Freakonomics, Abortion, and Crime

[Jelly]

I'm surprised this is just now making it to the mainstream and if not for Bill Bennett's comment it probably wouldn't have as this topic is probably too taboo for most people. Anyway, I'm not really interested in Bennetts foot-in-mouth problem, but thought I'd post something on Freakonomics, a really great book I read over the summer. The book is not all about abortion, that's just one chapter. But the abortion chapter is an interesting one.

The effect of abortion on violent crime
20 September 2005
By BOB BROCKIE

Between 1990 and 2000, the homicide rate in New York fell 74 per cent, and, across the whole of the United States, by 40 per cent. The sudden fall took everyone by surprise.


Some experts put the drop down to brilliant new police strategies. Others thought that more policemen, increased reliance on prisons, changing drug markets, an aging population, extending the death penalty, tougher gun laws, a surging economy, etc, did the trick.

Steven Levitt, a professor of economics in Chicago, looked at the figures and reckoned they didn't add up. He found that increasing police numbers, innovative police strategies, etc, had trifling effects on the crime rate. The real cause of the dramatic drop lay elsewhere – in relaxed abortion laws.

Abortions were legalised in some American states before 1971. Twenty years later, the murder rates in those states suddenly fell 23 per cent. In 1973, after the landmark Roe vs Wade Supreme Court decision, legalised abortion was extended to the whole country. Twenty years later, violent crime fell dramatically over the whole country.

Professor Levitt tells us that in the US, most violent criminals are born to poor, teenaged mothers with little education. Growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles an American child's propensity to commit serious crimes.

Before Roe vs Wade, only women who could afford $500 had abortions. After Roe v Wade, any woman with $100 could get one. Who took advantage of the new situation? Mainly poor, teenaged, uneducated, unmarried women and girls.

The effects of the changed birth pattern took 20 years to emerge – just as young men entered their criminal prime. A whole cohort of criminally inclined youth was missing in the 1990s, and this is why the US crime rate fell so suddenly.

Moralists and criminologists alike are pretty sceptical about Professor Levitt's theory – too unspeakable or too simple an explanation.

But perhaps we could test Professor Levitt's theory here in New Zealand? Our abortion laws were liberalised in 1977. Did our murder rate start falling 20 years later? A quick check shows that's exactly what happened. Justice Ministry figures reveal that, before 1977, an average 29.4 murderers were convicted annually in New Zealand. From 1997 to 2003, the number dropped to 25.9 murder convictions – an 11 per cent drop despite a growing national population. Someone needs to look at these figures more closely because it might be just a coincidence.

They say that economics is the "dismal" science, but Professor Levitt goes a long way to pep it up by exploring alternatives to conventional wisdom. For example, his research shows that it is 100 times more dangerous for an American child to visit a house with a swimming pool than to visit a house full of guns; that putting books in the homes of poor families does nothing to improve their educational success; that cheating is rife among American school teachers and Japanese sumo wrestlers; and so on.

That's why they call Professor Levitt the Indiana Jones of Economics. Read more in his recent book, Freakonomics.

[Vashner]

Interesting read.

[JoePublic]

Makes sense.

Less people. Less crime.

Less Ozone. More heat.

[RandomGuy]

It's a good book.

I thought the bit on crack dealer economics was very informative.

It should suprise no one that knows him that RG has read this book.

[Extra Stout]

Makes sense.

Less people. Less crime.

Less Ozone. More heat.His argument is that targeting abortions on a specific subset of the population, in this case poor unwed women, yields a disproportionate drop in the crime rate.

Basically, this is why Margaret Sanger started Planned Parenthood in the first place.

It's also why the wealthy conservative elite give little more than lip service to the pro-life movement. Abortion-on-demand means fewer poor people for the state to take care of, a lesser burden on things like schools, less crime, lower taxes, etc.

[scott]

On a slightly related note, I recommend "Sex, Drugs, and Economics" by Diane Cole for those who enjoyed Freakonomics. It covers more issues, and it takes more of a theoretical approach to various issues. Chapter one explores why prostitution isn't a more popular profession given the potential wealth one can make doing it.

[Nbadan]

Steven Levitt responds to Bill Bennet...


Bill Bennett and I have a fair amount in common. We've both written about crime (his "superpredator" theory gets a quick discussion in Freakonomics), we have both thought a lot about illegal drugs and education (he was the original "drug czar" and is a former Secretary of Education), and we both love to gamble (although it seems I do it for much lower stakes and perhaps with greater success).

