You will probably know all about this since it has been in the news, but we try to clean up after ourselves around here... Thus it is that I write this follow-up to a post I wrote in October linking to an article arguing that the abortion rate had increased under Bush. Fortunately, I kept my mouth shut and reserved explicit commentary, so I don't have to retract anything - which is good since the main argument was wrong, as did indeed sound likely to me back in October as indicated by a later post. Then I doubted that the debate would ever be solved... Well, I was wrong. Factcheck.org has an article on it, citing numbers from Guttmacher, and carrying an excerpt of a letter sent to them by Stassen himself, admitting the Guttmacher numbers are better (they also have a pdf of the whole letter, in which Stassen defends some of his ideas).
(I note though that, as the factcheck.org article points out, in some states the abortion rate did indeed go up, so even though the overall national trend is down, in some areas, it did increase during certain time periods.)
Now, having said all that, I don't think that the economic arguments have been made, including those by the author of the original article, Stassen, are entirely wrong. Though... So far, fortunately, the effect has not been observed. Which may mean that in fact the arguments are completely wrong. Indeed, this is a likely explanation. It is also possible that there are other hidden effects, or that these economic variables do not have a large enough impact relative to a greater downward trend to be observable, or that the effect is delayed and we simply have not seen it yet. And in some states the rate did go up. Given that, we (okay, admittedly addressing mainly conservatives there) should be careful. Furthermore, it is not just about what we do, but how we do it. Trying to decrease abortions while making it harder for women to keep children can be silly. Obviously that can be taken too far - we shouldn't worry about coddling people, they still have responsibility regardless. And it may require tradeoffs - e.g. do we make it economically easier for the rich to keep a baby, or the poor? But it makes little sense to be at odds with our own policy - saying one thing with our mouths and another with our wallets. I guess that would be a classic definition of hypocrisy. Furthermore, we must be humane. If we are going to require something - something which it is right to require - then let's not make it excessively hard to follow. We should have some mercy for those in the plight that would lead them to choose abortion (not to say for all women there is such a "plight," but for those for whom there is...)
(I feel that I must sound like am giving people who have abortions a free pass. I don't want to do that. I am not by any means ready to throw out culpability. Nor do I want to saddle everyone with, as I said, "coddling." But we must be humane. And we also must not be hypocritical, so that even if we are arguably not inhumane let's still try to decrease abortions when we have the power to through economics. Of course, one problem is deciding how to do that - conservatives and liberals may have very different answers sometimes. In such cases... a certain amount of good faith may be requried, and we may have to "agree to disagree." And also, of course, one must admit that sometimes - though we are not there today - lowering taxes may be a moral issue. Of course, spending tax money may also be a moral issue. So, good luck, but let's at least be willing to try, eh?)
[I had heard rumblings about this elsehwere, but it was Christianity Today's weblog that I finally read that pointed me to the factcheck.org article.]
I love dystopian literature. I am not entirely sure why, though I do know that much of my appreciation of it is because of its usefulness in pointing out the potential flaw in our social, cultural, and political systems.
[Remainder of article]My very good friend Heather Miller is in Peru on a pretty cool missions trip, and she is keeping a blog. Heather's team is doing research up in the mountains. I have to admit I am a little jealous, but given that (1) I don't speak Spanish (2) I could never take time off to do something like this and (3) I hate adventure, I can't be too jealous. Anyways, there is also a blog for the whole team, and a sehr cool photo album.
I can't believe I had missed this one... At work recently I am working on a problem where I have to use the simplex algorithm, which is used to do linear programming (not necessarily related to programming, but which is a way to optimize formulas subject to some constraints where both the formula and the constraints are linear, if you know what that means); simplex is fairly simple but potentially very useful, since linear programming has many applications.I hadn't used simplex in a while and I was reading about it. The simplex algorithm was invented by one George Dantzig, who did lots of other work on optimization, evidently. Dantzig's contribution's were significant it sounds like (incidentally, he was also the origin of the story about the math student who mistakes an open problem for homework, and solves it), and just speaking as far as the simplex algorithm, it is pretty important, being widely used in optimization, at least of linear problems. Since its invention several decades ago, some theoretically better algorithms have been propsed but interestingly, practically speaking simplex is still often preferable. Furthermore, it has a lot of historical significance for me, since I spent waaaay to much time on it and linear programming in college (we had a whole semester course on it... plus I did some course work on non-linear optimization in graduate school, which is related, though it does not use the same algorithms), besides being useful to me now. But anyway, the point of all of this is that Dantzig died just too weeks ago and noone told me about it! I'm sort of disappointed more people weren't talking about it. The NY Times had an okay obituary on him (though it is now an archive article and costs - part of the vast "not-quite-web").
