Today I read a review of Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, in today's Wall Street Journal, and it sounds fascinating (if I had the article at hand I'd credit the reviewer. A little help, someone?) Levitt's a University of Chicago economics wunderkind, winner of the John Bates Clark medal awarded annually to the most promising economist under 40, and Dubner is a journalist and Levitt's co-author. In a nutshell, it sounds like Levitt asks some difficult questions and uses rigorous quantitative analysis to come up with some suprising and controversial answers. For example, why did urban crime drop sharply in the 1990s? Most of us would say improving economic conditions, or community policing. Levitt says it's because the people who would have been expected to join the criminal underworld simply didn't exist: they were aborted almost two decades earlier in the wake of Roe v. Wade. The abstract from a 2000 white paper that Levitt wrote with John Donohue for the National Bureau of Economic Research reads:
We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.
And before you get up on your high horse, be sure to read uber-blogger Jason Kottke's brief interview with Levitt:
jkottke: In the chapter on the effect of abortion on crime rates, you and Stephen take care emphasizing what the data says and the strong views that people in the US hold on the issue of abortion. Still, if someone wants to twist your observations into something like "abortion is good because it lowers crime", it's not that difficult. Have your observations in this area caused any problems for you? Any extreme reactions?
Levitt: I have gotten a whole lot of hate mail on the abortion issue (as much from the left as from the right, amazingly). What I try to tell anyone who will listen -- few people will listen when the subject is abortion -- is that our findings on abortion and crime have almost nothing to say about public policy on abortion. If abortion is murder as pro-life advocates say, then a few thousand less homicides is nothing compared to abortion itself. If a woman's right to choose is sacrosanct, then utilitarian arguments are inconsequential. Mainly, I think the results on abortion imply that we should do the best we can to try to make sure kids who are born are wanted and loved. And it turns out that is something just about everyone can agree on.
Well, I guess he's not controversial all the time.
