On a different note, I wish you all a happy rapture today!

Happy Rapture day to you too Nicole, not that I'm likely to be raptured. I have the suspicion that I'll be sticking around to duke it out with all the demons that are coming our way.

Anyhoo Levitt's standard is just dumb and he's dropped in my estimation. I'm going to tell the demons all about him. Truthfully while there are some clever observations in Freakanomics, it's not all that. The examples they use are very common in freshman economics courses. It's just that lay people aren't accustomed to them, so they seem like radical insights.

I don't need the government to be my father, mother, nanny, sister or big brother.

I need the federal government to limit itself to the 18 enumerated powers. That is all.

If a state wants to legalize pot they should be able. If I don't like it I can either move to another state or petition my state government to prohibit it.

This is the same as prostitution being legal in Nevada. It isn't the feds business.

Levitt really is a silly man. There are a lot of things you hope your daughter does not become or become involved with. You'd hope they don't become morbidly obese, or smoke, or an alcoholic. Is he all for forcing the weighing of individuals (and mandatory attendance at a fat farm)? The banning of cigs and booze?

What about becoming something that makes you just a little bit uncomfortable? You know, like a Victoria's Secret model? Or a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model? Or a Frederick's of Hollywood model? (And yes, I would be a litle uncomfortable about seeing so much of my daughter splashed all over a catalog or magazine seen by millions of men. What father wouldn't be.) Do we make those occupations just a tiny bit illegal?

If you don't want your daughter to do certain things, you should teach her your values instead of trying to impose them on the rest of us.

I'm flying home today. Hope the pilot isn't raptured!

I haven't read Freakonomics. Is Levitt's economics as bad as his morality/politics?

I love playing poker!!! The internet poker sites were scamming a lot so I wouldn't mind protection from some of the fraud perpetrated, but I never understood why some politician would rather I go to Atlantic City or fly to Vegas than play in my living room. Is the fear that I could only develop a gambling problem if I don't have to travel to the game?
And no, I don't need the government to pass more drug laws or prostitution laws for that matter. I've never done drugs and I can only hope I instilled a sense of self in my kids, at least enough that they never do anything more than a normal teen experimentation. Do they really believe the laws prevent those behaviors? Maybe its just me but I'd say that the young girl who becomes a prostituted had more problems growing up leading her to become a pros. The law isn't going to suddenly correct that.

I've always seen Levitt as a provocateur... Is he actually arguing in a legal way? Or in that complicated logic that parents sometimes have to use? Remembering that sometimes parents forbid their children from doing things "because I say so"
It's not going to stand up to Ilya's scrutiny as a lawyer. But it may be closer to the way the average person feels about it. This is instructive only as a thought process, not law. I think Ilya is taking it too literally.

And I don't want my daughter to hang with people like Levitt. He might benefit but it couldn't be a good thing for her.

... why don't we use Tiger Mom's wishes for HER daughter as the standard?

Anyone applying this "daughter test" is basically saying that they have no problem having the government act like a parent.

Since it's stuff you don't want anyone doing to your daughter, sex is illegal?

Well, outside of marriage anyway. Yeah, that'll work. We can have sex offender registries and...

I think he already got what he wanted.

My oldest daughter was raised in a conservative religion and stopped going soon after I did. My youngest daughter never cared. I hope neither ever get involved in an organized religion. Not being sarcastic at all.

in spite of the fact that it would probably be more economically efficient to legalize drugs and prostitution subject to heavy regulation/taxation, I don't mind those activities being illegal

Yeesh on so many points there.

1)Despite the fact that legalizing drugs and prostitution would likely help the economy, we have to outlaw them because people's daughters might do drugs or be prostitutes.

2)Sons we don't care about, apparently.

3)Daughters don't do drugs or become prostitutes now, because those activities are illegal.

4)Making things illegal is the only way to keep people from doing those things.

5)Making things illegal has proven effective at keeping people from doing those things.

6)Levitt doesn't want to outlaw things himself, he just doesn't mind when they are. Way to piece together a vaguely tough and vaguely family-values-ish soundbite while not actually proposing action of any kind. His motto: "More of the same, I guess."

The "daughter test" my Southern, socially conservative, Church of Christ, Vietnam vet dad has used since I can remember: I don't want my daughter doing it, but she should make her own damn decisions, so why do I need legislation when I can actually be a parent?

2)Sons we don't care about, apparently.

Finally somebody said it! I'm assuming that Levitt only has a daughter, otherwise he is a sexist douchebag.

Levitt is more politely stating something I tend to note about prostitution: it sounds fine to libertarians, right up until someone dude is offering your slightly dim 18 year old niece a "job" in another city, where she will be humping strangers on a dirty mattress, in exchange for food, a place to live and not much else.

