December 3, 2005

Why have basketball and football diverged?

Over the last decade or so, scoring in basketball has dropped, with brutal scores like the 69-65 in the deciding game of the 2004 Eastern Conference Finals becoming common. Field goal and free throw percentages have fallen. This collapse of offense, while defense remains strong, seems to be related to the dominance of the hip-hop ethos in the basketball world, with its Me First attitude and its animus against all forms of "acting white," such as practicing your shooting by yourself rather than scrimmaging with others so you can show off more.

In contrast, offense in football has ascended to seldom-matched heights. For example, in big games in college ball today, #2 ranked Texas scored 70 points against Colorado and #1 USC tallied 66 against UCLA. USC running backs Reggie Bush, with 260 yards (228 of them in a first half that was as spectacular as any I've ever seen), and Lendale White, with 161, combined to carry the ball 40 times for 421 yards against a team that came in 9-1. USC may have more stars at the the skill positions than any college team ever and an overwhelming offensive line.

So, what's going on? Are defenses getting worse? Or are offenses just so much better? Why is basketball debilitated by hip-hop but football isn't?


Is there just not much practicing by yourself possible in football? The most obvious chances to practice by yourself are in kicking and punting, positions that are completely dominated by whites.


A reader sent me an article recently about all black high school teams in Washington D.C., like Dunbar H.S., who can't kick extra points to save their lives:

The teams combined for 11 touchdowns, but just one kicked extra point that day. Woodson also had a 3-yard punt and several horrendous kickoffs, including one in the fourth quarter that actually went backward. A Dunbar player eventually dove on the loose ball as it sat three yards behind its starting point. The referees took several seconds before deciding that a backward boot should be treated just like a forward one and awarding Dunbar the ball where it died.

Horrific kicking has long been a staple of D.C. high-school football (“Black Men Can’t Kick?” 11/16/2001). Jefferies, who over the years has proved he can turn kids into stars at every position except placekicker, says he’s always figured cultural or racial factors prevent his players from warming to the position.

“Everybody here wants to be the running back or the quarterback or the linebacker,” he says. “Very few kids want to be kickers or punters. And, well, soccer’s not big in D.C., not with African-American kids.” (Dunbar and Woodson fielded all-black squads. Neither school has a boys varsity-soccer program.)


In contrast, my old high school has had a dynasty of kickers going back to the 1990s, when our kicker made all 11 field goal attempts in a four playoff game march to the championship, four of them over 50 yards, highlighted by a game-winning last-second 58-yarder in the rain.

This is just another example of how ethnic groups in a country don't automatically assimilate to become more like each other. We're seeing a lot of examples of how blacks are deciding to become blacker all the time. You probably never even noticed that becoming a good placekicker is "acting white," but apparently most black youths understand that and they are determined to "keep it real" by being atrocious kickers.


By the way, the typical problem with picking the winner of the Heisman Trophy for college's best player is that players can rack up gigantic statistics if they are in the right spot at the right time, playing in an offensive system that rivals can't figure out how to stop. For example, Andre Ware of Houston won the 1989 Heisman for passing for 4,699 yards and 46 TDs in 11 games, but was a famous bust in the NFL and Canada. Jason White won two years ago at Oklahoma, but couldn't catch on in the NFL.

Obviously, the reasons Reggie Bush averaged an amazing 9 yards per carry this season include that's he's running behind an immense offensive line, that's he's spelled frequently by Lendale White who might have been an All-American if was a starter, and defenses have to watch out for USC's passing attack spearheaded by last year's Heisman winner Matt Leinart.

But If Reggie was playing for Rice U. instead of Tailback U., he still probably would have averaged 7 yards per carry. Has there been a more exciting open field runner since Barry Sanders?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Interracial Divorce Statistics

Because my 1997 article on interracial marriage "Is Love Colorblind?" remains popular, I get asked a lot about statistics on interracial divorce rates, but I'd never seen any. A reader now points me to this 1998 government report (PDF) that says about what you'd expect. Marital break-up rates for interracial couples are somewhat higher, but not hugely so:

First marriages in which the husband and wife are both members of the same race/ethnicity are more likely to succeed than those in which the spouses are of different race/ethnicity. After 10 years of marriage, interracial marriages have a 41% chance of disruption and same-race marriages have a 31% chance of disruption. The number of specific comparisons that can be made is limited because of small sample sizes. While specific pairings such as ‘‘white/black’’ or ‘‘black/Asian’’ are not shown, ... ‘‘White/any other’’ couples [which I believe include white-Hispanic as well as white-Asian] have similar chances of marital disruption [40%] as all ‘‘different race’’ couples [41%], which is not surprising as the majority of ‘‘different race’’ couples are ‘‘white/any other’’ pairings. ‘‘Black/any other’’ couples appear to have chances of marital disruption [48%] similar to those for all black couples [47%].

For first marriages between husbands and wives of the same race/ethnicity, the "disruption" (divorce or separation) rates at 10 years are Asians 20%, non-Hispanic whites 32%, Hispanics 34%, and blacks 47%. Lots of negative demographic factors correlate with higher divorce rates, so it's likely that the Hispanic "propensity to divorce" is less than the white propensity, all else being equal. Somebody should do a regression study of the demographic characteristics of interracial couples and see how their underlying propensity to divorce compares to same race couples.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 2, 2005

The War Nerd reviews the 1990s:

Gary Brecher writes that the 1990s featured:

1. Gulf War One, a glorious, magnificent war;

2. A lot of small, crummy wars that hogged all the media attention;

3. Four big, serious wars that nobody noticed...

Even now, I seem to be the only American who appreciates the Prussian-quality planning and execution of the 1991 Iraqi campaign. The rest of you booted Bush Sr. out the year after our victory and elected a draft-dodger who always reminded me of my student body president.

As if that wasn't bad enough, America's voters turned around and reelected Bush's idiot son last year, after the beady-eyed fool drove our Chevy right off the levee into Euphrates mud up to the side mirror. So what are you trying to tell us, guys? That you'll forgive military debacles, but not victories?

Part of the reason America was so ungrateful is that Powell, Schwarzkopf and the troops made it look too easy. After the war people said they knew all along it'd be easy. Well, I happen to remember 1991, and that's a lie. Check for yourself: read the op-ed pages for any U.S. paper from August 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. All the think tanks were predicting a long, bloody struggle to reduce the Iraqi fortifications. Every day you heard that their army was "battle-hardened from the Iran-Iraq War, that the Iraqi Army was "the fourth-largest in the world," and that Iraqi military engineers were brilliant at defensive warfare, with eight years of practice building sand berms, tank traps and moats of crude that they could set on fire as soon as our tanks got close...

It's easy to see now that Saddam had pretty much ensured we'd win easily, by deploying his troops exactly where an enemy whose strength is air power could pulverize them: a flat uninhabited desert. Saddam was the worst civilian commander since Churchill. He was a genius at running Iraq-we may as well admit it now, he did what we haven't been able to do, even with way more men, money and power. But when it came to conventional warfare, he was Schwarzkopf's dream date, the team you want to face in the playoffs.

