The mechanism by which any effects on crime have to be happening here are the women making good choices. Where can I find some variation in something that drives the thing that I want to see if it affects?, I still find it really difficult to explain fully what we are doing when we are separating correlation from causation. Will those numbers fall even further? A normative analysis of this phenomenon might ask the question of whether or not abortion should be legalized. That if its really true that most of the decline in crime is due to legalized abortion, then it brings real caution to the idea that a super-aggressive policing and incarceration policy is necessarily the right one to pursue. As with the abortion thesis, which used Roe v. Wade as a natural experiment, Reyess lead idea had a similar fulcrum point.
The highest abortion-rate states, the medium abortion-rate states, and the lowest-abortion rate states. LEVITT: Maybe its you, Dubner. GradeSaver, 27 July 2016 Web. Maybe its hanging around with you, and your great humanity has started to rub off on me. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt. The silver lining on Foote and Goetz pointing out the mistake is that it actually gave us the opportunity to go back and take care of the measurement error that was in the data, and actually think sensibly about it. Two big sources of environmental lead, in the old days, were gasoline and paint. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. Its funny that people argue, Oh, there can only be one cause to why crime went down. And it seems to me that thats a pretty good premise for young kids. But also, these so-called unwanted kids would ultimately be more likely to engage in criminal behaviors. Did it immediately suggest policy or political or healthcare follow-ups? And of course the Vietnam War had multiple influences that contributed to social unrest. NBC: The Ohio governor signing today what critics condemn as the most restrictive abortion law in the country. Here are the seven facts.. I really just wanted to understand, is this a factor that has altered the path of crime in the United States? I really think Ive gotten very mellow in old age. under the Clean Air Act in the early 1970s.
And it finally came out in 2001.
Indeed, this is how many academic researchers, and lots of other scientists, generally think about the world. And as Ive gotten older, Ive just gotten very soft and friendly and nice and I never would have imagined that I would be so accepting of my teenagers and their various foibles. And then, almost absent a lot of discussion of data, ask people to make a judgment about whether the hypothesis is true. One of his collaborators was named John Donohue. The Question and Answer section for Freakonomics is a great I wonder if it has to do with the fact that the issues themselves and the causal mechanisms underneath them are actually less important to people than the tribal affiliation with a position. LEVITT: It was fun for people to jump on the bandwagon of attacking us because nobody really liked the hypothesis in the first place. So ultimately I think our study is interesting because it helps us understand why crime has gone down.
The battle goes back at least to 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court took up a case called Roe v. Wade.
Policing and imprisonment. Not affiliated with Harvard College. When crime began to drastically fall in the U.S. in the early 1990s, experts sought an explanation for the fall. DONOHUE: The error was almost more in the description of the paper rather than an actual mathematical error.
While each of these, in theory, might seem to have some explanatory power, Levitt found they didnt. I think sometimes when people get older they get mean, and sometimes they get nice and Im not sure why I got nice instead of mean, but I somehow became more human. LEVITT: I didnt feel like the Foote and Goetz critique was very damaging to the hypothesis. Donohue had been doing a lot of thinking about the rise in crime, starting in the 1960s. These children born after the abortion ban would lead especially miserable lives, less successful in school and in the workforce on average than children born before them. What did Kevins mom offer to do if her son could meet these standards? So a bunch of different, all quite imperfect sources of variation, that allow us to get some sense of whether there might be some causality between legalized abortion and crime. But it does seem to me a very powerful force, and there is something so incredibly tragic to me about the idea that there are kids out there who arent loved and who suffer and look, its backed up by our data that leads them to tough things in life. And I think thats fair.
Levitt moves on to explanations that center on demographic change. So I think that the complexity of what we do, the fact that we use all of these econometric techniques to figure out these complex situations, makes it suspicious to people. REYES: There is a large, huge literature on how lead is toxic to humans. When Nicolae Ceausescu became the communist dictator of Romania, he made abortion illegal. Donohue was particularly interested in criminal-justice issues: gun policy, sentencing guidelines, things like that. I really wasnt thinking very much about the way in which this would be received. But what kind of policy would be suggested? Today, Blank is chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And these were New York, California, Washington state, Alaska, and Hawaii. Especially when other, more comforting theories present themselves. LEVITT: So, thats a pretty profound question. ABC: The Supreme Court today ruled that abortion is completely a private matter to be decided by mother and doctor in the first three months of pregnancy. It was certainly damaging to me and my reputation because I had made those mistakes, but the hypothesis I think comes through in flying colors.
