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[Limmo]

Sometimes I just...I don't know what to say.

[AugustWest]

Jeepers, what an ill-advised thing to say.

I just finished reading the book they're talking about, Freakonomics.  It was pretty good.  The point the book made re: legalized abortion and crime rate drop was this -- pregnancies are more likely to be aborted by women who do not want babies or are unable or unprepared to raise children.  Is it possible that children actually born into this situation are more likely to grow up and commit crimes?

[V-Adore]

Jeepers, what an ill-advised thing to say.

I just finished reading the book they're talking about, Freakonomics.  It was pretty good.  The point the book made re: legalized abortion and crime rate drop was this -- pregnancies are more likely to be aborted by women who do not want babies or are unable or unprepared to raise children.  Is it possible that children actually born into this situation are more likely to grow up and commit crimes?

Yeah, that's what really got me about this particular comment in the book. Insofar as it made any statement on the abortion question at all, the statement it made was "women appear to competently assess their ability and desire to raise a child and generally make appropriate choices." That really isn't a pro- or anti-abortion stance, just a stance in favor of allowing women to make a choice, as opposed to anything involving mandatory abortions. (Mandatory-abortion arguments might be my favorite straw man. Is anyone actually in favor of these?)

[jough]

Well, statistically a large number of *convicted* crimes are committed by black men, and black males make up the majority of our prison population.

Does this mean black men are more prone to crime, or does our justice system discriminate and sentence more black men than an equal amount of guilty white men?

I don't know.  But I don't think the crime problem has as much to do with race as economic status.  It's not that rich people don't commit crimes - but the crimes they tend to commit are different types of crimes.  

Anyway, I think you eliminate the lower class and you'll see crime drop to almost nothing.  

And the Republicans have been trying to eliminate the lower class for years. Ba doom boom.

[AugustWest]

Whether or not his statement was accurate it was an astoundingly impolitic thing to say.

[Golfhaus]

I'm of two opinions on it. The first, more immediate thought is the expected "How dare he? What a horribly insensitive thing to say, it's obvious how he really feels about blacks," etc.

The second, though, is that maybe we need more incendiary talk like this in politics to make people wake up and realize what the people we put in power really think about stuff. This isn't some dude with a blog. He was part of Reagan's Cabinet. He was in the Presidential Order of Succession (albeit as Sec. of Education, he ranked just above Castro and just below Skippy The Wonder Goldifsh).

Of course, he might be right. Maybe killing all the black people WOULD greatly reduce the crime rate. Then again, killing all the white people would redistribute the world's wealth on a grand scale and go a long way to eliminating the crime that blacks statistically are convicted of (a subtle point Jough made).

[AlohaDawg]

I thought it was odd for Bennett to say but without hearing the whole show it's tough. The fact that his show is on Salem and the link is to what looks to be a more left-leaning web publication indicates to me that more information would be helpful.

As for mandatory abortions being a straw man - well, until recently there were eugenics boards functioning in some areas, and that is not so different.  It's not as much a straw man as you might think, certainly not all that long ago. Here's a scary link: Future Generations

The socio-economic argument made by the caller is flawed but interesting. Since a great many black men don't live long enough to collect social security anyway, it would be free money IF all those babies went into the work force. Hmmm. They work, someone else eventually gets paid. I think European-Americans tried that before.

Whether you are pro-choice or pro-life, you have to admit that the likely socio-economic cost of outlawing abortion and thereby increasing the pressure on urban and rural women to make bad choices would be overwhelming and would disproportionately affect the minority poor. You would, I think, have to make significant changes and increases in social programming and expenditures (not to mention education, housing, and law enforcement) to manage that outcome. It would be very expensive; probably more expensive (in economic terms) than the abortions. Many people believe that the cost of abortions runs far beyond just the economic, though.

Good Catch, Limmo, that is really interesting.

[miles]

I think that in China some women have been forced to abort their pregnancies because of population laws.  I don't know whether it happens now.  If you were asking whether people in this country actually support mandatory abortion, I think that some people on the fringes do, in order to slow down population growth, but obviously no one who sides on the pro-choice side of the debate would argue for anything remotely close to mandatory abortion.

Also, I read an article about a study a year ago or so that suggested the link between economics and crime isn't as strong as a lot of people think.  Of course, I don't have a source, but apparently there isn't a complete consensus with the idea that poverty equals crime, and therefore a reduction in poverty (or in poor people) equals a reduction in crime.

