Freakonomics
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Mark Twain once said that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics: While I love Mr. Clemens, I have to respectfully disagree. Statistics, with a large enough sample size, tend to be the most "truthful" source of information we have.
By far the two most controversial claims this book makes are as follows:
1)The dropping crime rate is directly linked to Roe v. Wade and the availability of abortion. I.e., the unwanted children of irresponsible adults are the ones who are most likely going to be career criminals. It's obvious why this one didn't go over very well. Any argument that can be used to support eugenics touches upon the ultimate taboo in our society.
2)Parents have much less input in how their children turn out than we previously thought. What matters is what parents are like, rather than what they do. Intelligent, responsible, caring parents tend to have children who are like them; "mommy and me" groups and home activities are generally worthless. This actually meshes with my belief that our school systems are excellent at identifying intelligent people, but very poor at creating them; mostly for the simple reason that it is generally impossible to raise a person's underlying intelligence.
By far the two most controversial claims this book makes are as follows:
1)The dropping crime rate is directly linked to Roe v. Wade and the availability of abortion. I.e., the unwanted children of irresponsible adults are the ones who are most likely going to be career criminals. It's obvious why this one didn't go over very well. Any argument that can be used to support eugenics touches upon the ultimate taboo in our society.
2)Parents have much less input in how their children turn out than we previously thought. What matters is what parents are like, rather than what they do. Intelligent, responsible, caring parents tend to have children who are like them; "mommy and me" groups and home activities are generally worthless. This actually meshes with my belief that our school systems are excellent at identifying intelligent people, but very poor at creating them; mostly for the simple reason that it is generally impossible to raise a person's underlying intelligence.
posted by O.C. Mike at
8:50 AM
2 Comments:
The thing about parenting strikes me as particularly true. But then how does this work in large families where different children become different adult types with the same 2 parents? Wouldn't they all come out basically the same?
There are a billion ways genes can match up: if you look at identical twins, most intellectual traits do end up pretty darned similar, even when raised in wildly different environments.
Epigenetic changes can account for variances as well, but those are part and parcel of the DNA encoding your parents grant you.
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