do you think they are lying?

[wpietri]

It amazes me how long "the new thing has ruined the children" has been a trope.

You manage to combine two generations of it. Television started ruining children when the Boomers were growing up. The Millennials were ruined by the early internet. And now I hear the Zoomers are being ruined by TikTok. (Presumably Gen X was ruined by cable TV, which you left out.)

But that's just recently. The earliest iteration of this moral panic that I know of involved novels: https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/01/20/an-18th-century-mo...

That's right, the kids have been ruined since before America existed! Truly, it's amazing this steady worsening of the youth has not destroyed life as we know it.