Friday, April 05, 2013
Bad conclusion as usual
An interesting observation and an invalid conclusion:
Children born to parents in former East Germany between 1991 and 1993 are at least 50 percent more likely to become criminals as they grew up than children born in the West, the research states. The researchers say this is because the sudden collapse of the Communist regime created uncertainty about starting families, and led to a huge drop in the birthrate. Those women who did have children were "younger, less educated and more likely to be unmarried mothers," the study says.A 50% difference is definitely worth noticing! And the assumption that the parents themselves were a different cohort is also valid. But the rest is nonsense. Age, education and marriage were not causative factors here; they were parallel results of the difference in parents. Quite simply, only criminal types had children in those years of uncertainty, because criminal types don't notice uncertainty. They are only conscious of immediate gratification. Their kids inherited the tendency, because criminality is a human tendency and all human tendencies are partly heritable. Non-criminal types thought about the future and decided it didn't look good. Later on, after reunification (more or less) succeeded, the future looked tolerable again. So non-criminals decided it was okay to bring children into the world again. ¶ 8:39 AM