Now we also share the fact that we have made controversial statements about the link between abortion and crime.

...

2) Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics. It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets). In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement. Empirically, what matters is the fact that abortions are disproportionately used on unwanted pregnancies, and disproportionately by teenage women and single women.

...


7) There is one thing I would take Bennett to task for: first saying that he doesn't believe our abortion-crime hypothesis but then revealing that he does believe it with his comments about black babies. You can't have it both ways.

Freakonomics (http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/09/bill-bennett-and-freakonomics.html)

[jochhejaam]

Makes sense.

Less people. Less crime.


Not less people, fewer people that are categorized as "more likely to commit crime".


Oh, and BTW, you can purchase the "ebook" on ebay for 99 cents.


http://cgi.ebay.com/FREAKONOMICS-eBook-0-99-INSTANT-DOWNLOAD-PL0141339_W0QQitemZ4579489612QQcategoryZ378QQrdZ1Q QcmdZViewItem
(copy/paste)

[scott]

I think showing Levitt's full thoughts on Bennett's comments are in order:


Here are my thoughts on this exchange:

1) People should bear in mind that this took place on an unscripted radio show in response to a caller's question. It was clearly off-the-cuff. This is a very different situation than, say, Bennett's writing an op-ed piece.

2) Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics. It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets). In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement. Empirically, what matters is the fact that abortions are disproportionately used on unwanted pregnancies, and disproportionately by teenage women and single women.

3) Some people might think that my comments in (2) above are just ducking the race issue because it is politically correct to do so. Anyone who has read Freakonomics knows that I am not afraid to take issues of race head on. Much of the book deals with challenging issues of race (e.g. black-white test score gaps, black naming patterns, etc.). I mean it when I say that, from a purely fact-based and statistical perspective, race is not in any way central to our arguments about abortion and crime.

4) When a woman gets an abortion, for the most part it is not changing the total number of children she has; rather, it is shifting the timing so those births come later in life. This is an important fact to remember. One in four pregnancies ends in abortion and this has been true for 30 years in the U.S. But the impact of abortion on the overall birth rate has been quite small.

5) In light of point (4) above, it is hard to even know what Bennett means when he says "you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Implicit in his comment is the idea that some external force, like a government, is forcing blacks to have abortions. This is obviously a completely different situation than abortion as we know it today, in which a woman chooses whether or not to have an abortion now, and then starts her family later in life, when her situation is more stable and conducive. The distinction between a woman choosing to control her fertility and the government choosing to limit her fertility is fundamental and people often seem to lose sight of that.

6) If we lived in a world in which the government chose who gets to reproduce, then Bennett would be correct in saying that "you could abort every black baby in this country, and
your crime rate would go down." Of course, it would also be true that if we aborted every white, Asian, male, Republican, and Democratic baby in that world, crime would also fall. Immediately after he made the statement about blacks, he followed it up by saying, "That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down." He made a factual statement (if you prohibit any group from reproducing, then the crime rate will go down), and then he noted that just because a statement is true, it doesn't mean that it is desirable or moral. That is, of course, an incredibly important distinction and one that we make over and over in Freakonomics.

7) There is one thing I would take Bennett to task for: first saying that he doesn't believe our abortion-crime hypothesis but then revealing that he does believe it with his comments about black babies. You can't have it both ways.

8) As an aside, the initial caller's statement is completely wrong. If abortion were illegal, our Social Security problems would not be solved. As noted above, most abortions just shift a child from being born today to a child being born to the same mother a few years later.

[RandomGuy]

I wish the guy had a more important job with the government so that we could bring some rationality to our policies and not the cronyism and party hacks that seem to be running things...

[Dos]

and clinton never used cronyism... travelgate, chinagate, nannygate, whitewater..

the hypocrisy is so funny...

what's worse mike brown or ms. O'leary

As a globalist, Clinton promotes "multipolarity"– the doctrine that no country (such as the USA) should be allowed to gain decisive advantage over others.

To this end, Clinton appointed anti-nuclear activist Hazel O’Leary to head the Department of Energy. O’Leary set to work "leveling the playing field," as she put it, by giving away our nuclear secrets. She declassified 11 million pages of data on U.S. nuclear weapons and loosened up security at weapons labs.

