October 3, 2005

John Zmirak on Bennett and Freakonomics

On FrontPage.com, Zmirak explains the Rules of the Great American Race Game:

1) Thou shalt ignore any statistics that cast racial minorities, even provisionally, in an unflattering light.

2) Thou shalt condemn anyone who mentions these statistics as a racist, even if you know that he is not a racist. The truth is not important. The important thing is the taboo.

3) Thou mayst entertain and promote racist fantasies of eliminating poor babies, Hispanic babies, and black babies in the womb, so long as you don’t mention their race. It’s okay to kill them, but not to mention their race.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Alberto Gonzales with two X chromosomes

Regarding Bush's nomination of his personal lawyer / flunky Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, a reader writes to contend that it's all my fault:

It looks like Bush read your American Conservative piece on Gonzales and decided to go with a different Bush family consigliere this time.

The President, he's really something, isn't he? He must be thinking that by nominating a qualified individual in John Roberts, he has satisfied his entire Good Government obligation for this entire term, and now can get back to appointing loyal Arabian Horse Show judges and the like.

That a nimrod like George W. Bush is President of the United States (and that he beat an empty suit like John F. Kerry) is conclusive proof that there is something fundamentally wrong with our entire system of generating and selecting Presidential candidates. We need to do some serious thinking about how to reform the whole system to produce better Presidents.

A reader responds:

When the courts over the last 40 years converted every important decision made by American government, outside of foreign policy and budgeting, into a Constitutional question that would be decided by the courts, they turned elected governors into essentially French provincial administrators and elected legislators into, at best, accountants and at worst, poseurs, symbols, misery pimps, ideological hood ornaments and male models.

This is who we pick our presidential candidates from.

Well, to depress you more, I don't even blame Bush for an immigration proposal that is bad on its face. Instead, I wonder, what are the other 300 Republican congressman, senators and governors proposing on immigration, either whacko or worthwhile? I don't expect the President to have all the answers, much less all the right answers, to every question.

Moreover, it wasn't this way before, roughly, the early 1970s. If there was a problem or national issue, there was intense activity in the House, Senate and in many states to remedy or resolve it. Wise or unwise, there were proposals and politicians willing to advance them. Only by doing that, or by implementing new ideas in states and having success with them, could a man promote himself as presidential timber.

Now, with a handful of exceptions like Gingrich, Thompson or Guiliani, the opposite is true. You run for President like Clinton [or Kerry] did, by simply occupying office inoffensively forever and then making a dash for the finish line in a two-month campaign.

So the courts' preemption of controversial political issues has some benefits for elected leaders. Or at least it established customs with which they have become very comfortable.

One important step would be to get rid of gerrymandering of Congressional (and state legislative) seats to protect incumbents. Members of the House now see their jobs as lifetime sinecures ... unless they make a "gaffe." That's one reason why Congress has never undertaken to fulfill its Constitutional duty to declared war in the last 60 years -- having to go on record, pro or con, on something that gets voters as interested as war is the kind of thing that might get them voted out of office if they voted on what turned out to be the unpopular side. Better to just let the President worry about that.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

DeLong and Yglesias diverge in response to Franke-Ruta's hissy fit

After Garance Franke-Ruta of The American Prospect denounced liberal bloggers Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias for pointing out that Bill Bennett actually hadn't called for genocide and racism, economist DeLong offers a "partial recantation." In contrast to Franke-Ruta's frank Damn-the-Truth stance, DeLong has settled upon Darn-the-Truth.

In contrast, Yglesias shows backbone in his posting "I Recant Nothing." In the past, I've referred to him as "child prodigy blogger Matthew Yglesias," but he's starting to grow up fast.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 2, 2005

The iSteve.com Bad Bet Service adds a Moral Preening option

When John Tierney's NYT's op-ed column was taken out of free distribution, I saw a market niche opening up, so I announced the iSteve.com Bad Bet Service. In the tradition of that fellow named Matthew Simmons who got his new "Twilight in the Desert" peak oil book an entire NYT op-ed column's worth of publicity by betting Tierney $5,000 that oil would cost over $200 per barrel in 2010, I am pleased to accept any bet with the odds rigged hideously in my favor in return for my publicizing our wager on iSteve.com.

Now, in the wake of the Bill Bennett Brouhaha, I'm proud to announce a new use for my Bad Bet Service: moral preening. I've noticed that in online discussions of why Bennett's statement was evil, the more rational of Bennett's critics have been forced fall back through three stages of accusation:

- "Bennett advocated genocide of blacks!"

- "Well, okay, he was actually speaking out against aborting blacks, but he still implied that blacks have a higher crime rate!"

- "Well, I guess, [cough, mumble] blacks do have a higher crime rate, but Bennett was still evil because he assumed that the generation of blacks just now being conceived will have a higher crime rate when they grow up in 20 years and [triumphantly] that's WRONG!

So, I'm offering each and every critic of Bennett a chance to prove to the world what a morally superior anti-racist you are by putting your money where your mouth is. You can loudly bet me a large amount of money that you believe that in 2025 young African-Americans will have a per capita violent crime rate (according to U.S. government statistics) no higher than young white Americans. I will publicize your wager. For 20 years, you will get to boast that you are a true believer in racial equality, as shown by your having bet real money against evil old me. Of course, in 20 years, I will win the bet and take your money out of the escrow account, but just think of all the status-seeking points you will score in the meantime!

