← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · friedrich braun
Thread ID: 17774 | Posts: 9 | Started: 2005-04-14
2005-04-14 11:39 | User Profile
The main reason I support abortion rights: incredible eugenic benefits.
...
Back in 1999, Mr. Levitt was trying to figure out why crime rates had fallen so dramatically in the previous decade. He was struck by the fact that crime began falling nationwide just 18 years after the Supreme Court effectively legalized abortion. He was struck harder by the fact that in five states crime began falling three years earlier than it did everywhere else. These were exactly the five states that had legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade. Did crime fall because hundreds of thousands of prospective criminals had been aborted? Once again, the pattern by itself is not conclusive, but once again Mr. Levitt piles pattern on pattern until the evidence overwhelms you. The bottom line? Legalized abortion was the single biggest factor in bringing the crime wave of the 1980s to a screeching halt.
Mr. Levitt repeatedly reminds us that economics is about what is true, not what ought to be true. To this reviewer's considerable delight, he cheerfully violates this principle at the end of the abortion discussion by daring to address the question of whether abortion ought to be legal or, more precisely, whether the effect on crime rates is a sufficient reason to legalize abortion. He doesn't pretend to settle the matter, but in just a few pages he constructs exactly the right framework for thinking about it and then leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions. [url]http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006550[/url]
2005-04-14 14:18 | User Profile
[QUOTE=friedrich braun] Did crime fall because hundreds of thousands of prospective criminals had been aborted?[/QUOTE] Yes, but once again, the 800-lb gorilla is ignored. Crime fell because hundreds of thousands of Negroes were aborted, not simply generic 'prospective criminals.' I would point out that abortion is still wrong. Crime would also fall if we, for example, indiscriminately killed every non-Christian in the country, but that would also be wrong.
2005-04-14 14:30 | User Profile
We could accomplish the same thing by repatriating the blacks back to Africa, the place where God originally put them.
"What God has separated, let no man join together." :thumbsup:
2005-04-14 14:56 | User Profile
Q:
It is an old and venerable truism that politics is the art of the possible, it is politically impossible to execute all non-Christians (even if that was desirable on some hypothetical grounds); however, it is politically possibly to make abortion freely available to all. Personally, I would make the service totally free so that the long-term unemployed, low-income, low-IQ human weeds and refuse (most notably the Browns and Blacks) can voluntarily put a stop to their wildly excessive propagation and generational misery. According to Prof. Richard Lynn, next to implementing a national eugenics programme, making abortion easily available is the best that our western societies can do to genetically and racially improve our decadent populations.
2005-04-14 15:46 | User Profile
[I][B] - "The main reason I support abortion rights: incredible eugenic benefits. "[/B][/I]
Steve Sailer has recently spent a lot time in debunking Levitt, arguing that abortions have actually [B]raised[/B] murder rates:
[COLOR=DarkRed]"Meet the economist who figured out that legal abortion was behind dropping crime rates" burbles Steven E. Landsburg on the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com site. Yes, it's more hype for Steven D. Levitt's new book Freakonomics. Landsburg writes:[/COLOR]
[COLOR=Purple][I]Back in 1999, Mr. Levitt was trying to figure out why crime rates had fallen so dramatically in the previous decade. He was struck by the fact that crime began falling nationwide just 18 years after the Supreme Court effectively legalized abortion. He was struck harder by the fact that in five states crime began falling three years earlier than it did everywhere else. These were exactly the five states that had legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade.
Did crime fall because hundreds of thousands of prospective criminals had been aborted? Once again, the pattern by itself is not conclusive, but once again Mr. Levitt piles pattern on pattern until the evidence overwhelms you. The bottom line? Legalized abortion was the single biggest factor in bringing the crime wave of the 1980s to a screeching halt.[/I][/COLOR]
[COLOR=DarkRed][B]I first debated with Levitt over whether legalized abortion cut crime way back in Slate.com in 1999. My new article in the May 9, 2005 edition of The American Conservative (available to electronic subscribers this weekend) punches a big hole in Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory.[/B] Here's a brief excerpt:[/COLOR]
[COLOR=Indigo][I] "According to Levitt's logic, murder should have declined first among the youngest and last among the oldest. Did it?
"Unfortunately for Levitt, the opposite is true. The murder rate for Americans age 25 and over started falling way back in 1981 (when the youngest person in this cohort was born in 1956) and fell fairly steadily for two decades. Indeed, in contrast to his theory about post-Roe individuals being especially law-abiding, the adult murder rate has only begun to creep back up now that people born after Roe have begun to make up a noticeable fraction of those 25 and up. From 1999 through 2002 (the latest year available, when a 25 year old would have born four years after Roe), the murder rate among 25-34 year olds has risen 17 percent, while continuing to drop among the under 25s.
