Truthiness

Yup.. its Stephen Colberts word off the TV, truthiness.

For those of you who are uninitiated in this word - its the instances where things are treated as real because they "feel true" in your gut as opposed to just knowing they're true due to cold facts.

His use of it is as a satirical joke obviously but it is a very pertinent one to American society in particular where opinions are very affected by such gut feelings.

Take for example the studies by Stephen Levitt, the american economist and thinker, into the causes of the drop in crime of the 90s. Conventional wisdom (truthiness!) seemed to suggest that it was because of increased police expenditure or improved education.

Levitt posited a very different theory, but one based on the numbers nevertheless, and described how the drop in crime could be traced back to a certain court case; Roe vs. Wade.

How could one court case do all this for crime?

Bear with me, because this may appear a strange tangent - Roe vs. Wade was the seminal case in the fight to legalise abortion across the US, and led to legal and safe abortions being available and more importantly for the crime argument - affordable to more people.

This meant that the poorer communities could now legally and cheaply get an abortion and avoid an unwanted pregnancy. It is a statistical truism that unwanted children of poor families are far more likely to turn to crime than the desired children of more affluent ones. This meant that 12-17 years later, when all of these unwanted children would have been starting on the all too frequent road to crime, they simply weren't there.

Roe vs. Wade had reduced crime by reducing criminals.

Now.. I won;t go into the economic theory because i doubt I could put it better than Levitt and Dubner do in FREAKONOMICS, so just get the book and read the chapter.

As you might imagine, this was a very controversial conclusion to reach in an increasingly polarised social and religious climate and many people came out and found fault with methodologies and mainly with their thought processes. Levitt's response?

He improved the mathematical formulae and proved the conclusion again, and better.

The upshot of this is that economists are faced with something that is mathematically true but lacks that gut feeling of "truthiness". One economist in particular (and I may slightly misquote but this is the gist) stated that he could not fault the numbers or the methodology but found himself unable to agree with the conclusion.

How was that econmist looking at the conclusion? As an economist, or as a human being who is concerned at the overtones of Social Darwinism this evokes?

This in turn raises the point that Levitt himself makes.

Economics shows things as they are, not how they should be.

I would say the same of Darwinist thinking. If you believe in evolution it does not immediately follow that you believe that survivial of the fittest is the way societies should be run. Here is the Algo quote of the day;

Sciences of all kinds only show us what the world is. Only you can decide what you want it to be.

Peace.

A