E-mail me now with your bets! What do you have to lose (besides your money)?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Ancient Middle East wisdom

Ancient Middle East wisdom:

The friend of my enemy is my enemy.
The enemy of my friend is my enemy.
The friend of my friend is my enemy.
The enemy of my enemy is my enemy.
My friend is just my enemy whom I haven't gotten to know well enough yet.

(Okay, I just made it up. But it sure sounds authentic...)


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Hey, Hitch, why don't you debate Gen. Odom?

By most accounts, Christopher Hitchens got beat badly in his debate over Iraq with unseemly blowhard M.P. Gorgeous George Galloway. But Hitch is convinced he actually won. So, instead of debating a clown like Galloway, why doesn't Hitch pick on somebody who actually knows what he's talking about? For example, retired general William E. Odom, who was director of the National Security Administration under Reagan and Zbigniew Brzezinski's military intelligence adviser under Carter. Here's what Odom just said about Hitchens' beloved Iraq Attaq:

The invasion of Iraq was the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history,” a retired Army general said yesterday, strengthening an effort in Congress to force an American withdrawal beginning next year. Retired Army Lt. Gen. William Odom, a Vietnam veteran, said the invasion of Iraq alienated America's Middle East allies, making it harder to prosecute a war against terrorists.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

New Facts Undermining the Freakonomics Abortion-Crime Theory

There are two problems with Steven D. Levitt's popular theory (brought back into prominence by Bill Bennett's remarks) that legalizing abortion lowered the crime rate: it didn't work in historical reality and it doesn't even work in theory.

His theory, at least in the expunged version presented in Freakonomics (as opposed to the more race-based eugenic version in his 2001 academic paper) rests on the claim that abortion is more likely to get rid of "unwanted" fetuses, who would be more likely to grow up to be bad guys.

One difficulty with this theory is that legalizing abortion greatly increased the number of unwanted pregnancies (by almost 30%, according to Levitt), and not all of those ended up being aborted, so what the net effect was in terms of "pre-conception wantedness" is extremely uncertain.

But the second problem is the question of "unwanted by whom?" I've argued since 1999 that the use of legalized abortion is more likely to appeal to upwardly mobile women, and thus will tend to make society more, not less, underclass. Studies by the team of Katherine Trent and Eve Powell-Griner support my intuition. A criminologist writes me:

I am surprised that there isn't more research examining the predictors of abortion. I wonder if academics avoid it because the truth takes away from the "Cider House Rules" myth of abortion-users being incest victims. What little research I can find portrays abortion as a choice of an economically-minded woman. ... Kathy Trent looked at 500,000 pregnancies and found that risk of abortion rises with education among single women... She did find that, whereas unmarried blacks keep their babies more than unmarried whites, married black women are more likely to get an abortion than married whites. Trent suggests that married black women are more likely to be breadwinners than married whites--babies get in the way of bringing home the bacon. These findings do not seem consistent with Levitt's assumption that abortions are concentrated among those people most likely to produce criminals.

Trent and Griner's research, along with other studies undermining Levitt's central argument, was pointed out to Levitt by CCNY economist Ted Joyce in his response to Levitt & Donohue in the Journal of Human Resources, which was entitled "Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime?" Joyce summed up two reason why Levitt's theory didn't work. The second was:

Second, analysts, I being one, have tended to overestimate the selection effects associated with abortion. A careful examination of studies of pregnancy resolution reveals that women who abort are at lower risk of having children with criminal propensities than women of similar age, race and marital status who instead carried to term. For instance, in an early study of teens in Ventura County, California between 1972 and 1974, researchers demonstrated that pregnant teens with better grades, more completed schooling, and not on public assistance were much more likely to abort than their poorer, less academically oriented counterparts (Leibowitz, Eisen, and Chow 1986).

Studies based on data from the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) make the same point (Michael 2000; Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders 1999). Indeed, Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders (1999) found that teens who abort are similar along observed characteristics to teens that were never pregnant, both of whom differ significantly from pregnant teens that spontaneously abort or carry to term.

Nor is favorable selection limited to teens. Unmarried women that abort have more completed schooling and higher AFQT [the military's IQ test for applicants for enlistment] scores than their counterparts that carry the pregnancy to term (Powell-Griner and Trent 1987; Currie, Nixon, and Cole 1995).

In sum, legalized abortion has improved the lives of many women by allowing them to avoid an unwanted birth. I found little evidence to suggest, however, that the legalization of abortion had an appreciable effect on the criminality of subsequent cohorts.

Surely, Levitt must have read Joyce's response to his paper. If so, Levitt knew that his central theoretical argument was extremely dubious, but he didn't mention any of that when he pushed his "unwantedness" theory in Freakonomics this year, to vast acclaim and buckets of money. (Freakonomics is currently the #2 bestseller on Amazon.com).

Isn't it about time for the economics profession to conduct an inquiry into the professional ethics, such as they are, of Dr. Steven D. Levitt? How much ethical leeway should a scholar have in intentionally misleading the public in order to make money and become a celebrity?

So, what are the odds that the Golden Boy will ever be put on the spot by his profession or the media over his theory? A million to one? Too many important people have too much invested in the maintenance of Levitt's glamour. Levitt's media apotheosis is the most exciting thing to happen to an economics professor in years, so the profession has a vested interest in preserving his reputation.

In the unlikely event that Levitt is ever pinned down and forced to explain, Levitt's defense, logically, would have to be that his theory is still plausible because of raw racial eugenic logic: Sure, when all else is kept equal, the women who got abortions were more likely to raise law-abiding children than their equivalents who went ahead and had the babies, but (to quote Levitt and Donohue's 2001 paper):

"Fertility declines for black women are three times greater than for whites (12 percent compared to 4 percent). Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions."