The reason we outlaw it is because it degrades into some pretty scummy shit, and we rear back in disgust at it.

"it would probably be more economically efficient to legalize drugs and prostitution " - wonder how drugs and prostitution are in the same bucket especially when in one case, the enforcement is targeted solely at the supply side and in the other case, the enforcement is targeted solely at the demand side.

Does Steven Levitt have only a daughter and no sons...or is he a sexist gynocrat who only cares about the politically powerful set who are classified as oppressed though they are dominant and dosen't care about sons on any given day?

Does Steven Levitt have only a daughter and no sons...or is he a sexist gynocrat who only cares about the politically powerful set who are classified as oppressed though they are dominant and dosen't care about sons on any given day?

My guess is neither. It sounds as if Levitt (subconsciously?) retrofitted his reasoning to fit his political preferences instead of the other way around. He "realized" that his determinations were made based on what he didn't want his daughter to do. If cocaine is illegal, then his daughter won't do it, but she'll be a crackwhore in the time it takes to nuke a baked potato if we legalize drugs. I doubt he actually thinks that's the case, but he thinks legalizing cocaine would be wrong for indefinable reasons, so he came up with his "daughter test." It's a construct to define why he believes certain things.

Mind you, I'm taking my cues purely from what's at the top of the page, so I have no idea of Levitt's actual family life. But I think the daughter thing is a way to connect to the people who do tend to think that without legislation, their kids will turn into Corey Feldman circa 1990. It's paternalism, and paternalism does tend to focus on girls as needing someone strong to take care of them, lest they end up in situations like Spartee describes. I don't think people who share this view have the same concern for teenage boys ending up as drug-addled prostitutes.

It frightens me when people shape their reasoning around their actions, because that's usually the easiest way to relieve cognitive dissonance without having to do so much yucky thinking.

You know, we could have a society free from drugs, prostitution and all other forms of vice.

Of course, we'd have to learn how to cook tree bark, and praise the Dear Leader all day long, but what does that matter, if Virtue results?

I, for one, welcome our new North Korean overlords.

{/sarcasm]

So what if Levitt was a Muslim? His "daughter list" would be quite different. Oh wait ... I think they already have that. It's called Sharia law.

Well Spartee, having patronized a number of such establishments in countries where prostitution is a legal and regulated industry, I can personally attest that the scenario you describe in your "job in another city" statement, simply does not occur.

Where it does occur, is in places where it is illegal, there are no health or safety regulations involved in protecting the employees or their patrons, and the only ones running the operations are violent thugs...who I might add, probably turn a very hefty profit regardless of their lack of legal standing.

Practically speaking, making something illegal is a cost incurring measure which should only be undertaken in cases where harm is direct and imminent towards nonparticipants in an activity. i.e. Alcohol doesn't hurt anyone not drinking it until the drinker gets behind the wheel. Ergo drinking it is fine, but drive while drinking or drunk, and you pose a danger, so making such an activity illegal makes perfect sense.

Women who ply their trade as prostitutes in Europe can make tremendous sums, and having spoken with many of them, they are anything but emotionally damaged, they make more than many of their patrons, are regularly tested for STDs, and are on anything but "dirty mattresses". Abuse is next to nonexistent, and any attempt to do so by a patron is responded to quickly by the house and by the police.

So...with all that said, why are we so out of touch with the obviously negative results our current legal system has provided us with? We're supporting a bad system that criminalizes the most trivial of matters, and causes unbelievable harm to the people it is nominally supposed to protect, and all in the name of what? Protecting our daughters? Well obviously its hurting a lot more daughters than legalization could ever do. Those prostitutes plying their trade on our streets are after all, someones daughters too.

This is so offensive I just have to comment, even though previous comments have captured very well the offensive nature. I feel truly sorry for this man's daughter if he really thinks this way. He apparently doesn't believe that she is capable of any amount of self determination and will happily do anything that the government doesn't explicitly say she shouldn't do.

I also agree with the comments on how offensive it is that he would only apply this test to daughters. No wonder our society is so WEIRD if we think that daughters are so helpless that they need government oversight while apparently sons need absolutely no help with the world at all and should just stumble through blindly on their own. All children need to be taught values so they can turn into adults that don't need constant government oversight!

Huh. Let me offer a devil's advocate argument.

'Society' is not made up of internet paragons who are gifted with the benefits of good values, sufficient wealth, will power and intelligence to avoid the pitfalls of vice.