Federal investigators later concluded that China made off with the "crown jewels" of our nuclear weapons research under Clinton’s open-door policy – probably including design specifications for suitcase nukes.

Meanwhile, Clinton and his corporate cronies raked in millions.

[ChumpDumper]

what's worse mike brown or ms. O'learyWell, she actually ran a utility company before her appointment. Maybe if she was into horsies.

Her travel pissed me off more than anything.

[Nbadan]

It's books like these that make me glad that we don't have an economist as President. Economists truely have no heart, or at least they have a difficult time figuring in the true value of the human-heart into the raw statistics they are compiling. Kinda like Scott's human crude project, yes, a complete joke to most of us, but to an economist - it's reality baby!

:hat

[RandomGuy]

It's books like these that make me glad that we don't have an economist as President. Economists truely have no heart, or at least they have a difficult time figuring in the true value of the human-heart into the raw statistics they are compiling. Kinda like Scott's human crude project, yes, a complete joke to most of us, but to an economist - it's reality baby!

:hat

Believe it or not there is quite some debate in economic circles about the human costs of things and how to value that. Honest.

Economists want to understand the way things ARE, and use that to figure out the way things should be. An imperfect understanding of the way things are leads us into blunders like Iraq.

[RandomGuy]

and clinton never used cronyism... travelgate, chinagate, nannygate, whitewater..

the hypocrisy is so funny...

what's worse mike brown or ms. O'leary

As a globalist, Clinton promotes "multipolarity"– the doctrine that no country (such as the USA) should be allowed to gain decisive advantage over others.

To this end, Clinton appointed anti-nuclear activist Hazel O’Leary to head the Department of Energy. O’Leary set to work "leveling the playing field," as she put it, by giving away our nuclear secrets. She declassified 11 million pages of data on U.S. nuclear weapons and loosened up security at weapons labs.

Federal investigators later concluded that China made off with the "crown jewels" of our nuclear weapons research under Clinton’s open-door policy – probably including design specifications for suitcase nukes.

Meanwhile, Clinton and his corporate cronies raked in millions.

Bush senior used cronyism. Reagan used cronyism. Clinton used cronyism. I never said otherwise. I think it is much worse under Bush than it was ever underclinton. Usually you put political appointees someplace where they can't do much damage, like embassodor to outer mongolia, as opposed to agencies that manage disaster relief operations.

Clinton declassified a lot more than that, because he was advised that the US government was "over-classifying" everything at an enormous expense. It was part of the whole balancing the budget thing that Bush seems to be clueless about...

[RandomGuy]

Meanwhile, Clinton and his corporate cronies raked in millions.


Millions, heh, that's cute.

How much in contracts to US companies has Iraq been worth?

[RandomGuy]

Pop Quiz: How many spending bills has GW vetoed?


(answer: zero)


So Bush has essentially signed off on the biggest loads of pork in US history at the expense of our children's ability to make a decent living.

[ChumpDumper]

Saying that Clinton's declassifications were the sole cause of Chinese information theft is quite ridiculous. The Cox Report is replete with Chinese espionage techniques that had nothing to do with paging through declassified documents.

[RandomGuy]

Saying that Clinton's declassifications were the sole cause of Chinese information theft is quite ridiculous. The Cox Report is replete with Chinese espionage techniques that had nothing to do with paging through declassified documents.

Bingo. They had a good leap on us even without such things.

I will restate:

The costs of keeping so many classified documents gets big in a hurry, AND creates the appearance of impropriety when it comes to making governments accountable.

[Dos]

Pop Quiz: How many spending bills has GW vetoed?


(answer: zero)


So Bush has essentially signed off on the biggest loads of pork in US history at the expense of our children's ability to make a decent living.


and where is the democratic outrage, it's not like the democrats are all of sudden budget cutters... lol

[RandomGuy]

and where is the democratic outrage, it's not like the democrats are all of sudden budget cutters... lol

Democrats have been advocating balanced budgets since Clinton. The GOP used to be for balanced budgets until they got control of both houses of congress AND the executive. Then all of a sudden they realized that they wanted to be re-elected and that was more important than the public good.

[jochhejaam]

Democrats have been advocating balanced budgets since Clinton. The GOP used to be for balanced budgets until they got control of both houses of congress AND the executive. Then all of a sudden they realized that they wanted to be re-elected and that was more important than the public good.

