Sunday, March 07, 2004
Posner word problems:
List 3 ways Posner is wrong here.
Gerstmann falters in places, as when he uses studies that show that married people live longer and are less promiscuous than unmarried people to argue that homosexuals would obtain comparable benefits if they were allowed to marry each other. All the studies are of heterosexual marriage. He also errs when he cites the estimate that eight to ten million American children are being raised by homosexuals. Homosexuals are at most 3 percent of the population; most of them are not raising children; and the under-eighteen American population is only about seventy million. So the estimate is off by at least an order of magnitude: if--and this, too, is undoubtedly an overestimate--one-third of homosexual Americans are raising children, then 1 percent of the nation's children are being raised by homosexuals, which comes to seven hundred thousand.
Hat tip: that's news to me via baude
List 3 ways Posner is wrong here.
Gerstmann falters in places, as when he uses studies that show that married people live longer and are less promiscuous than unmarried people to argue that homosexuals would obtain comparable benefits if they were allowed to marry each other. All the studies are of heterosexual marriage. He also errs when he cites the estimate that eight to ten million American children are being raised by homosexuals. Homosexuals are at most 3 percent of the population; most of them are not raising children; and the under-eighteen American population is only about seventy million. So the estimate is off by at least an order of magnitude: if--and this, too, is undoubtedly an overestimate--one-third of homosexual Americans are raising children, then 1 percent of the nation's children are being raised by homosexuals, which comes to seven hundred thousand.
Hat tip: that's news to me via baude
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