[V-Adore]

Yeah, miles has it right. Mandatory abortion is a straw man when arguing the pro-life case, because virtually nobody on the pro-choice side would ever condone forced abortion under any circumstance. (There are probably people who would, but they're at the fringes.)

[AlohaDawg]

I think I can agree with Miles in that there isn't a one-to-one causal relationship between poverty and crime.

There were some studies based on interviews and recollections of the Watts riots that were done that seemed to indicate that poverty wasn't the issue nearly so much as the disparity between the rich and poor. The reasoning seems to follow that if everyone had the same stuff, no one would get the idea that they need or want something they don't have. If I recall what I read forever ago in urban studies, a major issue was televisions - poorer people (in 1965) didn't have them and there was a perception that a television set was a status symbol. A main target of the looting during Watts was television sets.

Another interesting study was done in New Orleans and I think other places in the 1990's - it was called 'Broken Windows'. As I recall it, several different neighborhoods with similar demographics - income, age, racial distribution - are selected. Then very careful study of the public areas of each neighborhood are studided. The condition of roads, parks, play structures, buildings, the number of empty lots, amount of trash, etc...everything except what the people were doing.

So they quantify all these environmental factors and create a method of quantifying the level of disorder.

Then they layered that data with public health and crime data. Interestingly enough, the neighborhoods with higher disorder also had higher levels of STDs, drug use, etc.

Neighborhoods with similar demographics but well maintained buildings and parks showed measurably lower levels of general bad outcomes that can be considered results of people's behavior.

So my point is that being poor is not and has never been automatically criminal. When people are in a situation where they feel that their basic needs and expectations aren't met (providing working play equipment for kids, safe schools, minimally maintained buildings) some people feel that they are justified in ignoring the law, since it's clear (to them) that whoever is responsible for social order (the government, etc.) is ignoring them. Probably it's more complex than that, but you know.

[slink]

Mmmmmmmm. Fox news...
As far as I will go is to say Fox News is probably the thing in the media that makes me regularly most angry and ill feeling.
Apart from that, I doubt I can add anything to this argument feeling seperately ill and incoherent as I already do.

[AlohaDawg]

Slink -

Do you get the identical Fox News that we get here? Just curious - I know there are CNNs made and broadcast overseas that are different from the US version.

The current state of News Media as a whole makes me pretty angry. The whole "tragedy TV" culture of breathless (and inaccurate) reporting of cannibalsim and mayhem in NO is a classic example. Also the really weird fixation on white, blond, female college students who go missing - the whole Aruba thing was just grotesque.

I take almost everything I see on TV news as OP-ED pieces. I have no faith in objectivity; I think it's gone. Fake documents, inability to check sources, fixation on things that just aren't national news - too much emphasis on entertainment. It cuts across Network, Cable, and Radio Talk show outlets. Maybe less so in slick magazines but they have clear leanings as well. Even the NY Times and LA Times have well publicized problems with journalistic integrity these days.

Bottom line: it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff anymore.

[AlohaDawg]

<<Transcript of call to Bill Bennett>>

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 occurs 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 [ways]. 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.

<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>

I don't think Bennet set out to articulate a racist position or a position supporting selective abortion. His main intent seems to be to caution the caller about extrapolating broad social effects from hypothetical policy changes.

He could have made the same exact argument by saying you could abort every white baby, or every asian baby, or every latino baby, or just some arbitrary percentage of all babies though - I think that <maybe> it's too convenient and to some degree ingrained in us to throw in the word 'black' when  discussing poverty or crime or drug use. That's a problem - but it's a problem that cuts across our culture without respect to politics.

[pmcd9]

I think I need more context before I can let Bill Bennet off the hook here.  The caller was talking about abortion in general and it was Bennet that suddenly started talking about "aborting every black baby."

And as for the "impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do" i'm not sure he was talking about the obvious and blatant racism in that statement?  Maybe he was saying that it's abortion he finds "morally reprehensible" even for black people.

~Paul

[slink]

Now, that may be the case, but we could do with some objectionality I feel.

Is that the same as objectivity? I think we could use that as well as some kind of real threshold as to what should be national news - I am tired of seeing it all over the cable news channels every time a white blond college student disappears or a white upper middle class pregnant wife either vanishes or is murdered. I just don't understand why that is more newsworthy than everything else that happened in every town in the US that day.

So for the most part, I agree with you.

 Now, I wonder, what do you think about David Frost going to work for Al Jazeera?