The 1990s were one of the better decades in human history and I suspect that some of that was owed to the exemplary nature of Desert Storm. It was a message to potential troublemakers around the world that if you stepped too far over the line, that the world, under the leadership of the United States, might come and clean your clock.

I'd love to see a study of the psychological impact of the overwhelming American victory in early 1991 over the Soviet-equipped Iraq army had on the Soviet soldiers. As you'll recall, in August 1991 the Communist hardliners arrested Gorbachev, but their coup collapsed when the military wouldn't follow their leaders and some units defected to Yeltsin. Did they feel that the hardliners would lead them into foreign adventures to to try to hold the Soviet union together and that Desert Storm had shown that would be deadly for Soviet troops?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

For all you visitors to isteve.com who have been wondering "is teve what?"

Some actual domain names:

Who Represents?, a database for agencies to the rich and famous:
www.whorepresents.com

I'd suggest getting her some bling. Don't worry if it's not too tasteful.

Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views:
www.expertsexchange.com

You definitely don't want some amateur doing it.

Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island.
www.penisland.net

Not after you visit www.expertsexchange.com

Need a therapist?

www.therapistfinder.com


It's the inspiration for a Sara Silverman joke: "I was raped by a Freudian therapist, which, for a Jewish girl, was a very bittersweet experience."


Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales:
www.molestationnursery.com


I guess all those daycare center Satanic abuse witch hunts in the 1980s were just looking in the wrong country.


New to Milan and you need electric light? Why not sign up on-line with Power-Gen?
www.powergenitalia.com

Thanks, but I'll stick with the old fashioned kind.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

UPDATED: Reports on Steven Pinker's lecture on the evolution of Jewish IQ:

A reader writes:

Saw Pinker's lecture [on the Cochran-Harpending theory of the evolution of Ashkenazi Jewish high intelligence] last night, it was great. I didn't feel like taking frantic notes like I was back in school so I quickly came to terms with the inevitability that I'd forget most of it. But I enjoyed it while it was happening. Though not even Pinker could prevent the most technical aspects from blurring beyond my comprehension, the talk overall was very much in his clear, amusing, engagingly constructed writing style.

Noah Feldman was the moderator and he asked if potentially "dangerous" ideas shouldn't be airtight before they can be published.


Funny how nobody asked that question before whooping up Steven D. Levitt's now-discredited abortion-cut-crime theory for the last six years... "A lie goes halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on."

As I recall, Pinker basically said "Maybe, good question, but no." I didn't quite understand how the theories are going to be sufficiently tested if they aren't allowed into the open until they no longer require testing. Maybe Feldman meant "in popular venues like New York magazine" as opposed to "obscure scientific venues where people are comparatively safe from politics."


Funny how the best overall critique of Levitt's theory appeared in Slate.com within days of his theory first surfacing in the media. In contrast, professional economists were largely missing in action for years.


But it wasn't clear and Pinker seemed to be saying No either way. (Feldman was asking the question in a fairly nonpartisan manner, by the way; he didn't seem at all to be arguing in favor of the withholding.)

Since it was the segment that I think inspired the most questions, I would say one of the main sources of interest to the audience were the anecdotes Pinker told which went counter the idea that Jews are intellectually accomplished because their culture/parents put so much emphasis on academic achievement (amusingly, Pinker introduced this question as "Jewish Genes or Jewish Mothers?").


Funny how Jennifer Senior in New York denounced attributing Jewish IQ to "Jewish genes" as a "stereotype," when her preferred explanation was "Jewish mothers." Nothing stereotypical about that concept!


One was a quote from Noam Chomsky's mother describing her reaction to her son's decision to study linguistics: "I go up and down the street all the time and I never see a sign that says: 'Help Wanted: Linguist.'"

Pinker seemed to be saying that an emphasis on education to the extent that education helps one succeed in life is not the same as a love of intellectualism for its own sake. So if the latter is a characteristic of Jews it's not the result of parents concerned about financial viability it's the result of raw intelligence desiring a sufficiently stimulating outlet. The audience seemed to be rebelling against this idea somewhat.


I'd sympathize with the audience. Jews definitely have a tradition of unprofitable scholarship. Marx, for instance, was always dunning his capitalist relatives for financial support in angry letters that assumed that they had a duty to support a genius like himself.


It reminded me of John McWhorter responding in the paperback of Losing the Race to the critiques that, contra his argument that blacks don't take enough interest in academics, blacks care very much about education because they realize it's a means of economic success. McWhorter emphasized that he didn't mean that they didn't get the practical value of a degree but rather that intellectualism for its own sake is what makes one do well in school.


My impression is that the intellectual orientation of blacks isn't bad, when you adjust for IQ. I'd guess that African-Americans are significantly more intellectually oriented than Mexican-Americans, who have a higher average IQ. Even adjusting for their high IQs, I'd guess that Ashkenazi Jews were the most intellectually oriented group on Earth, with the French in second place.


But, as Pinker seemed to be saying, that's the reverse of the real cause and effect—being into intellectualism for its own sake is the result of having a highly intelligent mind, and a highly intelligent mind is the most important thing for doing well in school, more so than "Jewish Mothers."


Indeed.


I'm pretty sure he declined to suggest resentment & fear for the No possibilities of the "Is it good for the Jews?" segment, nor did anyone else. I found that very strange, particularly as resentment and envy of middlemen ethnicities' accomplishment was cited as a reason for their persecution—it seems at least a possibility that that would be intensified if the accomplishment were shown to be genetically semi-destined.


That's certainly been the fear among Jews, the most likely reason why people like Stephen Jay Gould and Leon Kamin were so crazy in their demonizaton of IQ research.


Similarly, the issue of how people are going to take this if it gets solidly established and widely known was not very much explored. Noah Feldman's above question was the most I remember.

What was one of the most striking parts of the evening to me was how Pinker concluded he talk. He listed several interesting Final Thoughts and gave each of them at least a couple sentences of attention. But then, rather dramatically, he listed the final one and let it sit on its own without further comment and concluded the speech. It was that intellectual life is not at present prepared to deal with this topic.

At a café on the way home I began a book I just got, The Legacy of Jihad by Andrew Boston, and read the introduction by Ibn Warraq. At the end of the intro, Warraq quotes Albert Schweitzer: "Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now, always, and indeed then most truly when it seems most unsuitable to actual circumstances."

He was talking about acknowledging Islam's historic attitude toward kufr and dhimmis (it hasn't been great). But it fit into my mind very comfortably with Noah Feldman's question and Pinker's last Final Thought.

Of course, it's the same topic—diversity.


Lying Eyes was there and has an detailed report here. He summarizes:


I made it over to 16th St. tonight to see Pinker. There wasn't a lot of new material given how much I've read about the paper already, but it sure was a pretty full endorsement of Greg and Henry's arguments. I think the audience was stunned by the sheer weight of the arguments. If they understood it, I can't imagine they weren't convinced. The Q&A was pretty tepid - half-hearted objections.


Another reader writes:


Basically it was Pinker [Harvard professor, author of "The Blank Slate" and "How the Mind Works"] examining the Cochran-Harpending-Hardy paper. He broke it down into seven hypotheses (which I wish I'd been able to write down) and said that a lot of the evidence for the stuff was iffy but that it was falsifiable, and you could check by comparing siblings who were and were not carriers for Tay-Sachs, etc.; if the carriers were smarter, that would prove the hypothesis.

