> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> To get back to that Chicago study--and your expert critical analysis as a
> sociologist would be appreciated--the relationship between
> abortion and low > crime rates can only be stable if is grounded in the
existence of a >socio economic machine in which the poor surplus to
capital's demand are tracked
> for criminalisation, instead of, say, shared work with others to reduce
> labor time for all or public employment.
While critique of quantoid sociology is not my long suit, I think you are putting a slightly large burden here. The problem you do highlight is that higher abortion rates could be the result of other factors that themselves relate to a later decline in crime. Obviously, multi-variate regression tries to filter out all those factors and the assumption is that given two cities with all factors filtered out, if abortion is the only thing left standing, you have proved causality.
Of course, social fabrics are rather too complicated for such easy readings of any regression. The study would be stronger if it could precisely measure changes in legal repression or liberation related to abortion -- the judicial pressure on each woman -- rather than tracking raw numbers of abortions.
That said, beneath all the hype around crime and its recent fall, a lot of folks have pointed to teenage demographics as a major factor, if not THE major factor, in crime statistics. So increased abortion x years back should have an almost automatic effect on crime rates, so this study is hardly surprising in arguing the raw fact that abortion today prevents crime tomorrow.
Take any too populations, hold everything else equal, then decrease the proportion of teenages to general population in one group, and crime rates (at least the non-boardroom crimes measured in such statistics) will generally go down on a per capita basis in that group.
Which is an argument neither for or against abortion, despite the eugenics reading given to the studies. The same stats would probably show up 15 years after a mass childhood death due to influenza in one population versus another similar disease-free population.
--Nathan