In other words, Levitt would have to argue that: Even though the quality of the upbringing of the next generation of black youths went down because of legalization, the brute fact is that legal abortion still reduced the ratio of black births to white births. If you assume that blacks from upwardly mobile families are still more criminally inclined than whites from downwardly mobile families, then even though legalization lowered the average quality of the black population, it decreased the quantity of blacks so much relative to the quantity of whites that the average quality of Americans overall went up because abortion reduced the black share of the population!

Personally, I think legalization was bad for America overall because of the impact it had on lowering the quality of African-American upbringings. An awful lot of black kids who would have been raised to be strivers got aborted, so the ones who got born had more careless upbringings on average. Thus, legalization contributed, in some measure, to the the decline in African-American culture, symbolized by the popularity since the late 1980s of an entire musical style devoted to boasting about how murderous the rapper is. Interestingly, both gangsta rap and the crack business that it celebrated, emerged in the late 1980s out of the two major states that legalized abortion in 1970: California and New York. Coincidence? Maybe ... maybe not.

The bottom line is that we're all in this together, white and black, and something that lowers the quality of one of our communities, such as legalized abortion apparently did to blacks, hurts all of us.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 1, 2005

The egregious Garance Franke-Ruta is back

On The American Prospect's blog TAPPED, Garance Franke-Ruta, who denounced me last year for saying "But I believe the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking," is now criticizing her fellow liberals Matt Yglesias and Brad DeLong for not distorting Bill Bennett's statement about abortion. Instead, truth be damned, liberals should be practicing racial demagoguery in order to get "southern African Americans" all riled up (because, apparently, southern African Americans aren't into "cleverness)." You really have to read this:

"OUTRAGE VERSUS CLEVERNESS. One of the reasons the left has such a difficult time moving public opinion is that, all too often, it reacts with cleverness to situations where outrage would be a more appropriate response. Bill Bennett yesterday offered left bloggers a golden opportunity to make political hay, and what do we have? The spectacle of them explaining his remarks away in order to prove ... what exactly? That they, too, studied Latin and philosophy?

"Let me break the significance of this down in strict political terms. The last time Democrats gained seats in Congress, in 1998, it was thanks, in part, to unusually heavy voter turnout by southern African Americans....

So Bennett's comment is ... a statement that could scarcely have been better designed to outrage a critical part of the Democratic base.

Brad DeLong
, however, sees this as a great opportunity to defend Bennett for "attempting a reductio ad absurdum argument." I mean, what is the point of this other than to prove his own cleverness? Yglesias similarly takes Bennett's comments as an opportunity to assert that "the empirical claim here is unambiguously true."

Um, really? I rather thought that there was no empirical claim here. Does Yglesias really believe that he knows what a world in which there were no more black children would be like? One could equally well argue, since we are in the realm of science fiction, that such an occurence [sic] would wreak psychological, cultural, and economic devastation on America's cities, with God only knows what impact on crime. Every major city would start to look like Detroit, depopulated and run-down where it had formerly been vibrant.

Ah, my favorite word: "vibrant"! How do you know when a liberal is lying? When she uses "vibrant."

Uh, Garance, are you sure that you really want to use Detroit as your example?

Elementary schools would be the first to close, then high schools, then colleges. Tax bases would be wiped out. Whole swathes of the workforce would disappear, simultaneously depriving people of needed jobs and cities of employees to run necessary services. Who knows what would happen in such an environment -- it is really both unknowable and unthinkable.

Anyone who thinks they know what would happen is making assumptions. Implicit in Bennett's statement is the assumption that African Americans contribute only criminality to America, and that if he could he wave his magic wand and bring African Americans' tenure in this nation to an end, that is all that would disappear. That's what's offensive about his statement.

Garance, I realize you're not into "cleverness," but Bennett was saying that aborting all blacks would be a bad thing and that he was against it Specifically, he said in the same breath that it would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do." Moreover, he raised the issue precisely to oppose aborting anybody, no matter what legal abortion's side effects might be.

Garance, I know you are against cleverness and I know you are against telling the truth, but did it ever occur to you that you'd be a better professional liar, as you aspire to be, if you tried not to be a complete moron when you lie?

By the way, Garance, you should make sure never to tell the truth yourself, as you did in criticizing "Bowling for Columbine" The American Prospect in which you wrote:

"Nor are Moore's suburban white gun owners, no matter how ridiculous their fears, the reason that black Americans were six times more likely to be murdered than whites in 1999, and seven times more likely to commit homicides."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 30, 2005

"Proof"

In the movie adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning play, Gwyneth Paltrow plays the daughter of a brilliant and insane John Nash-like mathematician (Anthony Hopkins) who worries about which of her father's attributes she inherited, while handsome young U. of Chicago math prof Jake Gyllenhaal tries to get her to notice him. From my review in the upcoming American Conservative:

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, an affectionate romp through the mathematics of chaos theory, and his Hapgood, an inexplicable explication of quantum mechanics, are the masterpiece and failure, respectively, of the theatre's recent interest in scholars. Other examples include Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, Margaret Edson's Wit, and David Auburn's Proof, a drama about mathematicians that ran for 900 performances on Broadway, a street not previously known for its math-friendliness.