She published her findings in 2009, arguing that the removal of lead under the Clean Air Act was, an additional important factor in explaining the decline in crime in the 1990s. Did her paper refute the Donohue-Levitt conclusions about abortion and crime? So there is an enormously important role for science in understanding those causal mechanisms. DONOHUE: It was a whirlwind of reaction and some of it was a little unnerving, because people were reading into the study things that we certainly did not intend. Also: what this means for abortion policy, crime policy, and having intelligent conversations about contentious topics.
If you want more Levitt, mark your calendar: on September 26th in Chicago, hell be joining me for a Freakonomics Radio Live event on the state of counterterrorism and international risk management. So right now, maybe the most interesting way to portray an idea is to talk about the hypothesis. In many places today, violent crime is at historic lows. It wasnt driven by state policy. And we find numbers there that are completely consistent with the rest of our analysis, that those who were born just a few years apart do much less crime than those who were born in the earlier years. Were able to look and see well, is it really true that the highest abortion states and the lowest abortion states had similar crime trends when you expected them to have similar crime trends. Levitt reviews the eight most-cited explanations for this drop. And at the same time, there was pressure going in the opposite direction to try to reduce the harshness of punishment, and perhaps pull back a little bit on elements of policing.
DUBNER: How did the population of women who were having abortions change, from before Roe v. Wade or really, from before abortion was legalized state by state to afterwards? Access to birth control and many other factors that may intersect or not with crime causal factors. And we had thought of doing something that looked very specifically by single year of age, but we hadnt done it. Which, again points out how poor it is as a natural experiment.
So if theres one thing that comes out of our research, it is the idea that unwantedness is super-powerful. But many people who believed in the right to choose, they were also upset because we were kind of saying, Well youre killing these fetuses, so they never get a chance to grow up to be criminals. The number of death threats that I got from the left was actually greater than the number of death threats I got from the right. If youre pro-life and you believe that the fetus is equivalent in moral value to a person, well then, the tradeoff is awful. Fewer than 300 a year. And you know, is that better early education? That the two effects are operating relatively independently, and that each one is of similar magnitude when you do or dont account for the other. For instance, he found that minorities who kill whites receive disproportionately harsher sentences in Connecticut; this research ultimately led to changes in that state. And for the record, we should say that you have six kids, so plainly youre in the pro-kid camp and you want them. Thats right. DUBNER: So as youre putting together this collage of evidence, what did it feel like to see the strength of this evidence of the link between legalized abortion and crime? Newt GINGRICH: There are no violent offenses that are juvenile. I mean, these are really massive changes. This past May, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down an abortion-related appeal from Indiana. You know me, and Im not exactly completely human. What we did was, in a very tired, quick way, we added table seven to our paper, which turns out supported our paper, but we didnt try very hard. And as I was looking at the elements of crime in the U.S., there was quite an overlap between the populations that were involved in this increase in crime with the group that she was identifying as the group of women who were most likely to be experiencing higher rates of abortion. But since that would tend to have a disproportionate effect on lower socioeconomic status, you might see exactly the problem that we have identified, that the children that are most at-risk, because theyre unwanted pregnancies, would be the ones most likely to be born once these restrictions are imposed. Remember, there are still more than 600,000 abortions a year in the U.S. LEVITT: And John Donohue and I estimate maybe that there are 5,000 or 10,000 fewer homicides because of it. There are of course many reasons why a given woman may decide to have, or not have, a baby. Its a discussion about right or wrong. But we can sort of infer from the changes that did occur, and the fact that, you know, some states legalized in 1970 and became avenues for travel to have abortions done, we can sort of piece together who was traveling to have abortions and see how things changed when then abortion became legal everywhere. LEVITT: So if indeed these states are making abortions much harder to get, then our study, our hypothesis, unambiguously suggests that there will be an impact on crime in the future. LEVITT: I dont think so. And then youre wrong, but youve still looked at the data, you still have a lot of interesting patterns in the data and then you go back, and you reconstruct a new hypothesis based on what youve seen. I asked Levitt and Donohue what they might expect to happen to crime if, or as, abortion becomes less accessible.
So you and John Donohue did revisit the study. When we did table seven the right way, even correcting for that mistake we made in the initial paper, the results are actually stronger than ever. Remember, the magnitude of abortion was huge: at its peak, there were 345 abortions for every 1,000 live births. In 2001, the economist Steve Levitt and the economist-slash-legal scholar John Donohue published a paper arguing that the legalization of abortion in the U.S., in 1973, accounted for as much as half of the nationwide reduction in crime a generation later. One explanation that did have some effect on the crime drop was the bursting of the "crack bubble," when profits for dealing crack began to fall so the crack-dealing tournament lost its allure and gang violence abated. LEVITT: Theres a lot of validity to that argument. DONOHUE: So the nice thing in the data that we had available was we could look at arrest rates by single age of individual.
