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The biggest root cause of crime is fatherlessness
- squeegee_scream 3y agohttps://archive.is/A25Lp https://archive.is/A25Lp
- whoisthemachine 3y agoThe article headline prefaces this with "Opinion", perhaps the headline here should as well?
- barryrandall 3y agoIsn't the domain enough of a flag?
- tech_ken 3y ago[flagged]
- positus 3y agoWhy do you consider the opinion voiced in the article to be a "stupid opinion"?
- tech_ken 3y agoI edited my original comment to expound. The "evidence" he cites is incredibly thin, in my professional opinion.
- basfo 3y agoBecause correlation does not imply causation.
- misja111 3y agoBut if one factor correlates more with crime than all the others, it sure looks like that one is the cause.
- tech_ken 3y agoCan I use this comment (anonymized of course) as example in the next course I teach on regression stats? Because it's the exact opposite of how you're supposed to do regression inference. Selecting feature sets by beta alone is a recipe for disaster. Consider the following example: A + B => Y (one A and one B causes one Y) A => 2Z (two A causes one Z) If you have a data set featuring B, Z, and Y then a regression analysis will yield that Y = 2Z + B, and you would conclude that Z is "a root cause" of Y over B. However, by construction Z has no causal effect on Y, only B does. This is literally the point of "correlation does not imply causation". Moreover, the white-paper the op-ed author is citing [0] doesn't even have "fatherlessness" as the most correlated variable: it's poverty across the board (and by a lot). Even if your argument was sound it wouldn't be correct. [0] https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/ifs-strongerfamilies-final-1.pdf https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/ifs-strong... Tables 2 and 3
- misja111 3y agoThank you, I should have read the white paper better, you are right, the correlation with single parent households is actually one of the weakest. By the way, do I read correctly from the regression analysis stats, that "single young men age 15-29" is -negatively- correlated with all categories of crime?
- tech_ken 3y agoYes, that’s correct. Mixed significance pattern and wide-ish SEs so a little challenging to make claims across crime types IMO. This demo tends to commit the most recorded crimes, which means that they’re getting arrested or murdered. Presumably in an area where lots of crimes are occurring the corresponding increase in arrests and murders leads to lower population counts on the US Census (which I believe was their source of truth on demo stuff).
- PortiaBerries 3y agoWell, whether or not fatherlessness is the actual cause (and I believe there is abundant evidence that it is), it seems very likely that partially rewinding the societal changes that have led to widespread fatherlessness are going to have a positive effect on crime. And yes, I'm talking about the sexual revolution.
- PortiaBerries 3y agoI see your extended response now. Well, I'm happy to do some ironclad moralization.
- tech_ken 3y agoMore fool you
- tech_ken 3y ago"Whether or not we correctly understand the root causes of X, it seems likely that doing Y will clearly reduce it". I can't change your beliefs, but you have to understand how foolish this sounds to me. If you think the sexual revolution causes crime then just say that. I personally think it's ludicrous, but at least do me the decency of stating your conflicting opinion instead of trying to sidestep the point that this op-ed is fluff.
- mips_r4300i 3y agoYears ago, my dad owned and rented out some Section 8 houses in the hood. Tenants were single moms on welfare with usually 3 to 4 young kids. Many times he'd knock on the front door after a call to fix the toilet or some such repair, be told to hang on for a sec, and a man would try to run out the back door and disappear. This was the baby daddy (or a prospective one) being shooed out by the mom, because his presence was a risk to the single mom's welfare checks. Hard to improve when the incentives are against it.
- hotpotamus 3y agoI was led to believe that Clinton ended "welfare as we know it" to address that sort of thing. I wonder what your preferred solution is? Because it always seems to be something to the effect of "just get rid of welfare" which seems like it might be a bit hard on the kids as well.
- stronglikedan 3y agoMy solution is UBI. Ditch welfare as we know it. Ditch the requirements, and all the bureaucratic administration fees and salaries that go with them, and that would free up enough money for proper UBI.
- hotpotamus 3y agoSomehow I doubt that the WSJ has this solution in mind.
- EA-3167 3y agoThe problem with UBI is that once it's instituted, even if financial or other circumstances radically change, it will be politically suicidal to remove it. If it doesn't work well, if it's counterproductive, if anything turns out to be unworkable... tough, no politician can survive going against free money for everyone. That's a fundamental problem with such a... generous program. I'm not even going to get into the sheer pull factor for immigration it would create, and that pull would skew towards people who are both destitute and not likely to work.
- yourmatenate 3y agoIts almost as if being on the precarious end of a precarious system lets down the most vulnerable.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Podgajski 3y agoAnd poverty is the biggest root cause of fatherlessness.
- johnea 3y agoBut of course, the WSJ would never want to admit that massive wealth inequality has negative consequences...
