posted
I believe he did just that. And yet, I think the points he made were mostly valid. The part I don't buy is the suggestion that there's any intent on the part of anyone to use abortion as an anti-crime measure. I think that most people are utterly unaware that there is any correlation.
Also, there's the issue of correlation vs. causation, which didn't seem to be sufficiently addressed, but then, I haven't read the book yet, so I don't consider myself competent to comment on it.
But I certainly intend to buy it now. OSC may say that he's not a book critic or a movie critic, and I agree, considering how awful most of that breed is. To me, though, he is what a book critic or a movie critic should be. I rarely ever disagree with him on movies or books, to the point where his recommendation is one of the best reasons I know to see a movie or read a book.
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Some of us aren't willing to wait until OSC's essays show up on World Watch or Uncle Orson Reviews Everything. So we click on over to the Greensboro edition of the Rhinoceros Times to get sneak peeks of unformatted versions of his essays.
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There really is global warming going on, but it's way less than the fanatics claim, and it's a natural part of the environment.
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I read parts of this essay to my mom and her first reaction was "I don't like him anymore". lol. I personally thought it was brilliant. Though I do have to say that he relies a lot on statistics gathered by others. As Benjamin Disraeli said: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
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It's not a joke. And maybe it's just me, but when someone I respect says something that seems completely off-the-wall to me, my first reaction is to try and figure out what's up. Whether the person I respect might have seen something that I haven't yet.
It's an interesting way of going about things...
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I just checked my library, and the waiting list for that book has 193 people on it!
*settles in to wait*
quote:The part I don't buy is the suggestion that there's any intent on the part of anyone to use abortion as an anti-crime measure. I think that most people are utterly unaware that there is any correlation.
I agree. What interests me more is how people's positions would change if this information was widely disseminated and believed to be true. Would there be pro-lifers who would quietly stop demonstrating and hope for abortions to remain legal, because they are scared of higher crime rates? To be honest, I can't even imagine how pro-choicers would react. Pretend that it wasn't really eugenics? Call for more education?
Well, I'm certainly looking forward to reading this book. Hopefully that will happen in the next decade.
posted
Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause.
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quote:Originally posted by BannaOj: Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause. Correlation is not cause.
I thought I said something like that.
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His conclusion on abortion, and his desire to return to a more restrictive 40's like atmosphere is fanciful and dreamlike though. That might work in the suburbs and rural areas, but the point is moot there anyways, those aren't the areas where he says the largest amount of abortions are taking place.
He claims (most likely, correctly) that inner cities and poor single mothers are the ones having all these abortions. Well alright, explain this wonder paradox in Conservative ideology: Conservatives want to get rid of abortion, and they want to cut much of welfare. Many times women in these situations have abortions because they can't care for the child. Card's suggestion is that the parent should spend many many times more effort to supervise and guard the child to keep them sexuall repressed.
Well okay, if welfare is cut, and even if it isn't, a poor single mother spends most of her time at work, not at home, which is part of the reason she probably didn't want the baby to begin with. She doesn't have the time that all those wonderful two parent suburban homes of the 40's had to supervise and nurture the kid. Wake up Card, you aren't going to make 40's style values and good times appear magically in the ghetto just by outlawing abortion.
So, what if they give the kids up for adoption? Then we have a massive influx of unwanted kids lost in a huge bungled system that produces socially stunted, and uneducated children. They will come out less able to assimilate into society, and more than twice as likely to descend into crime.
I'm not saying we should keep abortion illegal as a means to curb crime. But I do wonder what is going on in the minds of Conservatives, and in Card's mind, to think that any sort of return to the 40's style of parenting is even possible, regardless of whether or not it is a good idea.
How would you pay for the increased burden? Can't raise taxes can you? Can't increase funding to social programs? How do you deal with the increased rate in crime? The drain on the healthcare system?
They aren't arguments against illegalization, but they are questions that have to be answered, lest a idealized state of morality leads us to a future state of moral decay.
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quote:There really is global warming going on, but it's way less than the fanatics claim, and it's a natural part of the environment.
I know. That's why I said bogus global warming trends. I.e. that we're causing the warming trend we've seen in the last century (greatly exaggerated) is the part that's bogus.
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quote: There really is global warming going on, but it's way less than the fanatics claim, and it's a natural part of the environment.
And you say that with a Climatology degree from what university?
The hole in the Ozone layer isn't a natural phenomenon. Furthermore, I don't really know what you mean by "way less than the fanatics claim." Do you mean in the sense that the problems that will come out of global climate change aren't as bad as they are being made to sound? or that it isn't happening as fast as they say?
