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I am using Freakonomics in my Intro. to Soc. class as a launching point for student journals and class discussions this semester. Since Levitt and Dubner discuss a number of relevant and sometimes controversial social issues in the book, I know we'll get more interesting classroom debates. I especially like the recurring theme of "correlation is not the same thing as causation" a point I have been trying to make with students for years!
Last week, several of my students had voiced how disturbed they were by the suggestion that abortion could be justified by using these declining crime rate statistics. I clarified for them that Levitt and Dubner are not actually advocating abortion as a method of crime control, they are merely anayzing the data. Then we discussed how data COULD be used for various purposes, and policy-makers could theoretically take such information and use it to set social policy, like the extreme of advocating for more abortions among poor single mothers to improve the quality of our citizens. (The authors of Freakonomics actually identified poverty and single-parents as being the key social factors, as well as the mother's lack of education, but they did not mention race specifically. Bill Bennett evidently interpreted poor, uneducated and single-parent as meaning black.)
The news story the next day after our class discussion gave the issue much more relevance, when Bill Bennett illustrated so beautifully just exactly what I have mentioned the night before about public figures distorting information. Thanks Bill.
Pat
Pat Scheib
Pennsylvania College of Technology
Academic Support Services, DIF 74
One College Avenue
Williamsport, PA 17701-5799
(570) 326-3761, x7575
>>> Andi Stepnick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 9/29/2005 2:13 PM >>>
Un-Freakin-believable. I didn't believe it until I heard the clip. You can listen below and read along! For those of us talking about race, ways of knowing, data, assumptions, stereotypes, etc. this is a powerful piece to deconstruct!! Andi From Media Matters for America.
----->>>>>>TO HEAR IT GO TO http://mediamatters.org/items/200509280006 The following message was included: OMG!
Bill Bennett: "[Y]ou could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down"
Addressing a caller's suggestion that the "lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years" would be enough to preserve Social Security's solvency, radio host and former Reagan administration Secretary of Education Bill Bennett dismissed such "far-reaching, extensive extrapolations" by declaring that if "you wanted to reduce crime ... if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Bennett conceded that aborting all African-American babies "would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do," then added again, "but the crime rate would go down."
Bennett's remark was apparently inspired by the claim that legalized abortion has reduced crime rates, which was posited in the book Freakonomics (William Morrow, May 2005) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. But Levitt and Dubner argued that aborted fetuses would have been more likely to grow up poor and in single-parent or teenage-parent households and therefore more likely to commit crimes; they did not put forth Bennett's race-based argument.
From the September 28 broadcast of Salem Radio Network's Bill Bennett's Morning in America:
CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this at all.
BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?
CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.
BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.
CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.
BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --
CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.
BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.
Bill Bennett's Morning in America airs on approximately 115 radio stations with an estimated weekly audience of 1.25 million listeners.
A.S.
Posted to the web on Wednesday September 28, 2005 at 3:09 PM EST
Copyright © 2004 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved.-- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: Social Movements Working Group <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:53:29 -0400
Subject: [smwg01] anti-sweatshop sign-on statement
Bob Ross is doing some really good public sociology/activist intellectual stuff.
STeve
Dear Colleagues,
Early this year I was privileged to witness an historic decision: United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), the premier national social justice advocate on American college campuses, began the construction of a campaign to combat sweatshops by strengthening unions around the world.
Faculty members from many campuses are joining with USAS to support this campaign.
Below is a statement that we are asking faculty members across the country to sign, indicating their support for this important effort. (The statement and the list of faculty signatories will be published later this year in the Chronicle of Higher Education).
USAS has available material, including Frequently Asked Questions, that they or I will be pleased to send you upon request. Briefly, the students will ask that university licensees reserve an escalating portion of their production for union factories that pay a living wage - unions from anywhere as long as they are truly workers' democratic choices.