Some critics have derided Proof as "middlebrow" for showing few of the formulas that obsess the main characters. In reality, "middlebrow" is a compliment, since it means a script pitched well above the contemporary average. In the admirable middlebrow tradition, Proof displays a healthy respect for mathematicians and an informative interest in those aspects of their careers that we can comprehend, such as their fear of losing their creativity before they hit 30...

The film version of "Proof," fortunately, is largely lacking in the feminist resentment that has been focused on college math departments since last winter's Larry Summers brouhaha (for instance, all 30 full professors at the U. of Chicago are male). As Gyllenhaal's lovelorn character makes clear, there's nothing the men of mathematics would like more than for beautiful young women to share their passion.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Levitt, you duplicitous son-of-a-gun

Today, responding to Bill Bennett's controversial citation of his theory that legalizing abortion cut crime, economist Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the bestseller Freakonomics, asserted on his blog that "Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics." Indeed, Levitt left out any mention of the much higher abortion and crime rates found among blacks from his best-selling book. However, his 2001 academic paper with John J. Donohue contains this passage:

Fertility declines for black women are three times greater than for whites (12 percent compared to 4 percent). Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions. Under the assumption that those black and white births eliminated by legalized abortion would have experienced the average criminal propensities of their respective races, then the predicted reduction in homicide is 8.9 percent. In other words, taking into account differential abortion rates by race raises the predicted impact of abortion legalization on homicide from 5.4 percent to 8.9 percent.

[Thanks to James Taranto --SS.]

In other words, race accounts for 39% of the putative Levitt Effect on supposedly reducing homicides. You can judge for yourself whether 39% is "not an important part."

So, in the wake of the crucifixion of Bill Bennett for mentioning one of the major aspects of Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory, I'd like to ask how come the entire respectable world gave Levitt's Freakonomics book tongue-baths last spring, praising him for his "courage" in pushing his abortion-crime theory. For example, the NYT gave his book two rave book reviews, a rave op-ed column, and they hired him to write a regular "Freakonomics" column for the NYT Magazine!

So, why didn't the Levitt Effect actually happen in the real world? Why didn't this conventional piece of eugenic and/or eucultural reasoning work? First, as I pointed out to Levitt in 1999, the crack wars happened in between the data points he looked at in 1985 and 1997. (Ironically, on the rare occasions when Levitt now deigns to answer his critics, he emphasizes the impact of crack, which he was barely cognizant of until I explained it to him in our Slate debate.) The Levitt Effect, if it even exists, was overwhelmingly swamped by much more powerful forces.

But, it's quite possible that legalizing abortion boosted the black violent crime rate among those youths born after legalization in 1970-1973. To see why that's quite possible, it's important to focus on the realism of that assumption Levitt made in 2001 when he wrote:

Under the assumption that those black and white births eliminated by legalized abortion would have experienced the average criminal propensities of their respective races ...

What if, instead, among blacks, aborted fetuses had instead been more likely to grow up in well-run homes and become solid law-abiding citizens? To a white college professor like Levitt, that seems inconceivable, but it actually is rather plausible. As I told him in 1999:

[Your] logic implies that legalized abortion should reduce illegitimacy. And since illegitimacy is closely linked to crime, therefore abortion must reduce crime. Right? Yet, abortion and illegitimacy both soared during the '70s, and then the youth violent-crime rate also soared when the kids born during that decade hit their teens. How come?

In theory, legal abortion reduces murder by being, in effect, "prenatal capital punishment." But, first, it's not very efficient. Like Herod, we have to eradicate many to get the one we want. While genes and upbringing do affect criminality, there's so much randomness that predicting the destiny of individual fetuses is hard.

Second, what if besides a contraceptive-using bourgeoisie and an abortion-using working class, there also exists an underclass to whom, in the words of Homer Simpson, "Life is just a bunch of things that happen"? What if in the '70s members of the underclass didn't effectively use either contraception or abortion, but, being too destitute or distracted or drunk or drugged, they just tended to let s*** happen all the way to the maternity ward? And what if the legalization of abortion gave them an excuse to be even less careful about avoiding pregnancy? In fact, in your paper you cite evidence that 60 percent to 75 percent of all fetuses aborted in the '70s would never have been conceived without legal abortion. If that's what happened across all classes, the increase in careless pregnancies specifically among the underclass might have been so big that it negated the eugenic or euculturalist effects of abortion.

Thus, legalizing abortion would have thinned the ranks of the respectable black working class but not the black underclass. Its cultural influence would therefore have mounted. Just compare the working-class black music of the '60s (e.g., Motown) with the underclass gangsta rap of the late '80s, which spread the lethal bust-a-cap code of the East Coast and West Coast crack dealers across America.

Third, legalizing abortion finished off the traditional shotgun wedding. Earlier, the pill had shifted responsibility for not getting pregnant to the woman. Then, legal abortion relieved the impregnating boyfriend of the moral duty of making an honest woman out of her. This would drive up the illegitimacy rate.

Finally, even more speculatively, but also more frighteningly, the revolution in social attitudes that excused terminating the unborn may also have helped persuade violent youths that they could be excused for terminating the born.

One of my readers who was an inner city social worker strongly endorses this theory that abortion hollowed out the black middle class. She says that in her experience, the black women who had abortions tended to be the "strivers," while the ones who had children out of wedlock instead were the less intelligent, less organized, and less ambitious

Recently, she pointed out to me that some data reported by Charles Murray in the September 2005 issue of Commentary from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth contradicts Levitt's assumption:

Now I'm soooooo confused! As you point out, Charles Murray in his article "The Inequality Taboo," has "calculated that 60% of the babies born to black women who began participating in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth in 1979 were born to women with IQs below the black female average of 85.7. Only 7% were born to black women with IQs over 100."

