On September 21, 2017, two versions of an essay of mine titled Facts v. Wax were published at the Heterodox Academy website. This essay responded to various statements made by my Penn Law colleague, Amy Wax, as well as to Haidt’s own defense of those statements. I sent my final version of this essay to the blog’s editor, NYU Professor Jon Haidt on September 14, and waited patiently for him to read and post it. Six days later, Professor Haidt suggested a small number of changes in phrasing but no changes in content, which, after some initial disagreement, I accepted. The next morning Professor Haidt published the resulting version.
Not long after he published my essay, Professor Haidt password-protected it and sent me an email informing me that he had removed general access. Professor Wax had contacted him that morning with objections to my account of correspondence in which I asked her and her coauthor, Professor Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego, for sourcing on one of the statements in their op-ed.
At the outset of the correspondence at issue, I gave fair warning, specifically telling Professors Alexander and Wax that I would edit my essay “to reflect your sources,” and that is what I did. It is true that Professor Wax subsequently asked not to be quoted, as she told Professor Haidt. It is also true that I did not quote her—instead, at her request, I paraphrased her position (Professor Alexander has never requested that I refrain from quoting or paraphrasing him). In addition, when I submitted my essay to Professor Haidt on September 14, I specifically called Professor Haidt’s attention to the part at issue and offered to document my claims as to the correspondence. Here is what I told Professor Haidt:
I added a discussion of my attempt to obtain sourcing from Professors Alexander and Wax related to one of their empirical claims, and that is somewhat lengthy. It appears in what is now Part I.A. If you would like proof that my summary of email correspondence is accurate, I will provide you the full threads of the relevant emails, provided you agree not to circulate them more broadly than necessary to publish the post--after I asked them if I could quote them, in full, Amy asked not to be quoted, and Larry never responded (I gave fair warning at the beginning of the conversation that I'd update the post to reflect whatever sources they provided).
Professor Haidt never responded to this offer. After he unpublished my essay, I sent him the emails I’d offered in the first place. He disclaimed interest, saying he was too busy.
At one point in my correspondence with Professor Haidt, I gave him until 3pm to republish my essay without changes. Subsequently, he took the position that unless I removed text to which Professor Wax objected, he would refuse to do so and I would have to publish it elsewhere. Having waited a week for my essay to be posted, I ultimately decided it would be better to publish what I could that day, with the possibility of providing the rest later.
I think it’s important for the originally published version to be available both as a matter of principle and because some might find it informative about the methods used by Professors Alexander and Wax. Below is the original version of Part I.A (I have left in the changes in phrasing that Professor Haidt suggested on September 20, because I agreed to those changes before the initial publication).
- Professor Wax’s Illuminating Basis for Claiming the Homicide Rate is “Tiny” Among “Those who Currently Follow the Old Precepts”
One sentence in Professor Wax’s op-ed that has not come in for much criticism, but to which more people should pay attention, is this:
“Among those who currently follow the old precepts, regardless of their level of education or affluence, the homicide rate is tiny, opioid addiction is rare, and poverty rates are low.”
Professor Wax offers no evidence for these claims. And when I read them, I strongly doubted she could. Why? Because I don’t know of high-quality data sources that simultaneously collect information on whether a person “follows the old precepts” and either homicides, opioid addiction, or poverty.
Let’s home in on the homicide rate claim. The homicide rate in a given period of time is understood by those who study crime to equal the number of homicide victims during that period, per 100,000 people in the area in question. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics explains that there are two counts of homicides in the U.S.—the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program and the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). The UCR data provide information on victims’ age, sex, race, and ethnic origin. I paged through all 152 variables available in this data set. So far as I can tell there is no “follows the old precepts” variable in the data set, nor anything like it. Similarly, the NVSS Fatal Injury Reports online data system has variables relating to age, sex, race, and Hispanic background, but nothing that seems much like “follows the old precepts”.
So I wondered: exactly how does Professor Wax know that the homicide rate is “tiny” among “those who currently follow the old precepts”? I decided to ask Professors Alexander and Wax, and their responses were revealing. As part of correspondence that occurred after I sent them earlier versions of this post, I asked Professor Alexander what sources he and Professor Wax could offer regarding their homicide rate claim, promising to update this post in light of his response.
The discussion that followed involved several emails between me and Professor Alexander, as well as two from Professor Wax. When it had concluded, I thought the full discussion would be illuminating for partisans on both sides. I asked Professors Alexander and Wax for their permission to quote this discussion in full (Professor Wax had expressed concern about “doctoring” of her words in an interviewpublished earlier on the day of our correspondence). Professor Wax asked me not to quote her, and as of this writing, several days later, Professor Alexander has not responded to my request. I will therefore summarize their comments here, to the best of my ability. It is appropriate to do so given that I gave fair warning that I would include their sources in this post. I will not publicly post the actual quotes from Professors Wax and Alexander unless they give me permission or contest the accuracy or good-faith intent of my characterization. I will, however, provide verbatim transcripts of my own comments. Here’s the conversation, from Saturday, September 9, 2017:
Gelbach (2:35pm): “I'd be grateful if you would let me know what sources you and Amy believe support the claim in your op-ed that ‘Among those who currently follow the old precepts, regardless of their level of education or affluence, the homicide rate is tiny.’ As I assume you know, neither the UCR nor the NVSS fatal injury data on homicides includes variables that would allow one to determine the precepts followed by homicide victims. I would be very interested in learning about the data source that does provide such information. And of course I will edit my response on the merits to reflect your sources.”
Professor Alexander(2:57pm), in response, pointed to that part of the op-ed’s “script we were all supposed to follow” which instructed people to “Eschew … crime.” He then explained to me that a person who murders necessarily fails to follow this precept.
