NY Times says one answer to black-boys homicide rates, ten times whites’, is “getting them jobs.”  Fine, says Heather Mac Donald.  Jobs for all is an excellent goal.

But the biggest barrier to the employment of crime-prone inner-city youth isn’t lack of real or even make-work jobs; rather, it’s their own willingness to show up every day on time and accept authority.

Not that “many inner-city teens aren’t courteous and enthusiastic workers.”  But:

Few teenagers from any background possess the self-discipline and reliability that employers seek; teens growing up in chaotic home environments are even less likely to have developed a work ethic.

Hard times add to crime rates, as NYT editorializes?  Hardly, says Mac D:

The claim that crime results from a bad economy has limited empirical backing in general, but it is particularly ludicrous applied to juvenile violence. It is not the collapse of consumer lending that induces a 16-year-old to shoot a rival who “disses” his girlfriend; it is a failure of self-control and a distorted understanding of self-worth.

Missing from the NYT editorial is the M-word:

The marriage imperative civilizes boys. By contrast, in a world where it is unusual for a man to marry the mother of his children, boys fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility: you are responsible for your children. Freed of the social expectation that they will have to provide a stable home for their offspring, boys have little incentive to restrain their impulses and develop bourgeois habits.

Not that anyone knows how to change the culture that has little room for marriage, but wouldn’t big ideas about how to solve the black youth murder rate have something to say about the problem, even in the NY Times?

The problem, newly discovered (!) is that black boys kill each other in alarming numbers. The answer, from a Northeastern U. academic, is clear:

Seizing on President-elect Barack Obama‘s incoming administration as an opportunity for more funding, Fox added: “There is an urgency for reinvestment in children and families. In essence, we need a bailout for kids at risk.”

And if you were wondering whom to blame, that’s easy:

The study partly blamed Bush administration grant cuts to local police and juvenile crime prevention programs for the surge in crimes by young black men and teens. Incoming Vice President Joe Biden has promised funding to put 50,000 new police officers on the street to help bring violent crime rates back to a decade-long annual decline that began in the mid-1990s, after then-President Bill Clinton provided local officials with money to hire 100,000 new cops.

Thank you, AP.  Wall St. Jnl, on the other hand, has an ameliorating quote:

James Alan Fox, co-author of the study, attributed the numbers to a variety of issues, including cuts in funding for local law-enforcement programs that were credited with lowering the nation’s record murder rates in the 1990s. “It’s hard to pin down cause and effect,” Mr. Fox said.

He adds, judiciously:

Mr. Fox said the cuts in law-enforcement programs and activities geared toward youth disproportionately affect African-Americans because they are more likely than their white counterparts to come from communities where there is inadequate adult supervision, high rates of single-parent homes, inferior schools and widespread gang activity.

“Cuts in support for youth have a much greater impact on black families who don’t have alternatives,” Mr. Fox said.

Mr. Fox, we hardly knew ye from the AP account, which operates somewhat sloppily out of its own preferred “narrative,” as rhetoricians would have it.  It’s why one can do better at Wall St. Jnl, every day in almost every way.

Here’s a grabber:

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

Temps are dropping like flies.  What’s more,

the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

The end of the world has been delayed.