On September 21, 2017, two versions of an essay of mine titled Facts v.

Wax were published at

the Heterodox Academy website. This essay responded to various statements made by my Penn
Law colleague, Amy Wax, as well as to Haidts own defense of those statements. I sent my final
version of this essay to the blogs editor, NYU Professor Jon Haidt on September 14, and waited
patiently for him to read and post it. Six days later, Professor Haidt suggested a small number of
changes in phrasing but no changes in content, which, after some initial disagreement, I
accepted. The next morning Professor Haidt published the resulting version.

Not long after he published my essay, Professor Haidt password-protected it and sent me an
email informing me that he had removed general access. Professor Wax had contacted him that
morning with objections to my account of correspondence in which I asked her and her
coauthor, Professor Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego, for sourcing on one of the
statements in their op-ed.

At the outset of the correspondence at issue, I gave fair warning, specifically telling Professors
Alexander and Wax that I would edit my essay to reflect your sources, and that is what I did.
It is true that Professor Wax subsequently asked not to be quoted, as she told Professor Haidt. It
is also true that I did not quote herinstead, at her request, I paraphrased her position
(Professor Alexander has never requested that I refrain from quoting or paraphrasing him). In
addition, when I submitted my essay to Professor Haidt on September 14, I specifically called
Professor Haidts attention to the part at issue and offered to document my claims as to the
correspondence. Here is what I told Professor Haidt:

I added a discussion of my attempt to obtain sourcing from Professors Alexander and

Wax related to one of their empirical claims, and that is somewhat lengthy. It appears in
what is now Part I.A. If you would like proof that my summary of email correspondence
is accurate, I will provide you the full threads of the relevant emails, provided you agree
not to circulate them more broadly than necessary to publish the post--after I asked them
if I could quote them, in full, Amy asked not to be quoted, and Larry never responded (I
gave fair warning at the beginning of the conversation that I'd update the post to reflect
whatever sources they provided).

Professor Haidt never responded to this offer. After he unpublished my essay, I sent him the
emails Id offered in the first place. He disclaimed interest, saying he was too busy.

At one point in my correspondence with Professor Haidt, I gave him until 3pm to republish my
essay without changes. Subsequently, he took the position that unless I removed text to which
Professor Wax objected, he would refuse to do so and I would have to publish it elsewhere.
Having waited a week for my essay to be posted, I ultimately decided it would be better to
publish what I could that day, with the possibility of providing the rest later.

I think its important for the originally published version to be available both as a matter of
principle and because some might find it informative about the methods used by Professors
Alexander and Wax. Below is the original version of Part I.A (I have left in the changes in
phrasing that Professor Haidt suggested on September 20, because I agreed to those changes
before the initial publication).
 A. Professor Waxs Illuminating Basis for Claiming the Homicide Rate is Tiny Among
Those who Currently Follow the Old Precepts

One sentence in Professor Waxs op-ed that has not come in for much criticism, but to which
more people should pay attention, is this:

Among those who currently follow the old precepts, regardless of their
level of education or affluence, the homicide rate is tiny, opioid addiction is rare,
and poverty rates are low.

Professor Wax offers no evidence for these claims. And when I read them, I strongly doubted
she could. Why? Because I dont know of high-quality data sources that simultaneously collect
information on whether a person follows the old precepts and either homicides, opioid
addiction, or poverty.

Lets home in on the homicide rate claim. The homicide rate in a given period of time is
understood by those who study crime to equal the number of homicide victims during that
period, per 100,000 people in the area in question. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics explains
that there are two counts of homicides in the U.S.the FBIs Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR)
program and the CDCs National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). The UCR data provide
information on victims age, sex, race, and ethnic origin. I paged through all 152 variables
available in this data set. So far as I can tell there is no follows the old precepts variable in the
data set, nor anything like it. Similarly, the NVSS Fatal Injury Reports online data system has
variables relating to age, sex, race, and Hispanic background, but nothing that seems much like
follows the old precepts.

