fubarobfusco comments on [Link] Social interventions gone wrong - Less Wrong
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It's an interesting thought. How would you control for the baseline levels of social shame that racial minorities, poor people, and teen mothers are already subjected to?
All sorts of things. There's a lot less lead paint on the walls, for instance; a lot more black men in prison for victimless crimes, too; "the situation" is hardly simple. What leads you to single out your particular claim?
Running a power drill through the eyeballs of people you dislike might "change people's behavior" too, but that doesn't make it a policy proposal rather than a psychopathy symptom.
In other words, it isn't clear that this is the same sort of thing at all. And specifically, the reasons certain proposals wouldn't work have to do with political realities — e.g. if you try to generate "stigma and fear" by forbidding doctors from treating teen mothers, the doctors are not likely to cooperate.
Specifically, I was referring to the fact that Blacks were even poorer back than so following the argument CronoDAS's link was making we would expect there to be more unwed motherhood among them. On the other hand unwed motherhood was much more stigmatized (and no it didn't involve laws forbidding doctors from treating teen mothers).
This is unrelated to the main argument, but I'm not sure the crimes in question are truly victimless for reasons given in these two posts.