A lot of the questions revolved around the explaining Cochran's hypotheses, which really are pretty complicated if you don't have a genetics background.

As far as I can remember, they were:

1. Intelligence is heritable
2. Jews have higher IQs
3. The Jewish advantage is heritable
4. Jews were concentrated in middleman jobs
5. The pressures of middleman jobs selected for intelligence (the last two were the important ones)
6. The genetic diseases arose specifically as a result of selection for intelligence, which you can see because they all affect a number of common pathways (this one's apparently got a complicated statistical argument behind it)
7. The genetic diseases increase intelligence, People with the genetic diseases have higher IQs

As far as the stuff you're interested in...he said that it was better to know if things like this were actually true because (a) you could disprove any of the old racist stereotypes that WEREN'T true and (b) reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing it.

He also did raise the possibility of personality traits as well as IQ explaining Ashkenazi success, and said that at least Jews being smart was better for the Jews than Jews being ruthless. (I'm not sure why personality traits predisposing to business success are so bad, especially in a business-focused country like this one. Though maybe in France...)

What I didn't hear was the possibility of anti-Semitism arising from resentment--i.e., your argument that being thought smarter is more dangerous than being thought dumber. But this was basically a New York Jewish audience (older folks mostly), so they probably felt pretty secure.

He also mentioned that middleman minorities, like the Indians in Africa or the overseas Chinese, have also been persecuted because untutored minds have been unable to comprehend the role of the middleman and just see them as parasites. (You can make a pro-capitalist teaching point out of this if you would like.)

Not much a regular reader of iSteve wouldn't get, in other words, but pretty good otherwise.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Economist on the Freakonomics Fiasco

The Economist on the Freakonomics Fiasco:

Oops-onomics
Dec 1st 2005
From The Economist print edition
Did Steven Levitt, author of “Freakonomics”, get his most notorious paper wrong?

But a paper published last week† by Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz, two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, finds an embarrassing hole in the evidence. Messrs Donohue and Levitt subjected the data to a battery of tests, some suggestive, others more systematic, in an effort to prove the links in the chain. The challenge is to distinguish the role of abortion from other potential influences on crime, many of which cannot be observed directly. Some of these rival factors vary year by year; others state by state. Messrs Foote and Goetz concentrate their fire on those that do both. They offer the crack epidemic, which rose and receded at different times in different places, as an example.

Messrs Donohue and Levitt claim to control for such effects in the final test of their paper. That exercise is meant to facilitate comparisons such as: did arrests of 20-year-olds in New York in 1992 diverge from those of 18-year olds in the same state and year? This automatically takes account of anything going on in the Empire state that year (such as a crack epidemic) that would have affected 18-year-olds and 20-year-olds alike. The principal difference between the two age groups is that one was born after the Supreme Court legalised abortion and the other before.

It was a good test to attempt. But Messrs Foote and Goetz have inspected the authors' computer code and found the controls missing. In other words, Messrs Donohue and Levitt did not run the test they thought they had—an “inadvertent but serious computer programming error”, according to Messrs Foote and Goetz.

Fixing that error reduces the effect of abortion on arrests by about half, using the original data, and two-thirds using updated numbers. But there is more. In their flawed test, Messrs Donohue and Levitt seek to explain arrest totals (eg, the 465 Alabamans of 18 years of age arrested for violent crime in 1989), not arrest rates per head (ie, 6.6 arrests per 100,000). This is unsatisfactory, because a smaller cohort will obviously commit fewer crimes in total. Messrs Foote and Goetz, by contrast, look at arrest rates, using passable population estimates based on data from the Census Bureau, and discover that the impact of abortion on arrest rates disappears entirely. “I am simply not convinced that there is a link between abortion and crime,” Mr Foote says.

It may be asking too much of the numbers to convince everybody. “The debate over abortion and crime will not be resolved within the parameters of our paper,” says Mr Donohue. He thinks the arrest figures are “muddy” and the state population data “sloppy”. Combining the two generates so much noise, it is hard for the statistical tests to hear anything. Ted Joyce, a professor at Baruch College (part of the City University of New York), who has had his own methodological disagreements with Messrs Donohue and Levitt, also thinks the debate is stretching the data too far. He points out that if you add controls for 50 states and 12 years—as Messrs Foote and Goetz do, and as Messrs Donohue and Levitt meant to do—you are, in effect, holding another 600 things constant. This robs the data of most of their variety, and of much of their ability to explain anything.

To say, as Mr Levitt does in “Freakonomics”, that “abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history” may be a bit strong. But the underlying thesis, however unpalatable to some, is not likely to be dispelled by a stroke of Mr Foote's computer key. Mr Levitt says his case is based on a “collage of evidence”, of which the flawed test is one small piece.

No, the flawed state-level econometric data was always Levitt's ace in the hole, the evidence that non-professionals didn't have the skills or resources to subject to critical analysis, since his "collage" of simpler evidence has been debunked repeatedly. But when he finally laid his cards on the table, it turned out he had been bluffing (presumably, by mistake).

He is, in particular, sceptical that crack undermines his thesis: it varied more by age group than by state, he says, hitting 17-year-olds in all states harder than 25-year-olds in any state. He is instead trying to improve his measures of abortion, to take account of the fact that people born under one state's abortion regime might later move elsewhere to commit their crimes.

So, the bottom line is what I've been saying for six years: nobody knows. You can make about as good a case that legalization drove up the crime rate as that it drove it down, but neither case is very persuasive.

The most surprising thing I've learned from this about legalized abortion is, despite the enormous political tumult over it, just how pointless it mostly proved. Legalized abortion turned out to be reminiscent of Homer Simpson's toast: "To alcohol! The cause of, and solution for, all of life's problems."

Legal abortion is a major cause of what it was supposed to solve -- unwanted pregnancies. Levitt himself notes that following Roe, "Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent …" So for every six fetuses aborted in the 1970s, five would never have been conceived except for Roe!


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

One out of 20 Japanese marriages are now "international:"

Hiragana Times reports:

Among international couples, foreign husbands and Japanese wives make up about 20 percent. Looking at the statistics by nationality. Koreans were involved in 2,235 marriages, followed by Americans in 1,529 marriages, Chinese in 890, British in 334 and Brazilians in 265 marriages respectively. Foreign wives and Japanese husbands make up about 80 percent, led by Chinese in 10,242 marriages followed by Filipino in 7,794 marriages, Koreans in 5,318, Thai in 1,445 and Brazilians [typically Japanese-Brazilians] in 296...

Statistics prove that men with low incomes and women with high incomes are highly likely to be unmarried. However, Japanese me with low incomes are still rich for those who live in developing countries and the situation will meet their conditions. Among foreigners Japanese women generally want to marry Western men.

How about the divorce rate among international couples? According to statistics from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2003, while the divorce rate among Japanese couples was 38 percent, for international couples, it was 42 percent, a little higher. In the case of foreign husbands, 39 percent and in the case of foreign wives, 43 percent.

I've never seen a divorce rate figure for interracial marriages in America. If you have, please let me know because I get asked about it a lot.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 30, 2005

The Freakonomics Fiasco summarized

I'm Shocked, Shocked to See This ...

