Your 2016 Presidential Candidate Speculation Thread

Also stellar moral example provided by Nixon administration.

lol wait abortion leads to crime? i r confused

link me to where it has been debunked? it's controversial to claim it's totally responsible but i've seen strong evidence that there is a correlation vis-a-vis early adopters of legal abortion?

yeah but Alfred that link isn't about lead paint, it's about leaded gasoline

― Οὖτις,

My mistake. I hadn't read the article in a while.

the freaknomics book had a chapter theorizing that the legalization of abortion lead to fewer unwanted children and a resultant drop in crime, it was comically bad science to set up a provocative thesis like everything they did

i don't think you have the full story

link me to where it has been debunked? it's controversial to claim it's totally responsible but i've seen strong evidence that there is a correlation vis-a-vis early adopters of legal abortion?

― Mordy, Thursday, May 14, 2015 2:18 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just google it my man

also a lot of the critics of the Donohue and Levitt study are anti-abortion critics as well so you need to be really careful about who you're listening to about it being "debunked"

here's the wiki page, lag00n: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect

yes wikipedia good job thank u lol

idk man you're talking as though you're 100% right. i understand if you're skeptical about the theory but "google it," doesn't give me a lot of confidence that you actually know why you should or shouldn't be skeptical but that maybe you heard somewhere that the freakonomics book is bad.

"you need to be really careful about who you're listening to" /links to wikipedia/

you said google it! i linked to a wiki page that in no way says, "this has been debunked"

maybe i should keep googling!

the lead paint theory is actually probably the best available theory—if you need just one, that is. but it's not foolproof. the biggest question it leaves is: if lead in paint and gasoline was prominent from the turn of the century, why do we not see a big jump in crime statistics until the 1950s–60s? of course, one might then argue (with reason) that crime statistics before that period are rather sketchy.

the abortion rate thing is probably wrong since crime went down throughout western countries and the increase in abortion rates only took place in a very few of them (including united states); in other places, decreased crime followed (by about 15–25 years) decreases in abortion rates.

i linked to a wiki page that in no way says, "this has been debunked"

it pretty clearly shows that the conclusion is highly debatable and not authoritatively supported by data tho

xp

so yeah i'm not sure if the "abortion theory" has been "debunked" but it doesn't really wash. unless you want to propose that decreases in violent crime in numerous western countries occurred independently and with completely different causes. which is possible but very unlikely.

xposts

my theory is that god is fucking with us, i'll get back to you with my evidence.

there is a lot of good evidence that does demonstrate a correlation, some of them listed from one of the original study authors here

crime boom was induced in part by people fleeing the cities, which had been building for decades but exploded after WWII, tale has been very well told elsewhere, many times, but it is really important not to underrate the effect on urban existence brought by huge rises in the cost of doing basically everything (particularly wages skyrocketing vs. 20, 50 years before) at the same time as an unbelievable collapse of the tax base as the people making a nice middle-class existence out of the city fled to the suburbs. and then, maybe more directly important for crime, employers and industries started following the suburban commuters out to the suburbs, so they weren't commuting anymore, and the kinds of meat-and-potatoes working class jobs are just disappearing left and right (or even employment in secondary and tertiary sectors - - - like i dunno, working at urban amusement parks which no longer have enough customers to stay in business). combine this with systemic racism and other barriers and you get the "urban crisis" of the 60s. take away the great society fallback for broke municipalities and you get the even worse crises of the 70s.

(obv. those who live in cities are still paying for all this in tons of ways - - detroit being "broke" (aka the line on the map that contains "detroit" not containing grosse pointe). the unbelievable cost of building NYC's second avenue subway today rather than the 70s. the abandonment of experimental steps forward in subsidized housing, so that we jumped from overbuilding the models of the 40s and 50s to basically nothing, and so that the only reference point for what "public housing" might be in the conversation consists of basically 70-year-old ideas that nobody likes very much. etc. etc.)

all this depends on how much you want to follow economics->crime arguments and again, this is ILX so i'm probably giving kind of a kindergarten summary of familiar material. maybe i'm just insisting on it because i'm a little hesitant to throw all this aside and go for leaded gasoline although there is a hypnotic tidiness to that story. i remember reading about that ~2 years ago and being really drawn into the article. i just worry that it lets off the hook all the people and policies who created a really unbearable and dysfunctional urban existence.

