Ecomomist Steve Levitt’s nemesis, Steve Sailer, predicted that a hot-shot young economist would make a name for himself by debunking Levitt’s abortion-reduced-crime theory found in the pages of the bestseller, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
A couple of economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found some coding errors in Levitt’s research. I don’t know how young and hot they are, but here’s the deal:
Mr. Levitt asserts there is a link between the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s and the drop in crime rates in the 1990s. Christopher Foote, a senior economist at the Boston Fed, and Christopher Goetz, a research assistant, say the research behind that conclusion is faulty…
The theory: Unwanted children are more likely to become troubled adolescents, prone to crime and drug use, than are wanted children. When abortion was legalized in the 1970s, a whole generation of unwanted births were averted, leading to a drop in crime nearly two decades later when this phantom generation would have come of age…The Boston Fed’s Mr. Foote says he spotted a missing formula in the programming of Mr. Levitt’s original research. (Source)
In response, Levitt writes, “This is personally quite embarrassing because I pride myself on being careful with data.” Download a PDF copy of the “debunking” paper.
I don’t think Levitt ought to be too worried about coding errors even if they blow the whole theory apart because most people couldn’t care less about statistics and economics, although they should. Several months ago Levitt and Sailer (and here) both commented on a post I’d written titled Steven Levitt Says Child Killing Reduces Crime.
I don’t care about stats as much as I should, either, but Sailer’s response to Levitt sounded more convincing than Levitt’s theory. It’s sort of like obscenity: I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it. Sailer wrote:
Did legalizing abortion in the early 70s reduce crime in the late 90s by allowing “pre-emptive capital punishment: of potential troublemakers? Or did the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, by outmoding shotgun weddings, adoption, and respect for life, instead make more murderous the early 90s crack wars fought by the first generation of youths to survive legalized abortion? (Source)
Yeah, that one.
I encourage you to read both articles cited above, then hop on over to Sailer’s abortion page to see how this male cat fight evolved (I mean that in a good way, boys…). 
Related post: What Bill Bennett Said
Bloggers’ links:
- Steve Levitt’s blog
- Steve Sailer’s blog
- Gregg Jackson’s abortion post