The most celebrated nonfiction book of the year is Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by U. of Chicago superstar economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The most admired aspect of the book has been Levitt's theory that legalizing abortion cut the crime rate. Now, it turns out, according to two economists at the Boston Fed who have finally checked Levitt's calculations in detail, that Levitt's theory is based on two mistakes Levitt made. So far, Levitt admits to making one error, saying it "is personally quite embarrassing."


Ever since my 1999 debate with Levitt in Slate.com, Levitt's fans have been telling me that my simpleminded little graphs and ratios of national-level crime trends showing, for example, that the teen homicide rate tripled in the first cohort born after Roe v. Wade couldn't possibly be right because Levitt's state-level analysis was so much more gloriously, glamorously, incomprehensibly complicated than mine, and Occam's Butterknife says that the guy with the most convoluted argument wins.


This fiasco reveals much about what's wrong with public policy discourse in modern America. Fifteen minutes of Googling would have shown that the abortion-cut-crime theory hadn't come close to meeting the burden of proof, but, instead, much of America's intellectual elite fell head over heels for it. Being largely innumerate and unenterprising, the punditariat is unable or unwilling to apply simple reality checks to complex models. It's easier to simply engage in intellectual hero-worship and take a guru figure like Levitt on faith.

Now, two economists have redone Levitt's work and found two fatal mistakes in it. The WSJ reports:

'Freakonomics' Abortion Research Is Faulted by a Pair of Economists
By JON E. HILSENRATH
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 28, 2005; Page A2

Prepare to be second-guessed.

That would have been useful advice for Steven Levitt, the University of Chicago economist and author of the smash-hit book "Freakonomics," which uses statistics to explore the hidden truths of everything from corruption in sumo wrestling to the dangers of owning a swimming pool.

The book's neon-orange cover title advises readers to "prepare to be dazzled," and its sales have lived up to the hype. A million copies of the book are in print. The book, which was written with New York Times writer Stephen Dubner, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 31 weeks and is atop The Wall Street Journal's list of bestsellers in the business category.

But now economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston are taking aim at the statistics behind one of Mr. Levitt's most controversial chapters. 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.

Long before he became a best-selling author, Mr. Levitt, 38 years old, had established a reputation among economists as a careful researcher who produced first-rate statistical studies on surprising subjects. In 2003, the American Economic Association named him the nation's best economist under 40, one of the most prestigious distinctions in the field. His abortion research was published in 2001 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, an academic journal. (He was the subject of a page-one Wall Street Journal story1 in the same year.)

The "Freakonomics" chapter on abortion grew out of statistical studies Mr. Levitt and a co-author, Yale Law School Prof. John Donohue, conducted on the subject. 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. He argues the programming oversight made it difficult to pick up other factors that might have influenced crime rates during the 1980s and 1990s, like the crack wave that waxed and waned during that period. He also argues that in producing the research, Mr. Levitt should have counted arrests on a per-capita basis. Instead, he counted overall arrests. After he adjusted for both factors, Mr. Foote says, the abortion effect disappeared. [Emphasis mine.]

"There are no statistical grounds for believing that the hypothetical youths who were aborted as fetuses would have been more likely to commit crimes had they reached maturity than the actual youths who developed from fetuses and carried to term," the authors assert in the report. Their work doesn't represent an official view of the Fed.

Mr. Foote, 40, taught in Harvard's economics department between 1996 and 2002; served stints as an economist on the Council of Economic Advisers in 1994, 1995, 2002 and 2003; and served as an economic adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2003 and 2004.

Mr. Levitt counters that Mr. Foote is looking only at a narrow subset of his overall work on abortion and crime, so his results are of limited value, and not grounds for dismissing the whole theory. He acknowledges the programming error, but says taken by itself, that error doesn't put much of a dent in his work. (Mr. Foote's result depends on changing that formula and on the adjustment for per-capita arrests.) Moreover, Mr. Levitt says the abortion theory has held up when examined in other countries, like Canada and Australia, and when applied to other subjects, like drug use.

"Does this change my mind on the issue? Absolutely not," Mr. Levitt says. [More]

Levitt and Donohue's abortion-cut-crime theory was put together and tested in a quick and dirty fashion in late 1998, and when their draft paper leaked to the Chicago Tribune in August 1999, they hadn't yet done the needed reality checks on their idea.

In our August 1999 debate in Slate, I pointed out to Levitt that the national-level homicide data easily available on federal government websites showed that his theory had radically failed the test of history: the first cohort born after the legalization of abortion had a homicide rate as 14-17 year olds triple that of the last cohort born before legalization.

Rather than damage his nascent career by expressing doubts about his signature theory, Levitt decided to dig his heels in and rely on his extremely complicated state-level analyses to buffalo people into ignoring my easy-to-understand national-level analyses that raised serious doubts about whether he'd come anywhere near meeting the burden of proof.

Hey, it worked. He's now rich and famous.

I told Levitt last month during the Bill Bennett Brouhaha, in which the former Education Secretary was widely denounced for making a reductio ad absurdum argument based on the racial aspect of Levitt's theory, that he should just walk away now from his most famous theory -- just admit that it's too hard to tell what actually happened. He's now a celebrity so he hardly needs this theory anymore to go on being a celebrity. Otherwise, someday, some little-known economist was going to make his reputation by taking the Freakonomist down. Well, Levitt's nemesis has arrived.


A reader writes:

Will this really matter? I guess I have my doubts. We have moved into an era when facts matter less than myths.

Indeed. Virtually nobody will admit they were wrong about this. Way too many important people have too much invested in Levitt's celebrity. This is a fiasco for the economics profession -- the most famous young economist's most famous theory has been exposed after six years of adulation as being based on something approaching malpractice -- but the likelihood that the economics profession will stage an inquiry must range between zero and negative infinity. I wonder how many economics professors have book proposals in right now for that next bestseller "Berserkonomics"? (By the way, Levitt and Dubner are working on a sequel with a title that reflects their characteristic elegant taste: Superfreakonomics.)

In the general media as well, too many influential people publicly endorsed the theory when a small amount of due diligence with Google would have shown them it was deeply dubious. And too many people want his abortion-cut-crime theory to be true for personal or political reasons. I've noticed, for example, that in online discussions, pro-lifers tend to want Levitt's theory to be true. They appear to want to be able to boast, "Even though legal abortion reduces the likelihood of me being a victim of crime, I'm still against it. That's how idealistic I am."

Here's the abstract of Foote and Goetz's paper:

Testing Economic Hypotheses with State-Level Data: A Comment on Donohue and Levitt (2001) [PDF - full paper]

Working Paper 05-15
by Christopher L. Foote and Christopher F. Goetz

State-level data are often used in the empirical research of both macroeconomists and microeconomists. Using data that follows states over time allows economists to hold constant a host of potentially confounding factors that might contaminate an assignment of cause and effect. A good example is a fascinating paper by Donohue and Levitt (2001, henceforth DL), which purports to show that hypothetical individuals resulting from aborted fetuses, had they been born and developed into youths, would have been more likely to commit crimes than youths resulting from fetuses carried to term. We revisit that paper, showing that the actual implementation of DL’s statistical test in their paper differed from what was described. (Specifically, controls for state-year effects were left out of their regression model.) We show that when DL’s key test is run as described and augmented with state-level population data, evidence for higher per capita criminal propensities among the youths who would have developed, had they not been aborted as fetuses, vanishes. Two lessons for empirical researchers are, first, that controls may impact results in ways that are hard to predict, and second, that these controls are probably not powerful enough to compensate for the omission of a key variable in the regression model. (Data and programs to support this comment are available on the web site of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.)