"But the acid test of Levitt's theory is this: Did the first New, Improved Generation culled by legalized abortion actually grow up to be more lawful teenagers than the last generation born before legalization?
"Hardly. Instead, the first cohort to survive legalized abortion went on the worst youth murder spree in American history.
"Abortion became legal in 1970 in California, New York, and three minor states, and was legalized in the other 45 states in 1973 by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. Let's compare the murder rate of 14-17 year olds in 1983 (who were born in the last pre-legalization years of 1965-1969) with that of 14-17 years olds a decade later in 1993 (who were born in the high-abortion years of 1975-1979).
"Was this post-Roe cohort better behaved than their pre-legalization elders? Not exactly. Their murder rate was 3.1 times worse.
"In contrast, 18-24 year olds in 1993 (some born before legalization, some after) committed 86 percent more murders than a decade earlier, while people 25 and up (all born before legalization) were 18 percent less lethal.
Back in 1983, 14-17 year olds were barely more than half as likely as 25-34 years olds to kill. In 1993 and 1994, however, this purportedly better-bred generation of juveniles was more than twice as deadly as 25-34 year olds."[/I][/COLOR]
[COLOR=DarkRed][B]A lot of naive reviewers like Landsburg are going to make fools out of themselves because Levitt and Dubner failed to mention any of these massive problems with Levitt's theory in their book Freakonomics[/B]. To get the full story on how legalizing abortion might even have caused the murder rate to go up, get the May 9th edition of The American Conservative.[/COLOR]
Much more can found in here:
[url]http://www.isteve.com/[/url]
Petr
2005-04-14 16:28 | User Profile
[QUOTE=friedrich braun] It is an old and venerable truism that politics is the art of the possible, it is politically impossible to execute all non-Christians (even if that was desirable on some hypothetical grounds); however, it is politically possibly to make abortion freely available to all.[/QUOTE] FB -- I certainly have no desire to execute all non-Christians. I was trying to provide an example of something that would be quite obviously immoral, notwithstanding its potential to produce some desirable results, such as a decrease in the crime rate. Sorry if I was unclear.
2005-04-14 18:12 | User Profile
Iââ¬â¢ll admit that Iââ¬â¢m ill equipped to decide who has the upper-hand in the Levitt and Sailer match. Nonetheless, the nexus between the easy availability of abortion and a reduction in crime rates has been drawn in the past by other scientists. And frankly it makes perfect sense from an intuitive perspective.
However, when I stated that I favoured an unrestricted and free access to abortions I particularly had in mind the aborting of genetically impaired or otherwise undesirable fetuses.
Prof. Richard Lynn writes:
[QUOTE]Nevertheless, from the 1960ââ¬â¢s, at the same time as eugenics was becoming rejected, a new eugenics was appearing and was to make considerable progress in the next three decades. This was the eugenics of medical technology. The three most important developments of the new eugenics have been the prenatal diagnosis of fetal genetic disorders, in vitro fertilization and gene therapy. Prenatal diagnosis followed by the abortion of fetuses with genetic disorders began with the development of amniocentesis and was initially used for the detection of Downââ¬â¢s syndrome. Later, other techniques of prenatal diagnosis have been developed including ultrasound scan, maternal serum screening, fetal biopsy and chorion villus sampling. From the early 1970ââ¬â¢s, pregnant women in the United States and throughout the economically developed world have been given these prenatal tests and been offered pregnancy terminations when genetic abnormalities have been identified.
