(continuing Grumpy v. Shuggy from my last post and his comment. He quotes me in italics, his comments are in normal type, mine on his are now in italics in square brackets. Any questions?)
[Thanks for rising to the bait, Shuggy. You'll doubtless not be surprised to learn that I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet...]
Where to begin?
The point as I take it about the drug laws is not necessarily that they have a huge positive impact on the control of gun crime, but that liberalization would simply be irrelevant.
Do you have any argument or evidence to back this up? I think you'll find that many police officers involved in the front-line in the 'war against drugs' (bit of a PR blunder to be seen to wage war on inanimate objects and lose, don'tcha think?) would agree with my analysis. [No, I have no evidence whatsoever, just a hunch based on certain fundamental assumptions about human nature that if people involved in serious crime see opportunities dwindling in their chosen branch of criminality, they're more likely to move on to a different one than to turn into model citizens. Do you have any evidence to convince me that I'm wrong?] But this is, as you say, a side-issue - so let's move on...
What you're overlooking is that gun crime is just the tip of an iceberg of alienation and underachievement, and yes, pretty much all of it does correlate more or less strongly with single parent families, as not even the leftie Unicef researchers can deny.
I'm not overlooking anything. I probably shouldn't speak for him but my understanding of it is neither Chris Dillow nor myself deny that there are social problems associated with the rise of single-parent families but I'm not happy with this idea that one can with a declaration that gun-crime is the 'tip of an iceberg' conflate a whole load of social problems that are not necessarily related to each other. This is merely to insist that one thing is not another thing: gun-crime is gun-crime; underachievement is underachievement. While I have no doubt that these are related, they are two distinct social phenomenon and I think this is something you have overlooked.
You say, "I take the point that the total amount of gun crime is small in proportion to the number of single parent families." I'm not sure you've taken the point at all. Can I encourage you to re-read Chris's two posts on this topic? It's not just that the proportion is small - it is statistically insignificant. As he said, "So, at least 98% of men from single-mother households don't become gun criminals. It would be odd to say that x causes y when over 98% of xs don't cause y." Someone made the analogous point that while the proportion of those breaking their legs through skiing is statistically small, there can be no doubt that skiing is a cause of broken legs. But the proportion is so small it holds that skiing is still a reasonable thing to do. So it is with single-parenthood and gun-crime. There may be other reasons why it is a bad idea but that is a different matter.
[I've re-read Chris's posts. Still not impressed.
1. Obviously if a phenomenon has more than one cause you don't expect to find a 100% correlation with any one of them. That doesn't mean you can arbitrarily ignore the ones you find uncongenial.
2. You think 2% is insignificant? It might not deter you from skiing, but broken legs usually heal. How would you feel about being prescribed a drug that had a 2% chance of killing you? Most smokers live to a ripe old age. Is smoking therefore safe? Most drink drivers get home in one piece. And so on.
3. Another way at looking at the stats is that if one in six males in the 16-24 age group grew up in single mother households and if 80% of gun crime is committed by males in this category (which could well be a conservative estimate,), an individual member of this category is at least 25 times more likely to commit gun crime than a male in the same age group who grew up in a two parent household. And that's before we factor in the next two points. Insignificant?
4. You haven't acknowledged my point about the multiplier effect of whole communities where single parenthood has become the norm.
5. Chris lumps all single parent families together. But UK gun crime evidently correlates most strongly, by far, with single parenthood in its most toxic form, i.e. where the father plays no role whatsoever beyond the provision of semen.
6. Re complex causality: it seems to me entirely logical to suggest that family breakdown promotes gun crime both directly (absence of positive male role model) and indirectly via underachievement (no job, plenty of time to hang out with the gang). And I hope we can agree that underachievement is a bad thing in its own right.]
Doesn't international comparison illustrate the nonsense of all this? You might take the case of the United States as reinforcing your argument as they have a much higher gun crime rate than we do - and they also have a higher rate of family breakdown. But the level of gun deaths in the US is so much higher that the UK that family structure cannot account for the difference. Then there's the case of Italy which has a higher level of gun crime than the UK but whose family structure is more stable. Or you could take Denmark which has roughly the same proportion of children living in single parent families as we do but which records lower levels of crime across the board, not just gun crime. Do we really have to factor in the Middle East before you acknowledge, at the very least, that there maybe one or two other variables you have failed to take into account?
[OK, let's do international comparisons...
1. US: strong correlation, surely, with communities where family breakdown has been entrenched for much longer than anywhere in the UK. Clearly there are other factors involved - in case I haven't made the point clearly enough, I'm not seeking to deny that.
2. Italy: family structures are indeed more stable, and Italy duly came out top in the Unicef report in terms of children's experience of family life. That in itself is a correlation worth taking seriously, is it not?
Agreed, Italian gun crime can't be associated with single parent families. But it does strongly confirm the role of cultural norms and the family. As opposed to purely economic causation: Sicily is poor, but not uniquely so by European standards. Clearly some Sicilian patriarchs provide very strong but negative role models. But the disappearing fathers of Peckham can never be anything other than negative role models.