People should be taught good values. I agree. What happens if your parents are slobs who wouldn't know a value if it didn't come in a dime bag? Sucks to be you, right? This is an argument for more paternalism, not less where society becomes the arbiter of values...and uses school to teach them (which they already do to some extent)

So, Ms. Strong Willed, Intelligent Educated Independent Thinker. You feel that since you can ignore, buy off, or successfully avoid the negative consequences of the illegal amusement you want the opportunity to indulge in, that the less sure, the less educated, and the more dependent should be able to do just as well. And if he can't? It's not the laws problem. After all, you're just fine!

Some people need a bit more structure in their lives. Now, the question is how much do you do put in and at what stratum of society they put it at. Overachievers? Average Joes? Slobs? There is a cost benefit analysis to make and society does it in the voting booth all the time.

So in Lake Woebegone, where everyone is above average (just like the internet), they don't need prostitution laws, drug laws, or even speed limits because the benefits are oh so obvious.

In the real world where people are young, stupid, make mistakes and get caught in a web of these addictions or problems at the same time, or even have momentary lapses of judgement, society puts in a speed bump or two to make people slow down. Stop someone from making a BIGGER mistake then they are already making. Some people see jail time as a bigger disincentive then Dad being pissed off.

So frankly, while Levitt is a bit paternalistic (you mean...being a DAD?!? HORRORS!), so are the people who are taking the 'devil take the hindmost' stand regarding laws. 'Everyone should be like me and if they aren't, that's their problem'

I agree with a good bit of what everyone is saying, but I'd suggest a bit more reflection.

And bravo to all those who want to make a mountain out of a molehill.

Levitt took a cheap emotional shot by mentioning daughters. Fine. What gender are most pros? What section of society is more vulnerable to physical abuse, dependency by pregnancy, lack of work and abandonment? Sons?

So for a site which is supposedly 'realistic' about the physical and psychological differences between men and women, this is a bit of willful obtuseness.

So in the crappy 'reach for anything to discredit a premise' the score is Levitt 1, Blogsite 1.

The spur for Levitt's statement came from a crackdown on gambling, and as far as I know, the majority of gamblers and gambling addicts are men. Not to mention that physical abuse and accidental/"accidental" pregnancies affect men, too. Which gender is more likely to be falsely accused of abuse or be financially beholden to an unscrupulous woman to support a child that's been proven to be not his? More than one way to play devil's advocate here.

It's not exactly making a mountain out of a molehill, flydye. Levitt isn't just some guy who made a stupid comment. Said stupid comment came from an economist who wishes to inform US policy.

Speaking for myself, I was more concerned with the paternalism of having to outlaw things to get people to quit doing them (as if that's proven effective so far) and the shaping of reasoning to fit standing beliefs than I was the gender of the test. That was just a glaringly obvious hole in his argument.

So are you saying that parental value teaching and dictats are stronger then a potential jail term with Bubba?

He is not saying that making X illegal will stop it. That is a bit of a strawman argument. No. You can make prostitution a capital case and you will still find whores (very expensive whores, but whores none the less). Ditto gambling, drugs etc.

It's cost/benefit. For example, take a hypothetical guy who drinks. If he has one too many, he will get a DUI, pay a fine, maybe go without a drivers license for a period of time. It is, despite what people say, not a real big deal, though worse then it was.

Now, say I raised the price to the point where if he was caught twice intoxicated, no matter where, no matter what, he'd lose a high paying job for two years. Is he still going to treat alcohol in the same careless manner? Unlikely. The cost of violation is much higher. That is not to say that occasionally someone won't get jacked up. People are fallible.

Should a daughter face legal sanction if she is with a man who her family doesn't approve of ala Iran? No. But you will note that in America, far more daughters run around ignoring parental 'values' then they do in Iran. Which suggests that while a legal sanction isn't perfect, it's also influential...sometimes.

At this point you seem to deny any effectiveness of legal sanctions because you can point to a failure or two. This is not persuasive.

Which is a long way to say:

A legal penalty is going to discourage X number of participants according to how much Y punishment you'll get.

The only tricky bit is finding the 'sweet spot' where the most are discouraged for the least amount of freedom encroachment.

And to make a different point: When those who stand foresquare against these sort of laws give their daughters/sons their first rock of crack and ask Heidi Fleiss to come to their children's High School career day, I'd be a bit more persuaded by the argument.

@ flydye

Hello,

I think it may have been me that you were talking to when you said

“o, Ms. Strong Willed, Intelligent Educated Independent Thinker. You feel that since you can ignore, buy off, or successfully avoid the negative consequences of the illegal amusement you want the opportunity to indulge in, that the less sure, the less educated, and the more dependent should be able to do just as well. And if he can't? It's not the laws problem. After all, you're just fine!”

