Sorry my English irony obviously bounced ;-).

I should have included a modifier ‘poor’ in front of ‘women’.

But if you read Freakonomics, what Levitt says is pretty shocking stuff. What it says, is that poor women know when they won’t be good mothers, and so restrict the number of children they have. And if they’re forced to have those children, then those are precisely the children who go on to become criminals.

I don’t know of anywhere in the literature that has, previously, credited women, poor, uneducated women, with such foresight.

Levitt himself (who after his wife’s miscarriage, adopted a child) says that abortions are an expensive way to prevent murders (roughly 6 abortions per murder prevented, from memory).

It’s not a comfortable place for either liberals, or conservatives, this notion that we can socially engineer society, by choosing who or who does not have babies.

On the one hand it justifies a total libertarian position: free access to abortion on demand, wherever, whenever. On the other hand it could be used to justify a position of total social control (we tell you whether you can have children).

It’s unsurprising, perhaps, that both sides selectively edit Levitt’s argument. Conservatives want you to know the free market triumphs, but they don’t want to know that that might lead to more or less murders (via the market for abortions). Liberals want you to know that freer abortion laws have benefits to society, unlooked for, but ignore some of the darker implications.

Where is your proof of that? And proof to the Holbo standard of reviewed articles? You certainly don’t have that. You can win any argument by asserting that it was all coded propaganda. It is like a Freudian saying that someone is in denial. You can never prove otherwise because “no I’m not” is considered further proof of denial. As a factual matter, Rose Bird was attacked because California passed a death penalty law which she refused to carry out. This death penalty law would have killed mostly white people if she had been doing her job correctly, so the racist charge really needs a bit more support if you are using it as a serious argument. Of course I strongly suspect you aren’t using it as a serious argument—more the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of STFU, but I’ll see how you respond.

Why is Brown an ‘outlier’ rather than a key Democratic insider?”

People only know of Rose Bird because she was the object of successful right-wing propaganda. That propaganda was intended to camouflage racism under concern with law and order. So here we are decades later, and you’re still insisting that the camouflage was the reality, because people heard about it. But of course people hear about successful propaganda.

You’re peddling the same right-wing BS as always. Forty years from now people like you will be saying that of course the invasion of Iraq was motivated by Iraq being linked to 9/11. Why? Because lots of right-wingers believed that Iraq was linked to 9/11.

Ok, but again, why do you dismiss the empirical result of actual elections that were based almost entirely on the issue in question? Why is Rose Bird’s shocking ouster an ‘anecdote’ rather than ‘evidence’?

Why is Brown an ‘outlier’ rather than a key Democratic insider?

The criticism of 1960s welfare was so strong that a Democratic president signed it, and many Democrats voted for it.

The mid-century HUD disasters are well known.

What counts as evidence here?

I disagree, I think. If you are going to engage with someone’s arguments at all, then you really have to engage with them in their strongest form. If they’re not worthy of that, then the only thing to do is ignore them, or else mock them (only if they’re more prominent than you and you’re good at that sort of thing.) I didn’t get the feeling that Holbo’s post was intended as mockery but as a genuine question. In which case we want to look at the logic of Douthat’s argument and not just pick holes in it. I mean, if the question is just, “Is Ross Douthat a serious thinker,” we already knew the answer to that.

Right you are. Same reason the EITC is one the one income-support program (many) conservatives love.

It appears to me that a basic income combined with a flat tax and elimination of the minimum wage would probably amount to a fair amount of redistribution from the middle class to the poor and a windfall for the rich/corporations – since the low-paid workers will have no incentive to demand higher wages.

There may be other roots to it but Milton Friedman certainly spent decades arguing for a negative income tax which is another way of getting to the same thing. Again, I wouldn’t describe him as a “conservative” as that word is used in American politics today.

You could also try Murray’s “In Our Hands”. Avoid the incentive problems of welfare by simply converting the system to a citizen’s basic income.

I know, I know, Barry’s already told me that I’m “cute” for believing that might solve anything.

Thank you for the clarification. The revised question makes a lot more sense, with one caveat: the word “mismanagement” confuses the issue a bit, because it implies a clear set of common goals whose achievement is a matter of good management. However, many of the conservative critiques of 1960s/70s-era liberal policies focus on the policies’ goals themselves, not just on how well their achievement was managed.

The most clear-cut example of actual liberal mismanagement would have to be the massive expansion of the welfare system. The goal—to reduce poverty—was universally shared, and the means chosen was later demonstrated pretty conclusively (by the 1996 welfare reform) to have been inferior to at least one proposed alternative.

On the other hand, racial policies such as busing and “affirmative action” are more complicated. While there may have been a consensus in favor of the goal of racial integration, the liberal version of this goal emphasized material and vocational equality, whereas centrists and conservatives emphasized social equality and racial harmony. Having achieved neither goal, busing can surely be seen in retrospect as a case of mismanagement. But “affirmative action” arguably increased material and vocational equality, at the expense of social equality and racial harmony, and therefore whether it reflects good management or mismanagement depends very much on which set of goals one endorses.

Finally, the controversy over liberal crime policies being played out in this comment thread is pretty clearly an example of differing goals. After all, nobody can possibly claim that the massive changes to the criminal justice system during the 1960s had crime reduction as their goal. Whether one views them as a spectacular success or a case of “epic mismanagement” therefore depends entirely on how much one values law and order compared to other values that they unquestionably promoted. (To pick just one example, I recall New York liberals complaining bitterly at the time that Mayor Giuliani’s cleanup of Times Square ruined the neighborhood’s previous colorful character, replacing it with bland middle-class neatness. Good government or “epic mismanagement”? It’s all a matter of taste…)

Finally, I’d like to point out that this analysis benefits greatly from occurring thirty to forty years after the fact—”now that the dust has settled”, to use your phrase. It might be worthwhile keeping that in mind before jumping to any conclusions about claimed cases of “epic mismanagement” dating from a mere couple of years ago.

But I AM familiar with it. That’s the point. (You can say I couldn’t possibly be, but that’s just an affair between you and the silky walls, as it were. Nothing to do with me.)

Sebastian, “showing the kind of creakiness”, etc. does not an ‘epic of mismanagement’ make.

Also, I didn’t say it couldn’t possibly have been true. I said I doubted it was true. There’s a difference there, big enough to cram in evidence, one way or another. Really, I appreciate suggestions of readings.

“Defining Deviancy Down” is a classic. Basically the ‘second’ wave of movement conserative intellectuals – the sociologists – give us lots of this stuff. But it’s a bit long in the tooth now. At least, it has serious problems of its own. Probably I just phrased my question in too confrontational fashion: now that the dust has settled, what is the proper, sober verdict on stuff like “Defining Deviancy Down” and the like. To what extent does it suffice to demonstrate ‘epic mismanagement’?