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ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

sad.

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But set aside the argument itself — what abot the style? What Levitt has in his favor is that he’s taken several debates out of the economic departments where they have an effect (through work with government agencies, think tanks that produce policy recommendations, etc.) but are isolated from the public debates, and presented them directly to the public. But what I wonder is, would an equally engaging counter-Freak work be as successful? This is where Eriksen comes in, because as I read his book, I couldn’t hep but feel that while the examples he holds up are all unquestionably successful — Pinker, Diamond, Mead, etc. — they are, for the most part, second-rate in terms of research in their respective fields. I wouldn’t want to practice an anthropology defined by its most popular works, and I have to wonder if the strategy of “hooking” an audience with, say, Mead and hoping that, later on, they’ll be interested enough to find out where Mead was wrong is a very strong strategy. (The interesting exception here is Ashley Montagu, whose work wouldn’t seem to be particularly accessible — Montagu wasn’t a great stylist, and having heard some of his lectures, I’d add not a super-engaging speaker — but which despite its style managed to shape debates over race, sex, gender, and other key topics for the last half-century.)

I guess at heart I’m asking if there’s something about writing for a popular audience that precludes first-rate work from being produced and/or successful. Could a writer like Levitt produce a successful work that says the opposite of what Freakonomics says?

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Just for the record, I did buy and read the book. I read it quickly, and while aware that factors 1-3 were included in the analysis do agree with Ozma that the overwhelming emphasis was on the abortion thesis.

That said, any notion that I am out to trash the book bespeaks a touch of paranoia. My assessment is that Levitt, who is clearly an ambitious young man (I can call him young because I am 61), did some interesting research, found what was sure to be a controversial result and successfully hyped it, selling a lot of books and zooming to the top of the table in terms of academic/pop culture notoriety. Since I’ve worked in advertising for over two decades, I actually admire his chutzpah and the skill with which he has executed his strategy.

I do not see him as deliberately attempting to reinforce prejudice. It is, after all, to his credit that, as the Wall Street Journal points out, he has put backs up both left and right. The left is up in arms because of “eugenics.” The religious right is upset because he seems to be saying that abortion might be a good thing. That both sides are so upset suggests to me that he might be on to something looking more closely at.

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What Ozma calls my “defense of Bill Bennett” begins:

“Bill Bennett is a hypocrite, a loathsome fungus on the tree of American politics, a man who has worked unceasingly to make America a worse place–when he’s not publishing the work of others under his own name, or rolling the dice at Las Vegas while claiming that America’s poor would be rich if only they had the righteousness and moral fiber than he does. But Bill Bennett is not afflicted with genocidal fantasies about ethnically cleansing African-Americans…”

Ozma’s implicit claim that I have views about human genetics that I do not dare say is equally mendacious. Here’s the context she does not quote:

“(And, while we’re at it: never get involved in a land war in Asia; do not read My Pet Goat when death is on the line; never play poker with a man named ‘Doc’; never accept a battle of wits where iocane powder is a factor; never blithely download and install a file from Microsoft without carefully, carefully researching what it will do beforehand; never get involved in an argument over Noam Chomsky; and never post about human genetics on your weblog.)”

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Checking out the defense of Bill Bennet entry on your blog, I’m curious — what is it you’d like to say about human genetics that you feel you can’t put on your weblog?

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Ummm… If you ask Levitt why crime in America has fallen over the past decade http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf, he will give you a multi-stranded multi-causal interpretation, consisting of four factors that he believes have a significant effect reducing crime:

1. Increased numbers of police
2. Increased numbers incarcerated
3. Declines in the numbers addicted to crack
4. The decline in the numbers of young males raised as “unwanted” induced by the legalization of abortion.

And six factors often claimed to be responsible that he believes have not had a significant effect:

1. Capital punishment
2. Concealed-carry laws
3. Gun-control laws
4. Smarter policing strategies by Rudolph Guiliani
5. Changing demography
6. The strong economy of the late 1990s

Whatever happened to reading what people have written before you trash them?

