Comments on: The Family That Prays Together, Starves Together

By: The Agitator » Blog Archive » Morning Links

The Agitator » Blog Archive » Morning Links — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:28:31 +0000

[...] recessions aren’t so bad, because they tend to mitigate income inequality? Come on. I know Michael Gerson’s mirror image is out there [...]

By: The Agitator » Blog Archive » Saturday Links

The Agitator » Blog Archive » Saturday Links — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:56:26 +0000

[...] pays lip service to concept of individualism anymore. And a good faction of the right, including much of its commentariat, is out and out hostile to commerce and [...]

By: Greg N.

Greg N. — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 01:56:26 +0000

Tell Gerson that if he wants his family to come together, I’d be happy to help by taking a healthy percentage of his paycheck.

By: Z

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:20:46 +0000

I assume the Gersons ride the rails in the midwest while eating pork and beans (one can only- to share) and playing dominos with scrap paper by candle light?

By: Boyd Durkin

Boyd Durkin — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 13:51:08 +0000

And so it begins. Rationalize everything. Povert is good. Down is up. The state keeps the sheeples asleep.

By: Judi

Judi — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:05:00 +0000

Sounds like Gerson is trying to put Danielle Steele outta business with his ‘romantic meanderings’.

By: Judi

Judi — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:02:28 +0000

Helmut, you forgot the ASHES!

Recession and depression makes desperate people.

Desperate needs are cause for desperate measures from robbing Peter to pay Paul and whacking your neighbor for food to feed your family.

I love the line…the recession will awaken in America a “less material orientation in life,” and “expand.. our horizons—like an escape from the dungeon of our own desires.”

Hell if I am anymore awake than I already am, I’ll be ‘nekkid’ (trust me, it would NOT be a Kodak moment) before long, icing Peter, Paul and the neighbor!

If that’s the case, let me sleep…better yet, a nice long coma might just do the trick.

By: To Anglicise this

To Anglicise this — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 10:55:03 +0000

[...] Think roughly Polly Toynbee’s grasp of economics and, erm, Polly Toynbee’s of individual liberty. [...]

By: Aresen

Aresen — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 05:16:25 +0000

Radley

You are not arguing fairly with Mr Gerson.

You are using facts.

By: ice9

ice9 — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 03:22:13 +0000

Spot on, especially the pithy demolition of Gerson’s smarmy prose style. The consistency of ethos/fail among WBush folks is astonishing. From Rove’s smiling, utterly comfortable hypocrisies to Gonzalez’ earnest determination to participate in his own indictments (oh, and Harriet Miers–holy crap what a gift to humorist progressives everywhere…) these people simply have no idea who they are. I’m especially charmed by GWB spending what, 45 minutes cutting brush in the Texas sunshine. The irony of a pampered class of neocons opining on what regular folks ought to do. Achh, I have no words. Ok, this: Rush Limbaugh avoided service in Vietnam because he had a boil on his ass. That should hurt. How come it doesn’t?

Gerson is a tool. I’d like him to spend three days in a normal American high school peddling that tripe.

ice

By: Bronwyn

Bronwyn — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 01:58:11 +0000

If Gerson wants some Grace through an unexpected door, I’m sure someone would be willing to oblige him.

What a pretentious twit.

By: chance

chance — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 01:50:01 +0000

I just read Lott’s paper – it isn’t very convincing compared to the Levitt-Donahue paper. I think I understand how he is trying to refute the hypothesis, but the testable predictions in Lott’s paper seem forced, and some of the assumptions do not seem reasonable (but I’m a layman, I admit). Was Lott’s paper ever finally published in a peer reviewed journal? Not saying that an unpublished paper can’t have valuable insights, but the fact that it kicked around for several years could suggest that significant criticisms had not been adequately addressed by the authors.

Here is Levitt’s response to the criticisms from Lott and Sailor: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/

To avoid an abortion thread hijick, I’ll just stop with my comments.

By: T. Ossit

T. Ossit — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:50:47 +0000

Regarding the research by Christopher Ruhm that the article mentions, Dr. Ruhm’s research doesn’t say that recessions are necessarily good for health. He found that mild recessions have some health benefits (people cut back on drinking and smoking and some exercise more as they hunt for a new job), but severe or prolonged recessions cause more harm than good. The second part is what one would expect; his findings that mild recessions have short-term health benefits were what made his research interesting, since it was unanticipated.

By: T. Ossit

T. Ossit — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:45:41 +0000

@ #2 chance

Levitt is indeed a very clever man, but his association of the availability of abortion with a declining crime rate is pretty full of holes. It did sell a lot of books, though. Lott did a good job of pointing out how the data could easily support the opposite conclusion. Additionally, Levitt’s attempt to link Romania’s revolution to the fact that abortion was illegal there is beyond ludicrous. Why then did East Germany also change governments when that country had abortion on demand and rapid no-fault divorces? Why didn’t the Republic of Ireland (no abortion) collapse of hoards of unwanted children grew up and challenged the status quo? Why did crime in the UK continue to increase despite the availability of abortion? Oh, that’s right, because Levitt was talking out of his hat on that one. Maybe, just maybe, the fact that the Red Army wasn’t going to march in and shoot demonstrators anymore was the reason for the changes in the GDR and Romania.

By: Dave Krueger

Dave Krueger — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:35:22 +0000

just don’t know if that’s enough to say that poverty has an “upside,” or that I’d make the leap from that, as Gerson does, to the conclusion that severe recession is capitalism’s way of punishing us for our materialism, filling us all with Gerson-esque virtue.

Recession is Capitalism’s way of telling us that we’re strayed too far from Capitalism.

By: solinox

solinox — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:29:51 +0000

“Gerson’s column from last week lectures us on the virtues of poverty…”

Who is John Galt?

By: chance

chance — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:23:07 +0000

I’m still partial to Steven Levitt’s observation in Freakonomics that part of the crime drop of the 90s was strongly correlated with the availability of abortions due to Roe v Wade. Causation still hasn’t been proven, but the argument makes intuitive sense (even if it is ethically repugnant to many, its a pretty logical argument).

By: Helmut O' Hooligan

Helmut O' Hooligan — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:04:53 +0000

Perhaps next time Mr. Gerson will just come out and advocate self-flagellation and th wearing of sack cloth.