I missed this one the first time around:
Kaus writes that, when he was on William Bennett’s radio show, “Bennett immediately zeroed in on a key political mystery: Are African-American voters on board with the Democrats’ recent amnesty-for-illegal-immigrants program?” I wonder if Kaus asked Bennett about this quote:
But I [Bennett] 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.
As Brendan Nyhan notes, Bennett wasn’t actually suggesting that black babies be aborted–in fact, Bennett said, “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” Bennett definitely sounds like the go-to guy for a savvy discussion of the black vote!
P.S. Just to clarify for those who might think that Bennett was simply calling-it-like-it-is, albeit in a politically incorrect style . . . On his Freakonomics blog, Steven Levitt supported Bennett’s reasoning, as follows:
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. . . .
As John DiNardo points out, Levitt seems to be confusing the number of crimes with the crime rate. The latter has a denominator. Beyond this, the intervention being hypothesized would certainly have many effects, and it is highly doubtful that the result would be to leave the crime rate among non-blacks unchanged. This is pretty basic causal reasoning, although given what I’ve heard about ed schools (sorry, Jennifer!), I guess it’s not completely unsurprising that a former Secretary of Education could get confused on the matter.
Perhaps (to return to a familiar Kaus theme), it’s a problem with the teacher’s unions? With a more dynamic education system, less bound by bureaucratic constraints, we’d surely be appointing cabinet-level education who had a better understanding of causal inference.