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With regard to what Pat said about causation and
correlation: I, too, used the Freakanomics
reference to lower crime rates and the legalization of abortion, for my Violence
in the Community course. We explored the possible implication that less
unwanted children have been poor in the last 30 years, ergo, we're now
experiencing a 30 year low in crime. This week we'll take a look at
another, often-mentioned set of parallel trends: when the sale of ice
cream goes up, crime goes up. Why? because crime escalates during warm
weather.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2005 12:06
PM
Subject: TEACHSOC: Re: Get this: [Y]ou
could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would
g
I am using Freakonomics in my Intro. to Soc. class as a
launching point for student journals and class discussions this
semester. Since Levitt and Dubner discuss a number of relevant and
sometimes controversial social issues in the book, I know we'll get more
interesting classroom debates. I especially like the
recurring theme of "correlation is not the same thing as causation" a point
I have been trying to make with students for years!
Last week, several of my students had voiced how disturbed they were
by the suggestion that abortion could be justified by using
these declining crime rate statistics. I clarified for them that
Levitt and Dubner are not actually advocating abortion as a method of crime
control, they are merely anayzing the data. Then we discussed how
data COULD be used for various purposes, and policy-makers could theoretically
take such information and use it to set social policy, like the extreme of
advocating for more abortions among poor single mothers to improve the
quality of our citizens. (The authors of Freakonomics actually identified
poverty and single-parents as being the key social factors, as well as
the mother's lack of education, but they did not mention race
specifically. Bill Bennett evidently interpreted poor,
uneducated and single-parent as meaning black.)
The news story the next day after our class discussion gave the issue
much more relevance, when Bill Bennett illustrated so beautifully
just exactly what I have mentioned the night before about public figures
distorting information. Thanks Bill.
Pat
Pat Scheib
Pennsylvania College of Technology
Academic Support
Services, DIF 74
One College Avenue
Williamsport, PA
17701-5799
(570) 326-3761, x7575
>>> Andi Stepnick
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 9/29/2005 2:13 PM >>>
Un-Freakin-believable. I didn't believe it
until I heard the clip. You can listen below and read along! For
those of us talking about race, ways of knowing, data, assumptions,
stereotypes, etc. this is a powerful piece to
deconstruct!! Andi From Media Matters for America.
----->>>>>>TO HEAR IT GO TO http://mediamatters.org/items/200509280006
The following message was included: OMG!
Bill Bennett: "[Y]ou could abort every black baby in this
country, and your crime rate would go down"
Addressing a caller's suggestion that the "lost revenue from the people who
have been aborted in the last 30 years" would be enough to preserve Social
Security's solvency, radio host and former Reagan administration Secretary of
Education Bill Bennett
dismissed such "far-reaching, extensive extrapolations" by declaring that if
"you wanted to reduce crime ... if that were your sole purpose, you could
abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."
Bennett conceded that aborting all African-American babies "would be an
impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do," then added
again, "but the crime rate would go down."
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.
From the September 28 broadcast of Salem Radio Network's Bill Bennett's
Morning in America:
CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the
loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security,
and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the
abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from
the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund
Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never
touches this at all.
BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?
CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it
would be an enormous amount of revenue.
BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I
think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.
CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.
BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue
for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it
cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book
Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you
know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down
is that abortion is up. Well --
CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.
BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either,
because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. 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. 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, extensive extrapolations are,
I think, tricky.
Bill
Bennett's Morning in America airs on approximately 115 radio stations
with an estimated weekly audience of 1.25 million listeners.
A.S.
Posted to the web on Wednesday September 28, 2005 at 3:09 PM EST
Copyright © 2004 Media Matters for America. All rights
reserved.-- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: Social
Movements Working Group <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:53:29 -0400
Subject: [smwg01]
anti-sweatshop sign-on statement
Bob Ross is doing some
really good public sociology/activist intellectual stuff.
STeve
Dear Colleagues,
Early this year I was privileged to
witness an historic decision: United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), the
premier national social justice advocate on American college campuses, began
the construction of a campaign to combat sweatshops by strengthening unions
around the world.
Faculty members from many campuses are
joining with USAS to support this campaign.
Below is a
statement that we are asking faculty members across the country to sign,
indicating their support for this important effort. (The statement and the
list of faculty signatories will be published later this year in the
Chronicle of Higher Education).
USAS has available material,
including Frequently Asked Questions, that they or I will be pleased to send
you upon request. Briefly, the students will ask that university licensees
reserve an escalating portion of their production for union factories that
pay a living wage - unions from anywhere as long as they are truly workers'
democratic choices.