There United States wasn't involved in a whole heck of a lot of world turmoil when Clinton was President. We weren't involved in any major military conflicts, oil was plentiful and because of this and other factors, that were not a result of Clinton being President, we had a rather robust economy.

Today, with unprecedented recent natural disasters occuring along our coasts over the past two years and with terrorist induced Wars and terrorism causing worldwide conflagration, a balanced budget goes out the window.
Ever have a crisis in your family that caused you to spend more than you had? (Credit)

Oh, and the Dems are just as bad as the Repubs when it comes to putting pork in the budget. As the saying goes, "the pork always gets greased on both sides". You don't mess with my pork and I won't mess with yours.

[RandomGuy]

There United States wasn't involved in a whole heck of a lot of world turmoil when Clinton was President. We weren't involved in any major military conflicts, oil was plentiful and because of this and other factors, that were not a result of Clinton being President, we had a rather robust economy.

Today, with unprecedented recent natural disasters occuring along our coasts over the past two years and with terrorist induced Wars and terrorism causing worldwide conflagration, a balanced budget goes out the window.
Ever have a crisis in your family that caused you to spend more than you had? (Credit)

Oh, and the Dems are just as bad as the Repubs when it comes to putting pork in the budget. As the saying goes, "the pork always gets greased on both sides". You don't mess with my pork and I won't mess with yours.


Democrats in congress are indeed as culpable of pork as the GOP. But the GOP are in the majority. All the credit, all the blame.

The dangerous thing is that the President is not of the opposition party and hasn't called them on their pork.

Balanced budgets can easily be balanced by either spending reductions or raising taxes, IF you are fiscally responsible.

Deficit spending on occasion is not really a bad thing, but how much is too much?

Do we wait until we have to have massive tax increases to cover our over-extended credit to think "gee maybe we should have balanced the budget a bit more"?

Does it take economic collapse to do something about it? Disaster planning and fortifying the fiscal levees should be done BEFORE the hurricane hits.

The cost of doing nothing and hoping for the best is NOT a rational one.

[RandomGuy]

Your personal credit rating is based on your earning potential and amount of accumulated debt. Countries are evaluated along similar lines.

Here is our overall (government) debt compared to our national income.

http://mwhodges.home.att.net/debtfull.gif

[RandomGuy]

It gets worse when we factor in consumer and corporate debt...

http://mwhodges.home.att.net/nat-debt/natdebt-vs-natincome.gif

[RandomGuy]

But Random Guy, isn't all that government debt money we owe ourselves? So when we pay it back it just goes back into the economy, right?

Not really...

http://mwhodges.home.att.net/debt-foreign-share.gif

[RandomGuy]

Charts and graphs to back it up, I know it's scary compared to the usual half-baked crap that pervades most message boards, so I hope it doesn't freak y'all out too much.

[RandomGuy]

First, approximately 17 cents out of every dollar of total tax revenue collected is immediately used merely to pay the burgeoning interest on the Federal debt. This is now surpassing the costs for our entire defense establishment, and it is exceeded only by the revenues needed to fund the total Medicare and Medicaid programs. (Ostensibly, Social Security is funded independently.) We are held hostage by this horrendous debt; 17 cents is the ransom to be paid out of every dollar we must cough up in taxes.

A good article on this topic (http://www.businessforum.com/debt01.html)


Somebody tell me again how Reaganomics works? :rolleyes
The effect of all this is essentially tax raises on the future.

[RandomGuy]

:angel

I might claim to be an accounting student next. I might even claim to know something about finance due using all my electives on finance courses that I got A's in.

But since this is the internet, I would probably be lying, because I couldn't possibly know more than any randomly selected Joe-schmoe. :rolleyes

[RandomGuy]

Having said that:

http://www.trephination.net/gallery/macros/internet_cock.jpg

:smokin

[RandomGuy]

Saying that Clinton's declassifications were the sole cause of Chinese information theft is quite ridiculous. The Cox Report is replete with Chinese espionage techniques that had nothing to do with paging through declassified documents.

Maybe not ridiculous, but rather:

The evidence doesn't support such a conclusion.

Believing it does, THAT is ridiculous.

[RandomGuy]

Hmm, I seem to have killed this with too many facts.