I don't know enough to speak to the second, but I know enough to contradict you on the first. The potential effects of global warming over the next 200 years could be devastating unless substantial changes are made now. And while there is some evidence to suggest that this might be part of a natural warming trend, there isn't enough data to say with certainty that man isn't intensifying the effect beyond what the natural cycle of the environment would do. There's less data on historical climatology than there is on the current state of the world and our effects on it. Saying otherwise is pure conjecture.
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quote:Wake up Card, you aren't going to make 40's style values and good times appear magically in the ghetto just by outlawing abortion.
Yea I agree with you. The one thing I hate about abstinence and abstinence only teaching in schools is that some teenagers are going to have sex anyway. If they aren't aware of safer sex options such as condoms, etc, what good will that do? This isn't the 40's or the 50's, this is the 00's.
And yea, you could say that if the kids aren't responsible enough to find out about safer sex on their own, they shouldn't be having sex anyway (leaving the marriage issue aside here), but if the information isn't readily available, how are they going to find it? I don't think teaching kids about what a condom is encourages sex, I think it encourages more informed decisions, especially for those who would have sex anyway.
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Reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes strip, BannaOj. Calvin is sitting in front of the blaring TV talking to Hobbes. Goes something like this...
"Does television glorify violence? Sure! Does it desensitize us to violence? Of course! Does it justify violence? Absolutely! Does it cause violence?
...
Well, that's hard to prove."
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I don't think this particular essay proves or disproves whether or not OSC has guts or not...it's just an essay, and he likes kicking up a ruckus, after all.
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Why would this have to be a joke? I think it's an interesting possibility, but frankly I don't think there's enough evidence on a range of subjects to be definitive in any direction.
Or are there reliable statistics on the following questions?
1. What were the demographics of people who had 'unwanted children' prior to the legalization of abortion?
2. What are the demographics of people today who have abortions?
3. What are the percentages regarding that second question?
Unfortunately I think the answers to those questions are / will be very hard to find. But I think the idea has some possibilities.
I think that children who grow up in a one-parent home with their parent away most of the time, in a bad, high-crime neighborhood, without an emphasis on education, are more likely (note: I didn't say likely) to later become criminals than other children without those penalties existing right at birth.
The question is, <1973 were those couples not having abortion? And >1973 are they now having abortions?
quote:And while there is some evidence to suggest that this might be part of a natural warming trend, there isn't enough data to say with certainty that man isn't intensifying the effect beyond what the natural cycle of the environment would do. There's less data on historical climatology than there is on the current state of the world and our effects on it. Saying otherwise is pure conjecture.
Exactly. Like other people with an axe to grind, the environmentalists we see on TV-and their industry-rep counterparts-speak only of certanties. It is happening, it's not happening, so let's make enormous economic changes, or make none at all.
Doesn't seem very sensible to me. And while the rhetoric of people who oppose environmentalists is often head-in-the-sand, the rhetoric of those who support them is often scare-tactics.
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quote:I don't think teaching kids about what a condom is encourages sex, I think it encourages more informed decisions, especially for those who would have sex anyway.
I think this is a strange argument...when properly used and manufactured, condoms afford a the opportunity for sex almost without consequences, excepting some intangible emotional issues.
Now, I'm not saying don't distribute or educate about condums. Not at all. But condums take a lot of the con (pardon the pun) from the comparison, and takes away only a bit of pro-especially for people who haven't had sex yet anyway. Seems to me that the presence of condums does have a chance to increase the likelihood of sex.
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quote:Doesn't seem very sensible to me. And while the rhetoric of people who oppose environmentalists is often head-in-the-sand, the rhetoric of those who support them is often scare-tactics.
True. I think the jury is still out on the subject, but in the mean time we should be aiming for more of a 50/50 split between fossil fuels and renewable energy. If the environmentalists are right, then we're half way to our goal, and haven't lost any time. If the anti-environmentalists are right, then we won't have wasted too much money, and we'll be more energy independent at the very least. I call that a win/win.
But the chance you take on doing nothing, is that by the time you know you have to do something, it may be too late to do anything at all.
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I've read Freakanomics, but from what I gathered from the posts here, it looks like no one else has, yet.
Which is a pity, because it's a fascinating book. As someone who's also trained (to some extent) in the tools of economics, I must say that not all of Levitt's claims can be supported - at least not in the manner he's doing it.
But the chapters on abortion and catching cheaters are spot on. (I didn't have time to read the chapter on drug dealers.) The book doesn't have the actual numbers (as it's for the general reader), but if what Levitt says is accurate, I'd have to agree with his conclusions.
Unfortunetly, OSC didn't represent Levitt's analysis as well as he ought to have. The eugenics and "killing babies" part is all OSC. And everything after the subtitle "Read It and Think" is OSC's point of view - such as the stuff on "the New Morality." Levitt , in best economist fashion, presents the facts and statistics, and let's you draw your own policy conclusions from there.