So I wondered: exactly how does Professor Wax know that the homicide rate is tiny among
those who currently follow the old precepts? I decided to ask Professors Alexander and Wax,
and their responses were revealing. As part of correspondence that occurred after I sent them
earlier versions of this post, I asked Professor Alexander what sources he and Professor Wax
could offer regarding their homicide rate claim, promising to update this post in light of his
response.

The discussion that followed involved several emails between me and Professor Alexander,
as well as two from Professor Wax. When it had concluded, I thought the full discussion would
be illuminating for partisans on both sides. I asked Professors Alexander and Wax for their
permission to quote this discussion in full (Professor Wax had expressed concern about
doctoring of her words in an interview published earlier on the day of our correspondence).
Professor Wax asked me not to quote her, and as of this writing, several days later, Professor
Alexander has not responded to my request. I will therefore summarize their comments here, to
the best of my ability. It is appropriate to do so given that I gave fair warning that I would
include their sources in this post. I will not publicly post the actual quotes from Professors Wax
and Alexander unless they give me permission or contest the accuracy or good-faith intent of my
characterization. I will, however, provide verbatim transcripts of my own comments. Heres the
conversation, from Saturday, September 9, 2017:

Gelbach (2:35pm): I'd be grateful if you would let me know what sources
you and Amy believe support the claim in your op-ed that Among those who
currently follow the old precepts, regardless of their level of education or
affluence, the homicide rate is tiny. As I assume you know, neither the UCR
nor the NVSS fatal injury data on homicides includes variables that would allow
one to determine the precepts followed by homicide victims. I would be very
interested in learning about the data source that does provide such information.
And of course I will edit my response on the merits to reflect your sources.
Professor Alexander (2:57pm), in response, pointed to that part of the op-
eds script we were all supposed to follow which instructed people to Eschew
crime. He then explained to me that a person who murders necessarily fails
to follow this precept.
Gelbach (3:10pm): I see--you're saying it's true by definition, rather than
an empirical claim. Just out of curiosity, why did you write tiny if you meant
zero?
Professor Alexander (3:17pm), conceded that Id made a good point. He
then indicated that he supposed he and Professor Wax might have been thinking
of all their precepts other than Eschew crime.
Gelbach (3:21pm): Thanks for the concession, and the supposition. Time
allowing, I'll edit my post to reflect the substance of our discussion.
Professor Wax (5:40pm), writing in response to Professor Alexanders
2:57pm message, the one that pointed to the Eschew crime precept,
expressed full agreement with this explanation, which Professor Alexander had
subsequently rejected after all.
I include the above to show the mismatch between (i) the actual basis of claims made by
Professors Alexander and Wax in the op-ed and (ii) the claims by Professor Wax and her
defenders that they are involved in an exercise of scholarly communication of empirical evidence
to the public.

If Professor Alexanders initial response to me and Professor Waxs endorsement of it

several hours later indeed reflect their position, then their claim is a wholly non-empirical one:
the position is that it would be impossible for a person who follows bourgeois values to
perpetrate a murder, because murder is crime, and by definition people who follow bourgeois
values dont do crime. This is a tautology, so it could not possibly be falsified by any data in the
world; it is empty as an empirical claim.

But on the tautological interpretation, the statement that Among those who currently follow
the old precepts, regardless of their level of education or affluence, the homicide rate is tiny is
puzzling. As I asked Professors Alexander and Wax, why use the word tiny to describe the
incidence of an event you believe is logically impossibleand thus would naturally be referred
to with the word zero?