Levitt's reply on his Freakonomics blog is here.


All my posting on this issue are at http://www.iSteve.com/abortion.htm

***Permalink***


Levitt's response to the Freakonomics abortion-cut-crime theory fiasco

Levitt blogs:

Everything in Freakonomics is wrong!

Or at least that is the impression you might get if you read this article in today’s Wall Street Journal.

I will post a longer blog entry once I have had time to fully digest the working paper by Foote and Goetz which is the basis for the article.

For now, I will say just a few things:

1) It is not at all clear from the WSJ article is that Foote and Goetz are talking about only one of the five different pieces of evidence we put forth in our paper. They have no criticisms of the other four approaches, all of which point to the same conclusion.

2) There was a coding error that led the final table of my paper with John Donohue on legalized abortion to have specifications that did not match what we said we did in the text. (We’re still trying to figure out where we went wrong on this.) This is personally quite embarrassing because I pride myself on being careful with data. Still, that embarrassment aside, when you run the specifications we meant to run, you still find big, negative effects of abortion on arrests (although smaller in magnitude than what we report). The good news is that the story we put forth in the paper is not materially changed by the coding error.

3) Only when you make other changes to the specification that Foote and Goetz think are appropriate, do the results weaken further and in some cases disappear. The part of the paper that Foote and Goetz focus on is one that is incredibly demanding of the data. For those of you who are technically minded, our results survive if you include state*age interactions, year*age interactions, and state*year interactions. (We can include all these interactions because we have arrest data by state and single year of age.) Given how imperfect the abortion data are, I think most economists would be shocked that our results stand up to removing all of this variation, not that when you go even further in terms of demands on the data things get very weak.

Again, as I said, I will post again on this subject once I have had a chance to carefully study the details of what they have done, and after I have been able to go back to the raw data and understand why the results change when one does what Foote and Goetz do.

5 COMMENTS » Posted by Steven D. Levitt @ 2:46 pm on Monday, November 28, 2005 in General

In contrast, economist John R. Lott, a longtime critic of Levitt's theory who came in for a half page of ad hominem abuse in Freakonomics, is feeling better than Levitt is today. He blogged:

Christopher L. Foote and Christopher F. Goetz's paper can be found here. Personally, I think calling this a "programming oversight" is being much too nice. More importantly everyone who works with panel data knows that you use fixed effects.

My own work concentrated on murder rates, but I also included fixed effects. Donohue and Levitt never provided us with all their data or their regressions and would never answer any questions that we had so I just assumed that they had included fixed effects from the beginning. It would have been nice if they had provided us with this same information years ago.

Financial economist and blogger Mahalanobis (Michael Stastny) writes:

Levitt's response is on his website (see here) where he notes

The part of the paper that Foote and Goetz focus on is one that is incredibly demanding of the data. For those of you who are technically minded, our results survive if you include state*age interactions, year*age interactions, and state*year interactions.

3 interaction variables are necessary to get the right sign and significance? I think that is very technically demanding. In my experience, interaction variables are kitchen sink type regressors that induce severe multicollinearity and give spurious results. It's like an economist saying his results only appear after doing 3-stage least squares. I have to think something's not really there if you can't normalize the data somehow and show in a simple graph that the pattern is there (in this case, say, by showing the change in arrest rates for abortion and non-abortion states for the relevant age cohort).

I'm partial to the opposite theory, that abortion would, if anything, increase the proportion of evil-doers: abortion is more common among forward-thinking moms who would be good moms, less common among bad moms who view life as a series of random events that happen to them.

Right. The reason that in his theory of American crime trends, Levitt cites European studies claiming that women who have abortions would make less organized mothers than the ones who went ahead and had their children is because the American studies of who gets an abortion came to the opposite conclusion.

This undermines Levitt's only argument these days about about how abortion would cut cime. (now that Levitt has hushed up his earlier racial eugenic/eucultural argument that because more blacks get abortions and more blacks commit murders, more abortions should mean fewer murders). These Americans studies were pointed out to Levitt by CCNY economist Ted Joyce in his response to Levitt & Donohue in the Journal of Human Resources, which was entitled "Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime?" Joyce summed up two reason why Levitt's theory didn't work. The second was:

"Second, analysts, I being one, have tended to overestimate the selection effects associated with abortion. A careful examination of studies of pregnancy resolution reveals that women who abort are at lower risk of having children with criminal propensities than women of similar age, race and marital status who instead carried to term. For instance, in an early study of teens in Ventura County, California between 1972 and 1974, researchers demonstrated that pregnant teens with better grades, more completed schooling, and not on public assistance were much more likely to abort than their poorer, less academically oriented counterparts (Leibowitz, Eisen, and Chow 1986).

"Studies based on data from the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) make the same point (Michael 2000; Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders 1999). Indeed, Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders (1999) found that teens who abort are similar along observed characteristics to teens that were never pregnant, both of whom differ significantly from pregnant teens that spontaneously abort or carry to term.

"Nor is favorable selection limited to teens. Unmarried women that abort have more completed schooling and higher AFQT [the military's IQ test for applicants for enlistment] scores than their counterparts that carry the pregnancy to term (Powell-Griner and Trent 1987; Currie, Nixon, and Cole 1995).

"In sum, legalized abortion has improved the lives of many women by allowing them to avoid an unwanted birth. I found little evidence to suggest, however, that the legalization of abortion had an appreciable effect on the criminality of subsequent cohorts."


My earlier response to thelatest Freakonomics fiasco is here.


All my blog postings on the controversy can be found at http://www.iSteve.com/abortion.htm

***Permalink***



Abortion and crime: So, Levitt was wrong. But, what actually happened?

Now that Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt's mishandling of his abortion-crime data has been exposed by economist Christopher Foote, I'd like to review what actually happened in American over those decades.

As I tried to explain to Dr. Levitt when we debated in Slate in 1999, what happened, simplifying greatly, was that the vast youth crack crime wave took off first in later 1980s in the socially liberal states where legal abortion also had taken off first about 17 years earlier, most notably New York and California, which legalized abortion in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade.

In other words, there was at the state level, a positive correlation (when appropriately weighted by population of state), between the legal abortion rate in the early 1970s and the homicide offending rate in the late 1980s and early 1990s among those youths born after legalization, not the negative correlation asserted by Dr. Levitt. Unfortunately, Dr. Levitt initially only looked at crime rates in the years 1985 and 1997 (and only looked at the overly crude age groups of over and under 25), so he completely missed how his theory had catastrophically failed its most obvious historical test.

