A Specious 'Experiment'
A Specious 'Experiment': "In defending his words, Bennett has said he was citing 'Freakonomics.' So why did his 'thought experiment' refer only to black children?
Levitt's thesis is essentially that unwanted children who grow up poor in single-parent households are more likely than other children to become criminals, and that Roe v. Wade resulted in fewer of these children being born. What he doesn't do in the book is single out black children.
Perhaps the ostentatiously intellectual Bennett went back and read Levitt's original 2001 paper on the subject, co-authored with John J. Donohue III. The authors do mention race briefly, in a discussion of the falling homicide rate, but attribute most of the decline to those race-neutral factors that Levitt later cited in 'Freakonomics.' To bolster their argument, they cite research on abortion and lowered crime rates in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe -- not places where you're likely to find a lot of black people.
If he was citing Levitt's work, Bennett could have said that to lower the crime rate 'you could abort every white baby' or 'you could abort every Hispanic baby' or 'you could abort every Asian baby,' since every group has unwanted, poor children being raised by single mothers."
Click link to read entire article
Levitt's thesis is essentially that unwanted children who grow up poor in single-parent households are more likely than other children to become criminals, and that Roe v. Wade resulted in fewer of these children being born. What he doesn't do in the book is single out black children.
Perhaps the ostentatiously intellectual Bennett went back and read Levitt's original 2001 paper on the subject, co-authored with John J. Donohue III. The authors do mention race briefly, in a discussion of the falling homicide rate, but attribute most of the decline to those race-neutral factors that Levitt later cited in 'Freakonomics.' To bolster their argument, they cite research on abortion and lowered crime rates in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe -- not places where you're likely to find a lot of black people.
If he was citing Levitt's work, Bennett could have said that to lower the crime rate 'you could abort every white baby' or 'you could abort every Hispanic baby' or 'you could abort every Asian baby,' since every group has unwanted, poor children being raised by single mothers."
Click link to read entire article
posted by Blackgold at 5:20 PM
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