But wait, weren't all those [low IQ, lower class] women having abortions? That's what genius economist Steven Levitt says in his super-brilliant book *Freakonomics,* where he tells us that abortion cut crime substantially because it kept hordes of little ghetto marauders from being born. Well, OK, Levitt doesn’t exactly put it that way, but we all know what he means (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

If we are to believe Murray's figures, then it would seem that the black women who had abortions must actually have been the *brighter* ones -- whose children (had they been born), would statistically have been less likely to commit crimes than those born to lower-IQ women.

Could this mean that Levitt is, ahem, wrong?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

One more point on the Bennett Freakonomics brouhaha

One of the logical distinctions that needs to be made in thinking about the purely hypothetical effect on crime of a prenatal genocide of an entire ethnic group is:

Are we talking about what would be the impact on the total number of crimes in the country?

Or are we talking about the impact on the national per capita crime rate?

Steven D. Levitt, author of the abortion-cut-crime theory, tries to glide past the nasty racial implications of his theory by claiming on his blog:

... if you prohibit any group from reproducing, then the crime rate will go down)...

But that's not true. If all future Asian-Americans were aborted, the national crime rate, as measured in per capita terms, would go up because the Asian-American crime rate is below the national average. (Asian-Americans in 2001 were incarcerated per capita only 22% as often as whites and only 3% as often per capita as African-Americans.)

For ethnic groups with higher than average crime rates, the opposite would be true.

Now, please don't claim I'm advocating genocide. Indeed, for six years, I've been a voice crying in the wilderness saying that Levitt's theory that abortion-cut-crime turns out not to be true when you look at the actual historical record in any detail, which Levitt failed to do when he concocted it.

For an explanation of one reason, besides the crack wars, why the black violent crime rate shot up among the cohort born after legalization of abortion, see here.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Levitt on Bennett

On his Freakonomics blog, economist Steven D. Levitt, the main promoter of the old theory that legalizing abortion cut crime, writes:

2) Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics.

C'mon, Steve, try being frank about your abortion-crime theory for once. Your widely circulated draft paper in 1999 argued that one reason abortion should have cut crime is because blacks, per capita, have more abortions and commit more crimes. (See this NYT story from 1999 for the details). You dropped that reference later to stay out of trouble.

It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets).

Oh, boy ... where to begin?

- "Except homicide"? -- That reminds me of the old joke: "Except for that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"

- The homicide gap existed long before crack was invented in the 1980s. Back in 1976, the first year of separate black and white data in the Bureau of Justice Statistics website, the black homicide rate per capita was 9.5 times the white rate.

- Further, I'm highly dubious that the racial aspect of homicide is all that different. In the important new report "The Color of Crime, 2005," the incarceration rate is broken out for a variety of crimes by ethnicity. (The authors split out Hispanics from whites, unlike many of the other crime statistics, which makes them more accurate and the black to white ratio even higher because Hispanics are imprisoned, overall, 2.9 times more per capita than non-Hispanic whites.)

Judging from the graph in Fig. 9 of "The Color of Crime, 2005," (I don't have the exact data), the black to non-Hispanic white ratio for incarceration for murder is 8.3 to 1. But for all crimes overall, blacks are imprisoned 7.2 times more often than whites, so the difference isn't that great. And blacks are incarcerated 33 times more than Asian-Americans!

For robbery, the black-white ratio looks like about 14.8 to 1, or nearly 2 to 1 over the homicide rate.

Aggravated assault looks like about 7.3 to 1. Other violent crimes are lower (rape is about 3.0 to 1), but the overall violent crime incarceration ratio is about 7.1 to 1, not too different from the homicide ratio.

Strikingly, the non-violent incarceration ratio is just as bad, also in the 7 to 1 rate. This is driven in part by drug offenses, which are in the 12.5 to 1 area. But, blacks are incarcerated for non-drug property crimes about 5.1 times the white rate.

Blacks even get themselves thrown in jail for white collar crimes disproportionately: 4.0 times more often for fraud, 5.1 times more often for "Bribery / Conflict of Interest," 3.2 times for racketeering, and even 2.9 times more often for embezzlement. I suspect you'd have to go all the way to high end white collar crimes like anti-trust violations and insider trading to find ones where whites have higher per capita rates.

In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement. Empirically, what matters is the fact that abortions are disproportionately used on unwanted pregnancies, and disproportionately by teenage women and single women.

First of all, for the purpose of discussing whether or not the Levitt Effect of abortion driving down the crime rate works in part by aborting more black fetuses per capita than white fetuses, these kinds of attempts at "underlying explanations" are largely irrelevant. (The real objection to the Levitt Effect is that, judging from the historical record, it didn't work at all.)

Second, I find this highly dubious. Levitt doesn't cite any research supporting this. And even if he did, I've found that when I go an read his reports, his track record for veracity in his claims that prior research supports his views is dubious.

Third, this is the kind of thing "explaining away" that gives correlation analysis such a bad odor with the public. As Colby Cosh pointed out, on the "Daily Show," John Stewart rightly grilled Levitt on exactly how you "control for" other variables, and Levitt couldn't come up with a trustworthy answer.

You can make all sorts of things disappear by "controlling" for variables that are closer to symptoms than causes. For instance, you can make the average height gap between the Dutch and the Japanese disappear by "controlling for" inseam length of the pants hanging in their closets.