Second, and also contrary to Levitt's theory, this vast youth murder wave took off first specifically in the demographic group that had the highest legal abortion rate: urban blacks. The non-white abortion rate peaked in 1977, well before the peak of the white abortion rate. The peak years for homicide among 14-17 year old black males were 1993 and 1994 -- i.e., the cohort born at the peak of the black usage of legal abortion. As Donohue and Levitt wrote in 2001, under their theory, the opposite was supposed to happen:

"“Fertility declines for black women are three times greater than for whites (12 percent compared to 4 percent). Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions."

Instead, among black males born in the late 1970s, their murder rate among 14-17 year olds was four times higher than among black males born in the late 1960s, before the legalization of abortion. The black to white teen murder rate ratio almost doubled after legalization. So, the Levitt-Donohue theory failed its first two historical tests in a disastrous fashion.

Then, two things happened historically that helped create the (presumably, assuming Foote's new technical critique doesn't completely eliminate it) state-level negative correlation between later 1970s abortion rates and later 1990s crime rates that Levitt and Donohue have emphasized so repeatedly, while trying to cover up the earlier negative correlation. (They imply that the longer the time lag between presumed cause and effect, the more trust we should put in it!)

1. From NY and CA, crack spread to more socially conservative states, where the abortion rate had also gone up later. So crime was higher in the mid to late 1990s in socially conservative states where abortion rates didn't go up until the late 1970s or early 1980s.

2. And, the crack wave burned out first in the places where it started first, most famously New York City.

We've all heard a million arguments about why crime fell in NYC in the 1990s, but an overlooked explanation was brought up by Knight-Ridder reporter Jonathan Tilove recently: there are today in NYC, 36% more black women alive than black men. Nationally, among all races, there are 8% more women than men alive.

Obviously, this gigantic black male shortage in NYC wasn't caused by abortion -- there was virtually no sex selective abortion at the time. No, it was mostly caused by an enormous increase in imprisonment and by the most dangerous black men murdering each other in large quantities in the late 1980s and early 1990s. (AIDS played a role too.) Levitt has never written, as far as I know, about the impact of these "selective post-natal abortions," as it were, on the crime rate, but it's clearly a substantial factor in a number of big cities that were hit hard by crack. (NYC is by no means unique in terms of the current black male shortage.)

Moreover, as I pointed out to Levitt in 1999, and as his deservedly famous chapter in "Freakonomics" on how dealing crack pays so badly confirmed, a lot of the next cohort of urban youths, those born more than a half decade after abortion was legalized in their state, figured out that dealing crack was a stupid career choice. Seeing how their older brothers and cousins were winding up in prisons, wheelchairs, and cemeteries, they became less likely to commit murder. Participating in the crack wars were, for the vast majority of the gangstas, extremely bad life choices, and it's hardly surprising that the later cohort born in the early 1980s did a better job of figuring this out.

But these anti-crime trends in the 1990s happened first where crack happened first, which tended to also be where legal abortion happened first, thus creating the most likely spurious correlation between legal abortion and the crime decline in the later 1990s that Freakonomics focuses upon.

So, for this controversy, the crucial issue is The Burden of Proof. Dr. Levitt has tried hard to hand the burden of proof off to his skeptics, claiming that he's looked at all other possible causes of the 1990s crime decline, and they aren't adequate to explain it, so abortion must be the cause of the remainder. That's a weak and irresponsible argument.

Of course, in reality, he hasn't looked at all the causes -- for example, I've never seen him take into account "selective post-natal abortions" of the most dangerous gangstas by other gangstas, nor the social learning impact on the next cohort of seeing their older brothers die or go to prison.

But, moreover, there's an old saying that large assertions require large evidence. And Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory is one of the largest assertions in the social sciences in recent years. Clearly, the burden of proof rests on Dr. Levitt.

There's also an old idea in science called Occam's Razor, which more or less says that scientists should be biased toward simplicity in explanations. Throughout this six year controversy, Dr. Levitt has consistently gone for the most complicated, hard-to-understand, and (as we've seen this week, to Dr. Levitt's embarrassment) hard-to-check-up-on statistical models.

In contrast, he's combined statistical incomprehensibility with the most simple-minded behavioral models -- he has repeatedly assumed, despite all the evidence from American studies cited above, that ghetto women decide whether or not to engage in unprotected sex and whether or not get an abortion or have an illegitimate child for the same reasons that would appeal to highly educated women of his own class. While Levitt's style of thinking about how women respond to legalized abortion has proven highly persuasive to the nonfiction book purchasing class, it doesn't explain much at all about the behavior of the class in which potential criminals are typically raised.

Maybe the technical opacity of Dr. Levitt's analysis was necessary -- social phenomena are terribly complicated. But the impact of his behavior on the public and on much of his profession has been to encourage among his numberous fans not a critical engagement with the historical and sociological record, but an attitude of faith, a warm feeling that this really smart guy has Figured It All Out using Really Complicated Statistics and we should just take his word for it.

As a marketing strategy, the oracular approach of "Freakonomics" has been mind-bogglingly successful, but perhaps I may be forgiven for wondering whether it advances the cause of good social science.

All the data cited above can be found documented at http://isteve.com/abortion.htm

***Permalink***


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Another white receiver who couldn't get a scholarship

In 11 games for the St. Louis Rams this year, Kevin Curtis has 50 receptions for 741 yards, putting him on pace for the 1,000 yards in a season milestone. Like many highly effective whites at stereotypically black positions, such as Mike Haas of Oregon State who is leading the NCAA in receiving yardage this year, he couldn't get a college scholarship. So, Curtis walked on at Utah State and ended up setting school records. (Curtis, by the way, scored a 156 IQ on the quick and dirty Wonderlic IQ test that the NFL mandates.) The Deseret News, being a Utah paper and thus less gagged by the diversity sensitivity that makes newspapers in in more diverse parts of the country so boring, even mentions that Curtis is white in this article.

Football is basically meritocratic, but it appears to have a tendency to overlook whites playing black positions. The same tendency toward a minor amount of discrimination against unstereotypical jobseekers happens all the time in competitive markets, but the free market is pretty good at developing niche firms that capitalize on these mistakes by snatching up people who are the victims of prejudice.

Thus, it would make sense for some college programs to develop the recruiting expertise to fill a niche specialization in recruiting overlooked white players. The problem though is that if the sportswriters, those most frantic enemies of free speech on race, found out that you were systematically looking for discriminated-against whites, you would be run out of the coaching business on a rail.

Indeed, at the Air Force Academy, where the high admissions requirements (the Air Force doesn't like the idea of football player cadets with 85 IQs trying to fly expensive planes) and the four years in USAF requirement, means the football team is extremely white by typical college standards (I counted only 12 blacks out of 77 pictures in the press guide), coach Fisher DeBerry has put together an impressive program that consistently wins by focusing on what white players do best. You can never put together a national championship team without a heavily black line-up, but if you play in a second string conference like Air Force does, DeBerry has shown that you can consistently qualify for bowl games.

DeBerry was allowed to get away with this for years as long nobody mentioned the racial aspect of the Air Force teams, but as soon as the 67-year-old coach mentioned recently that he needed more black players to compete with the fastest teams, then he was crucified in the press and publicly humiliated by the Academy.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 29, 2005

Why are South Koreans world class rioters?

