[Marxism] Bill Bennet racism

["BHANDARI, RAKESH" <bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bennett draws on study by Levitt. I criticized that study on lbo-talk in 
August, 1999. here are
some of my posts
_____________
In a helpful and appreciated note, Nathan wrote:

> higher abortion rates could be the result of other factors that themselves
> relate to a later decline in crime.  Obviously, multi-variate regression
> tries to filter out all those factors and the assumption is that given two
> cities with all factors filtered out, if abortion is the only thing left
> standing, you have proved causality.

Well, if we try to assign partial coefficients to unemployment, poverty and 
fewer teenagers, their
retort seems obvious (though I can't access their paper from here): abortion 
accounts for the
reduction in teenagers as % of pop. (esp. of the type prone to crime),  
unemployment and poverty.
It seems that they will claim that these other 'factors' were relatively or 
first reduced in those
states early to legalize abortion--though I would be surprised if their 
evidence turns out be very
strong in this regard.

Moreover, this study would have no counterfactual import ("Extrapolating our 
estimates out of
sample to a counterfactual in which there were no abortions, crime rates might 
be 10-20 percent
higher than they currently are with abortion") without the operation of a socio 
economic machine
in which those surplus to capital's demands are tracked for poverty, 
unemployment and
criminalization. Yet how does one index such a machine in the regression 
analysis--much less
determine its durability against evolutionary transformation or external 
modification on the basis
of such statistical analysis, though the discovered 'causal' relationship 
between abortion and
reduced crime would have no relative stability or counterfactual import without 
the durability of
such a machine?

At any rate, what kind of social machine must be in place for an allowance of 
abortion twenty
years earlier to 'cause' a reduction in crime today?

yours, rakesh
____________________

Levitt does provide evidence for his idea that had these fetuses not been 
aborted, many would have
grown up to be criminals on account of the long term psychological effects of 
their unwantedness.
The idea, explicitly argued, thus seems to be less genetic determinism than 
misogyny: it's lack of
mother' love, plus her smoking and drinking, that produces criminals
(the criminal underclass remains a peculiarly gendered phenomenon in social 
science work as Adolph
Reed, Jr has long noted); luckily it's just those bad mothers who abort--Levitt 
seems to be
implying. They also just happen to be disproportionately minorities and 
impoverished people.

Now he does submit real evidence for the effects of unwantedness (though he 
does not show that
unwantedness increases criminal propensity sufficiently that had these kids 
been born--even if
they all turned out be truly unwanted--the crime rate would have been up to 20% 
higher; he does
not even try to quantify the effect, though he suggests it is the main causal 
pathway).

But there is a study he cites:

"A number of studies have looked at cases of women, living in jurisdications in 
which govt
approval to have an abortion was required, who sought to have an abortion, but 
were denied to the
right to do so. Dagg
(1991) reports that these women overwhelmingly kept their babies, rather than 
giving them up for
adoption, but that they often resent the unwanted
children and, perhaps because of feelings of depression and anger, were far 
less likely than other
mothers to nurture, hold, and breastfeed their children. In an array of studies 
in Eastern Europe
and Scandinavia, Dagg found that the children who were born because their 
mothers were denied an
abortion were substantially more likely to be involved in crime and have poorer 
life prospects,
EVEN WHEN CONTROLLING FOR THE INCOME, AGE, EDUCATION, AND HEALTH OF THE MOTHER. 
This literature
provides strong evidence that unwanted children are likely to be 
disproportionately
involved in criminal activity, which may be the causal pathway from greater 
availability of
abortion to lower rates of crime."

What's wrong with this study. as summarized here?

It does not control for the income of the child's family, only the mother's. It 
still could be
that these women often wanted to abort because they were to be single mothers 
who may indeed make
more or are more
educated than individual women on average. The real problem here may be lack of 
father's and
social support for the children single women decided to decided to abort, not 
that they were bad
mothers who created demon
spawn.

Second, these children's school and peer environment may be be more 
impoverished even when their
mother does better on average than other women. It's hard to pinpoint the 
mother as the cause of
criminality, no?

Third, we don't know if unwanted children are more often and easily given up 
for adoption in the
US than in the countries studied here.

This Levitt study strikes me as quite silly. I do agree that the availability 
of abortion allows
rational control over birthing decisions by
women and this should allow for a better home environment for the children 
women choose to have.
But the causal claim vis a vis crime reduction seems
to me ridiculously and perniciously unmediated. We have an unmediated link here 
between bad
mothers, popularly imagined to be what minority and poor women are, and demon 
spawn. This is
prejudice, not social science.

.__________________



Of course  S Levitt would make no policy recommendations given his prentensions 
as a positive
scientist (by the way, is Stephen by any wild
chance related to  Norm of the Science Wars?). And I don't think we should 
accept this gift
horse--that is, use their study to fight for full access
for birth control.

First, the underlying theory of crime here is that bad mothers make criminals. 
That's the only way
to support the counterfactual that their causal theory implies: that had these 
children been born,
many of them
would have been criminals (and the crime rate would have been up to 20% higher).

Second, there is every danger that this study will be read as argument that the 
best way to reduce
crime is to kill off would be criminals young (or real young). This opens what 
Troy Duster has
called the backdoor to
eugenics. Aside from insidious uses of genetic screening, there is the risk of 
the spread of
family caps and compulsory sterilization for welfare
receipt. Levitt may argue that the public interest in crime reduction does not 
justify coercive
abortions or birth control but others will surely weigh things differently  It 
is not difficult to
guess at the demagogic uses that this study could be put to in the context of 
crime escalation in
a downturn.

We should not fight for reproductive freedom on the grounds that unwanted (or 
poor or minority)
children can only become criminals in our society so
it's best to give bad mothers every chance to abort them. That many of these 
children may well
have ended up in the criminal underclass is not an
indictment of their mothers or an argument for abortion; it's an indictment of 
the underlying
socio economic machine, as I have been trying to suggest
from the outset.



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