Will You Trade Homosexuality for Abortion?

pimptight · Oct 1, 2012

So, let’s look at the assumptions one by one and see how they fare.

1)Did the arrival of crack lead to rising youth crime? Yes. No argument from me here.

2) Did the decline in crack lead to a “boomerang” effect in which crime actually fell by more than it had risen with the arrival of crack? Unfortunately for your story, the empirical evidence overwhelmingly rejects this claim. Using specifications similar to those in our paper, we find that the states with the biggest increases in murder over the rising crack years (1985-91) did see murder rates fall faster between 1991 and 1997. But for every 10 percent that murder rose between 1985 and 1991, it fell by only 2.6 percent between 1991 and 1997. For your story to explain the decline in crime that we attribute to legalized abortion, this estimate would have to be about five times bigger. Moreover, for violent crime and property crime, increases in these crimes over the period 1985-91 are actually associated with increases in the period 1991-97 as well. In other words, for crimes other than murder, the impact of crack is not even in the right direction for your story.

3) Were high-abortion-rate states in the ’70s hit harder by the crack epidemic in the ’90s? Given the preceding paragraph, this is a moot point, because all three assumptions must be true to undermine the abortion story, but let’s look anyway. A reasonable proxy for how hard the crack epidemic hit a state is the rise in crime in that state over the period 1985-91. Your theory requires a large positive correlation between abortion rates in a state in the ’70s and the rise in crime in that state between 1985 and 1991. In fact the actual correlations, depending on the crime category, range between -.32 and +.09 Thus, the claim that high-abortion states are the same states that were hit hardest by crack is not true empirically. While some states with high abortion rates did have a lot of crack (e.g., New York and D.C.), Vermont, Kansas, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Washington were among the 10 states with the highest abortion rates in the ’70s. These were not exactly the epicenters of the crack epidemic.

So, what is the final tally? Two of the key assumptions underlying your alternative hypothesis appear to be false: The retreat of crack has not led to an “overshoot” in crime, causing it to be lower than 1985, and even if it had, the states with high abortion rates in the ’70s do not appear to be affected particularly strongly by the crack epidemic. Moreover, when we re-run our analysis controlling for both changes in crime rates from 1985 to 1991 and the level of crime in 1991, the abortion variable comes in just as strongly as in our original analysis.

Re-reading this response five years later, it still sounds pretty good to me. Interestingly, at the time, Sailer refused to respond directly to my arguments. His response in Slate completely side-stepped the fact that I had destroyed his core argument. He wrote, for instance, “…rather than mud wrestle in numbers here, I’ll privately send you my technical suggestions. In this essay I’ll step back and explain why this straightforward insight [that abortion reduces crime] might not work in practice.” I should note that I am still waiting for those technical suggestions he promised to arrive!! And if you compare his Slate arguments to his “new” article in the American Conservative, you will see that his thinking has not progressed very far on the issue. In contrast, I spent two years working on that paper on crack cocaine, which provides hard, quantitative evidence in favor of those earlier conjectures I had made.

Now let’s talk about John Lott for a minute. Along with John Whitley, he wrote a paper on abortion and crime. It is so loaded with inaccurate claims, errors and statistical mistakes that I hate to even provide a link to it, but for the sake of completeness you can find it here. Virtually nothing in this paper is correct, and it is no coincidence that four years later it remains unpublished. In a letter to the editor at Wall Street Journal, Lott claims that our results are driven by the particular measure of abortions that we used in the first paper. I guess he never bothered to read our response to Joyce in which we show in Table 1 that the results are nearly identical when we use his preferred data source. It is understandable that he could make this argument five years ago, but why would he persist in making it in 2005 when it has been definitively shown to be false? (I’ll let you put on your Freakonomics-thinking-hat and figure out the answer to that last question.) As Lott and Whitley are by now well aware, the statistical results they get in that paper are an artifact of some bizarre choices they made and any reasonable treatment of the data returns our initial results. (Even Ted Joyce, our critic, acknowledges that the basic patterns in the data we report are there, which Lott and Whitley were trying to challenge.)

