-------- Original Message --------
Robert, my posts to the Biofuel list have been getting waylaid since the
20th. I've sent this 3 times now, and it has not gotten through. Would
you mind posting it to the list for me? I see your messages are still
getting through.
Thanks, Darryl
-------- Original Message --------
robert and benita rabello wrote:
> Darryl McMahon wrote:
>
>> Actually, I've done some x-y correlation research in my day, and while
>> it's been a while, the text of the book rings true with my experience.
>> It strikes me that Levitt has done a reasonable job of substantiating
>> his conclusions, as much as anyone can in the social sciences where
>> running conscious control populations can be tricky. However, he's
>> done a pretty good job of finding reasonable controls for comparisons
>> from data typically collected for other purposes.
>>
>>
>
> I'm not ready to concede the point to you. The argument presented in
> the book didn't seem convincing to me because there are too many other
> factors that influence crime rates. Others have also questioned Mr.
> Levitt's analysis. For instance:
>
> http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5246700
>
> Now the following words come from Christopher Foote from the Federal
> Reserve Bank of Boston, but they underscore my point pretty well:
>
> " " But now economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston are taking
> aim at the statistics behind one of Mr. Levitt's most controversial
> chapters. Mr. Levitt asserts there is a link between the legalization of
> abortion in the early 1970s and the drop in crime rates in the 1990s.
> Christopher Foote <http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/econbios/foote.htm>,
> a senior economist at the Boston Fed, and Christopher Goetz, a research
> assistant, say the research behind that conclusion is faulty.
>
> " Long before he became a best-selling author, Mr. Levitt, 38 years old,
> had established a reputation among economists as a careful researcher
> who produced first-rate statistical studies on surprising subjects. In
> 2003, the American Economic Association named him the nation's best
> economist under 40, one of the most prestigious distinctions in the
> field. His abortion research was published in 2001 in the Quarterly
> Journal of Economics, an academic journal. (He was the subject of a
> page-one Wall Street Journal story1 in the same year.)
>
> " The "Freakonomics" chapter on abortion grew out of statistical studies
> Mr. Levitt and a co-author, Yale Law School Prof. John Donohue,
> conducted on the subject. The theory: Unwanted children are more likely
> to become troubled adolescents, prone to crime and drug use, than are
> wanted children. When abortion was legalized in the 1970s, a whole
> generation of unwanted births were averted, leading to a drop in crime
> nearly two decades later when this phantom generation would have come of
> age.
>
> "The Boston Fed's Mr. Foote says he spotted a missing formula in the
> programming of Mr. Levitt's original research. He argues the programming
> oversight made it difficult to pick up other factors that might have
> influenced crime rates during the 1980s and 1990s, like the crack wave
> that waxed and waned during that period. He also argues that in
> producing the research, Mr. Levitt should have counted arrests on a
> per-capita basis. Instead, he counted overall arrests. After he adjusted
> for both factors, Mr. Foote says, the abortion effect disappeared.
> [Emphasis mine.]
>
> " "There are no statistical grounds for believing that the hypothetical
> youths who were aborted as fetuses would have been more likely to commit
> crimes had they reached maturity than the actual youths who developed
> from fetuses and carried to term," the authors assert in the report. "
>
>
> Correlating cause / effect relationships is a slippery business at best,
> and the biggest assumption Mr. Levitt made was that abortion eliminated
> a significant percentage of unwanted babies, who would, in turn, have
> become criminals because of their lack of familial love and guidance.
> However, statistics concerning illegitimate births in the US indicate a
> RISE after abortion was legalized. How can that correlate with
> "wantedness" and result in reduced crime?
>
> The whole exercise was mindless, in my view.
This is good stuff. People are thinking, there is an open discussion,
facts are actually being used. I had not gone further than what was in
the book, and your comments have forced me to do so.
It appears that Levitt and Donohue have addressed the issues raised by
at least some of their critics, Foote and Goetz in particular. They
actually agree that there was an error in their formula, and have redone
the work correcting for that. Their resulting conclusion: the effect
is still statistically significant, but not as strong as they previously
found.
This Wikipedia article was a good starting point for what I found
tonight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect
This AEI link is dated March 2006, so the debate is not over.
http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.1285/summary.asp
(I believe this is the AEI where Cheney was a fellow.)
On the page, there is a link to a January 2006 response by Levitt and
Donohue (21 pages). I'm printing it off to read later, but lifted this
from the abstract:
"When one uses a more carefully constructed measure of abortion (e.g.
one that takes into account cross-state mobility, or doing a better job
of matching dates of birth to abortion exposure), however, the evidence
in support of the abortion-crime hypothesis is as strong or stronger
than suggested in our original work."
It would appear the debate is still in progress. I think that's
probably healthy. It's going to keep me thinking a while longer I suspect.
>
> (Neocons)
>
>>
>> Interesting perspective. I certainly did not see it that way. In
>> fact, I would have thought NeoCons would have hated it. I suppose
>> anyone can find something they like in here, but NeoCons and the whole
>> book, that I don't see. Maybe my definition of NeoCons is off. I
>> tend to associate them with the current White House crowd (Bush II,
>> Rove, Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc) and the American
>> religious right.