It was also a time of great flux around the Vietnam War. And we really just want to understand what that is. Copyright 1999 - 2022 GradeSaver LLC. As an Amazon Associate, Freakonomics may earn commissions from qualifying purchases made through links on this site. Its called multivariate causality: that is, almost no effect has only a single cause all the time. In the early 1990s, violent crime began to fall and then it fell and fell and fell some more.
People who are in favor of right-to-life were upset because our argument seemed to be endorsing the idea that legalized abortion had positive effects. And I even find it like my family, I cant convince them. I mean, this is your most famous research.
Thats Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author. REYES: You should be trying to figure out what is true. Often, either you start with the data or a set of patterns and then you build the theory back from that, or often what happens is you have a theory, you have a hypothesis, and you go to the data. ABC: New developments in the escalating battle over abortion. Capital punishment (i.e. the death penalty), however, did not significantly reduce crime, since executions so rarely happened in the United States anyway. This episode features a relatively rare appearance by my Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levitt. That seemed to be firm evidence in support of the thesis. Today, with about the same number of live births, there are only about 640,000 abortions. LEVITT: I remember coming into my office and my voicemail was full. So even while their argument was empirically strong, and their cause-and-effect mechanism plainly logical, it might be discomfiting to fully embrace it. That, again, is Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, who wrote about the link between crime and lead pollution. DUBNER: Did that initial thought even make you a little uncomfortable? Which of the following factors do you think would show a strong correlation (positive OR negative!) Lets use New York City as an example. That was in 1990. Do you think it will continue to hold forth or is the world, this complex world we live in, changing enough so that the effect of abortion on crime will diminish over time? LEVITT: So if Im born in 1972 in Minnesota well, I probably live a pretty similar life to someone whos born in 1974 in Minnesota, okay? Or, you know, minimum incomes? The firstthe aging of the populationwas too slow to explain the sudden crime drop. Who knows what the answer really would be. But in terms of policy towards abortion, youre really misguided if you use our study to base your opinion about what the right policy is towards abortion. But it involved travel and expense, and therefore was too much of an impediment for the group of women that we are most interested in, which are the ones who are usually at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, and did not have the opportunity and resources that would permit them to travel. DUBNER: Okay. You rape somebody, youre an adult. Initially, perhaps, but recently too. But somehow Im growing more human traits over time, dont you think? And its affected me as a father in the sense that when I first was having kids, I didnt feel maybe so obligated to make children feel loved. Heres Levitt. They actually were states that had many, many more abortions, a much higher abortion rate than the other states. Aside from abortion itself being a controversial subject, the main reason why it is difficult for people to accept Roe v. Wade as the number-one factor contributing to the crime drop is that, since it happened nearly 20 years before, it seemed so far removed from the present. Its really hard for a layperson to be able to watch a scientific debate, or social-scientific debate, especially one thats being mediated through, you know, newspapers and magazines and blogs, so much being lost in translation, and figure out whats really true. I think a great approach is not to say, Heres my hypothesis. A great approach is say, Heres what we know about the world.
DUBNER: I do. They argued that Donohue and Levitts paper contained a coding error which, when corrected, blunted their findings. Bob DOLE: Experts call them superpredators. Im lacking some of the basic things that many humans have. He wondered, for instance, if it might somehow be connected to the huge drop in crime. And its interesting that now as I go through a second round of kids, I am not trying to teach my kids very much. The sheer magnitude of abortions surprised Levitt. DONOHUE: There are lots of moving parts to this story. He says this is because we prefer to link causality with things we can touch and feel, rather than with a distant or difficult phenomenon.
DUBNER: You know, a lot has changed since 1973, beyond abortion policy and abortion laws.
DONOHUE: Yeah. Its sort of this magic thing were doing and then we come out with results. The last clinic in Missouri on the verge of closing today. The overall abortion rate has also fallen by nearly as much. That said, so-called unwanted pregnancies have been falling in the U.S. One toxicant Reyes focused on was lead pollution. So that you have different states experiencing different time patterns of lead exposure. Theyre not very helpful at all. It also paints a chilling picture of the kind of crime levels that may have been similarly seen in the U.S. had the Roe v. Wade decision gone the other way and the crime rate continued rising. Because the other thing that emerged out of the media coverage is that it very quickly became a question of race, even though really our paper wasnt about race at all. Oops-onomics. In the Wall Street Journal? (There are eight that are strongly correlated and eight that arent.). There are some important corporate, political dynamics.
That is, after Roe v. Wade, what were the characteristics of the women most likely to get an abortion. The Impact of Childhood Lead Exposure on Crime. But really you could not and you cannot effectively explain the patterns of crime looking at the kinds of components that people typically talk about when they try to understand why crime goes up and down.
