Recently, I debated on Twitter with Dr. Michael Austin, president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society. He supported Kamala Harris, because he thought that both parties are the same on abortion. I explained that Kamala supported legislation to end state-level pro-life laws, and Trump didn’t. He claimed that the total number of abortions had gone up after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

If you get a challenge like this one, I would start by explaining that it’s possible for the overall number of abortions to go up, even as the numbers declined in pro-life states because of restrictions on abortions passed in those pro-life states. In that case, the increase in abortions in states with no restrictions on abortion would be larger than decrease in abortions in states with pro-life legislation. Then I would explain how Kamala had previously supported legislation to end those state-level restrictions. That makes her position on abortion different from Trump, who would leave those restrictions in place.

Today’s post counters the original claim that Michael Austin made that the total number of abortions went UP after Roe v. Wade was repealed.

This is from Daily Wire:

Abortions of unborn babies fell 2% the year the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC’s annual abortion surveillance report, published on Wednesday, found that a total of 613,383 unborn babies were legally aborted within 48 reporting areas in the United States in 2022, the year the High Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe.

Out of the 47 areas that were consistently reporting data between 2021 and 2022, there was a 2% decrease from the 622,108 unborn babies who were legally aborted in 2021, to 609,360 in 2022.

By the way, I’ve noticed that a lot of Christian philosophers want to reduce policy debates down to abortion. They don’t seem to have thought through how other policy areas affect a Christian’s ability to live out a Christian life. For example, my ability to work and earn in the competitive private sector as a software engineer is affected by many, many different areas of policy. That’s why I have to know a little about many different areas, like energy policy, education policy, guns and crime, basic economics, health care policy, etc. I am affected by the prices of gas and electricity. I am affected by the price of health care. I am affected by government regulations. I am affected by bans on firearms and bans on self-defense. I am affected by rising costs due to illegal immigration. If I lived in an ivory tower, and was mainly concerned with impressing my colleagues with words, then maybe these topics wouldn’t matter to me. I get the impression that philosophers are not informed in these areas, because they have chosen a discipline that often insulates them from the need to solutions that work in the real world.

If I wanted to understand something about economics, I would read Thomas Sowell. If I wanted to understand something about guns and crime, I would read John Lott. If I wanted to understand something about health care, I would read Regina Hertzlinger or Avik Roy. And so on. In the real world, you can’t arrive at correct beliefs with “thought experiments”. You need to run real experiments – in the lab. You need to write real code – in the lab. It’s so important for people to have private sector work experience, developing solutions for customer problems in the competitive private sector.

Philosophers are the people LEAST LIKELY to understand basic economics. They tend to support bigger government in order to get more bailouts and redistribution of wealth.

Here’s an article from Newsweek:

Overall, socialism isn’t winning over the majority of college students. When broken down by major, though, its popularity doubled with philosophy students.

[…]Only 39 percent of the 10,590 undergraduates polled had a favorable view of socialism, and the same percentage responded that they had an unfavorable view. When respondents were broken out by major views of capitalism shifted considerably.

Philosophy majors were most likely to view socialism positively, with 78 percent of those polled saying they had at least a somewhat favorable view of it. Anthropology majors were a close second at 64 percent, followed by English majors at 58 percent and international relations, sociology and music majors all at 57 percent.

Least likely to view socialism favorably were accounting and finance majors at 20 percent and 22 percent respectively.

Why are most philosophers so wrong on areas that touch on reality, like finance and economics? Maybe, it’s because they make their living with words. Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, who is one of the good philosophers, calls people like this “wordsmiths”.

He explains the consequences of being a “wordsmith” here in this essay for the Cato Policy Report (Cato Institute):

What factor produced feelings of superior value on the part of intellectuals? I want to focus on one institution in particular: schools. As book knowledge became increasingly important, schooling–the education together in classes of young people in reading and book knowledge–spread. Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher’s favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better.

The schools, too, exhibited and thereby taught the principle of reward in accordance with (intellectual) merit. To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher’s smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.

The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority “entitled” them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?

Now, it’s important to be fair and acknowledge that some “wordsmiths” do understand finance and economics. But it’s the minority. It’s a sad thing when one of these wordsmiths manages to get to the top of an evangelical organization, though. Which is why you need to be careful what you let your children study, and where you send your donations. Giving money to evangelical wordsmiths who think that “Jesus didn’t care about politics” and “both parties are the same on abortion” and “abortions went up after the repeal of legalized abortion” is a waste of money.