Doug Henwood wrote:
> I don't see how differences among individuals are explicable by
> anything but circumstances (allowing for "temperament," aka Freud's
> "constitutional factors," and random variation). History,
> inequality, family patterns, racial hetero/homogeneity - these are
> precisely the differences among societies you'd want to investigate
> to explain differences in crime rates.
This is true. The question though is the extent to which you can investigate the influence of "circumstances" in this much broader sense through certain kinds of statistical methods. How, for instance, could the development of Nazism is Germany be explained entirely through factors expressible as variables in a statistical relation? This doesn't preclude all kinds of uses of "statistics" in a much broader sense, including their use to get at influences indicated as important by psychoanalysis (the insight or lack of insight of psychoanalysis requiring to be established in another way).
Ted