Bill Bennett's final solution: aborting all black babies could reduce crime

Lets get on the same page here:

Suggest: To bring or call to mind by logic or association; evoke:

Bennett "called to mind by logic or association" that committing genocide would reduce crime.

Bennett suggested genocide just as you just suggested killing old people will save social security. Both suggestions are equally stupid, yours and his.

Anyway you slice it, even hinting at genocide is bad. You know what else is bad? People that defend comments about genocide.

 

Here's what Bennett said: "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." Bennett quickly added that such an idea would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do." But, he said, "your crime rate would go down."

You have converted his demonstrative "could" to a mandate of "should."

That is a very subtle yet dramatic shift.

 

So are you now agreeing that abortion IS genocide?!

 

Care to stay on topic?

But yes, aborting ALL BLACK babies unwillingly by the mothers would be a form of genocide, yes.

giddyup, we know what he said. Quite hiding behind semantics. Let the man take responsibility for his own comments. He doesn't need you to define "could" and "should". Are you going to ask us next what the meaning of "is" is?

 

The theory about abortions and lower crime, doesn't single our race. Crime was mentioned, and Bill Bennet brought the discussion immediately to black people.

That association with crim and a race, came from Bill Bennet's mind, not from a theory, not from a caller, or from anyone else. Out of all the things that he could have associated with black people, Bill Bennet associated crime with them.

As has been pointed out in this thread already, the statistics are only a shallow look crime. I see a lot of people in prison with mustaches. If we did a study and found that most crimes are committed by mustachioed men. It might be technically accurate, but stupid, shallow, and have no bearing on the real problem, if a radio host suggested aborting all babies with a genetic capability to grow mustaches.

The same is true of statistics on crime and blacks. Blacks are far more likely than whites to be the VICTIMS of crime. Does that mean that blacks need training on how not be victimized?

Blacks get convicted at a higher rate. But to focus in only that statistic is why it is a shallow and meaningless thing to bring up. It is also silly to use it as a reason to justify Bennet associating unborn innocent babies of being criminals. Look at factors such as education, socio economic status, family stability etc. Looking at those factors are far more telling about criminal activity, and would be worth bringing up. But just using one factor which, by the way doesn't show CAUSATION and using it to justify Bennet's racist comments is moronic.

Statistics don't make what Bennet said less racist, unless they also showed causation and occurred at least a greater than 50% rate... probably closer to 95%. But they don't.

 

Who is riding the genocide bandwagon? Where did Bennett talk about genocide? Nowhere. Stop lecturing.

 

Okay, I'll use your terminology.

What term would you like to give to the systematic termination of all black babies in America?

 

I think the hypersensitive parrots on this board salivate when they sense an opportunity to lambaste someone. Even the title of the thread was irresponsible and skewed the entire conversation. Bill Bennet's "final solution"? How convenient! A parallel to Nazi Germany AND genocide! And I am not defending him. I still don't know who the hell he is. I read Freakonomics and was impressed by the whole book. And the co-author of the book was a black guy. Why don't you guys villify him as well?

Let's see what the other co-author has to say about Bennet:
Link
Bill Bennett and I have a fair amount in common. We've both written about crime (his "superpredator" theory gets a quick discussion in Freakonomics), we have both thought a lot about illegal drugs and education (he was the original "drug czar" and is a former Secretary of Education), and we both love to gamble (although it seems I do it for much lower stakes and perhaps with greater success).

Now we also share the fact that we have made controversial statements about the link between abortion and crime.

Here's what Bennett said during the Sept. 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.

Bennett's comments have, not surprisingly, ignited a furor. For some of the media reactions, see here and here. Less than an hour ago, the White House weighed in.

Here are my thoughts on this exchange:

1) People should bear in mind that this took place on an unscripted radio show in response to a caller's question. It was clearly off-the-cuff. This is a very different situation than, say, Bennett's writing an op-ed piece.

2) Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics. It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets). In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement. Empirically, what matters is the fact that abortions are disproportionately used on unwanted pregnancies, and disproportionately by teenage women and single women.

3) Some people might think that my comments in (2) above are just ducking the race issue because it is politically correct to do so. Anyone who has read Freakonomics knows that I am not afraid to take issues of race head on. Much of the book deals with challenging issues of race (e.g. black-white test score gaps, black naming patterns, etc.). I mean it when I say that, from a purely fact-based and statistical perspective, race is not in any way central to our arguments about abortion and crime.

4) When a woman gets an abortion, for the most part it is not changing the total number of children she has; rather, it is shifting the timing so those births come later in life. This is an important fact to remember. One in four pregnancies ends in abortion and this has been true for 30 years in the U.S. But the impact of abortion on the overall birth rate has been quite small.