>>
>>
>
> Those people use religion to promote a very secular agenda. To them,
> economics is twisted into a scheme that increases profit. Religion and
> pious-sounding talk serve to lull the masses to sleep. They're a
> hawkish bunch who promote "free trade" only when it suits them. (Don't
> get me started about softwood lumber!) My sister (and most of the
> people in my family, for that matter) fall quite nicely into the NeoCon
> camp. News that two American soldiers were recently tortured and
> brutally slain in Iraq brought outraged responses from solid,
> church-attending people who think that we ought to "bomb them all to
> hell" for this.
Yes, I tend to be a bit touchy on the softwood lumber dispute myself.
It still baffles me that having over 100,000 Iraqi dead doesn't seem to
have nearly the same impact in the U.S. as even one U.S. casualty.
As for the bombing strategy, well the "Shock and Awe" campaign was
completely successful in its objective wasn't it? That was to find the
WMDs, er, defeat terrorism, er, get Osama, er, get Saddam, er, well
something like that. (Actually, I also have the original Bushworld book
by Maureen Dowd on the go - frightening retrospective - had to believe
this group is still in power.)
> Now the reason NeoCons in my family LOVE this book, is that they say
> Freakonomics lays out a persuasive case for monetary and tax policies
> that encourage current trends. Therefore, we don't need to worry about
> energy, global warming, a HUGE tax deficit and an overextended
> military. Concerns about these sorts of thing are so "old school" . . .
Hunh?? Where did they get that from this book? Are the confusing
Levitt with Lomberg? I think somebody is doing some serious spinning here.
> That wasn't my take, but theirs.
>
>> I disagree. I don't think morality has much of a relationship with
>> economics, any more than physics. If a meteorite strikes the earth
>> and kills people, that's reality that can be explained by physics, but
>> I don't ascribe any morality to the event. Economics attempts to
>> explain the actions of individuals relative to their choices in the
>> use of resources. Levitt gives a couple of cases where the economic
>> incentives are in conflict with the presumed moral choice. Which one
>> wins depends on the individual. The take-away for me is that we
>> should be doing a better job of aligning incentives with morality as a
>> society, not putting them in conflict to see which wins.
>>
> If that's your position, you are NOT disagreeing with me. Because
> economic issues center on human choice, it IS fundamentally rooted in
> one's sense of morality. I contend that the current paradigm puts short
> term profit over people, that the economic deck is stacked in favor of
> the wealthy, and that statistical analyses given to us every night on
> the news present a different story than the one faced by the vast
> majority of human beings alive on the planet.
>
>> If we want to expend the effort, I'm sure we can get a reasonable
>> estimate of how much it costs to destroy the environment, and human
>> life and extracting wealth from the poor for the benefit of the rich.
>> (That may come in a later post; I'm currently reading The Weather
>> Makers by Flannery; in a word-terrifying.)
>>
>>
>
> Sounds like my kind of book!
I'll post something when I'm done. It strikes me so far as a call to
action. On the other side, I've just re-discovered the
"CanadianSolution" Web site on climate change. If this is the starting
point for the Harper government "made-in-Canada" solution (and I've
heard hints it is), we are in serious trouble.
I also saw the movie, An Inconvenient Truth on the weekend. My wife
fell asleep, my son was energized by it. My fear is that this movie
will not reach the population it needs to, but just those already
convinced. I looked at a lot of the audience departing the theatre. No
debates, just nodding heads.
>
>> I trust you feel this direction is counter to your morality; it is
>> counter to mine. So, I would not expend the effort on the accounting
>> analysis. Economics is a tool, like a shovel. You can use a shovel
>> to cultivate the garden, or stove in your neighbour's head. The
>> shovel has no inherent morality. Economics can be used to our benefit
>> (e.g. Schumacher) or our detriment (e.g. Reagan supply-side economics,
>> and I would argue Friedman's monetarism - but that's another debate).
>> So long as we permit social policies to incent action that is contrary
>> to our morality, it is not the fault of economics that it can explain
>> the mechanism or keep score; it is our fault for permitting the policy
>> to remain in effect.
>>
>>
>
> Ah, I understand you now. I'm not faulting economics as a study, but
> rather as a means of perpetuating the status quo.
Economics is simply a tool. Those in power are the ones perpetuating
the status quo. If they can use economics to support their power base
they will, just as they will use the legal system, the media, and
anything else that comes to hand.
>
>> The thing I hope most people take away from this book is to look past
>> the "conventional wisdom", and think for themselves. That alone would
>> be a great step forward.
>>
>>
>
> Most people I know who have read the book aren't thinking at all, and
> THAT is scary!
Concur.
>
> robert luis rabello
> "The Edge of Justice"
> Adventure for Your Mind
> http://www.newadventure.ca
>
> Ranger Supercharger Project Page
> http://www.members.shaw.ca/rabello/
>
--
Darryl McMahon http://www.econogics.com
It's your planet. If you won't look after it, who will?
--
Darryl McMahon http://www.econogics.com
It's your planet. If you won't look after it, who will?
--
robert luis rabello
"The Edge of Justice"
Adventure for Your Mind
http://www.newadventure.ca
Ranger Supercharger Project Page
http://www.members.shaw.ca/rabello/