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quote:Like the claim that schools are unfair to girls (the so-called “Ophelia Complex”) when in fact the opposite is dramatically true – schools are actually hostile to boys. There is no evidence that the person who claimed to have proved the Ophelia Complex ever had any facts at all. But the claim spread through our society and shaped our perception of school, without any scientific basis whatsoever and in the face of substantial contrary evidence.
If not, he's certainly making a very strong claim in the opposite direction, yet without providing any more evidence (less, actually) than the supporters of the Ophelia Complex do.
This is one of the issues I have with OSC's articles. He states things as facts which are not, repeatedly.
Also, he makes an extremely faulty assumption in his logic: that the rate of unmarried pregnancies parallels the rate of unmarried births. That's an implied assumption for his "proof" that people in the 1950s were better at restraining himself. An alternate potential hypothesis is that many of the people not restraining themselves back then went and got married when there was a pregnancy.
Without that element, his argument is significantly flawed. There may well be other issues as well, when I came to that logic error I reduced the scrutiny I put the rest under.
A roughly 25% rise in average marriage age, particularly as nearly everyone getting married is at least 17 or 18 yet the average marriage age in 1950 was 20.3 for women, is huge, and indicates many, many people are getting married older, on average.
Significant further research would need to be done for OSC to be able to make the leap from a lower birthrate outside of marriage in the 1950s to a meaningfully lower rate of sex outside of marriage, and I strongly suspect it will turn out to be impossible.
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I didn't have time to read the entire book, but I don't think the Ophelia Complex stuff is in there. A quick look at the chapter previews at http://www.freakonomics.com/ makes me more certain that it wasn't in there.
I know all of the 1950's better morality stuff wasn't in the book. Steve Levitt says something along the lines of: the people who are most likely to have abortions are also the people who are most likely unable to raise a child well (resource-wise). Teens, unwed, poor, people with too many children to handle already: these are the people that Levitt mentions as correlated with abortions. These are also the people who are less likely to have good resources and/or enviroments to raise a child in.
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The link you posted (isteve) is very intersting, fugu, but I don't buy the guy's arguments. I think they're best presented in a Slate dialougue between Lewitt and Steven Sailor, the isteve guy, at http://slate.msn.com/id/33569/entry/33571/ His argument seems to be saying that there are so many other things, such as the crack boom and bust fo the 80's and 90's, that predict crime better, therefore abortion doesn't predict crime. Clearly a problem in that reasoning, and Lewitt points it out in the dialouge.
Lewitt's regression, as I understand it, took all of the *typical* predictors of crime rates, such as the crack thing, and then added in abortion, which resulted in a better R squared (which can be thought of as the amount that the dependent variables correlate with the independent variable. Even if there's a minor improvement in the R squareed, it's still a big deal when dealing with huge problems that have so many affecting varibles. I got a .2 correlation in my research on foreign direct investment patterns this summer, and I was thrilled.
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Funny thing about this whole essay is that it is even more unprovable than the crap he was bitching about....and he admits it. Then he goes off and says whatever he wants, warping facts and ignoring the scientific method, just to "prove" his own preconceived notion of right and wrong.
Never mind that spending on crime prevention and control reached new highs at those same time....never mind that correlation and causation are the first thing WRONG with most statistical models on crime....hell, on most things. It is the single most common error in the entire field, and has been demonstrated over and over again.
It is all the fault of the Pill and Abortion...and anyone who disagrees with this has to have poor impulse control.
Thanks god they are godless abortionites...think of what their children would have been like if they weren't murdering them in the womb...
For the first time I am truly disgusted with OSC and his views.
And that makes me sad, and angry, and most of all disappointed.
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I think the guy's positive arguments have flaws, yes, but his negative arguments are pretty persuasive (unsurprisingly; its much easier to make negative arguments).
Ignoring for the moment the question of correlation, the statistics he points out seem to significantly undermine levitt's causality argument. I don't doubt levitt's correlation argument is pretty well constructed, but a correlation also doesn't tell us very much.
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I don't think people want to hear that abortion and crime are related in any way, *or* that the 50's were better/safer/saner than today...
It was like I was telling my daughter just yesterday, If you're angry, outraged, disgusted, frustrated...
Check yourself. Start asking yourself *why* you feel that way. Chase the counter rhetoric in your head all the way back to its premises and turn *those* over. (I prefer it to counting to ten, personally. It's more productive.)
Once the surge of hormones has passed, and the ideas are merely ideas again, *then* the conversation can start.
Once we got that far with my daughter, her anger was *funny* to her, instead of hot rage, and her disgust with my parenting skills was gone.
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I read the book because of the interview, and found everything to be very believable and quite surprizing. The main reason it was believable is because Levitt doesn't come off as having any agenda whatsoever, other than to figure things out.
The abortion = less crime argument is very pursuasive because of states who legalized abortion first saw the drop in crime first.