What Levittt has done is pick three variables that currently correlate closely with being black and used them as a proxy for blackness. This is the opposite of Occam's Razor, which says you ought to be biased in favor of the fewest number of explanatory variables.

Fourth, Levitt's three variables sound extremely dubious historically. Think about that 9.5 to 1 difference in homicide rates between whites and blacks back in 1976. Most of those killers in 1976 were born in the 1940s and 1950s, when over 80% of black children were being born to married women. And during the Baby Boom, lots and lots of white babies were being born to teenage mothers.

Yet, the homicide rate went shooting up in 1965, just when the illegitimacy rate went shooting up too. We didn't have to wait a generation to get the effects of rising illegitimacy on crime, we saw them instantly. That's because a major effect of society deciding to allow sex without marriage is on the young men who now don't need to get a job so they can get married so they can have sex. They can hang around, do a few crimes, and still have a girlfriend.


In summary, Levitt is one slippery operator.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The American Scene

Ross Douthat's American Scene blog is an anomaly: It receives few comments, but a high fraction of those are from people you've heard of. For example, here Ross, Matt Yglesias, myself, and a physicist hold a civilized discussion on why cosmologists are less likely to be strident atheists than are evolutionary biologists. (And, no, I don't accuse anybody of lying, which is probably as much of a relief for me these days as it must be for my readers!)


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

William Bennett blasted for citing Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics theory

Ever since New Orleans, the hysteria among the political and media elite has been building: Who among us bigshots will crack first and allude to the elephant in the living room?

That trumpeting pachyderm that they've all been trying to ignore is the higher crime rate among African-Americans. According to the official Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Blacks were 7 times more likely than whites to commit homicide in 2002," but You Can't Talk About That.

Today, the mounting pressure finally burst over merely an abstract musing on the radio.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi immediately spoke on the floor of the House:

"Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to express my deep disdain and disgust for comments made yesterday by former Reagan Secretary of Education William Bennett on his radio call-in show. ... These are shameful words. I am appalled to have to say them on the floor of the House of Representatives. Secretary Bennett's comments reflect a narrow-minded spirit that has no place within American discourse."

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean issued the following statement:

"Bill Bennett's hateful, inflammatory remarks regarding African Americans are simply inexcusable. They are particularly unacceptable from a leader in the conservative movement and former Secretary of Education, once charged with the well being of every American school child. He should apologize immediately. This kind of statement is hardly compassionate conservatism; rather, Bennett's comments demonstrate a reprehensible racial insensitivity and ignorance. Are these the values of the Republican Party and its conservative allies? If not, President Bush, Ken Mehlman and the Republican Leadership should denounce them immediately as hateful, divisive and worthy only of scorn.

So, what horror of horrors did Bennett blurt out? The Washington Post reports:

Bennett Under Fire for Remark on Crime and Black Abortions

Democratic lawmakers and civil rights leaders denounced conservative commentator William J. Bennett yesterday for suggesting on his syndicated radio show that aborting black children would reduce the U.S. crime rate.

The former U.S. education secretary-turned-talk show host said Wednesday that "if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Bennett quickly added that such an idea would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do." But, he said, "your crime rate would go down." ...

Bennett's comments came Wednesday, during a discussion on his talk show "Morning in America." A caller had suggested that Social Security would be better funded if abortion had not been legalized in 1973 because the nation would have more workers paying into the system.

Bennett said "maybe," before referring to a book he said argued that the legalization of abortion is one of the reasons the crime rate has declined in recent decades. Bennett said he did not agree with that thesis.

"But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down," Bennett said, according to an audio clip posted on Media Matters for America's Web site. "That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, you know, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

That's it? It's a symptom of the September Sickness that has afflicted our elites all month that the repressed frenzy finally broke over that.

There are two somewhat separate logical issues to which Bennett is referring. The first is the utterly theoretical question of the impact on crime of aborting every black baby (since African-Americans made up 50.8% of homicide offenders in 2002 according to federal statistics, it would obviously be large), while the second is the much-admired Freakonomics theory that legalizing abortion in the 1970s reduced crime in the 1990s. Bennett, obviously, opposes both ideas on moral grounds.

As for the first, democrat Brad DeLong sensibly points out:

His caller said: "Abortion is bad because it has worsened the financing of Social Security." Bennett says: "Stay focused. We're anti-abortion not because we think that abortion is a means that leads to bad ends like a higher Social Security deficit; we're anti-abortion because abortion is bad; make arguments like 'abortion is bad because it increases the Social Security deficit' and other people will make arguments like 'abortion is good because it lowers the crime rate' and we'll lose sight of the main point."

Bennett is attempting a reductio ad absurdum argument.

As for the second, ABC reported:

In an interview with ABC News, Bennett said that anyone who knows him knows he isn't racist. He said he was merely extrapolating from the best-selling book "Freakonomics," which posits the hypothesis that falling crimes rates are related to increased abortion rates decades ago. "It would have worked for, you know, single-parent moms; it would have worked for male babies, black babies," Bennett said.

Bill, Bill, Bill, that's what you get for reading the softball reviews of Freakonomics in the NYT, the WSJ, the WP, and the LAT instead of reading iSteve.com, where you would have learned that economist Steven D. Levitt's ultrapopular but slapdash abortion-cut-crime theory disastrously failed to predict even the past.

