Reading this, which I thoroughly enjoyed, I also began to wonder at how we decide whether reaction times are 'good enough' or not.

Specifically, lead was known to be harmful and to be produced in large quanties in automobiles at least by the 1950s with the work Patterson did. So within 25 years of rather game-changing avant-garde research (it was literally a libel suit to say this just a few years before in '37), the Clean Air Act was passed and enforced. So from libel to legal it took 42 years.

So is that too slow? Did government reaction time take too long? Because as also brought up, a major impetus in the adoption of these standards was the development of catalytic converters and their aversion to lead.

It's like how Obama put controls on coal plants in a major way, but after natural gas destroyed the coal industry anyway. Leaded gas went extinct after catalytic converters were going to go on cars (also admittedly at the order of the government).

And in the first place, we were talking about this in the other conversation about how regulation and centralization of power is an inherent attractant for the corrupting influence of the regulated. So what do we see here? Government doing exactly what industry wanted, doing shoddy scientific work for a long as possible, and legitimizing the use of leaded gasoline by repeatedly, and knowingly providing false information under official auspices.