To anyone who actually made it this far, I applaud you for your patience. Let me simply end with an analogy. Let’s say that we are living in a world in which global warming is taking place, but also a world in which El Nino occasionally leads to radical, short run disruptions in normal weather patterns. You wouldn’t argue that global warming is false because for a year or two we had cold winters. You’d want to figure out what effect El Nino has on winter weather and then see whether controlling for El Nino it looks like global warming is taking place. The impact of legalized abortion on crime is a lot like global warming — it is slow and steady and grows a little year by year. Crack is like El Nino, it comes in with a fury and then largely disappears. That is why I have invested so much time and effort in understanding both abortion and crack, and why the criticisms made against the abortion-reduces-crime hypothesis to date have not been very compelling.
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http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/

Giftedone · Oct 3, 2012

Blackrook said: ↑

I will make a deal.

I am a devout Catholic and I think homosexuality is a grave personality disorder and that homosexual acts are a mortal sin.

Needless to say, I am totally opposed to the gay agenda.

But I am willing to cut a deal.

I will drop my opposition to the gay agenda if you will agree to stop the slaughter of innocent human beings at abortion clinics, 1.5 million babies killed per year.

Who's game?
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First off why should anyone care what you think
Second .. why don't you stop forcing your religious beliefs on others
Third .. quit spouting logical fallacies "baby killing" without being able to support this stupid claim

stig42 · Oct 3, 2012

Blackrook said: ↑

I will make a deal.

I am a devout Catholic and I think homosexuality is a grave personality disorder and that homosexual acts are a mortal sin.

Needless to say, I am totally opposed to the gay agenda.

But I am willing to cut a deal.

I will drop my opposition to the gay agenda if you will agree to stop the slaughter of innocent human beings at abortion clinics, 1.5 million babies killed per year.

Who's game?
Click to expand...

Im not seeing any good reason why abortion or homosexuality is bad hear maybe maybe a slight condemnation of some of Catholicism

stig42 · Oct 3, 2012

Blackrook said: ↑

Not one person is willing to give up killing babies to help the gays?

Telling.

But really, that's the result I expected.

In this age of declining faith, you will have it all -- including the total destruction of marriage and the family.

Children will be raised by the state and parents will be lucky to have visitation rights.

The Israelis did this voluntarily, and it shows how far the left wants to take things to destroy all family bonds.
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um legal abortion and giving homosexuals = rights doesnt destroy heterosexual marriages or familys they should survive just fine

Anders Hoveland · Oct 17, 2012

Blackrook said: ↑

I am greedy and want it all, killing babies and the full gay agenda thrust on the American people.
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I believe you will find most Liberals to be like this, stubborn unwillingness to make any compromises on the social issues they feel they are so entittled to.

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Will You Trade Homosexuality for Abortion?

Will You Trade Abortion for Homosexuality???

I will agree to stop killing babies so that gays can have full civil rights.

No, killing babies is so important to me I would not give it up to help the gays.

I am greedy and want it all, killing babies and the full gay agenda thrust on the American people.

Abortion is a sacrament of my godless religion and I won't stop ever.

pimptight Banned

Giftedone Well-Known Member Past Donor

stig42 New Member

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Anders Hoveland Banned

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Will You Trade Homosexuality for Abortion?

Will You Trade Abortion for Homosexuality???

I will agree to stop killing babies so that gays can have full civil rights.

No, killing babies is so important to me I would not give it up to help the gays.

I am greedy and want it all, killing babies and the full gay agenda thrust on the American people.

Abortion is a sacrament of my godless religion and I won't stop ever.

pimptight Banned

Giftedone Well-Known Member Past Donor

stig42 New Member

stig42 New Member

Anders Hoveland Banned

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