Bill, if you'd gone to the source for statistical social analysis instead of all those credulous, innumerate mainstream sources, you would have known that when abortion was legalized over 1970-1973, the homicide rate of 14-17 year old black males, rather than declining, more than quadrupled in the decade from 1983 (when all living 14-17 year olds were born in the last prelegalization years of 1965-1969) to 1993 (when they were born in the high abortion years of 1975-1979, when the nonwhite abortion rate peaked in 1977 -- see page 8 of this report for abortion trends).

You can go look for yourself at the homicide graphs that Levitt was too slipshod in his research methods to look at when he came up with his theory in 1999. Go to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics page here and page down to the second set of four graphs, which show homicide offending rates by age by race by sex.

The main reason Levitt's theory didn't work in reality was because the larger impact of legalizing abortion was to drive up the number of unplanned pregnancies. Levitt himself wrote in Freakonomics that following Roe, “Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent …” The most unremarked but remarkable historic fact about legalizing abortion was how pointless it turned out to be: mostly it just caused the very problem -- unwanted pregnancies -- it was purported to cure.

I pointed this out to Levitt in 1999 in our debate in Slate, but he went ahead and left all these inconvenient facts out of Freakonomics six years later. Misleading the public has made him a rich man, but he has to live with his conscience.

I laid all this out in even more monomaniacal detail last Spring, and I apologize to my long-term readers for taking up their time then and now.

One thing I've noticed is that the pro-lifers have shown almost zero interest in the fact that Levitt's theory isn't empirically valid. Strikingly, many of them want it to be true in order to prove the purity of their moral intentions: Even though legal abortion would lessen the chance of me being murdered or mugged, I'm still against abortion on principle.

Well, swell, but that's just moral vanity. Whatever happened to "the truth shall set you free"?

David Brock's Media Matters, which mostly broke the story, claimed:

Bennett's remark was apparently inspired by the claim that legalized abortion has reduced crime rates, which was posited in the book Freakonomics (William Morrow, May 2005) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. But Levitt and Dubner argued that aborted fetuses would have been more likely to grow up poor and in single-parent or teenage-parent households and therefore more likely to commit crimes; they did not put forth Bennett's race-based argument.

That's disingenuous, almost as disingenuous as Dr. Levitt.

Levitt's original draft paper with John J. Donohue in 1999 specifically referred to the higher rates among blacks of both abortion (which currently is about five times higher than among non-Hispanic whites) and crime (blacks are currently incarcerated at a rate 7.2 times the non-Hispanic white per capita rate) as one of the reasons why legalizing abortion should have cut crime. The New York Times reported in 1999:

"Most of the reduction," Dr. Levitt and Dr. Donohue write, "appears to be attributable to higher rates of abortion by mothers whose children are most likely to be at risk for future crime." Teen-agers, unmarried women and black women, for example, have higher rates of abortion, the researchers note, and children born to mothers in these groups are statistically at higher risk for crime in adulthood.

Levitt took out the reference to the much higher abortion and crime rates of blacks when he published Freakonomics. Instead, it was all supposed to work by getting rid of "unwanted" fetuses, even though he admitted that legalization vastly increased the number of unwanted fetuses.

But let's get real. Last Spring, when Levitt was the toast of American intellectual life, everybody who was proclaiming his wonderfulness knew deep down that his abortion-crime theory was still based in large measure on aborting black fetuses, but nobody would come out and say it.

I was the only one who kept pointing out the new emperor of the bestseller lists had no empirical clothes, but nobody cared, because the unwritten message of Freakonomics -- no black, no crime, as Stalin might have said -- seemed so convincing.

But since you aren't supposed to discuss the higher black crime rate in public, our national immune defenses against bogus ideas couldn't resist Levitt's lie.

Have you noticed lately how, ever since New Orleans, America is knee-deep in lies? See, once you start denouncing people for telling the truth, you just have to lie and lie and lie some more. Every truth leads to more truths, but once you start down the path to lying, every lie means you need to lie again.

God, I am sick of lies.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 29, 2005

The manic-depressive conventional wisdom on New Orleans

I consistently argued at the time that having 100,000 people live through days of anarchy in New Orleans was a national disgrace, and that the breakdown of order caused people to drown and die of exposure due to violence paralyzing rescuers who feared for their own lives, partly due to exaggeration but partly due to reality. I never argued there was a mass slaughter going on. I also suggested that there would be a massive media cover up to convince us to forget what we saw with our lying eyes.

As I blogged way back on Labor Day, September 5th:

But, yes, sniping during rescue operations, as in the 1967 Detroit riot, is a complete calamity since it can send rescuers fleeing. Generally, the amount of actual sniping gets exaggerated while it's happening, but that reflects the terror and revulsion that any sniping at relief workers generates.

Whenever the talking heads on TV and their partners in print notice that they are showing mass evidence of blacks behaving badly, they are inspired into a paroxysm of lying about white racism to prevent the formation of "stereotypes" among viewers inclined to believe their own lying eyes.

Sure enough, in the last 48 hours, we've seen the national media suddenly decide that since New Orleans was not the Rape of Nanking with huge numbers murdered, then, hey, it wasn't so bad. In fact, it was just racist stereotypes that made us believe what we saw! Yeah, that's the ticket...


For example, Jonah Goldberg writes:


Race is obviously part of the equation, too. "If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle-class white people," Times Picayune editor Jim Amoss said, "it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor mongering." As with the cannibalism canard [which I scoffed at immediately], there seemed to be an eagerness on the part of many — on the Right and Left — to believe the very worst stories possible about poor African Americans.