I just want you to know that I grew up in an abusive family. I moved out at 15. My world was very dangerous, scary, sad, pretty much what you would expect from a person who was taught no values and given no safe place to live or sleep. It took years of struggle, which included NOT successfully avoiding the consequences of having very little information to make good decisions and a very skewed emotional state. I did get state sponsored scholarships to college and am now a successful and productive member of society. In my experience drug laws didn’t keep me from doing drugs and actually at the time the drugs were probably a good thing in my life because they did give me a way to cope with my pain. When I was in college I was able to go to counseling for free and that allowed me to learn alternative coping skills that were not illegal. It has been my experience that paternalistic laws did NOT help my life. I imagine this is because the things that decent parents do are more extensive that just telling their kids that drugs, prostitution, gambling, etc. are illegal and shoving them in jail if they get caught doing them. I imagine that decent parents provide kids with a safe place to sleep and safe food to eat all while providing an example of a way to live that is functional, hell they may even talk with their kids about the problems that arrive in their life and help them explore different solutions. I really am not sure what functional parents do but I assume it is more than making certain things off limits. For those of us that didn’t get that life is really hard and I didn’t find paternalistic laws telling me what I couldn’t do to cope very helpful in learning how to cope. I found personal, one on one counseling EXTREMELY helpful in that respect.

Thank you for worrying about the less fortunate. I think that is an extremely positive quality and not everyone has it. You sound like you have a kind heart and I wanted you to know a little piece of my story. I think people in unfortunate situations can be helped by people who reach out to them and give them information to better their lives or a safe place to live or safe food to eat or even a kind ear to listen to what their real struggles are. I'm not a Christian but I'm thinking of the "teach a person to fish" parable here.

This is a bit of a wandering thought but I want to share. One thing that my mom used to do when I complained about my situation was to threaten to put me up for adoption. When she did that I imagined a family like the ones at her church taking me in and expecting me to live like them. That absolutely terrified me as a child. It was a much more scary thought than staying in my abusive home. I did not grow up with parents like that. I knew that I would not be able to handle going from a situation where at best I wasn’t noticed and when I did get attention it was scary negative attention to a “normal” family where there were rules that were set up to keep kids safe. I was afraid that if a good family adopted me they would realize soon that I was a bad kid, just like my parents thought I was and they would start to hate me just like my parents did. No amount of tough love or curfews so I couldn’t go out and do bad things could have helped me at that point. The rules in my household did not keep me safe and I was very scared/paranoid/suspicious of anyone trying to force me to do anything.

This is where I think some of the things that seem so very reasonable when flydye says them wouldn’t apply in the way you would think they would to abused children. When you grow up in an environment where the authority figures that YOU LOVE are trying to hurt you, the fear of government sponsored authority figures threatening to put you in a cell with Bubba is really not as terrifying as it would be to a kid who grew up in a relatively safe environment. My childhood was being cooped up in a house with a scary “bubba” type figure. I really think I had to just keep plodding through my course of life because the damage to my emotional state had already been done and I needed to learn new skills on how to set boundaries in my life and deal with social situations and I needed counseling to have someone to listen to me and very carefully and slowly and in a safe place challenge my false assumptions about myself and the world. I also met AMAZING people who reached out to me in the smallest and least threatening and most helpful ways I can imagine. One older friend once gave me small pamphlet on personal boundaries one day over lunch when I was explaining how I was having problems in my romantic relationship. She didn’t make a big deal of it. She patiently listened to me talk about being in an unhealthy relationship. She very casually and with no fanfare gave me some reading material that I could take home by myself and read alone, where I didn’t feel any judgment. When I read it, it was the first time I realized that there were different ways, which I had never learned, to control my interactions with people. It fundamentally changed my life. Not overnight. It was probably five more years before I was really applying that different way of interacting regularly in my life, but that was the day I learned the information and started practicing it.

I say this because even though it seems like an easy answer to just have paternalistic laws telling people who don’t know any better what we can and can’t do, I didn’t find that solution to be effective in my real life situations. I know I am just one person, but I suspect that other people from abusive families have similar experiences.

Now, say I raised the price to the point where if he was caught twice intoxicated, no matter where, no matter what, he'd lose a high paying job for two years. Is he still going to treat alcohol in the same careless manner? Unlikely

Then explain why with some of the toughest DUI laws in the country - as in felony prison time; why the rates of drinking and driving have not gone down?

At this point you seem to deny any effectiveness of legal sanctions because you can point to a failure or two.

My intention was to point out faulty reasoning, not to say certain legal sanctions aren't right. There are better arguments for prostitution and drugs being illegal than "I don't want my daughter doing them." Some of those reasons have been illustrated in this thread. Again, my big problem with Levitt was the adapting of reasoning to fit beliefs, versus the other way around.