(turns on his conservative-mind reader device, and turns up the volume)

"That damn random guy! we were trying to have a completely baseless defense of the Bush administration and he keeps bringing up these inconvenient facts. How can we argue like mindless parrots when all these facts keep getting in the way?

[scott]

Trust me, inconvenient facts won't get in the way for some...

[Extra Stout]

I have a few questions:

At what percent of GDP does the national debt get so high that creditors lose faith in the ability of the U.S. to pay it back? How does the national debt load compare to other industrialized nations? How does it compare to major corporations? Are comparisons to major corporations valid?

Also,

How does the return on investment for our deficit spending compare to the interest it is incurring? Are we getting any return on it or is Congress just looting the Treasury?

[boutons]

The EC demands that member countries keep their deficit below 3% of GDP. France is currently in trouble with the EC for not being able to get below 3%, and risks fines, but will probably wiggle out claiming "special circumstances":

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3160494.stm

For the USA:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-01-26-def_x.htm

.... projected 2005 budget deficit at 4.2% of GDP.

There's no return on the portion of the deficit going up in smoke in the Iraq war. But the biggest cause of the explosion the US budget deficit is tax cuts. What is the return for the US govt in tax cuts?

Keynesian principles would say running temporary deficits to stimluate the economy are advisable. But the US economy isn't in need of stimulation. Temporary tax cuts are a way to incur temporary deficits for temporary problems. But the Repubs don't give a shit about solving problems, only cutting taxes blindly, so they want to make tax cuts, predominantly for the rich and crops, permanent, making the budget deficit permanent and increasing.

The obvious Repub goal of running big deficits is to accelerate the inevitable point where the deficits have to reduced, the interest on the debt paid. The Repub reponse has been and will be to cut programs for the poor. eg, disqualifying people from Medicaid (200K people were disqualified from Medicaid recently in KY or TN to "fix" that state's budget problem). The whole approach is the well-known "starving the beast", where the US govt is all bad, govt is THE problem, and taxes are a form of stealing.

The Repubs see Katrina and Rita as opportunities, pretexts to over-spend like hell, no monitoring, dropping $Bs on the Gulf Coast region, like sand bags of $$ from helicopters. Just another Repub tactic to run up deficits and justify cutting back govt programs, esp social safety net programs, later.

[RandomGuy]

I have a few questions:

At what percent of GDP does the national debt get so high that creditors lose faith in the ability of the U.S. to pay it back? How does the national debt load compare to other industrialized nations? How does it compare to major corporations? Are comparisons to major corporations valid?

Also,

How does the return on investment for our deficit spending compare to the interest it is incurring? Are we getting any return on it or is Congress just looting the Treasury?


HOOORAAAYY!!! Intelligent questions.

Q. At what percent...?
A. Nobody knows until they stop buying our treasuries, and by then it is too late, and interest rates go through the roof.

Q. How does the US debt load compare to other countries?
A. Bloody good question, and one I don't know myself. (fires up google for an answer)

Germany:
Every second, Germany's national debt increases by €2,186 ($2,621), BdSt, the self-proclaimed "financial conscience of the nation" calculated. That figure reflects the average monthly salary of a German employee. The group estimated that Finance Minister Hans Eichel had to spend every fifth euro paid in taxes last year to cover the €38 billion interest the national debt acquired.
Nearly too fast for the naked eye
The last four digits on the clock move so quickly you can hardly register them. On Friday morning it stood at €1,361,959,207,548.
article on the german "Debt clock" ((( http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1239561,00.html ))
Note current euro exchange rates are about 1.17 dollars to one euro.
This suggests to me that german debt is running roughly the same as ours, that is about 20% of governmental revenue. Given that the german government consumes more of a percentage of the GDP than the US government, I would estimate their debt level to be larger in proportion to ours.

Japan:
http://www.mof.go.jp/english/budget/brief/2004/2004f_01.htm
Tax + Other Revenues (A)45,520.9 National Debt Service (B)17,568.6
The Japanese have done a LOT of deficit spending in a rather fruitless attempt to kick-start their moribund economy, so based on the above their level of debt service is about at 24 percent or so of their government revenues.

I would guess that other industrialized countries are running about the same as the US, or worse.

This leads me to a really good page on the topic:
http://www.sumeria.net/politics/debt.html

It is a bit dated, but has some interesting points in it. I am not sure I agree with the guy on everything, but the article is a very educational one.

I MUST get some sleep, so I will get to the rest of it later.