1) Five states legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade. Crime started falling three years earlier in these states, with property crime (done by younger people) falling before violent crime.
2) After abortion was legalized, the availability of abortions differed dramatically across states. In some states like North Dakota and in parts of the deep South, it was virtually impossible to get an abortion even after Roe v. Wade. If one compares states that had high abortion rates in the mid 1970s to states that had low abortion rates in the mid 1970s, you see the following patterns with crime. For the period from 1973-1988, the two sets of states (high abortion states and low abortion states) have nearly identical crime patterns. Note, that this is a period before the generations exposed to legalized abortion are old enough to do much crime. So this is exactly what the Donohue-Levitt theory predicts. But from the period 1985-1997, when the post Roe cohort is reaching peak crime ages, the high abortion states see a decline in crime of 30% relative to the low abortion states. Our original data ended in 1997. If one updated the study, the results would be similar.)
3) All of the decline in crime from 1985-1997 experienced by high abortion states relative to low abortion states is concentrated among the age groups born after Roe v. Wade. For people born before abortion legalization, there is no difference in the crime patterns for high abortion and low abortion states, just as the Donohue-Levitt theory predicts.
4) When we compare arrest rates of people born in the same state, just before and just after abortion legalization, we once again see the identical pattern of lower arrest rates for those born after legalization than before.
5) The evidence from Canada, Australia, and Romania also support the hypothesis that abortion reduces crime.
6) Studies have shown a reduction in infanticide, teen age drug use, and teen age childbearing consistent with the theory that abortion will reduce other social ills similar to crime.
These six points all support the hypothesis. There is one fact that, without more careful analysis, argues against the Donohue-Levitt story:
7) The homicide rate of young males (especially young Black males) temporarily skyrocketed in the late 1980s, especially in urban centers like Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington, DC, before returning to regular levels soon thereafter. These young males who were hitting their peak crime years were born right around the time abortion was legalized.
If you look at the serious criticisms that have been leveled against the Donohue-Levitt hypothesis, virtually all of them revolve around this spike in homicide by young men in the late 1980s-early 1990s. (There are also some non-serious criticisms, which I will address below.) This is the point that Sailer is making, and also the point made far more rigorously by Ted Joyce in an article published in the Journal of Human Resources.

kinda disappointed you think Freakanomics is reputable Mordy

xp

No one here, to be clear, has said lead gas is the only explanation.

thanks, DC!

nothing or no one is "reputable." you read the evidence for a particular theory and draw your own conclusions. 'reputable' heuristics are not reputable.

like what, you read some dude whose name you can no longer remember once who wrote a nasty takedown of freakonomics and now your opinion on the correlation between abortion + crime is set in stone for life?

Our original data ended in 1997. If one updated the study, the results would be similar.

I mean come on with this bullshit

iirc they ran it w/ the updated numbers. he's talking about the original study.

dude this reflexive dismissiveness is nagl imho. what's the cost of them being right? that you had a wrong impression for a minute and a half? it's not like the hypothesized correlation doesn't fit neatly into your preexisting politics.

mordy, if you posit abortion as the main cause, how do you explain corresponding decreases in crime rates in societies that did not see increased rates of abortion in the relevant years?

i do not posit abortion as the main cause. i think it is one of a few causes.

and my dismissiveness isn't "reflexive"--i thought the abortion argument was pretty interesting/compelling. but it isn't the best argument, i do't think.

don't

i should clarify btw: the lead theory has at least as much to do w/ lead in gasoline as lead in paint. in fact lead in gasoline is more likely to be ingested/absorbed.

i agree lead is more compelling but things like crime drops have many correlations. the problem w/ the lead theory is that it's too tidy when actually many different things contribute to something as amorphous as crime. (not to mention the general state of the economy, or policing techniques, or methods for counting + reporting crime, etc.) and i thought pt 2 made it clear that there was a difference in states that adopted legal abortion first from states that didn't do so until later. this isn't like broken windows where the data supporting it is literally all bonkers.

right, i was just pointing out the problems w/ abortion argument and why it isn't likely to be the main cause of drop in crime rates across many wealthy (and some not-so-wealthy) western countries.

as with any huge shift in social trends the causes are probably multiple, not to mention uneven.

i think it is one of a few causes.

I'll allow that it's a possible contributing factor.

I am prejudicial to sources that have a history of being unreliable or blatantly ideologically biased, not embarrassed to cop to this

xxp

lol prejudicial against I should have said there sorry

prob the canonical freakanomics demolition but theyre dime a dozen really http://www.crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/mythsofmurder.htm

i'm often curious how my upbringing in the 1980s (an era when fear of crime was nearly at its peak) affected my outlook/consciousness. vs. millennials (esp. later millennials) who grew up in an era when not only were rates of crime decreasing but people were starting to acknowledge the trend.

i mention that b/c the actual rate of violent crime and the perception of violent crime are somewhat independent variables.

what is the ideological bias of the abortion argument in yr eyes? to me it seems to support making abortion as legal + safe everywhere as possible to every citizen who needs it. it seems obvious to me that being forced to have an unwanted child (for whatever reason) is not going to produce good social results down the line.

lag00n i read the section of that link that dealt w/ the abortion link. it quotes a very irrefutable study (the Hott study) and basically makes the crack argument that the link i posted addresses - ie yes, there are other major factors. abortion isn't the only one. similarly the crack-theory proponents would probably have the same criticism of lead, how can you say it was mostly lead when etc etc

a very refutable i meant

not really interested in any of the other arguments in that link - i haven't investigated them at all and for all i know they're all terrible arguments.

(any of the other arguments that the paper tries to refute I should specify)

the abortion argument raises the spectre of the whole "pathology of poverty" question which is always a lightning rod

but aside from that the evidence seems very faulty to me!

mordy you have a funny way of insisting that people read the stuff you post and then blithely dismissing the stuff other people post w/o reading it!

of course, see also: almost every ILE poster.

sorry I was speaking generally there, not about that particular argument. I trust Freakonomics about as much as I trust Breitbart, albeit for different reasons which are not always mutually exclusive (the former is sloppy, the latter are just flat-out evil)

xp

amateurist - i read the section related to our argument! i'm not really interested in the "they've published other bad stuff so this is bad argument."