Oh, come on, Jonah ... you know that that's absolutely the opposite of the truth about which stories the American media like to report, which are ones about whites being mean to blacks. The national press is acutely uncomfortable with reporting on black crime. Note, for instance, that the "Color of Crime" report has now been out for over two weeks, and, according to Google News, it has so far only been mentioned in two publications among the many hundreds covered by Google News: VDARE.com and David Horowitz's FrontPage.


We now know, thanks to valuable post-mortems by the Los Angeles Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, that a great deal of the "great reporting" was in fact great rumor mongering. The stories of rape and murder in the Superdome were all unfounded. Six people died in there, tragically. But nobody was murdered.

Whoa, hold your horses, Jonah. When civil control breaks down, so does official record-keeping, and this week's spate of revisionism is based on officials, typically self-interested ones, stating they have no records of bad things happening.. That doesn't mean none of them happened.

What we have been seeing recently is local newspapers across the country and in Britain and Australia publishing accounts of survivors from their regions that are much less politically correct than the national news media's accounts, which have been growing more constrained by their felt need to make all the news fit their pre-existing conceptual slots about white racism, black victimization etc.

For example, the following story about two survivors from the Boston area appeared today not in the Boston Globe but in the second-rank Boston Herald reported today:

Local witnesses haunted by murder at Superdome
By Theresa Freeman/ MetroWest Daily News Thursday, September 29, 2005 -
Updated: 03:12 AM EST

A Holliston woman and her Ashland friend are outraged officials are saying reports of atrocities after Hurricane Katrina were exaggerated, claiming they witnessed a deadly fight at the Superdome.

Adrienne Long of Holliston said she was ringside when two men wrangled over the last sip of Jack Daniel's whiskey and one beat and stabbed the other to death. Her friend William ``Teddy'' Nichols of Ashland was nearby and saw the bloody aftermath. Long was angry when she first heard of the exaggeration reports on television Tuesday.

``I was sitting here screaming at the TV. Did I imagine everything I saw?'' said Long. ``I just can't believe people would say this.''

Both say they are reluctant to contact authorities with information. They are both terrified by memories of what they said was a lawless city.

New Orleans Police Lt. Reginald Jacques said yesterday the city's homicide detectives are spread out because police headquarters was destroyed. He added they are not investigating Long's murder report.

Long had traveled to the Big Easy to drop off her son at Tulane University. He made it home safe long before she did.


A reader responds:

The Herald story is a truncated version of a longer report in the MetroWest Daily News, a suburban paper (and corporate cousin of the Boston Herald). I found the original Daily News story online, I read it closely, and I concluded based on the clues provided that this killer, who allegedly took his friend's life in a dispute over a whiskey bottle, is white.

To confirm my supposition, I emailed the reporter, Theresa Freeman, and she wrote me back. “The first draft of my story included that both men involved in the fight were white," she says, "but my editors removed the reference because it was not germane to the story.”



My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Somebody please invent this

What the world needs now is a television set that can only be powered by a home exercise machine. You want to watch some TV, you have to hop on your exercycle or stairclimber or whatever and generate the current yourself.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Capote" and the death penalty

The biopic with the great character actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, the American Alec Guinness, as the fey author of the first modern true crime book, In Cold Blood, opens Friday, Sept. 30 in NYC and LA. Here are some brief excerpts from my review in the October 10th issue of The American Conservative (now on newsstands). The film recounts the visits Capote made to one of the two condemned murderers, Perry Miller, on Death Row:

In a sinister example of life imitating art, Miller was played in the 1967 movie version of "In Cold Blood" by actor Robert Blake, who was recently acquitted in his wife's murder...

"Capote" is rewarding, even though the film's criticism of the author is tendentious...

Capote helped the pair get a good lawyer to craft their first appeal against the death penalty. But after he'd completed most of his manuscript and realized how strong it was, his need for a dramatic ending (such as, say, their hangings) made him increasingly impatient with their endless appeals.

Screenwriter Dan Futterman attacks Capote for being a heartless monster who manipulated poor Miller into telling him his secrets even though Capote eventually hoped for his execution.

In reality, of course, the true monsters were the murderers, who had decided days before their home invasion to shotgun the whole family to eliminate all witnesses. With his conventional liberal bias against capital punishment, Futterman doesn't realize that without the death penalty, repeat offenders, who face long prison terms if convicted of robbery, would more often find it logical to kill their robbery victims to keep their identities secret.

The death penalty is a complicated issue, but a key point that I almost never hear brought up is how, in our era of long prison sentences for non-homicidal offences, having an ultimate punishment serves to deter criminals from killing their victims to eliminate the witnesses.

That's the flip side of the strongest argument against the death penalty: the fairly high proportion of mistaken convictions in homicide cases. The reason DNA evidence is has gotten a bunch of people off death row in recent years is because murder is inherently a tougher crime to acquire foolproof evidence about than, say, robbery, rape, or violent assault, precisely because the best witness -- the victim -- can't testify because he's been murdered.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What Hollywood could do for New Orleans

Simple. The great New Orleans comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces has been in Hollywood Development Hell since even before its official publication a quarter of a century ago. No novel since The Maltese Falcon has had more perfect movie dialogue already down on the page, yet the business has repeatedly failed to get its act together and make the damn movie.

In the wake of the flood, the movie industry should resolve that it will bring intense pressure on all the different players who own a piece of the property to get them to resolve their differences and to film the novel on location in New Orleans in 2007. And to film it right, too, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, not Will Ferrell, as Ignatius J. Reilly.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer