So, the most popular option offered by conservatives to explain race differences in crime or criminology in general is single motherhood. Some popular pundits who expunge this theory are Larry Elder, Thomas Sowell, and Charlie Kirk. Overall, this theory is strongly flawed.
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Schumm’s error: does same-sex marriage lower fertility rates?
I semi-recently read Dr. Walter Schumm’s book Same-Sex Parenting Resarch: A Critical Assessment. My thoughts? Meh.
Continue readingAn interesting study on race and aggression: Hawkins et al. 1991
This is one of the more interesting studies done on race differences in aggression, particularly due to its experimental nature. I felt like this study is deserving of a commentary blog post.
Continue readingGetting rid of traffic laws
After getting a (second) speeding ticket today, I decided to revisit an interesting topic: open roads. Essentially, this has been done in a few European countries. It is a system where there are really no traffic laws. The roads are shared by bikers, pedestrians, and cars (in some cases), and things like speed limits, traffic lights, etc. are done away with. To drivers like me, this is paradise. But is it sustainable?
Continue readingWhat is the proper interpretation of the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study?
The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study was a long project dedicated to directly measuring the influence of shared environment on the racial gaps in intelligence. The original paper about it came out in 1976 and the authors hypothesized that socialization in favorable environments would significantly reduce the racial gap in IQ (Scarr and Weinberg, 1976). At that point, the data did suggest an environmentalist hypothesis regarding race differences, however it was revisited by the authors in 1992, an event which caused much more controversy regarding the results. While the authors still supported an environmentalist position (Weinberg et al., 1992), their data brought a number of replies. In this post, I am going to summarize the main arguments used by the authors and review the replies as well as the authors’ responses to those replies.
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