I am asking you to join us in signing this statement. To do so, simply email USAS campaign organizer Zack Knorr at [EMAIL PROTECTED] (and please copy me) with your name, school, department, and a line saying that you are in support. Also, please feel free to forward this email, with your own personal comments, to other colleagues you think will be sympathetic and lend their support to this important effort.
At the end of my work on sweatshops in the apparel industry I argued that there were three pillars of decency for workers by the middle of the 290th century: their own associations and self -defense, usually in the form of unions; successful alliance with reformers and consumers (usually from the middle classes); and together, sympathetic public policy. This campaign can help erect once again the first pillar decency
In Solidarity,
Robert J.S. "Bob" Ross
Statement in Support of United Students Against Sweatshops' Sweat-Free Campus Campaign
It is now more than five years since colleges and universities began adopting anti-sweatshop codes of conduct. Not enough has changed in factories producing collegiate apparel. Apparel workers around the world too often face abusive treatment, excessive working hours, wages that are woefully inadequate to meet basic needs, and the denial of universally acknowledged associational rights when they organize for improvements. Apparel brands put tremendous pressure on their supplier factories to cut costs and these pressures make broad, deep and sustainable improvements in wages and working conditions effectively impossible. The gains we have seen at individual factories have been too limited and too fragile.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned, strongly support United Students Against Sweatshops' (USAS) new sweat-free campus proposal. Under this proposal, campus logo apparel would be produced in designated supplier factories where workers are able to enforce their rights through union representation and are paid a living wage. The goal of this proposal is to supply these factories with steady orders from university licensees at prices adequate to allow full respect for workers' rights.
We realize this proposal challenges current practices, but we believe it is fully achievable. The new sweat-free campus proposal strengthens existing initiatives in order to bring us closer to the day when university apparel is truly made under dignified working conditions.
Robert J.S. Ross, PhD
Chair, 2005-6, Section on Political Economy of the World-System, American Sociological Association
Professor of Sociology
Director, International Studies Stream
Clark University
950 Main Street
Worcester, MA 01610
508 793 7376
fax: 508 793 8816
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Boyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Social Movements Working Group <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:17:51 -0400
Subject: Re: [smwg01] Peak Oil and Energy talks
Hi Dana!
Go for it..I know that Mathew Simmons is coming to speak down there..we have
quite a peak oil group up here too. One friend set up the
www.peakoil.org a few months ago and very quickly was getting up to 4000 hits a
day. The Colin Campbell, the British predictor of global production
peaking at about 2010 (and in End of Suburbia and a more recent dvd), called my
friend and asked to buy the legal rights to his website. Jim turned
him down so we're still cranking.
So what comes first..peak oil or the "peaking" of the dollar? Please tell
everyone that Robert Williams , the Guilford economist, will speak up
here Friday, Oct 21 at 7:30pm on his new book on global finance "The
Moneychangers", Zed Press, forthcoming). His talk "Will the Dollar Crash?"
goes after the Bush policies of maintaining a weak dollar and heavy deficit
spending. Robert says it's really not if but when the dollar will
spiral downward in global currency markets.. and now that we just borrow for for
Katrina and ,of course, the war etc..it's really scary.
If people can't make it for the evening event, I'll also have him in a classroom
at 2pm.
Take care!
Jeff
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Following up on Gerald Cecil's talk last Wednesday on peak oil, I wanted to
> forward the schedule of upcoming talks at Duke this semester on oil and
> energy issues. For the full listing, go to:
> <http://www.physics.unc.edu/about/robertsonseminars
>
> I also highly recommend the documentary "The End of Suburbia" for those who
> haven't yet seen it!
>
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unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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--
Andi
Every object, every being,
Is a jar of delight.
Be a connoisseur.
~Rumi~
Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into
something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It's in our hands.
~Cathy Better~
Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of things which matter
least.
~Johann von Goethe~
----------------
Dr. Andi Stepnick
Associate Professor of Sociology
314 Wheeler Humanities Building
Belmont University
Nashville TN 37212-3757
Direct Line: (615) 460-6249
Office Manager: (615) 460-5505
Sociology Fax: (615) 460-6997
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