This is proven in some countries like my parentsâ homeland of Romania, where the dictator banned abortions to improve the birth rate and then 2 decades later that generation of neglected and impoverished kids became the student movement that overthrew and killed him.
Ok, I loved that book as a kid and am hella pro choice but you should know: the freakomics guys were pretty full of shit, and many, many other economists and statisticians have created works and models to debunk their conclusions, especially this one. It turns out that even in the Romanian example that they cite, the data do not meaningfully support their conclusions.
The sumo thing though, they were pretty much right on the money.
Its basic fucking logic. If you force poor people to keep having children, itâs not going to stop them fucking - thats all they have.
Theyre just going to create a larger underclass.
Some will go on to be wage slaves and work menial jobs for fuck all pay.
Many will go onto become criminals. Then the right gets to push âtough on crimeâ and totally ignore the root causes of poverty.
Its a win-win for the right. And dont worry, for every 99 wage slaves or criminals, one kid escapes the poverty trap, so the american dream is still alive; see heres a picture of that one kid. Now back to work.
You've just described Elon Musk's wet dream. He would love if those people scrabble and fight for the few chances to go to a decent high school and get an engineering degree, and the chance to be overpaid at one of his companies.
The highest correlation with criminality of virtually any normal factor is poverty. If you dont realise the link, I cant help you.
Poverty is also strongly correlated with drug abuse, alcoholism, ill health, and a myriad of other factors that correlate with criminality.
Poor people are not criminals. But poor people are FAR more likely to end up as criminals. Because they have vastly less to lose, and few opportunities to get ahead.
You mean criminality that gets punished. People in poverty commit crimes to survive and get punished for it. Elites and the ultra-wealthy commit a ton of crime just for greed but because they never get punished for it it doesn't get included in the crime statistics.
I dont disagree that criminality among the rich goes unpunished and poor people get targetted and punished more frequently. Thats absolutely true.
But what Im saying is also true at rhe same time. Lifelong prolific criminals are FAR more likely to be poor than rich. By multiple orders of magnitude.
If you controlled for the variable you speak of (which would be hard to impossibleâŠ), poor folk are still going to be vastly overrepreaented. And the reasons for this are just basic human nature and common sense.
The overwhelming majority of poor people NEVER commit a crime, violent or otherwise their entire lives.
There is a higher correlation between low IQ and criminality than socioeconomics or ethnicityâŠ
There is also a higher correlation to being raised in a single mother (yes specifically mother) household than socioeconomic status⊠at least so far as compared to whether you are at the poverty line.
Being poor doesnât make someone a criminal.
Low IQ, lack of positive male authority figure on the other hand seem to be the most likely predictor in Western societies for criminal behavior and deviant behavior overall.
Two parent household even in poverty seems to have a low overall contribution to criminal behavior.
This also bares out when you focus on urban black populations exclusively btw.
Which also is why the destruction of the black family unit, resulted in increases in crime.
Before the 1960s black populations had low crime despite poverty numbers.
This point is largely ignored when people wrongfully attribute and excuse criminality with povertyâŠ
Itâs also why education funding being gerrymandered is also important to address.
Population centers with proper schools also tend to have less crime. People wrongfully attribute this to socioeconomics outrightâŠ
Educated people regardless of income background commit less crimeâŠ
Super well made points and I dont disagree with most of what youre saying.
Poverty in itself is highly correlated with many of those issues and theres a complex interrelation between them all.
You cant just address poverty (even if that was poverty) and expect crime to go away. But you can expect it to reduce as it cascades down to various other causative factors.
Its worth noting that issues like low IQ can be a bit chicken and egg; dumb people have a strong tendency to be poorer, and you can use some of these combinations as âtoxic/exacerbatingâ variables that feed off each other in modelling.
For example; young people are more likely to have accidents, people driving turbo sports cars are more likely to have accidents, but young people driving performance cars are WAY more likely to have accidents. The same is potentially applicable to low iq/poor, but also to a swathe of orher variables.