5) In light of point (4) above, it is hard to even know what Bennett means when he says "you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Implicit in his comment is the idea that some external force, like a government, is forcing blacks to have abortions. This is obviously a completely different situation than abortion as we know it today, in which a woman chooses whether or not to have an abortion now, and then starts her family later in life, when her situation is more stable and conducive. The distinction between a woman choosing to control her fertility and the government choosing to limit her fertility is fundamental and people often seem to lose sight of that.

6) If we lived in a world in which the government chose who gets to reproduce, then Bennett would be correct in saying that "you could abort every black baby in this country, and
your crime rate would go down." Of course, it would also be true that if we aborted every white, Asian, male, Republican, and Democratic baby in that world, crime would also fall. Immediately after he made the statement about blacks, he followed it up by saying, "That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down." He made a factual statement (if you prohibit any group from reproducing, then the crime rate will go down), and then he noted that just because a statement is true, it doesn't mean that it is desirable or moral. That is, of course, an incredibly important distinction and one that we make over and over in Freakonomics.

7) There is one thing I would take Bennett to task for: first saying that he doesn't believe our abortion-crime hypothesis but then revealing that he does believe it with his comments about black babies. You can't have it both ways.

8) As an aside, the initial caller's statement is completely wrong. If abortion were illegal, our Social Security problems would not be solved. As noted above, most abortions just shift a child from being born today to a child being born to the same mother a few years later.

 

It's not worth talking about. It was just a device to demonstrate a point. It's not a construct of his political beliefs... in spite of what some here would strive to prove.

I'm just objecting to you taking me to task for "getting off topic" when most of the criticism of Bennett here is just going "off topic."

 

Then leave and quit nitpicking me.

You took me to task. I was simply responding to you.

You are the one that tried to derail the topic by attacking my personal views on abortion... which has nothing to do with Bennett's comments.

 

I think responding to genocidal comments doesn't fall into the category of "hypersensitive."

And if you happen to be just another white guy, then you have no grounds to tell non-white people how to respond to Bennett's comments. Sorry, but that is just the way it is.

Then why are we having this conversation ...if you are not defending him?

I'm not commenting on the book Freakonomics.
I'm not commenting on the black co-other.

I'm commenting on Bill Bennett's comments.

He said what he said and he can't hide behind the shield of, "well, I'm just repeating what somebody else said." That is a cheap defense. He said it, period.

 

if I change my statement to "could", what do you think?

 

I went out of my way to show in big letters that we aren't arguing that Benneit believed it was a good idea. Why are you still arguing that topic?

But the fact is that when talking about crime, Bill Bennet brought race into it. The one race he brought into it was black unborns. No author made that point, no caller made that point, only Bill Bennet did.

Furthermore say whatever you want about statistics, but those statistics don't show CAUSATION. They explain next to nothing about the crime rate. They might explain something about problems in our country when combined with other relevant statistics, but Bennet wasn't even talking about that.

Furthermore if he's talking about applying something to a whole race that applies to less than one half, then he is judging a whole race by a few individuals. That is called racism.

 

I think you would probably have an accurate result... and I would not be offended even though I am white.

Should is way different than could.

 

Anyone who listens to anything coming from the mouth of a degenerate gambler like Bill Bennett or a hopeless junkie like Rush Limbaugh ought to have their head examined.

 

The caller was talking about abortion and crime. Bennett brought race into it.

No one was attempting to show causation. Bennett himself dismissed the exercise as futile because it is a far more complex problem. That's why he entered into the example.

Are you saying that Bennett said anywhere that all blacks are pre-disposed toward crime? Where did he say that? Nowhere...

 

Or a degenerate sex addict like Clinton. Or a liar like John Kerry. Or an alcoholic like Ted Kennedy. Or a coke head like Dubya...

 

I am saying that Bennet associated crime with blacks. To make that as the association one has with a race is racist.

Bennet statements and the fact that he brought them up do in fact show that association. It is textbook racism.

If someone starts talking about crime, and out of the blue you mention all blacks, then yes racism is involved.

I know that Bennet wasn't suggesting aborting all blacks. That has ZERO to do with whether his statement was racist or not.

It wasn't racist because Bennet was in favor of the solution, or not in favor of the solution.

It was racist, because Bennet has shown that he has an association of crime with Blacks. I don't know how to put it any simpler than that. Ignoring all of the more relevant statistics, and determining factors about crime, Bennet chose to bring only one factor to the conversation, and that was race.

 

Which station airs Clinton, Kerry, or Kennedy's talk shows?

Oh that's right....they aren't radio "talk show" hosts like Bennett and Limbaugh!

That fourth guy you mentioned....I couldn't care less about him!

 

Since you and Giddyup have since responded to other people but not me (I'll presume its because you have no defense), I'll respond to your previous post to me.

Even if you took that as true, how is it a useful statement to suggest aborting all black babies would reduce crime?

Please tell us the merit in that statement.