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Brad DeLong replies: “Why, you… you.. chomsky! choMSKY! CHOMSKY!!!”

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If you click here, a sponsor will donate a computer to a school in Turkey. I tried, it says which company gives to which school.. I cannot verify this but the page belongs to a respected media channel and i…

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wow. must keep this vokabel in mind.

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This actually circles back to what I’ve been saying again and again again to you, Tim: you say, over and over, that you don’t like the *form* of my argument while (implausibly, in my view) insisting you are agnostic as to its content. Brad DeLong has the considerable virtue of being much less coy about his own position — or, to put it in a fashion more apropos to *his* mode of argumentation, of admitting that he wants to bite when you poke him.

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I’m actually not stepping into the ring here to oppose Levitt. I simply found what she had to say as interesting and coherent as what Delong and others had to say. My comment was meta-blogging, rather than an argument against Levitt. I actually did no reading of Levitt in this case, my reading was of Delong and of the rest of the thread.

Perhaps Levitt’s argument is supported by evidence that more easily convinces those that share a similar paradigm. It isn’t really for me to say. As someone who puts a lot of stock in the evidence derived from fieldwork and participant-observation, I see Levitt’s claims about crime and abortion rates as intriguing, but in no way conclusive. Statistics on social behavior are easy to compile, and are a good starting point for social and cultural research, but leaving them as the final conclusion without looking at actual people seems premature to me.

I respect demographics, and think they can reveal truth, but we are dealing with an area (discussions of race, crime and reproductive rights) too freighted with our social assumptions to be simply clarified by any set of numbers.

Your ideal refutation of Levitt, if I understand you, is one that deals with him on his own disciplinary territory. That’s surely correct, but he has written a popular text meant for a wide audience, and so he has to encounter any number of responses from non-economists. It’s easy to say that other paradigms than his own are predisposed to have a problem with his methodology, but I don’t see methodology as the main problem here. He’s making statements about issues (race, crime and abortion) that have all sorts of baggage attached whomever tries to analyze them. The issues come prepackaged with instrumentalities and motivations, so of course Levitt samples from those in discussing them. Any honest discussion is honor bound to take on the possible motivations these issues bring with them.

As for Ozma being substantive: this is a blog after all, and I feel her post and comments met the local standards of discussion, whether they ideally refute Levitt or not.

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Even with a book as awful and instrumental as The Bell Curve, most of its critics took the time first to demolish its substantive arguments and evidencein the terms those arguments were offered, and second, to not just criticize the motives of its authors merely from the content of the book, but by actually going out and examining their institutional, sociological, and political projects, their network of collegial relations, and the allied discourses that preceded and followed on the book. If you’ve got anything like that to say about Levitt, I’m certainly prepared to be convinced that as a mere reader of the book, there’s something I didn’t know about him. If all you’ve got is garden-variety inferential claims about discourse, that because you perceive an alignment between his book and many other things you object to, said alignment exists, then I am unpersuaded by your substantive claims, as I am by most such attempts to name discourses associationally, without any of the details of intertextuality that make such namings persuasive ethnographically and otherwise.

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in other words, how social scientific knowledge advances.

Tim — you real point seems to be repeated iterations about how you want the “invective” turned down. This is a way, as I have said again and again, of refusing to take a proper stance and of phrasing substantive objections that you might wish to disavow (or about which you are fundamentally conflicted) in the form of objections about style.

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Your reading of Levitt is incorrect. The chapter in question does not make an argument that abortion rates are a single-cause or overwhelming primary explanation for falling crime rates. I’d agree that Levitt’s economism is not where my personal preferences lie for explanations of complex social phenomena, but your characterization (and Ozma’s) of what he actually says is exaggerated or misleading. The chapter in question reviews a range of explanations for falling crime rates, argues that there is no quantitative data to support some which are commonly (in popular or expert discourse) given credit, but also agrees that a number of common explanations are sound and supported by data, to which he adds the factor of abortion rates.

Where Levitt is strong, in my view, is when he stacks up his explanations against explanations that operate within similar paradigms using similar evidence, whether those explanations are a kind of common-sense among wider publics or are competiting explanations offered by other economists and political scientists. If you accept the evidentiary, methodological and intellectual premises of such disciplines even to some extent, then Levitt’s challenges to conventional wisdom are often very strong. If you don’t accept some of those premises, then Levitt is no more persuasive than many other scholars. This is why the conversation (I think properly) goes to abstractions and metadisciplinary principles, but why I think Ozma and even Rex can’t take the positions they’re taking without being inclusive in ways that they might not intend or desire. For one, you can’t undercut him on deep methodological grounds if you like what he has to say about the bagel salesman but not what he has to say about abortion.

