EMERGENCE, OR INTELLIGENT DESIGN? Laura at 11-D offers a different take on David Brooks's "Virtues of Virtue" column.

What David Brooks is really saying is that America is doing swimmingly for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with government. American youth are pulling themselves up by their bootstraps with the help of family and church groups. Our Republican government has sensibly not devoted one cent to these efforts. Just set a good example. (Eyes rolling.)

Brooks wisely sets up his essay by pointing to the drop in the levels of domestic violence, which takes the steam out of any liberal counterargument. Who wants to play down that important development? If it is true that fewer women are getting thumped, then great. But to attribute that change to an underfunded church group and an army of well scrubbed teenagers is bizarre.

Mr Brooks does point to a 1994 federal criminalization of violence against women as a potential contributing influence, a point that arises in the comments. There is likely to be a research article or four attempting to tease out such effects. There are also likely to be what the statisticians call "confounding factors," something that Mr Brooks noted in his column.

The decline in family violence is part of a whole web of positive, mutually reinforcing social trends.

For some of these, identifying the effect of government policies will be difficult. Tighter standards for drunken driving, more driving, fewer drunken driving fatalities. (Did I mention cheaper gas providing an incentive to buy more crashworthy cars, federally mandated airbags notwithstanding?) For others, well, maybe we're observing better behavior on average because better people are choosing to be parents. (That's one of the more frequently cited bits of Freakonomics, which I reviewed, focusing on the econometrics, to the exclusion of the selectivity effect of abortions, which everybody else goes directly to.)

And then, there are those people doing the relatively obscure work, such as a Chicago Tribune columnist who wants to say "Enough" to hip-hop-pimp.

Maybe I'm just sick and tired of the whole pimp lifestyle and rap music's glorification of it all. And "Hustle & Flow," albeit well-done, is just an extension of that.

Maybe I'm just frustrated by how rap fits into a broader culture that continues to objectify women, and the movie, which for an independent film is doing well at the box office, is just an extension of that too.

These days, when you have a young daughter, as I have, it's constant and steady work to dispel the negative images out there of women and navigate around rap music's influences.

Read the column and note the absence of a call for government action. Then read her follow-up column, culled from reader mail.

Suggestive lyrics go beyond rap music, says John J. of Chicago: I could go on about the garbage sold by a lot of the white bands. Ever listen to a country/western song? Drinking and sleeping around are still very prevalent there, too. I'm beginning to think that our music says a lot about us as a civilization and it ain't good."

I don't know if that writer read Black Rednecks and White Liberals, but that connection is in that book, and I will be offering a review of it as part of a late summer doubleheader.

Pier S. of Chicago writes: I am entering my senior year as a Comparative Women's Studies major at Spelman College. Rapper Nelly's foundation approached Spelman with putting together a bone marrow drive, and when a few students saw one of his recent videos with him swiping a credit card down the backside of a woman, we told him not to come to our school.

And such support encouraged the columnist, who will probably stay on this message as a consequence. It is by small steps such as these that the great leaders and the great speeches will emerge.

(As a sidelight to researching this post, Steve Levitt has a new economic analysis of crack addiction, which is still present but less deadly. He suggests that policy sometimes ought be changed when the conditions leading to the policy are no longer present, but policy makers are often reluctant to rethink their designs.)