With the additional context of the responses by Professors Alexander and Wax to my
question, which I gave fair warning Id use in this post, how should we understand what
Professors Alexander and Wax did in the op-ed? Here are six logically possible understandings:

1. All along, they meant to make a tautological statement, but, whether

accidentally or sloppily, they used the word tiny where zero fit.
2. They were intentionally misleading their readers by passing off as
empirical evidence what they knew was a tautological statement.
3. They meant to make an empirical claim, were ignorant of what data are
available on the homicide rate, and then tried to explain it away after the
fact with what they thought was a clever argument based in logic, in the
moment overlooking the odd fit of the word tiny with their tautology.
4. They were intentionally misleading their readers by making an empirical
claim for which they knew they had no empirical support.
5. They have some preconceived notions, they wrote a sentence that reflected
them, and they didnt bother to look for evidence that would support those
notions.
6. There is some other explanation, including those that would reflect better
on Professors Alexander and Wax than any of the first 5.
I think any reasonable reader not privy to their responses to me would think that Professors
Alexander and Wax were making an empirical claim. That would eliminate possibilities 1 and 2
aboveleaving intentional misleading, ignorance, preconceptions, or some other explanation. I
neither know nor will speculate as to which of these possibilities is correct.

This one example may seem to be far down into the weeds. I include so much detail about it
because it raises the question of whether Professors Alexander and Wax are involved in a serious
attempt to communicate empirical facts to a wider audience. Writing on this blog in defense of
Professor Wax, Professor Haidt stated that although There are no footnotes in a Philly.com
opinion essay, nevertheless in Waxs other writings on family law it is clear that she knows
and is informed by the relevant social science research. Heather Mac Donald went much
further at National Review, stating that No thinker in the law or social sciences is more rigorous
than Wax.

Contra this image of rigor and knowledge of the research literature painted by such
defenders, Professors Alexander and Wax failed to point to any empirical support for their
homicide rate claim, and the evidence-free responses each initially gave to my simple request for
such support look more like a cheap debate-club trick than making an argument in good faith
using methods of argumentation that fall within the normal range of her part of the academy, to
use Professor Haidts terms.

For completeness, let me do what Professors Alexander and Wax didnt and provide some
empirical facts about the homicide rate. One can obtain the FBIs UCR crime data on the rate of
murders and non-negligent homicideshenceforth, just the murder ratefrom an easy-to-use
FBI website. I downloaded the data for the years 1960 to 2014 (the widest range available on the
site) and have plotted the rate of murders and non-negligent homicides per 100,000 people. The
result is the chart just below.
 Rate of Murders & Non-Negligent Homicides, 1960-2015
(per 100,000 population)
Sources: (1) https://www.ucrdatatool.gov/Search/Crime/State/TrendsInOneVar.cfm;
(2) https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/offenses-known-to-law-enforc
12

10

0
1966

1970

1974
1960
1962
1964

1968

1972

1976
1978
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
2012
2014
The chart shows that the murder rate climbed sharply after 1963. Taken in isolation, this fact
seems partially consistent with the overall story told by Professors Alexander and Waxone of
monolithic social collapse starting in the mid-to-late-1960s. But then the murder rate it peaked in
1975 and cycled up and down for a while, including a boomlet throughout most of the 1980s,
before commencing a long and pronounced decline over the years following 1993. As of 2014,
the murder rate stood at 4.5 per 100,000slightly lower than 1963s trough of 4.6. The FBIs
2015 data show a rise to 4.9 per 100,000 in 2015, equal to the rate in 1964, before the end of the
hegemonic period of bourgeois culture that Professors Alexander and Wax identify.

These trends are as widely known by experts in crime statistics as they are undiscussed by
Professors Alexander and Wax. Criminologists and other experts who study the murder rate have
struggled to understand the causes of these patterns, which are undoubtedly complex. I dont
know exactly what explains these patterns, but the bourgeois values story Professors
Alexander and Wax offer seems no more convincing to me than would be the claims that the
murder rate fell because Richard Nixon resigned (though it did fall after that), that it increased
because Ronald Reagan was re-elected (though it did increase after that), that it fell because Bill
Clinton took office (though it did fall after that), that it stopped falling because George W. Bush
took office (though it did stop falling for several years after that), or that it resumed falling
steadily in 2008 because the financial crisis made it likely the Democrats would take the White
House (though it did start falling after that and continued to do so until it increased in the next-
to-last-year of President Obamas second term). None of these, including the demise of
bourgeois values in the mid-1960s, is a serious candidate explanation for trends in the murder
rate.