I am asking you to join us in signing this
statement. To do so, simply email USAS campaign organizer Zack Knorr at [EMAIL PROTECTED] (and please copy
me) with your name, school, department, and a line saying that you are in
support. Also, please feel free to forward this email, with your own
personal comments, to other colleagues you think will be sympathetic and
lend their support to this important effort.
At the end of my
work on sweatshops in the apparel industry I argued that there were three
pillars of decency for workers by the middle of the 290th century: their own
associations and self -defense, usually in the form of unions; successful
alliance with reformers and consumers (usually from the middle classes); and
together, sympathetic public policy. This campaign can help erect once again
the first pillar decency
In Solidarity,
Robert J.S. "Bob"
Ross
Statement in Support of United Students Against
Sweatshops' Sweat-Free Campus Campaign
It is now more than
five years since colleges and universities began adopting anti-sweatshop
codes of conduct. Not enough has changed in factories producing collegiate
apparel. Apparel workers around the world too often face abusive treatment,
excessive working hours, wages that are woefully inadequate to meet basic
needs, and the denial of universally acknowledged associational rights when
they organize for improvements. Apparel brands put tremendous pressure on
their supplier factories to cut costs and these pressures make broad, deep
and sustainable improvements in wages and working conditions effectively
impossible. The gains we have seen at individual factories have been too
limited and too fragile.
In light of these conditions, we, the
undersigned, strongly support United Students Against Sweatshops' (USAS) new
sweat-free campus proposal. Under this proposal, campus logo apparel would
be produced in designated supplier factories where workers are able to
enforce their rights through union representation and are paid a living
wage. The goal of this proposal is to supply these factories with steady
orders from university licensees at prices adequate to allow full respect
for workers' rights.
We realize this proposal challenges
current practices, but we believe it is fully achievable. The new sweat-free
campus proposal strengthens existing initiatives in order to bring us closer
to the day when university apparel is truly made under dignified working
conditions.
Robert J.S. Ross, PhD
Chair, 2005-6,
Section on Political Economy of the World-System, American Sociological
Association
Professor of Sociology
Director, International Studies
Stream
Clark University
950 Main Street
Worcester, MA 01610
508 793 7376
fax: 508 793 8816
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Boyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To:
Social Movements Working Group <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:17:51 -0400
Subject: Re: [smwg01] Peak Oil
and Energy talks
Hi Dana!
Go for it..I know that Mathew
Simmons is coming to speak down there..we have
quite a peak oil group up
here too. One friend set up the
www.peakoil.org a few months ago
and very quickly was getting up to 4000 hits a
day. The Colin Campbell,
the British predictor of global production
peaking at about 2010
(and in End of Suburbia and a more recent dvd), called my
friend and
asked to buy the legal rights to his website. Jim turned
him down so
we're still cranking.
So what comes first..peak oil or the
"peaking" of the dollar? Please tell
everyone that Robert Williams , the
Guilford economist, will speak up
here Friday, Oct 21 at 7:30pm on his
new book on global finance "The
Moneychangers", Zed Press,
forthcoming). His talk "Will the Dollar Crash?"
goes after the
Bush policies of maintaining a weak dollar and heavy deficit
spending.
Robert says it's really not if but when the dollar will
spiral
downward in global currency markets.. and now that we just borrow for for
Katrina and ,of course, the war etc..it's really scary.
If
people can't make it for the evening event, I'll also have him in a
classroom
at 2pm.
Take care!
Jeff
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Following up on Gerald Cecil's talk last Wednesday on
peak oil, I wanted to
> forward the schedule of upcoming talks
at Duke this semester on oil and
> energy issues. For the full
listing, go to:
> <http://www.physics.unc.edu/about/robertsonseminars
>
> I also highly recommend the documentary "The End of
Suburbia" for those who
> haven't yet seen it!
>
> --- You are currently subscribed to smwg01 as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To
unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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--
Andi
Every object, every being,
Is a jar of delight.
Be a connoisseur.
~Rumi~
Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our
existence into
something beautiful, or debase it
into ugliness. It's in our hands.
~Cathy Better~
Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of
things which matter
least.
~Johann von
Goethe~
----------------
Dr. Andi Stepnick
Associate Professor of Sociology
314 Wheeler Humanities Building
Belmont University
Nashville TN 37212-3757
Direct Line: (615) 460-6249
Office Manager: (615) 460-5505
Sociology Fax: (615) 460-6997
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