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Check out the near-perfect correlation between average new house sizes and obesity rates at Alchemic Spot.

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Let’s assume that Levitt’s data holds up under scrutiny. Does this really negate sociocultural explanations of the phenomena?

Not unless the data in question substantially undermine the competing hypotheses. Ozma is right to point out that Levitt’s strategy is not simply to assert that the data supports his hypotheses but to make the stronger claim that it is inconsistent with competing hypotheses (demographic, economic, policing, etc.).

But even if this is true, the possibility of stronger explanations incorporating sociocultural factors cannot be ruled out a priori.

The problem is whether such explanations exist and demonstrably fit the data better. Neither impugning Levitt’s motives nor handwaving in the form of claims that the situation must be more complicated than Levitt’s hypothesis allows for, a no-brainer in a world in which reality is always more complex than models that purport to explain it, is a satisfactory answer.

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No, you are lying. Even standing this far off from you, I am having trouble keeping the spittle from showering my face.

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In the oldest systematic reflection on rhetoric of which I am aware, Aristotle identifies three ways to argue: (1) use facts and logic to appeal to reason; (2) use metaphor or other tropes to appeal to emotion; (3) attack your opponent’s character.

The “smirking,” “slithery,” “sticky” tropes are plainly attempts to arouse derision and revulsion (2). The central assertion in the message is that,

This is a book about feminism and racism written for people who feel either uncomfortable or unwelcome in the great conversation North American society has been having about feminism and racism since the 1960s. It presents an authoritative alternate language in which — not to participate in, but—to dominate that conversation.

is equally plainly an attempt at character assassination(2). It implicitly depicts the author and his readers as rejects and bullies.

This line has been continued by pointing to two instances of students who happened to pick topics close to those that their professor works on and generated results like those their professor seems to favor. Oh, my Lord, how crass! How appalling! (As if it weren’t the norm in academic relationships.)

The overall thrust has been to attack the author’s motives.

Contrast the way in which the Wall Street Journal article Ozma so usefully cites concludes.

Still, as economic debates go, this one is relatively civil. Mr. Foote praises Mr. Levitt for making all of his data and his programming easily accessible and hastens to add that “in many ways it is a very careful paper.” Mr. Levitt responds, “I think this is exactly the way science should work,” with controversial theories being poked and prodded for their robustness.

Edward Glaeser, a Harvard professor who helped referee Mr. Levitt’s original abortion submission to the Quarterly Journal of Economics, said the Foote critique isn’t damning, though it does suggest the impact of abortion on crime has not been as strong as Mr. Levitt has argued. “These guys have put the [data] through the wringer,” Mr. Glaeser says of Mr. Foote and his research assistant. “There is no question that the results get smaller and weaker, but there still seems to be something there.”

This hardly seems the sort of thing to justify the “See, I told you so” tone of the comment in which this article is cited. Neither does the earlier statement that,

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.

do much to reinforce the notion that the invective levelled at Mr. Levitt should be taken more seriously than what the man himself has written.

Were I to conclude, then, with no further qualification that Ozma is right, I would, indeed, be guilty of that “good faith,” of which I in no sense accuse her.

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I’m not sure how Emily Oster’s paper on witchcraft has anything to do with her claim that Amartya Sen mis-attributed the cause of the “missing women”. Please to explain. I *do*, however, see a similar kind of causality operative — the emphasis in her title is placed on weather, not culture, so that the impetus for an outcome which was particularly punitive toward women is located in nature rather than in culture/politics/history. My question is *why* she and her colleagues favor these kinds of explanations.

As for Roland Fryer: I think “where blacks went wrong” (his question, by self-report) starts, again, an important inquiry off on exactly the wrong foot: in such a way as to have the emphasis fall in a particularly-invested place and to selectively determine the results. I don’t think he’s an Uncle Tom nor that Emily Oster is a right-wing nut nor that Steven Levitt goes home at night and torments small fuzzy animals. However, I do think they are all heavily invested in a mode of argumentation that is extremely disingenuous. How about explaining why you think otherwise?

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