I include their abortion measure in my analysis, and I find that the abortion effect is pretty much unchanged when one includes the lead effect. In terms of other things like policing or drugs or other things in the environment. What happened to crime? Instead, what we have to do by necessity is to look at a collage of evidence. Before that point, abortion rates were high in Romania, with four abortions for every live birth. And when you write an academic paper you go through a refereeing process and the refereeing process we went through was especially brutal. So it really isnt very policy-relevant.
Freakonomics study guide contains a biography of Steven D. Levitt, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Because its almost mind-boggling that a factor that is so removed from the usual set of things that we think about influencing crime may have been such an enormous factor. Steve Levitt and John Donohue discuss their original research, the challenges to its legitimacy, and their updated analysis. But by the time Donohue and Levitt corrected their work, and found that the correction didnt weaken their hypothesis, the headlines had already been written. Let me answer a very narrow aspect of that question. LEVITT: It turns out in this particular case, John Donohue and I had a hypothesis and then we went to the data. Had these children been born, they would have been 50 percent more likely to live in poverty and thus extremely likely to have a criminal future. You just released an update to that 2001 paper, and this ones called The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime Over the Last Two Decades. Did your prediction turn out to be true, false, somewhere in the middle? Imprisonment acts as a deterrent to crime, despite being an extremely costly procedure, and accounted for roughly one-third of the drop in crime. LEVITT: So John Donohue and I started working on this paper probably in, I dont know, 1996. And you see how people make very, very strident arguments often as you said not really using a fully considered set of the data.
A positive analysis is objective and fact-based. Normative analysis, however, is subjective and value-based. LEVITT: And Id actually distinguish between the very thoughtful, careful work that she did from some of the other work on lead which is not nearly so good. DONOHUE: And lo and behold, the results were substantially stronger than they were in the 2001 paper.
If the way that social science was reported was to say, Here are the five facts that are true about the world. And then what those mean are up to people to agree upon.
LEVITT: Everybody hated it. LEVITT: Well, theyre all liberal, and Alaska and Hawaii are just weird. LEVITT: So the abortion hypothesis is quite unusual among typical economic ideas in that it makes really strong and quite straightforward predictions about what should happen in the future. That was compared to roughly 4 million live births. But the difference is that those who were born in 1974 were exposed to legalized abortion; those who were born in 1972 werent. We incarcerate millions of people. The abortion ban continued until Ceausescu lost his grip on Romania, when in 1989 he was captured and killed by protestors largely consisting of the youth of Romaniathe ones who would not have been born, had he not instated the abortion ban. But Im curious whats the causal mechanism, honestly. Why? In any case: whats a layperson to do if youre trying to make sense of a debate over complex issues like this? We were just trying to figure out when public policy had changed in this profound way, did it alter the path of crime? But if you think that a fetus is like a person, then thats a horrible tradeoff. How can I figure out is that causal? And that was certainly not anything that we even considered. And it would be useful if people remembered, and were able to put the Okay, Im putting my right-and-wrong hat on as I talk about this, or Im putting my scientific hat on as I talk about exactly how much the world is warming. And those are both very important conversations to have. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And then they almost always come true by the time we write the paper because you only include as your hypothesis the one that is supported, even if it turns out its your seventh hypothesis, and your first six got rejected. LEVITT: So Jessica wrote a really interesting and careful paper that tries to look at patterns in leaded gasoline and relate them to crime. We found that there was roughly a 30 percent difference in what had happened to crime between the highest abortion states and the lowest abortion states by 1997. Freakonomics essays are academic essays for citation. Freakonomics Abortion Research Is Faulted by a Pair of Economists..
What led to this unprecedented, and wildly unexpected turnaround? Levitt does this in his analysis of all of the additional explanations cited to explain the 90s crime drop; while innovation policing strategies appeared to be correlated with the crime drop, in reality it was the rise in the number of police officerswhich went along with the change in policing strategiesthat had the more significant effect. Which is why percentages and probabilities are useful: they express the magnitude of various causes. LEVITT: I actually think that our paper makes really clear why this has nothing to do with eugenics. What did Donohue mean by unwantedness? And John said Yeah, but what about unwantedness? And Im like, What do you mean, unwantedness?.
Everyone agreed that violent crime was out of hand, that the criminals were getting younger, and that the problem was only going to get worse. But the second one really does relate to the idea that if unwantedness is such a powerful influencer on peoples lives, then we should try to do things to make sure that children are wanted. One of my first rules of doing research is when you find out youre wrong, its much better to kill your own theory than have someone kill your theory.
But thats pretty rare in economics and social sciences. Suduiko, Aaron ed. But it is important to remember that correlation does not always prove causation.
And much of the justification for that comes from the idea that those are effective policies for reducing crime.
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