← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Faust
Thread ID: 20484 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2005-10-01
2005-10-01 22:26 | User Profile
William Bennett tells the Truth!
"if you wanted to reduce crime, you couldââ¬âif that were your sole purposeââ¬âyou could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."-William Bennett
Main thread on William Bennett:
Bennett under fire for remarks on blacks, crime [url]http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?p=132187[/url]
An old thread on William Bennet
The Bennett Brouhaha By Sam Francis [url]http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6571[/url]
2005-10-01 23:20 | User Profile
Steve Sailer has devoted long, long explanations on his blog why Bennett did [B]not[/B] exactly "tell the truth" because he uncritically relied on the simplistic and fallacious research of Steven Levitt:
[url]http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/09/william-bennett-blasted-for-citing.html[/url] [FONT=Times New Roman][SIZE=3][B]
"Bill, Bill, Bill, that's what you get for reading the softball reviews of [I]Freakonomics[/I] 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.[/B]
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[B] quadrupled [/B]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 [I]Freakonomics[/I] that following Roe, ââ¬ÅConceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent ââ¬Â¦Ã¢â¬Â 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 [I]Freakonomics[/I] 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 [I]want it to be true[/I] in order to prove the purity of their moral intentions: [I]Even though legal abortion would lessen the chance of me being murdered or mugged, I'm still against abortion on principle[/I].
Well, swell, but that's just moral vanity. Whatever happened to "the truth shall set you free"?
...[/SIZE] [/FONT]
Petr
2005-10-16 03:47 | User Profile
i suspect bennett was either drunk or put up to it. while there was more than a grain of truth to what he said, and some of the usual suspects dont like aspects of it, i still dont trust him.
i must be getting old.