The “Correlation” Between Statistics and Eugenics
By Aubrey Clayton,
Los Angeles Review of Books
| 07. 18. 2024
Image "Sir Francis Galton" by Spudgun67 from Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
IN 2013, A SERIES of ads about the dangers of teen pregnancy appeared on New York City subway trains. Sponsored by the city’s Human Resources Administration, the ads cautioned prospective teen parents that babies were likely—surprise!—to exact a heavy toll on their finances, relationships, and job prospects. The ads were formulated as plaintive messages from the babies themselves. One teary-eyed toddler lamented: “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen.” As then-mayor Michael Bloomberg explained, “This campaign makes very clear to young people that there’s a lot at stake when it comes to deciding to raise a child.” The ad campaign was quite rightly ridiculed, in large part because it offered no support services for teens who were, or might become, pregnant.
From a statistical point of view, though, the most objectionable part of the whole campaign was a single word—“because.”
At the bottom of the poster, a footnote contained this statistic: “Kids of teen moms are...
Related Articles
By Sayantani DasGupta, MedPage Today | 08.05.2025
It's just a jeans ad.
It's not that deep.
It's just social media outrage.
Should physicians care about the recent American Eagle "Sydney Sweeney Has Good Genes Jeans" controversy? What, if anything, does the provocative campaign have to...
By Staff, National Women's Law Center | 08.13.2025
INTRODUCTION
Baby bonuses. Motherhood medals. Fertility tracking. You may have heard of these policy proposals as solutions from the Trump administration to help encourage women to have more children.
Besides falling short of ensuring that people have what they need...
By Zusha Elinson, The Wall Street Journal | 08.12.2025
BERKELEY, Calif.—Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, a mathematician, spent seven years researching how to keep an advanced form of artificial intelligence from destroying humanity before he concluded that stopping it wasn’t possible—at least anytime soon.
Now, he’s turned his considerable brainpower to promoting...
By Tania Fabo, Newsweek | 08.06.2025
"Sydney Sweeney" by Jay Dixit, CC 4.0
American Eagle came under fire recently for an ad campaign featuring actress Sydney Sweeney. In one ad, Sweeney fiddles with her jeans, saying, "Genes are passed down from parents to offspring...