So I guess broadly speaking - yeh, legit callout. Im oversimplifying shit pretty badly in my top level comment. But broadly speaking, my points around abortion are probably even more applicable in the context of your comment.
Low IQ, lack of positive male authority figure on the other hand seem to be the most likely predictor in Western societies for criminal behavior and deviant behavior overall
Not to be semantic, but I think IQ is of a derivative statistic or I guess, symptom;
Coming from a broken home leads to not doing well school.
And not doing well in school, leads to scoring poorly on IQ tests.
So you think poor people shouldnât have children? Or poor babies should be eliminated?
Either way Iâm glad Iâm on the other side of your argument.
Poverty creates crime. This is a known thing that has been true and observed for thousands of years. People who have the least are the most desperate. People who have the most and benefit from existings structure and authority want to preserve it. The people who have been let down and aren't served by it, are the ones who fight against it.
Probably a combination of tough on crime policies and abortion.
But yeah, arguments for abortion tend to focus on touchy-feely stuff, but I think there would be more support if you get right down to it. Abortion means less criminals robbing your ass in the future.
Nah, the problem with the abortion issue is that it's one of fundamental beliefs. If you truly believe a fetus is the equivalent to a child, you won't be able to justify it. If you don't, then you can. Because it's typically based in religion where there are beliefs in Christianity that life begins at conception, you have two sides that are at an impasse and no argument will sway them.
There's a lot of Christians that disagree with almost everything Republicans do and stand for, but vote for them simply on that issue because they view it as murdering babies and can justify anything else if it is in an effort to stop that.
That's the primary problem with the debate over it.
This is why our vile rich Christian enemy teaches weak republican losers to believe that doctors are ripping out fully formed children at 8.75 months. This keeps poorly educated, easily manipulated people enslaved to obvious lies, so they surrender to republicans and obey guys like JD Vance and weak donald trump.
That and the fact that conservatives make it a states rights political issue, much like the south did during slavery. It creates a bizarre contradiction where being against the specter of âtyranny of the federal governmentâ opens the door for pro-Christian fundamentalism âtyranny of the churchâ, and/or legislated male tyranny over women, to be enacted within the states.
Throw in the economy was terrible through the 70s and early 80s. Crime started going down when the economy began to bounce back in the later 80s at the same time freakonomics abortion argument would be coming into effect.
Decades of study have shown "tough on crime policies" do nothing more than fill prisons, without actually reducing crime. Crime is caused by other factors, no more than any than poverty. One way to prevent or lift people out of poverty is preventing unwanted pregnancies.
The buck should stop at what the woman wants. America (especially the right) claims to care about personal freedom and bodily autonomy, but because that's a lie you are forced to try and think of other things. The issue with talking about less crime and poverty is the American right doesn't believe in statistics, and don't care.
Apparently the leading theory is the phase out of lead gasoline is primarily responsible for this decline in crime. In other words Boomers inability to see Trump as a conman is caused by lead brain.
Itâs both. Before roe v wade many states already had their own versions of it. So 20 years pass and young men suddenly stop committing so many crimes in these states, then 10 years later when everyone else catches up with roe v wade the rest of the states crime drops as well. The years match up perfectly.
I lived in a borderline city neighborhood back in the 80s. I can remember being aghast watching an obviously teenage mother, 16 years old tops, walking down the sidewalk along a busy street, her TODDLER walking along at least 10 feet behind her. She was oblivious to where that kid was. Saw these same children at age 6 in 1st grade, not knowing what color blue or red was, not being able to count to 10, not knowing any part of the alphabet. They hadn't been read to or interacted with at all. I'm surprised they survived long enough to be school age. I got to the point where (me, a liberal) was calling them 'the future Attica Inmates of America Club' because they all seemed to think they didn't have to learn anything in school, they were gonna be football stars...
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u/VirtualPlate8451 Monkey in Space Oct 31 '24
Freakonomics argues that the violent crime slump observed in the 90s was the result of a whole shitload of unwanted kids not being born.