In the evidentiary domains that Levitt is operating, I don’t think Ozma’s original post actually had a great deal to offer as a substantive rebuttal to his work on abortion and crime: she mostly insisted on the deep foundational illegitimacy of his argument on crime rates and imputed deep instrumental motives for that argument. I think if you want to claim substantive rebuttal here, you’ve got to be able to wield the same disciplinary apparatus and methodological tools or explain why you regard work arguing against Levitt within those traditions as being persuasive. It’s not enough to just say, “There’s a study that disagrees with the study that I disagree with”. That’s the game of dueling expertise that already disfigures public-sphere debates about technocratic, economic and similar policy problems. One group of partisans gets their expert, the other group gets a different expert, and then the most you can do beyond that is a kind of bean-counting, where whomever has the seeming consensus wins the day.

I don’t mean to say that a non-expert can say nothing substantive: quite the contrary. I think it’s possible to roll up your sleeves and read through scientific work on global warming and make some generalist evaluations of the claims being made. I’m not a psychologist, but at a certain point in past research, I hit a comfort level with saying where many canonical psychological studies of the effects of television on children were flawed even in their own terms, let alone within the methodological paradigms I myself tend to call on. I think you can get to this point pretty quickly with a great deal of weakly formulated evolutionary psychology (which is most evolutionary psychology).

I think that’s what a substantive reply to Levitt that claims to refute his claims in the terms they’re offered has to look like,and that such a reply has to come without assumptions of the instrumentalities or motivations behind Levitt’s claims. That comes later, and only if you can (or others can) demonstrate the overwhelming and transparent spuriousness of the arguments being made. Rex in this post seems to be saying the opposite: that the claim about underlying instrumentalities or purposes can be made preemptively, in advance of trying to understand the discourse in its own terms.

That’s an abstract way to formulate the discussion. The simple version: don’t caricature what the guy actually says. Even what he actually says is highly debatable both on its specifics and on its methodological generalities, but it pays to turn the invective dial down a notch or four.

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“is associated,” coincidence is not causation smart guy.

Just because Levitt makes an argument for his beliefs doesn’t make them true.

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Steve Levitt writes: “legalized abortion is associated with a 10 percent reduction in homicide, violent crime and property crime rates, which would account for 25–30 percent of the observed crime decline in the 1990s.”

John Fulton writes: “Levitt… fails to prove [his claim] that other explanations for crime rates are always secondary to the primary one of abortion rates. Humans have a long history before medical abortion techniques were invented, and if crime rates never varied in that time, I’ll eat my hat.”

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My point, which didn’t seem to interest you, is that Ozma provided substantive content in her original posts and her comments. Claiming she has none is a failure to engage, as well as insulting to her.

I’m cheered to see that Levitt included one long paragraph of citations supporting his beliefs. It shows he’s making an effort and that we should feel free to engage him as a fellow writer. Yet it still fails to prove that other explanations for crime rates are always secondary to the primary one of abortion rates. Humans have a long history before medical abortion techniques were invented, and if crime rates never varied in that time, I’ll eat my hat.

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Steve Levitt writes: “Donohue and Levitt (2001) report a number of pieces of evidence consistent with a causal link between legalized abortion and crime, a hypothesis that to my knowledge was Ž rst articulated in Bouza (1990). The Ž ve states that allowed abortion in 1970 (three years before Roe v. Wade) experienced declines in crime rates earlier than the rest of the nation. States with high and low abortion rates in the 1970s experienced similar crime trends for decades until the Ž first cohorts exposed to legalized abortion reached the high-crime ages around 1990. At that point, the high-abortion states saw dramatic declines in crime relative to the low-abortion states over the next decade. The magnitude of the differences in the crime decline between high- and low-abortion states was over 25 percent for homicide, violent crime and property crime. For instance, homicide fell 25.9 percent in high-abortion states between 1985 and 1997 compared to an increase of 4.1 percent in low-abortion states. Panel data estimates conŽ rm the strong negative relationship between lagged abortion and crime. An analysis of arrest rates by age reveal that only arrests of those born after abortion legalization are affected by the law change. A number of other studies confirm a link between abortion and crime.9 Reyes (2002) reports somewhat smaller, but still substantial estimates of abortion on crime using U.S. data. Sen (2002) Žfinds a link between abortion and crime in Canadian data that mirrors the U.S. experience. Pop-Eleches (2002) documents the effects of an unexpected abortion ban imposed in Romania in 1966. Extrapolating the conservative estimates of Donohue and Levitt (2001) to cover the period 1991–2000, legalized abortion is associated with a 10 percent reduction in homicide, violent crime and property crime rates, which would account for 25–30 percent of the observed crime decline in the 1990s.”

John Fulton goes on to write that Levitt’s *real* sin is that: “[Steve Levitt] doesn’t seem to care that he’s claiming truth for a concept that powerful political conservatives like Bennett now find useful to support their arguments about race.”

I think that speaks for itself.

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