The great majority of women have opted to have genetically impaired fetuses terminated and this has had a considerable impact in reducing the birth incidence of a number of genetic disorders. There have been huge reductions in the birth incidence of anencephaly (the absence of a brain), spina bifida (in which the vertebrae fail to develop properly) and Tay-Sachs disease (formerly known as amaurotic familial idiocy), and significant reductions in the birth incidence of cystic fibrosis, which is the commonest single gene genetic disorder in European populations. The impact of prenatal diagnosis is likely to increase, as methods for diagnosing genetically impaired fetuses are improved. These procedures have had a eugenic impact in so far as they have reduced the genes for genetic disorders in the population. [/QUOTE]
[url]http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol2no1/rl-eugenics.html[/url]
Those with an interest in the multifarious pros of eugenics can hardly do better than consult Matt Nuenkeââ¬â¢s very informative site: [url]http://neoeugenics.home.comcast.net/[/url]
[QUOTE=Petr][I][B] - "The main reason I support abortion rights: incredible eugenic benefits. "[/B][/I]
Steve Sailer has recently spent a lot time in debunking Levitt, arguing that abortions have actually [B]raised[/B] murder rates:
[COLOR=DarkRed]"Meet the economist who figured out that legal abortion was behind dropping crime rates" burbles Steven E. Landsburg on the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com site. Yes, it's more hype for Steven D. Levitt's new book Freakonomics. Landsburg writes:[/COLOR]
[COLOR=Purple][I]Back in 1999, Mr. Levitt was trying to figure out why crime rates had fallen so dramatically in the previous decade. He was struck by the fact that crime began falling nationwide just 18 years after the Supreme Court effectively legalized abortion. He was struck harder by the fact that in five states crime began falling three years earlier than it did everywhere else. These were exactly the five states that had legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade.
Did crime fall because hundreds of thousands of prospective criminals had been aborted? Once again, the pattern by itself is not conclusive, but once again Mr. Levitt piles pattern on pattern until the evidence overwhelms you. The bottom line? Legalized abortion was the single biggest factor in bringing the crime wave of the 1980s to a screeching halt.[/I][/COLOR]
[COLOR=DarkRed][B]I first debated with Levitt over whether legalized abortion cut crime way back in Slate.com in 1999. My new article in the May 9, 2005 edition of The American Conservative (available to electronic subscribers this weekend) punches a big hole in Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory.[/B] Here's a brief excerpt:[/COLOR]
[COLOR=Indigo][I] "According to Levitt's logic, murder should have declined first among the youngest and last among the oldest. Did it?
"Unfortunately for Levitt, the opposite is true. The murder rate for Americans age 25 and over started falling way back in 1981 (when the youngest person in this cohort was born in 1956) and fell fairly steadily for two decades. Indeed, in contrast to his theory about post-Roe individuals being especially law-abiding, the adult murder rate has only begun to creep back up now that people born after Roe have begun to make up a noticeable fraction of those 25 and up. From 1999 through 2002 (the latest year available, when a 25 year old would have born four years after Roe), the murder rate among 25-34 year olds has risen 17 percent, while continuing to drop among the under 25s.
"But the acid test of Levitt's theory is this: Did the first New, Improved Generation culled by legalized abortion actually grow up to be more lawful teenagers than the last generation born before legalization?
"Hardly. Instead, the first cohort to survive legalized abortion went on the worst youth murder spree in American history.
"Abortion became legal in 1970 in California, New York, and three minor states, and was legalized in the other 45 states in 1973 by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. Let's compare the murder rate of 14-17 year olds in 1983 (who were born in the last pre-legalization years of 1965-1969) with that of 14-17 years olds a decade later in 1993 (who were born in the high-abortion years of 1975-1979).
"Was this post-Roe cohort better behaved than their pre-legalization elders? Not exactly. Their murder rate was 3.1 times worse.
"In contrast, 18-24 year olds in 1993 (some born before legalization, some after) committed 86 percent more murders than a decade earlier, while people 25 and up (all born before legalization) were 18 percent less lethal.
Back in 1983, 14-17 year olds were barely more than half as likely as 25-34 years olds to kill. In 1993 and 1994, however, this purportedly better-bred generation of juveniles was more than twice as deadly as 25-34 year olds."[/I][/COLOR]
[COLOR=DarkRed][B]A lot of naive reviewers like Landsburg are going to make fools out of themselves because Levitt and Dubner failed to mention any of these massive problems with Levitt's theory in their book Freakonomics[/B]. To get the full story on how legalizing abortion might even have caused the murder rate to go up, get the May 9th edition of The American Conservative.[/COLOR]
Much more can found in here:
[url]http://www.isteve.com/[/url]
Petr[/QUOTE]
2005-04-14 18:57 | User Profile
I suspect several reasons for the falling crime rate. Not abortion per se, but the shrinking family size. Crime is the occupation of the idle, especially the young and idle. When there's less young, there's less crime.
There has been leaps in crime-fighting ability and prevention, such as the ubiquitous security cameras which hardly existed a couple of decades ago.
2005-04-16 18:19 | User Profile
I may have missed it, but I don't see any mention of the fact that incarceration rates went way up in the 1990's.
This, not abortion, accounts for the drop in crime. Instead of being released to commit more crimes, criminals spent much more time in prison. Hence, crime rates dropped.
This is a very expensive way to reduce crime, but it does work. Racial segregation of some kind would work even better.