3. Denmark: I plead ignorance, but it seems I may not be alone. In the Unicef report the section on single parent families notes (p. 23) that little research has been done outside the US and UK. As with the US you've only demonstrated that there are other factors affecting overall crime levels, which I'm not disputing. Would Danish crime levels be even lower if there were fewer single parent families? We'll have to wait until the Danes do some research.]
Then there's this - It has to be possible to discuss all this without being accused of stigmatising those who are single parents more through misfortune than by choice.
We live in a society where contraception is freely available. Those who elect to create single parent families have exercised their power to choose. It is, of course, their children who are truly powerless.
Contradictory set here, no?
[Contradictory in what way? You've maybe misunderstood the distinction drawn in the first quote, which is between single parent families created as a result of the breakdown of what was intended to be a permanent relationship, and those created deliberately. And then I say that in the latter case a choice has been exercised. Where's the problem?]
Let me close with this:
'Insofar as it focuses upon single parents, the stupid party therefore acts like a bully, attacking the vulnerable whilst cringing towards power'. I don't hold any brief for the Tories (I've never voted for them either), but this is just emotional manipulation.
I can only reiterate my support for what Chris wrote here. The stupid party did indeed show themselves to be a bully with their back to basics campaign - and recent evidence would suggest they haven't changed. They had, and have, nothing to say against those who hold real power in our society, preferring instead the usual targets - those who failed to get on their bikes; the mythical 'trendy teachers'; those whose unemployment was a price worth paying to reduce inflation; immigrants and 'bogus asylum seekers; those who were ruining society with their reckless breeding... I believe I hate them for this. I certainly feel emotional about this but is it really the case that I hold the power to 'manipulate' anyone? I think not.
[Again, no brief for the Tories, and I'm not going to be diverted into any of the other issues in your catalogue of Tory crimes, but you seem here to be virtually declaring as a matter of principle that you are not interested in any evidence that poor people's problems are partially of their own making. I've suggested that people who elect to create single parent families may be exercising a rather significant degree of power to harm their children (with the implication that those who have it in their power to influence them should try to dissuade rather than persuade or acquiesce); your response is that this is not 'real power'. What, precisely, is unreal about it?
There have been some signs in the media reaction to the Peckham killings that we're moving on a bit from the kneejerk dismissal by 'progressive' opinion of any problem that the Tories talk about. I welcome that; the alternative is, after all, pretty stupid.]
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1) That doesn't mean you can arbitrarily ignore the ones you find uncongenial.
I didn't 'arbitrarily ignore' it; the point is it isn't statistically significant, a point we'll come to further down...
2) You think 2% is insignificant? It might not deter you from skiing, but broken legs usually heal. How would you feel about being prescribed a drug that had a 2% chance of killing you? Most smokers live to a ripe old age. Is smoking therefore safe? Most drink drivers get home in one piece. And so on.
You said you re-read Chris's posts but obviously not the bit where he talked about how he used 'heroic assumptions' to arrive at that figure - which he did to make a point. This would be the one you've missed. The real figure is lower. I'll ignore drink driving because I don't know anything about it. Smoking, on the other hand, is demonstrably more dangerous than a 2% fatality rate. If only 2% of smokers died younger than non-smokers, there wouldn't be all this fuss about it, would there?
3) This point has been dealt with above. You've misunderstood the way Chris was using the 2% figure, so we'll have to leave that for a time when we have the actual data. Not sure if it exists? Anyway, a correlation doesn't prove causation - another of Chris's points you don't seem to have got.
4) You haven't acknowledged my point about the multiplier effect of whole communities where single parenthood has become the norm.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'the multiplier effect' - could you clarify? I did a bit of economics at uni but I sense you're not talking about Keynes here. My purpose was not to suggest there are no social consequences to single-parenthood; merely to insist that one thing is not another thing.
5) Chris lumps all single parent families together. But UK gun crime evidently correlates most strongly, by far, with single parenthood in its most toxic form, i.e. where the father plays no role whatsoever beyond the provision of semen.
Does he? I'm assuming this is because the data is not broken down between single parent families where dad takes the weans every second weekend and those who have fucked off completely. Do you have this data available? If so, perhaps you could tell me this. I share custody of my son with his mother, 50:50. Is he much more likely to grow up and shoot someone compared to a child of a lovely Christian couple or only a wee bit more likely? It'd be good for me to know. His marginal propensity to go out and waste someone is something I'm obviously concerned about.
6) Re complex causality: it seems to me entirely logical to suggest that family breakdown promotes gun crime both directly (absence of positive male role model) and indirectly via underachievement (no job, plenty of time to hang out with the gang). And I hope we can agree that underachievement is a bad thing in its own right.]
So mothers saying, "Don't go out and shoot someone" has no effect; it has to be dad. Well ok, but aren't we lacking a bit of evidence here? Underachievement - assuming you mean educational and economic - is indeed a bad thing. What causes it? It could be lack of positive male role models. And/or it could be that it is a cause of poverty. The prohibitive cost of childcare means it is difficult for single mothers to work full-time. This means they are more likely to live in shitty areas and go to shitty schools. Surely any study that considers the sociology of single-parenthood should control any sample they use for variables such as income, housing, schoolong etc.? Do the blimps that write in papers like the Times do this? Maybe - but I doubt it.
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