- superfunny 3y agoIf you believe the reason some children are fatherless is because a hedge fund manager owns a jet, you're reaching.
- Podgajski 3y agoIt’s not that the own a jet, it’s the fact that financial capitalism extracts money from people through rentier economics that enable them to make such exorbitant profits so they can afford to buy a jet.
- dhosek 3y agoHow about the idea that the people working at the dollar store or walmart are making poverty wages while the leadership team hoovers up all the profits? The UAW went on strike this year because the auto makers returned to huge profitability and wanted to keep the concessions the workers gave to keep the manufacturers afloat during the hard times once the hard times were over. So, yes, it’s not that big of a reach to say that some children are fatherless because the money that might have gone into their parents’ pockets is going to pay for that hedge fund manager’s jet.
- aijoe5pack 3y agoIf you take a quarter for each person and give it to an executive as additional compensation, the executive will experience a 250/hr increase in pay given a 1000 employee company, and the individual will experience only a loss of 25 cents. Cut executive compensation by that much and they will leave. Heck, cut it by half as much and they will do so. Aside from that, research shows that executive compensation issues are down to the conflict of interest that boards and CEOs have, since the CEO hires the compensation analysts for the board. Hedge funds doing 'vulture capitalism' or stripping the equity from a company without a bias towards a going concern is not down to Jets. Its down to the regulatory environment incentivizing companies to do so.
- jeffbee 3y agoThis theory only works if you narrowly construe crime to exclude large-scale white collar crimes like attempting to overthrow the government, poisoning the whole nation with addictive painkillers, dodging taxes, etc. It's pretty clear that on a crime-weighted basis the root cause of virtually all crimes is being born rich.
- foogazi 3y agoHow many crimes did Bernie Maddof commit ? How many crimes do local police officers commit ? Are people in possession of federally illegal drugs committing a crime ? Did they have fathers?
- jewayne 3y agoThat's an excellent point. There's a survivorship bias here. Perhaps fatherlessness doesn't cause crime so much as it makes you more vulnerable to the criminal justice system.
- ofo8 3y agoThis is easy to falsify; lesbian parents exist, how do their kids rank? Study after study has found little difference in outcomes. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-sexual-continuum/201006/25-year-long-study-finds-children-lesbian-parents-may-be-better https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-sexual-continuum... Fatherless-ness in those Various studies have analyzed personality data written by teachers, managers, etc of kids raised by straight parents and kids raised by lesbians. Kids of lesbians self report fewer instances of anxiety to their teachers and other non-parental mentors. Those non-parental mentors register in their teachers notes, or medical notes, similar sentiments; trained professionals see fewer outbursts in kids raises by lesbians. Personally, will categorize this as “ossified mind parrots memorized social script, film at 11” What’s most likely is economic instability and too little quality mentorship overall leave people feeling crime is their only option.
- mandmandam 3y agoIt's good to read at least as far as the sub-headline: > Children are likelier to finish high school and stay out of trouble if they’re brought up by two parents. Article goes on to talk about 2 parent families.
- john015 3y ago[flagged]
- ofo8 3y agoMany would find it politically expedient to publish the opposite conclusion. Guess we’ll never know who they might be or what logic they used, since you only posted such a conclusion, no logic for measurement. Science has nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with the logic used to compute them. You’re sharing numbers and no logic, so who knows if your numbers are meaningful?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> children in 1 mother/1 father do have significantly better outcomes than lesbians Source? Keep in mind, gay and lesbian couples who have kids are richer than baseline. Parents who chose their children, and can afford to advantage them, will have better kids than the alternatives. Put another way, I haven’t met a kid of a gay or lesbian parent who isn’t obviously going to be, at the very least, alright. I cannot say that for virtually any other demo.
- gwern 3y agoNo, it is not, and we are quite sure of this. The fatherhood correlation never survives any control for family-level factors, like comparing siblings or looking at kids who lose their father to accidents. And none of the evidence cited by OP addresses this or provides real evidence of causality, much less hyperbolic claims of it being biggest.
- Morte42 3y agoThe paper referenced by the article actually shows what the author is saying is false. He is either very confused or convinced that nobody will read the linked paper so he can make up what he wants.
- stairlane 3y agoDo you have any evidence to back up your claims? I have yet to be convinced otherwise.
- misja111 3y agoWell the evidence is actually in the white paper that the article is about. Amazingly, in the white paper the correlation between crimes and single parent households is one of the weakest. The strongest by far is poverty. It must have taken quite some guts and determination to spin this into a story that claims that fatherlessness is the root cause of crime. But it makes sense if you check who the authors of the paper and of the WSJ article are. Please have a look if you want to be convinced: See https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/ifs-strongerfamilies-final-1.pdf https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/ifs-strong... table 2 and 3.
- bb88 3y agoMods, add Opinion to the title.