In today’s round-up, I offer you a potpourri of topics for discussion.
First, a few blog shout-outs. Tami Gill, inspired by me to read the Harry Potter books, currently is on Book 5. Surf over and welcome her to the fandom. (And no spoilers!) For you Harry-Potter-is-evil folks, check out Laura Mallory and the Misguided Crusade.
Welcome Christian Harry Potter fan and professor John Granger to the blogosphere (and I’m thrilled to see my Christian fantasy fiction blog on his roll)! Also see “Harry Potter and the Charmed Christians” and Who Killed Albus Dumbledore?
The Carnival of Homeschooling celebrates one year of existence. Loyal reader and trackbacker Nathan Bradfield at Church and State celebrates his one-year blogiversary. And welcome commenter and new blogger (relatively speaking) Thomas Nguyen to the blogosphere.
Next on the list is Steve Sailer’s “Fragmented Future” article in American Conservative. Some folks call Sailer a racist; I call him a realist. His latest article is not as controversial as others, but it’s worth checking out. Also see his notes on the Great White Defendant.
Sailer surmises that people tend not to trust people who don’t look or act like them. Citing a study that concludes cultural diversity engenders distrust, Sailer says it also tends to inhibit social cohesion, to the dismay of those who worship the multiculti god. If you live in a “diverse” neighborhood, what’s been your experience?
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Ecomomist Steve Levitt’s nemesis, Steve Sailer, predicted that a hot-shot young economist would make a name for himself by debunking Levitt’s abortion-reduced-crime theory found in the pages of the bestseller, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
A couple of economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found some coding errors in Levitt’s research. I don’t know how young and hot they are, but here’s the deal:
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, a senior economist at the Boston Fed, and Christopher Goetz, a research assistant, say the research behind that conclusion is faulty…
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. (Source)
In response, Levitt writes, “This is personally quite embarrassing because I pride myself on being careful with data.” Download a PDF copy of the “debunking” paper.
I don’t think Levitt ought to be too worried about coding errors even if they blow the whole theory apart because most people couldn’t care less about statistics and economics, although they should. Several months ago Levitt and Sailer (and here) both commented on a post I’d written titled Steven Levitt Says Child Killing Reduces Crime.
I don’t care about stats as much as I should, either, but Sailer’s response to Levitt sounded more convincing than Levitt’s theory. It’s sort of like obscenity: I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it. Sailer wrote:
Did legalizing abortion in the early ’70s reduce crime in the late ’90s by allowing “pre-emptive capital punishment†of potential troublemakers? Or did the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, by outmoding shotgun weddings, adoption, and respect for life, instead make more murderous the early ’90s crack wars fought by the first generation of youths to survive legalized abortion? (Source)
Yeah, that one.
I encourage you to read both articles cited above, then hop on over to Sailer’s abortion page to see how this male cat fight evolved (I mean that in a good way, boys…). 
Related post: What Bill Bennett Said
Bloggers’ links:
“Declining crime rates could result from… selective abortion on the part of women most at risk to have children who would engage in criminal activity…” – Steven Levitt
At first glance this may sound like a sick joke, but what looks like bad humor is actually somebody’s idea of serious work. Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, posits that crime rates went down in the 90s because more women killed their babies in utero after child killing was “legalized” in the 70s. He writes:
Greater numbers of abortions are likely to reduce the size of a cohort, which can have a straightforward, but ultimately temporary, effect on overall crimes rates: if abortion decreases the number of births in a cohort, when that cohort reaches the late teens and twenties, there will be fewer young males, and thus more crime.
Of course, the racial (and eugenics) implications of Levitt’s theory are enormous. Since black women are three times more likely to kill their babies and blacks, on average, commit more crimes, following Levitt’s logic, declining crime rates are attributed more to the deaths of black babies. I don’t think the pro-aborts want to latch on to this one.
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