Gelbach (3:10pm): “I see--you're saying it's true by definition, rather than an empirical claim. Just out of curiosity, why did you write ‘tiny’ if you meant ‘zero’?”
Professor Alexander (3:17pm), conceded that I’d made a good point. He then indicated that he supposed he and Professor Wax might have been thinking of all their precepts other than “Eschew … crime.”
Gelbach (3:21pm): “Thanks for the concession, and the supposition. Time allowing, I'll edit my post to reflect the substance of our discussion.”
Professor Wax (5:40pm), writing in response to Professor Alexander’s 2:57pm message, the one that pointed to the “Eschew … crime” precept, expressed full agreement with this explanation, which Professor Alexander had subsequently rejected after all.
I include the above to show the mismatch between (i) the actual basis of claims made by Professors Alexander and Wax in the op-ed and (ii) the claims by Professor Wax and her defenders that they are involved in an exercise of scholarly communication of empirical evidence to the public.
If Professor Alexander’s initial response to me and Professor Wax’s endorsement of it several hours later indeed reflect their position, then their claim is a wholly non-empirical one: the position is that it would be impossible for a person who follows “bourgeois values” to perpetrate a murder, because murder is crime, and by definition people who follow “bourgeois values” don’t do crime. This is a tautology,so it could not possibly be falsified by any data in the world; it is empty as an empirical claim.
But on the tautological interpretation, the statement that “Among those who currently follow the old precepts, regardless of their level of education or affluence, the homicide rate is tiny” is puzzling. As I asked Professors Alexander and Wax, why use the word “tiny” to describe the incidence of an event you believe is logically impossible—and thus would naturally be referred to with the word “zero”?
With the additional context of the responses by Professors Alexander and Wax to my question, which I gave fair warning I’d use in this post, how should we understand what Professors Alexander and Wax did in the op-ed? Here are six logically possible understandings:
- All along, they meant to make a tautological statement, but, whether accidentally or sloppily, they used the word “tiny” where “zero” fit.
- They were intentionally misleading their readers by passing off as empirical evidence what they knew was a tautological statement.
- They meant to make an empirical claim, were ignorant of what data are available on the homicide rate, and then tried to explain it away after the fact with what they thought was a clever argument based in logic, in the moment overlooking the odd fit of the word “tiny” with their tautology.
- They were intentionally misleading their readers by making an empirical claim for which they knew they had no empirical support.
- They have some preconceived notions, they wrote a sentence that reflected them, and they didn’t bother to look for evidence that would support those notions.
- There is some other explanation, including those that wouldreflect better on Professors Alexander and Wax than any of the first 5.
I think any reasonable reader not privy to their responses to me would think that Professors Alexander and Wax were making an empirical claim. That would eliminate possibilities 1 and 2 above—leaving intentional misleading, ignorance, preconceptions, or some other explanation. I neither know nor will speculate as to which of these possibilities is correct.
This one example may seem to be far down into the weeds. I include so much detail about it because it raises the question of whether Professors Alexander and Wax are involved in a serious attempt to communicate empirical facts to a wider audience. Writing on this blog in defense of Professor Wax, Professor Haidt stated that although “There are no footnotes in a Philly.com opinion essay,” nevertheless “in Wax’s other writings on family law it is clear that she knows and is informed by the relevant social science research.” Heather Mac Donald went much further at National Review, stating that “No thinker in the law or social sciences is more rigorous than Wax.”
Contra this image of rigor and knowledge of the research literature painted by such defenders, Professors Alexander and Wax failed to point to any empirical support for their homicide rate claim, and the evidence-free responses each initially gave to my simple request for such support look more like a cheap debate-club trick than “making an argument in good faith using methods of argumentation that fall within the normal range of her part of the academy,” to use Professor Haidt’s terms.
For completeness, let me do what Professors Alexander and Wax didn’t and provide some empirical facts about the homicide rate. One can obtain the FBI’s UCR crime data on the rate of murders and non-negligent homicides—henceforth, just “the murder rate”—from an easy-to-use FBI website. I downloaded the data for the years 1960 to 2014 (the widest range available on the site) and have plotted the rate of murders and non-negligent homicides per 100,000 people. The result is the chart just below.
The chart shows that the murder rate climbed sharply after 1963. Taken in isolation, this fact seems partially consistent with the overall story told by Professors Alexander and Wax—one of monolithic social collapse starting in the mid-to-late-1960s. But then the murder rate it peaked in 1975 and cycled up and down for a while, including a boomlet throughout most of the 1980s, before commencing a long and pronounced decline over the years following 1993. As of 2014, the murder rate stood at 4.5 per 100,000—slightly lower than 1963’s trough of 4.6. The FBI’s 2015 data show a rise to 4.9 per 100,000 in 2015, equal to the rate in 1964, before the end of the hegemonic period of “bourgeois culture” that Professors Alexander and Wax identify.
These trends are as widely known by experts in crime statistics as they are undiscussed by Professors Alexander and Wax. Criminologists and other experts who study the murder rate have struggled to understand the causes of these patterns, which are undoubtedly complex. I don’t know exactly what explains these patterns, but the “bourgeois values” story Professors Alexander and Wax offer seems no more convincing to me than would be the claims that the murder rate fell because Richard Nixon resigned (though it did fall after that), that it increased because Ronald Reagan was re-elected (though it did increase after that), that it fell because Bill Clinton took office (though it did fall after that), that it stopped falling because George W. Bush took office (though it did stop falling for several years after that), or that it resumed falling steadily in 2008 because the financial crisis made it likely the Democrats would take the White House (though it did start falling after that and continued to do so until it increased in the next-to-last-year of President Obama’s second term). None of these, including the demise of “bourgeois values” in the mid-1960s, is a serious candidate explanation for trends in the murder rate.