But you have to remember, this is low-life crime. The book also deals with white colar crime, like what happened at Enron. I can't remember the exact conclusion, but I think it goes along the lines that we really have no idea how much white colar crime goes on because it is rarely discovered. Dead bodies and missing people are hard to ignore. But CEO's pocketing money often never goes discovered.
I don't remember reading about the Ophelia Complex.
Another interesting point of the book. If you have kids and you send them to a house with a gun, are your kids safe? Safer than sending your kid to a house with a pool? Pools kill more children than guns. And the ironic part of it is that the deaths are so preventable.
And another interesting point was that upper class people change names for children like they do clothing fashions. And ironically, the lower class start naming their kids the cast off names of the upper class, presumably because they want to be upper class.
My favorite part of the book was where the author detailed how the KKK was destroyed by... SUPERMAN! I'm not kidding. Read the book.
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OSC wrote a much longer article on the Ophelia Complex several years ago (not on Hatrack). I have seen it pop up several times. I am feeling lazy now, but knowing that it exists, maybe you can find the write search terms to Google it with. Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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I've noticed that no one here is offering any more evidence than OSC did, while deriding him for not offering evidence.
I HAVE read many of the books that he has based his opinions on (including Freakonomics and The War Against Boys ... where he got the stuff about the Ophelia Complex), and he DOES have good reasons to say what he says. You may not agree, but that's fine — just don't accuse him of making things up out of whole cloth. He really believes in and lives by the intellectually-rigorous attitude he promotes in the article. That doesn't mean he's always right, but it DOES mean that he doesn't deserve most of the harsh criticism he is receiving in this thread.
Lyrhawn, I'd like you to point out where he said that outlawing abortion would cause a return to '40s-era culture. I seem to recall that he saw the lack of that culture as one of the reasons that abortion became tolerable ... but I never saw him lay out a plan for returning to the old system. And where did he, at any point, adopt a typical conservative anti-welfare position?
Kwea, read the book and see what it says about crime spending and crime-prevention programs before you try to lay that down as a trump card. And you can stop putting words in his mouth. He didn't say anything about the impulse control of people who disagreed with him.
I get the impression that people reading this thread who have not read the article are probably imagining a completely different essay that what is actually there.
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The point of the chapter was to show that abortion is the only phenomenon with statistics that match those of the crime decrease, showing the strongest correlation: there's almost nothing about causality.
Further, the author goes further, to indicate that even if you DO assume causality, there are mixed moral implications, because the number of lives saved by the decrease in violent crime is still far outweighed by the number of fetuses aborted. You can be pro-life or pro-choice and still use the correlation as a means of backing up your opinion: the pro-choice crowd will use the numbers to demonstrate that abortion should continue and is a benefit to society, while the pro-life crowd will use the numbers to demonstrate that while there may be a correlation, we're committing more murders than ever.
I don't really see what people are upset about.
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1) Read a book that, from your point of view, reinforces one of your existing biases. Call it brilliant and present it as a revolutionary new blow for underdog truth.
2) While discussing the brilliance of one of the points "proved" in the book, briefly mention one of the other largely unfounded assumptions you hold to be fact and cite it as yet another example of the way the liberal elites keep "truth" from the ears of the people, even though there may not in fact have been any real controversy (much less suppression) regarding the first point, the one made by the actual book being "reviewed."
3) Find a way to insult the Baby Boomers.
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Puppy and erosomniac--thank you. You said a lot of what I was planning to.
I think much of the conflict and anger in this thread is due to people either skimming the article (if they read it at all) or never picking up the book.
I highly recommend that you read both carefully before posting. Without doing so you only clearly demonstrate your ignorance. Don't get upset unless you're sure there's something to get upset over.
For example, many of you are going on and on about correlation not being the same as causation. If you'd read the book, you would have noticed that the author clearly and frequently emphasizes this very same thing.
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quote:We expected people to control themselves, and we kept them from having the freedom to act on their impulses until they had learned how to control them.
Compare this with the method we use today: Letting mothers have someone kill their babies for them. What we used to do with words and customs, now we do in blood. With eugenics.
And the third alternative? Sexual freedom without responsibility – and the resulting children grew up to be disproportionately criminal, making the whole society less viable for everyone.
I pick A. I think B and C are both vile. That’s my opinion. But at least I took the available information into account when I reached it.
I did read the article, and that looks a lot like a call for a return to the good ole days. The latter part of that essay beats the crap out of the status quo while championing the good old days.
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Lyrhawn, I think the issue is, is it prescriptive? In other words, yes, he champions the good old days. That doesn't mean he thinks we should force everything back into Pandora's box. I suspect he doesn't believe that's possible through coercive measures like doing away with sex ed and outlawing abortion. Instead, though, he may wish it were within his power to convince people to voluntarily adopt his code of ethics--which is not the same.
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