A reader responds to the great photos on the Riot Porn blog of South Korean riots and explains why South Korea is the land of Work Hard, Riot Hard:

You may want to confirm this with other Korean readers since this is purely second-hand (my mother grew up in Korea until the age of 25), but: Korea is very socially stratified. If you get into university, you are basically set for life (others go to vocational schools or come to America). So, there is no need for university students to study and many don't even go to class (this may also explain the phenomenal online gaming rate). All they do is plan and attend protests. Since there is so much social cohesion and there is so much time devoted to it, these events are meticulously planned. Of course, protesting was necessary under the military government and was seen as very successful because it led to the fall of the military junta in the 80s. So, successful college kids plus an authoritarian (but not too authoritarian) regime plus past success equals the best protestors in the world. I guess it's something like Berkeley in the 1970s, spoiled rich kids, building off of success from the past, pushing around a not-too-evil regime.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Abortion and crime: So, Levitt was wrong. But, what actually happened?

Now that Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt's mishandling of his abortion-crime data has been exposed by economist Christopher Foote, I'd like to review what actually happened in American over those decades.

As I tried to explain to Dr. Levitt when we debated in Slate in 1999, what happened, simplifying greatly, was that the vast youth crack crime wave took off first in later 1980s in the socially liberal states where legal abortion also had taken off first about 17 years earlier, most notably New York and California, which legalized abortion in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade.

In other words, there was at the state level, a positive correlation (when appropriately weighted by population of state), between the legal abortion rate in the early 1970s and the homicide offending rate in the late 1980s and early 1990s among those youths born after legalization, not the negative correlation asserted by Dr. Levitt. Unfortunately, Dr. Levitt initially only looked at crime rates in the years 1985 and 1997 (and only looked at the overly crude age groups of over and under 25), so he completely missed how his theory had catastrophically failed its most obvious historical test.

Second, and also contrary to Levitt's theory, this vast youth murder wave took off first specifically in the demographic group that had the highest legal abortion rate: urban blacks. The non-white abortion rate peaked in 1977, well before the peak of the white abortion rate. The peak years for homicide among 14-17 year old black males were 1993 and 1994 -- i.e., the cohort born at the peak of the black usage of legal abortion. As Donohue and Levitt wrote in 2001, under their theory, the opposite was supposed to happen:

"“Fertility declines for black women are three times greater than for whites (12 percent compared to 4 percent). Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions."

Instead, among black males born in the late 1970s, their murder rate among 14-17 year olds was four times higher than among black males born in the late 1960s, before the legalization of abortion. The black to white teen murder rate ratio almost doubled after legalization. So, the Levitt-Donohue theory failed its first two historical tests in a disastrous fashion.

Then, two things happened historically that helped create the (presumably, assuming Foote's new technical critique doesn't completely eliminate it) state-level negative correlation between later 1970s abortion rates and later 1990s crime rates that Levitt and Donohue have emphasized so repeatedly, while trying to cover up the earlier negative correlation. (They imply that the longer the time lag between presumed cause and effect, the more trust we should put in it!)

1. From NY and CA, crack spread to more socially conservative states, where the abortion rate had also gone up later. So crime was higher in the mid to late 1990s in socially conservative states where abortion rates didn't go up until the late 1970s or early 1980s.

2. And, the crack wave burned out first in the places where it started first, most famously New York City.

We've all heard a million arguments about why crime fell in NYC in the 1990s, but an overlooked explanation was brought up by Knight-Ridder reporter Jonathan Tilove recently: there are today in NYC, 36% more black women alive than black men. Nationally, among all races, there are 8% more women than men alive.

Obviously, this gigantic black male shortage in NYC wasn't caused by abortion -- there was virtually no sex selective abortion at the time. No, it was mostly caused by an enormous increase in imprisonment and by the most dangerous black men murdering each other in large quantities in the late 1980s and early 1990s. (AIDS played a role too.) Levitt has never written, as far as I know, about the impact of these "selective post-natal abortions," as it were, on the crime rate, but it's clearly a substantial factor in a number of big cities that were hit hard by crack. (NYC is by no means unique in terms of the current black male shortage.)

Moreover, as I pointed out to Levitt in 1999, and as his deservedly famous chapter in "Freakonomics" on how dealing crack pays so badly confirmed, a lot of the next cohort of urban youths, those born more than a half decade after abortion was legalized in their state, figured out that dealing crack was a stupid career choice. Seeing how their older brothers and cousins were winding up in prisons, wheelchairs, and cemeteries, they became less likely to commit murder. Participating in the crack wars were, for the vast majority of the gangstas, extremely bad life choices, and it's hardly surprising that the later cohort born in the early 1980s did a better job of figuring this out.

But these anti-crime trends in the 1990s happened first where crack happened first, which tended to also be where legal abortion happened first, thus creating the most likely spurious correlation between legal abortion and the crime decline in the later 1990s that Freakonomics focuses upon.

So, for this controversy, the crucial issue is The Burden of Proof. Dr. Levitt has tried hard to hand the burden of proof off to his skeptics, claiming that he's looked at all other possible causes of the 1990s crime decline, and they aren't adequate to explain it, so abortion must be the cause of the remainder. That's a weak and irresponsible argument.

Of course, in reality, he hasn't looked at all the causes -- for example, I've never seen him take into account "selective post-natal abortions" of the most dangerous gangstas by other gangstas, nor the social learning impact on the next cohort of seeing their older brothers die or go to prison.

But, moreover, there's an old saying that large assertions require large evidence. And Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory is one of the largest assertions in the social sciences in recent years. Clearly, the burden of proof rests on Dr. Levitt.

There's also an old idea in science called Occam's Razor, which more or less says that scientists should be biased toward simplicity in explanations. Throughout this six year controversy, Dr. Levitt has consistently gone for the most complicated, hard-to-understand, and (as we've seen this week, to Dr. Levitt's embarrassment) hard-to-check-up-on statistical models.

In contrast, he's combined statistical incomprehensibility with the most simple-minded behavioral models -- he has repeatedly assumed, despite all the evidence from American studies cited above, that ghetto women decide whether or not to engage in unprotected sex and whether or not get an abortion or have an illegitimate child for the same reasons that would appeal to highly educated women of his own class. While Levitt's style of thinking about how women respond to legalized abortion has proven highly persuasive to the nonfiction book purchasing class, it doesn't explain much at all about the behavior of the class in which potential criminals are typically raised.

Maybe the technical opacity of Dr. Levitt's analysis was necessary -- social phenomena are terribly complicated. But the impact of his behavior on the public and on much of his profession has been to encourage among his numberous fans not a critical engagement with the historical and sociological record, but an attitude of faith, a warm feeling that this really smart guy has Figured It All Out using Really Complicated Statistics and we should just take his word for it.

As a marketing strategy, the oracular approach of "Freakonomics" has been mind-bogglingly successful, but perhaps I may be forgiven for wondering whether it advances the cause of good social science.

