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?

According to yet another study, women tend to seek “less masculine” men as mates and masculine men for casual encounters. Why? They say men with more masculine features engage in riskier activities, i.e., prone to cheat and invest less time in childrearing. True? Actually, there are two things going on here. Does “more masculine” necessarily mean “more attractive”?

Allow me to offer my five cents. Although I desired the extremely handsome man from afar, I never wanted to date him. Why? Because he was highly sought after and heavily valued by other women, at least at the surface level. Being no prize myself, I figured he’d want an equally attractive woman on his arm.

What is or isn’t handsome is relative, I suppose. And some very attractive men may not even know how beautiful they are. For instance, I once heard Denzel Washington say he had no idea he was considered “cute.”

Yeah, right.

What I like about Washington, besides his face, is that he’s still married to the wife of his youth.

Gary Dourdan, on the other hand, must have known from birth that he was attractive (those eyes!). Hey, I’m as superficially attracted to good-looking faces and fabulous smiles as the next human being with functional eyes.

What do women want as far as a mate is concerned? Well, this Christian woman wants a godly man who isn’t averse to working, is socially conservative and moderately ambitious (family comes first), can deal with my strong opinions but isn’t afraid to tell me when I’m wrong or out of line, and wants his wife (as opposed to day care or a nanny) to raise his children. [Double secret coded message: I think that describes you. ]

“The ideal mate” is relative (how many times have I used that word today?), of course. Our ideal mate probably is not classically handsome or high earning, but he’s ideal for us based on qualities like good character, the ability to patiently put up with us, etc.

Ladies and guys, if you’re still single, what qualities would your ideal mate have? If married, are you with your ideal mate?

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:

• Steve Levitt’s blog
• Steve Sailer’s blog
• Gregg Jackson’s abortion post

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.

I did a search on Levitt’s 1999 article and found it at EconPapers. Click here for a PDF copy of “Legalized Abortion and Crime.”

I don’t know if Levitt thought about the implications when he decided to publish his ideas, but Steve Sailer, who often writes about race, sure has. In Pre-emptive Executions?, Sailer eviscerates Levitt’s flawed findings and offers a much more rational explanation for crime reduction. Although some dismiss Sailer as a racist, at least he understands that Levitt’s strange and racially-loaded ideas are “morally repugnant.” He writes:

Although Levitt desperately wants to avoid talking about race in relation to abortion and crime, blacks make an ideal test case for his theory because, as Levitt himself has noted, black women have about triple the number of abortions per capita as white women. So Levitt’s theory suggests that black teens should have “benefited” more than whites from abortion. Instead, black 14- to 17-year-olds were an apocalyptic 4.4 times more murderous in 1993 than a decade earlier. The black-white teen murder ratio grew from five times worse in 1983 to 11 times worse in 1993, according to the FBI.

The embarrassing truth, as Levitt admitted to me when I debated him on Slate.com in 1999, is that when he dreamed up his theory with John J. Donohue, he looked at crime rates in 1985 and 1997 and paid little attention to the vast crack epidemic that laid waste to urban America in between.

Sailer’s analysis of crime rates sounds “right,” more intuitive. Levitt, by his own admission, sought a “novel” explanation for falling crime rates, one that doesn’t ring true. Think about the logical leap you’d have to make to conclude that crime has decreased because of something akin to retroactive capital punishment. The fact that more criminals are locked up is the most likely reason crime rates fall, not that there are fewer criminals alive!

Another plausible argument is that legalized child killing has increased crime. That sounds right. Sailer writes:

The liberal politics and permissive social attitudes that made legal abortion popular in New York, California, and Washington, D.C. (where it was de facto legal before Roe) likely also contributed to the crack epidemic. D.C., for example, enjoyed both the highest abortion rate in the U.S. and, in later years, a popular mayor, Marion Barry, who was himself a crackhead.

The last line was unexpected but sadly true, and it illustrates the absurdity of abandoning standards of decency and the havoc it wreaks on society.

Update: I think this is an online debate on Slate.com between Steve Sailer and Steven Levitt. It looks like Part I, II and III of “Does Abortion Prevent Crime?”

Related: The Roe Effect and Babies Having Fewer Babies.

Readers respond to this Opinion Journal article.

Update II (4/21): Steve Levitt responds:

I think it is only fair to an author that if you are going to criticize a theory, you first invest the time to read what the author has written. Everything on this blog is a response to someone’s criticism of my work, not the work itself. It completely misses the point. My research is not an endorsement of abortion, baby killing, eugenics, etc. It is not a pleasant theory, but the data overwhelmingly support it. And it makes sense. As some of the people posting say, if you kill everyone there will be no crime. Essentially that is my point. I’m not saying it is good or bad, I am just saying that if you abort 1 million fetuses a year, it should be no surprise crime is lower when that generation reaches its peak crime years. That is not an endorsement, it is a fact.

LaShawn, if you are interested, I will send you a copy of the book and/or the academic article. I am confident that after you read it you will have a different opinion. If you are serious about the truth, give me a chance.

My response:

Thanks for stopping by, Steve. I would like to read your book. I’ll send you an e-mail with my contact information.

I read some of your report but not all of it. I will read the rest. Time will tell if I change my view of your premise. And I hope you noticed that I didn’t accuse you of endorsing abortion. In fact, the post title simply restates your conclusion, and the post itself is about the racial implications of your conclusion and Sailer’s analysis of your theory.

I linked to the PDF copy of your report and responses to Steve Sailer so my readers would have the relevant information and form their own opinions. I will give your book a fair reading and post a review on the blog.