DarkWizard12

Freakonomics Fiasco: Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory collapses by Steve Sailer; Steven D. Levitt, John J. Donohue, Christopher Foote, Christopher Goetz, Ted Joyce, John R. Lott, Dubner, homicide, murder, Roe v. Wade, Slate

Interesting. Abortion doesn't cut crime afterall...and a university is saying this...I never knew any slightly-conservative university outside Tyler!

shuamort

I read that book more as an interesting theoretical book that offered ideas of how we got to X. I never gave him a lot of credibility as some issues are rather large leaps in logic (yes, he laid a path there, but dominoes don't always fall so linearly).

mikhail

You would have to be blind to not see the theory stands up.Its no perfect thing but it makes perfect sense that if the poorest people in society stop having kids crime willl go down.

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DarkWizard12

Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot the part where you read the link.

mikhail

I did read the link but it doesent mean the basic theory stands up.

Ethereal

So, your only issue with their theory is that you don't agree with its conclusions?

Gladiator

"....the programming oversight made it difficult to pick up other factors that might have influenced crime rates during the 1980s and 1990s, like the crack wave that waxed and waned during that period. He also argues that in producing the research, Mr. Levitt should have counted arrests on a per-capita basis. Instead, he counted overall arrests. After he adjusted for both factors, Mr. Foote says, the abortion effect disappeared..."

No one makes the conculsion of the Mexico City Policy and 24 years later the US has a large immigration problem of illegal immigrants from South America.

Abortion was not made legal to prevent homocide by 14 to 19 year olds. Also, using Crack as a factor to ignore homocides, begs the question of accidental parenting, which is the issue, which may have contributed to the Crack epidemic.

So saying the murder rate was reduced because the Crack epidmic subsided, not because fewer youngsters had accidental parenting, may have been the REASON the Crack epidemic reduced in the first place, because fewer youngsters had accidental parenting.

Da.

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Scucca

Try Donohue and Levitt (2008, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Measurement Error, Legalized Abortion, and the Decline in Crime: A Response to Foote and Goetz, Vol 123, pp 425-440):

We are grateful to Foote and Goetz for noting that the final table of Donohue and Levitt (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116 (2001), 379-420) inadvertently omitted state-year interactions. Correcting our mistake does not alter the sign or statistical significance of our estimates, although it does reduce their magnitude. Using a more carefully constructed measure of abortion that better links birth cohorts to abortion exposure (by using abortion data by state of residence rather than of occurrence, by adjusting for cross-state mobility, and by more precisely estimating birth years from age of arrest data), we present new evidence that abortion legalization reduces crime through both a cohort-size and a selection effect.

I'm afraid you've only stumbled on the debate. The theory (with empirical evidence in support) has not been discredited

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prometeus

You state that as if anyone is claiming that cutting crime is the main purpose of abortion. What point if any did you try to make?

Scucca

Given the rabid American right wingers are typically anti-choice and crime worry pots, dismissing the abortion angle is rather important to them. They just do not manage to do it convincingly. I'd suggest that it because, without realising it, they support the theory but don't like the consequences.