All the data cited above can be found documented at http://isteve.com/abortion.htm

***Permalink***


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 28, 2005

Jim Kalb

makes The Ambler and Gideon look like InstaPundit when it comes to nonstop bloggarrhea. Kalb has put up his first post on his Turnabout blog in six weeks and it justifies all the fruitless times I've clicked on his website looking for something new. In the tradition of Caesar and Hegel, he divides Liberal Tyranny in three parts. Here's #3:

The Tyranny of Inclusiveness: All groups defined by traditional concepts of identity must participate equally in all significant social functions. It follows that no significant institution can take traditional concepts of identity into account except to counteract any residual effect they may have. All social institutions that characteristically take such things into account, family and historical community for example, or that can’t be adequately supervised to ensure their effects are eradicated, must in effect be done away with. Since traditional concepts of identity are involved in every kind of functional human relationship other than those based wholly on money and force, world markets and universal rational bureaucracies become the only things allowed to play a significant role in social life. [More]

Contemporary American mainstream conservatism has been deformed by its allergy to leftist identity politics into arguing that traditional concepts of identity, such as ethnicity, race, kinship, sex, religious membership, and class, not only shouldn't mean anything, but that they don't mean anything, which is awfully silly.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Riot Porn

The blog Riot Porn is devoted to photos of street rioting from around the world, with regular features such as "Burning Bus of the Day." Judging from the blog's recent pictures, the world champion gnarliest rioters must be the South Koreans, as illustrated by "South Korean farmers riot" and "South Korean anti-APEC riot." I'm not exactly sure what APEC is, but, boy, there are some South Koreans who are really sore about it. Being Koreans, the rioters look extremely well organized, with each one swinging an identical two meter-long color-coded cop-whacking stick.

We've all been hearing about how the French riots were caused by lack of jobs. The funny thing is that South Koreans have one of the fastest growing economies, and work the most hours of any country in the industrialized world. I guess the national motto must be: "Work Hard, Riot Hard." (Thanks to Mangan's Miscellany.)


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Levitt's response to the Freakonomics abortion-cut-crime theory fiasco

Levitt's response to the Freakonomics abortion-cut-crime theory fiasco: Levitt blogs:

Everything in Freakonomics is wrong!

Or at least that is the impression you might get if you read this article in today’s Wall Street Journal.

I will post a longer blog entry once I have had time to fully digest the working paper by Foote and Goetz which is the basis for the article.

For now, I will say just a few things:

1) It is not at all clear from the WSJ article is that Foote and Goetz are talking about only one of the five different pieces of evidence we put forth in our paper. They have no criticisms of the other four approaches, all of which point to the same conclusion.

2) There was a coding error that led the final table of my paper with John Donohue on legalized abortion to have specifications that did not match what we said we did in the text. (We’re still trying to figure out where we went wrong on this.) This is personally quite embarrassing because I pride myself on being careful with data. Still, that embarrassment aside, when you run the specifications we meant to run, you still find big, negative effects of abortion on arrests (although smaller in magnitude than what we report). The good news is that the story we put forth in the paper is not materially changed by the coding error.

3) Only when you make other changes to the specification that Foote and Goetz think are appropriate, do the results weaken further and in some cases disappear. The part of the paper that Foote and Goetz focus on is one that is incredibly demanding of the data. For those of you who are technically minded, our results survive if you include state*age interactions, year*age interactions, and state*year interactions. (We can include all these interactions because we have arrest data by state and single year of age.) Given how imperfect the abortion data are, I think most economists would be shocked that our results stand up to removing all of this variation, not that when you go even further in terms of demands on the data things get very weak.

Again, as I said, I will post again on this subject once I have had a chance to carefully study the details of what they have done, and after I have been able to go back to the raw data and understand why the results change when one does what Foote and Goetz do.

5 COMMENTS » Posted by Steven D. Levitt @ 2:46 pm on Monday, November 28, 2005 in General

In contrast, economist John R. Lott, a longtime critic of Levitt's theory who came in for a half page of ad hominem abuse in Freakonomics, is feeling better than Levitt is today. He blogged:

Christopher L. Foote and Christopher F. Goetz's paper can be found here. Personally, I think calling this a "programming oversight" is being much too nice. More importantly everyone who works with panel data knows that you use fixed effects.

My own work concentrated on murder rates, but I also included fixed effects. Donohue and Levitt never provided us with all their data or their regressions and would never answer any questions that we had so I just assumed that they had included fixed effects from the beginning. It would have been nice if they had provided us with this same information years ago.

Financial economist and blogger Mahalanobis (Michael Stastny) writes:

Levitt's response is on his website (see here) where he notes

The part of the paper that Foote and Goetz focus on is one that is incredibly demanding of the data. For those of you who are technically minded, our results survive if you include state*age interactions, year*age interactions, and state*year interactions.

3 interaction variables are necessary to get the right sign and significance? I think that is very technically demanding. In my experience, interaction variables are kitchen sink type regressors that induce severe multicollinearity and give spurious results. It's like an economist saying his results only appear after doing 3-stage least squares. I have to think something's not really there if you can't normalize the data somehow and show in a simple graph that the pattern is there (in this case, say, by showing the change in arrest rates for abortion and non-abortion states for the relevant age cohort).

I'm partial to the opposite theory, that abortion would, if anything, increase the proportion of evil-doers: abortion is more common among forward-thinking moms who would be good moms, less common among bad moms who view life as a series of random events that happen to them.

Right. The reason that in his theory of American crime trends, Levitt cites European studies claiming that women who have abortions would make less organized mothers than the ones who went ahead and had their children is because the American studies of who gets an abortion came to the opposite conclusion.

This undermines Levitt's only argument these days about about how abortion would cut cime. (now that Levitt has hushed up his earlier racial eugenic/eucultural argument that because more blacks get abortions and more blacks commit murders, more abortions should mean fewer murders). These Americans studies were pointed out to Levitt by CCNY economist Ted Joyce in his response to Levitt & Donohue in the Journal of Human Resources, which was entitled "Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime?" Joyce summed up two reason why Levitt's theory didn't work. The second was:

"Second, analysts, I being one, have tended to overestimate the selection effects associated with abortion. A careful examination of studies of pregnancy resolution reveals that women who abort are at lower risk of having children with criminal propensities than women of similar age, race and marital status who instead carried to term. For instance, in an early study of teens in Ventura County, California between 1972 and 1974, researchers demonstrated that pregnant teens with better grades, more completed schooling, and not on public assistance were much more likely to abort than their poorer, less academically oriented counterparts (Leibowitz, Eisen, and Chow 1986).

"Studies based on data from the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) make the same point (Michael 2000; Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders 1999). Indeed, Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders (1999) found that teens who abort are similar along observed characteristics to teens that were never pregnant, both of whom differ significantly from pregnant teens that spontaneously abort or carry to term.

"Nor is favorable selection limited to teens. Unmarried women that abort have more completed schooling and higher AFQT [the military's IQ test for applicants for enlistment] scores than their counterparts that carry the pregnancy to term (Powell-Griner and Trent 1987; Currie, Nixon, and Cole 1995).

"In sum, legalized abortion has improved the lives of many women by allowing them to avoid an unwanted birth. I found little evidence to suggest, however, that the legalization of abortion had an appreciable effect on the criminality of subsequent cohorts."


My earlier response to thelatest Freakonomics fiasco is here.


All my blog postings on the controversy can be found at http://www.iSteve.com/abortion.htm

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My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer