Did Legalizing Abortion Cut Crime? The Levitt Freakonomics theory critically analyzed. Additional analysis and data by Steve Sailer.

Did Legalizing Abortion Cut Crime?

From December 2005 ...

Part 1: I'm Shocked, Shocked to See This ...

The most celebrated nonfiction book of the year is Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by U. of Chicago superstar economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The most admired aspect of the book has been Levitt's theory that legalizing abortion cut the crime rate, which became Instant Conventional Wisdom. Now, it turns out, according to two economists at the Boston Fed who have checked Levitt's calculations in detail, that the abortion-cut-crime theory rested upon two mistakes Levitt made. So far, Levitt admits to making one error, saying it "is personally quite embarrassing."

Ever since my 1999 debate with Levitt in Slate.com, Levitt's fans have been telling me that my simpleminded little graphs and ratios of national-level crime trends showing, for example, that the teen homicide rate tripled in the first cohort born after Roe v. Wade couldn't possibly be right because Levitt's econometric state-level analysis was so much more gloriously, glamorously, incomprehensibly complicated than mine, and Occam's Butterknife says that the guy with the most convoluted argument wins.

This fiasco reveals much about what's wrong with public policy discourse in modern America. Fifteen minutes of Googling would have shown book reviewers of Freakonomics that the abortion-cut-crime theory hadn't come close to meeting the burden of proof, but, instead, much of America's intellectual elite fell head over heels for this theory. Being largely innumerate and unenterprising, the punditariat is unable or unwilling to apply simple reality checks to complex models. It's easier to simply engage in intellectual hero-worship and take a guru figure like Levitt on faith. A few book reviewers, like James Q. Wilson (America's leading expert on crime for several decades), expressed deep skepticism, but most were negligent.

Now, two economists have redone Levitt's work and found two fatal flaws in it. The Economist has a good summary here:

Oops-onomics
Dec 1st 2005
Did Steven Levitt, author of “Freakonomics”, get his most notorious paper wrong?

And the Wall Street Journal reports:

"'Freakonomics' Abortion Research Is Faulted by a Pair of Economists
By JON E. HILSENRATH
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 28, 2005; Page A2

" Prepare to be second-guessed.

" That would have been useful advice for Steven Levitt, the University of Chicago economist and author of the smash-hit book "Freakonomics," which uses statistics to explore the hidden truths of everything from corruption in sumo wrestling to the dangers of owning a swimming pool.

" The book's neon-orange cover title advises readers to "prepare to be dazzled," and its sales have lived up to the hype. A million copies of the book are in print. The book, which was written with New York Times writer Stephen Dubner, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 31 weeks and is atop The Wall Street Journal's list of bestsellers in the business category.

" But now economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston are taking aim at the statistics behind one of Mr. Levitt's most controversial chapters. 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.

" Long before he became a best-selling author, Mr. Levitt, 38 years old, had established a reputation among economists as a careful researcher who produced first-rate statistical studies on surprising subjects. In 2003, the American Economic Association named him the nation's best economist under 40, one of the most prestigious distinctions in the field. His abortion research was published in 2001 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, an academic journal. (He was the subject of a page-one Wall Street Journal story1 in the same year.)

" The "Freakonomics" chapter on abortion grew out of statistical studies Mr. Levitt and a co-author, Yale Law School Prof. John Donohue, conducted on the subject. 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. He argues 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. [Emphasis mine.]

" "There are no statistical grounds for believing that the hypothetical youths who were aborted as fetuses would have been more likely to commit crimes had they reached maturity than the actual youths who developed from fetuses and carried to term," the authors assert in the report. Their work doesn't represent an official view of the Fed.

" Mr. Foote, 40, taught in Harvard's economics department between 1996 and 2002; served stints as an economist on the Council of Economic Advisers in 1994, 1995, 2002 and 2003; and served as an economic adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2003 and 2004.

" Mr. Levitt counters that Mr. Foote is looking only at a narrow subset of his overall work on abortion and crime, so his results are of limited value, and not grounds for dismissing the whole theory. He acknowledges the programming error, but says taken by itself, that error doesn't put much of a dent in his work. (Mr. Foote's result depends on changing that formula and on the adjustment for per-capita arrests.) Moreover, Mr. Levitt says the abortion theory has held up when examined in other countries, like Canada and Australia, and when applied to other subjects, like drug use.

" "Does this change my mind on the issue? Absolutely not," Mr. Levitt says. [More]

Levitt and John J. Donohue put together their abortion-cut-crime theory in a quick and dirty fashion in late 1998. There's nothing wrong with that -- that's an inevitable aspect of hypothesis-generation. Unfortunately, when their draft paper leaked to the Chicago Tribune in August 1999, they hadn't yet done the needed reality checks on their idea.

For example, the peak years for serious violent crime by 12-17 year olds, as reported in the FBI's authoritative annual survey of crime victims were 1993 and 1994, or a couple of decades after Roe v. Wade made abortion legal nationally.

Their key assumption about how humans behave was that legalizing abortion increased the "wantedness" of babies who were actually born, yet one obvious test was whether Roe v. Wade had driven down the illegitimacy rate. As it turns out, it definitely had not. Fathers, at least, were certainly not "wanting" babies more after Roe.

The most striking fact about legalized abortion, but also the least discussed, is its sizable pointlessness. Legalized abortion turned out to be a lot like Homer Simpson's toast: "To alcohol! The cause of, and solution for, all of life's problems."

Legal abortion is a major cause of what it was supposed to cure -- unwanted pregnancies. Levitt himself notes that following Roe, "Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent …" So for every six fetuses aborted in the 1970s, five would never have been conceived except for Roe! This ratio makes a sick joke out of Levitt’s assumption that legalization made a significant difference in how "wanted" children were. Indeed, perhaps the increase in the number of women who got pregnant figuring they would get an abortion, but then were too drunk or drugged or distracted to get to the clinic has meant that the average quality of the upbringing of surviving babies has declined.

My guess would be that the existence legal abortion made condoms unfashionable in the 1970s. Jonathan Klick's study suggested that legalized abortion caused a sizable increase in infections with sexually transmitted diseases, which supports that hypothesis.

In our August 1999 debate in Slate, I pointed out to Levitt that the national-level homicide data easily available on federal government websites showed that his theory had radically failed the test of history: the first cohort born after the legalization of abortion had a homicide rate as 14-17 year olds triple that of the last cohort born before legalization.

Rather than expressing doubts about his signature theory, however, Levitt dug in his heels in and relied on his extremely complicated state-level analyses to try to intimidate readers into ignoring my easy-to-understand national-level analyses about whether he'd come anywhere near meeting the burden of proof.

Hey, it worked. He's now rich and famous.

I told Levitt last month during the Bill Bennett Brouhaha, in which the former Education Secretary was widely denounced for making a reductio ad absurdum argument based on the racial aspect of Levitt's theory, that he should just walk away now from his most famous theory -- just admit that it's too hard to tell what actually happened. Levitt's now a celebrity so he hardly needs his trademark theory anymore to go on being a celebrity (i.e., famous for being famous). Otherwise, someday, some little-known economist was going to make his reputation by taking the Freakonomist down. Well, Levitt's nemesis has arrived.

A reader writes:

Will this really matter? I guess I have my doubts. We have moved into an era when facts matter less than myths.

Indeed. Virtually nobody will admit they were wrong about this. Way too many important people have too much invested in Levitt's celebrity. This is a fiasco for the economics profession -- the most famous young economist's most famous theory has been exposed after six years of adulation as based on incompetence. I wonder how many economics professors have book proposals in right now for that next bestseller "Berserkonomics"? (By the way, Levitt and Dubner are working on a sequel with a title that reflects their characteristic elegant taste: Superfreakonomics.)

In the general media as well, too many influential people publicly endorsed the theory when a small amount of due diligence with Google would have shown them it was deeply dubious.

And too many people want his abortion-cut-crime theory to be true for personal or political reasons. I've noticed, for example, that in online discussions, pro-lifers tend to want Levitt's theory to be true. They appear to want to be able to boast, "Even though legal abortion reduces the likelihood of me being a victim of crime, I'm still against it. That's how idealistic I am."

The notion that somebody would want to know what the truth is, rather than just to find a talking point for their pre-existing policy prejudice is alien to American thinking today.

Here's the abstract of Foote and Goetz's paper:

Testing Economic Hypotheses with State-Level Data: A Comment on Donohue and Levitt (2001) [PDF - full paper]

Working Paper 05-15
by Christopher L. Foote and Christopher F. Goetz

State-level data are often used in the empirical research of both macroeconomists and microeconomists. Using data that follows states over time allows economists to hold constant a host of potentially confounding factors that might contaminate an assignment of cause and effect. A good example is a fascinating paper by Donohue and Levitt (2001, henceforth DL), which purports to show that hypothetical individuals resulting from aborted fetuses, had they been born and developed into youths, would have been more likely to commit crimes than youths resulting from fetuses carried to term. We revisit that paper, showing that the actual implementation of DL’s statistical test in their paper differed from what was described. (Specifically, controls for state-year effects were left out of their regression model.) We show that when DL’s key test is run as described and augmented with state-level population data, evidence for higher per capita criminal propensities among the youths who would have developed, had they not been aborted as fetuses, vanishes. Two lessons for empirical researchers are, first, that controls may impact results in ways that are hard to predict, and second, that these controls are probably not powerful enough to compensate for the omission of a key variable in the regression model. (Data and programs to support this comment are available on the web site of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.)

Levitt's reply on his Freakonomics blog is here.

All my posting on this issue are at http://www.iSteve.com/abortion.htm

***Permalink***

Part 2: Levitt's response to the Freakonomics abortion-cut-crime theory fiasco

Levitt blogs:

Everything in Freakonomics is wrong!

Or at least that is the impression you might get if you read this article in today’s Wall Street Journal.

I will post a longer blog entry once I have had time to fully digest the working paper by Foote and Goetz which is the basis for the article.

For now, I will say just a few things:

1) It is not at all clear from the WSJ article is that Foote and Goetz are talking about only one of the five different pieces of evidence we put forth in our paper. They have no criticisms of the other four approaches, all of which point to the same conclusion.

2) There was a coding error that led the final table of my paper with John Donohue on legalized abortion to have specifications that did not match what we said we did in the text. (We’re still trying to figure out where we went wrong on this.) This is personally quite embarrassing because I pride myself on being careful with data. Still, that embarrassment aside, when you run the specifications we meant to run, you still find big, negative effects of abortion on arrests (although smaller in magnitude than what we report). The good news is that the story we put forth in the paper is not materially changed by the coding error.

3) Only when you make other changes to the specification that Foote and Goetz think are appropriate, do the results weaken further and in some cases disappear. The part of the paper that Foote and Goetz focus on is one that is incredibly demanding of the data. For those of you who are technically minded, our results survive if you include state*age interactions, year*age interactions, and state*year interactions. (We can include all these interactions because we have arrest data by state and single year of age.) Given how imperfect the abortion data are, I think most economists would be shocked that our results stand up to removing all of this variation, not that when you go even further in terms of demands on the data things get very weak.

Again, as I said, I will post again on this subject once I have had a chance to carefully study the details of what they have done, and after I have been able to go back to the raw data and understand why the results change when one does what Foote and Goetz do.

5 COMMENTS » Posted by Steven D. Levitt @ 2:46 pm on Monday, November 28, 2005 in General

In contrast, economist John R. Lott, a longtime critic of Levitt's theory who came in for a half page of ad hominem abuse in Freakonomics, is feeling better than Levitt is today. He blogged:

Christopher L. Foote and Christopher F. Goetz's paper can be found here. Personally, I think calling this a "programming oversight" is being much too nice. More importantly, everyone who works with panel data knows that you use fixed effects.

My own work concentrated on murder rates, but I also included fixed effects. Donohue and Levitt never provided us with all their data or their regressions and would never answer any questions that we had so I just assumed that they had included fixed effects from the beginning. It would have been nice if they had provided us with this same information years ago.

Financial economist and blogger Mahalanobis (Michael Stastny) makes first a technical point about Levitt's reliance on complexity of analysis a then a substantive point about Levitt's understanding of human behavior:

Levitt's response is on his website (see here) where he notes

The part of the paper that Foote and Goetz focus on is one that is incredibly demanding of the data. For those of you who are technically minded, our results survive if you include state*age interactions, year*age interactions, and state*year interactions.

3 interaction variables are necessary to get the right sign and significance? I think that is very technically demanding. In my experience, interaction variables are kitchen sink type regressors that induce severe multicollinearity and give spurious results. It's like an economist saying his results only appear after doing 3-stage least squares. I have to think something's not really there if you can't normalize the data somehow and show in a simple graph that the pattern is there (in this case, say, by showing the change in arrest rates for abortion and non-abortion states for the relevant age cohort).

I'm partial to the opposite theory, that abortion would, if anything, increase the proportion of evil-doers: abortion is more common among forward-thinking moms who would be good moms, less common among bad moms who view life as a series of random events that happen to them.

The reason that in Levitt's theory of American crime trends, Levitt cites only foreign studies claiming that women who have abortions would make less organized and effective mothers than the ones who went ahead and had their children is because the American studies of who gets an abortion came to the opposite conclusion.

This undermines Levitt's only argument these days about how abortion would cut crime (now that Levitt has hushed up his earlier racial eugenic/eucultural argument that because more blacks get abortions and more blacks commit murders, more abortions should mean fewer murders). These Americans studies were pointed out to Levitt by CCNY economist Ted Joyce in his response to Levitt & Donohue in the Journal of Human Resources, which was entitled "Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime?" Joyce summed up two reason why Levitt's theory didn't work. The second was:

"Second, analysts, I being one, have tended to overestimate the selection effects associated with abortion. A careful examination of studies of pregnancy resolution reveals that women who abort are at lower risk of having children with criminal propensities than women of similar age, race and marital status who instead carried to term. For instance, in an early study of teens in Ventura County, California between 1972 and 1974, researchers demonstrated that pregnant teens with better grades, more completed schooling, and not on public assistance were much more likely to abort than their poorer, less academically oriented counterparts (Leibowitz, Eisen, and Chow 1986).

"Studies based on data from the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) make the same point (Michael 2000; Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders 1999). Indeed, Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders (1999) found that teens who abort are similar along observed characteristics to teens that were never pregnant, both of whom differ significantly from pregnant teens that spontaneously abort or carry to term.

"Nor is favorable selection limited to teens. Unmarried women that abort have more completed schooling and higher AFQT [the military's IQ test for applicants for enlistment] scores than their counterparts that carry the pregnancy to term (Powell-Griner and Trent 1987; Currie, Nixon, and Cole 1995).

"In sum, legalized abortion has improved the lives of many women by allowing them to avoid an unwanted birth. I found little evidence to suggest, however, that the legalization of abortion had an appreciable effect on the criminality of subsequent cohorts."

My earlier response to the latest Freakonomics fiasco is here.

All my blog postings on the controversy can be found at http://www.iSteve.com/abortion.htm

***Permalink***

Part 3: Abortion and crime: So, Levitt was wrong. But, what actually happened?

Now that Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt's mishandling of his abortion-crime data has been exposed by economist Christopher Foote, I'd like to review what actually happened in American over those decades.

As I tried to explain to Dr. Levitt when we debated in Slate in 1999, what happened, simplifying greatly, was that the vast youth crack crime wave first emerged in the later 1980s in the socially liberal states where legal abortion also had taken off first about 17 years earlier, most notably New York and California, which legalized abortion in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade.

In other words, contrary to Levitt's theory, there was at the state level, a positive correlation (when appropriately weighted by population of state), between the legal abortion rate in the early 1970s and the teen homicide offending rate in the late 1980s and early 1990s among those youths born after legalization. Unfortunately, Dr. Levitt initially only looked at crime rates for the years 1985 and 1997 (and only looked at the uselessly crude age groups of over and under 25), so he completely missed how his theory had catastrophically failed its most obvious historical test.

Second, and also contrary to Levitt's theory, this vast youth murder wave took off first specifically in the demographic group that had the highest legal abortion rate: urban blacks. The non-white abortion rate peaked in 1977, well before the peak of the white abortion rate. The peak years for homicide among 14-17 year old black males were 1993 and 1994 -- i.e., the cohort born at the peak of the black usage of legal abortion in 1977. As Donohue and Levitt wrote in 2001, under their theory, the opposite was supposed to happen:

"Fertility declines [following the legalization of abortion] for black women are three times greater than for whites (12 percent compared to 4 percent). Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions."

When William Bennett was denounced for mentioning on the radio the racial logic of Levitt's theory, Levitt tried to give the impression to journalists that race had never played an important role in his theory. Indeed, in Slate.com, William Saletan blamed me for giving Bennett the impression that Levitt was thinking about race. As Ross Douthat rebutted, the racial element in Levitt's theory was prominently played up in the national media even before my debate with Levitt.

But, as I tried to explain to Levitt in 1999, his racial eugenic /eucultural logic hadn't worked. Instead, among black males born in the late 1970s, their murder rate as 14-17 year olds was four times higher than among black males born in the late 1960s, before the legalization of abortion. The black to white teen murder rate ratio almost doubled after legalization. So, the Levitt-Donohue theory failed its first two historical tests in a disastrous fashion.

Then, two things happened historically that helped create the state-level negative correlation (presumably, assuming Foote's new technical critique doesn't completely eliminate it) between later 1970s abortion rates and later 1990s crime rates that Levitt and Donohue have emphasized so repeatedly, while trying to cover up the earlier negative correlation. (They imply that the longer the time lag between presumed cause and effect, the more trust we should put in it!)

1. From NY and CA, crack spread to more socially conservative states, where the abortion rate had also gone up later. So crime was higher in the mid to late 1990s in socially conservative states where abortion rates didn't go up until the late 1970s or early 1980s.

2. And, the crack wave burned out first in the places where it started first, most famously New York City.

We've all heard a million arguments about why crime fell in NYC in the 1990s, but an overlooked explanation was brought up by Knight-Ridder reporter Jonathan Tilove recently: there are today in NYC, 36% more black women alive than black men. Nationally, among all races, there are 8% more women than men alive.

Obviously, this gigantic black male shortage in NYC wasn't caused by abortion -- there was virtually no sex selective abortion at the time. No, it was mostly caused by an enormous increase in imprisonment and by the most dangerous black men murdering each other in large quantities in the late 1980s and early 1990s. (AIDS played a role too.) Levitt has never written, as far as I know, about the impact of these "selective post-natal abortions," as it were, on the crime rate, but it's clearly a substantial factor in a number of big cities that were hit hard by crack. (NYC is by no means unique in terms of the current black male shortage.)

Moreover, as I pointed out to Levitt in 1999, and as his deservedly famous chapter in "Freakonomics" on how dealing crack pays so badly confirmed, a lot of the next cohort of urban youths, those born more than a half decade after abortion was legalized in their state, figured out that dealing crack was a stupid career choice. Seeing how their older brothers and cousins were winding up in prisons, wheelchairs, and cemeteries, they became less likely to commit murder. Participating in the crack wars turned out to be, for the vast majority of the gangstas, extremely bad life choices, and it's hardly surprising that the later cohort born in the early 1980s did a better job of figuring this out.

But these anti-crime trends in the 1990s happened first where crack happened first, which tended to also be where legal abortion happened first, thus creating the most likely spurious correlation between legal abortion and the crime decline in the later 1990s that Freakonomics focuses upon.

So, for this controversy, the crucial issue is The Burden of Proof. Dr. Levitt has tried hard to hand the burden of proof off to his skeptics, claiming that he's looked at all other possible causes of the 1990s crime decline, and they aren't adequate to explain it, so abortion must be the cause of the remainder. That's a weak and irresponsible argument.

Of course, in reality, he hasn't looked at all the causes -- for example, I've never seen him take into account "selective post-natal abortions" of the most dangerous gangstas by other gangstas, nor the social learning impact on the next cohort of seeing their older brothers die or go to prison.

But, moreover, there's an old saying that large assertions require large evidence. And Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory is one of the largest assertions in the social sciences in recent years. Clearly, the burden of proof rests on Dr. Levitt.

There's also an old idea in science called Occam's Razor, which more or less says that scientists should be biased toward simplicity in explanations. Throughout this six year controversy, Dr. Levitt has consistently gone for the most complicated, hard-to-understand, and (as we've seen this week, to Dr. Levitt's embarrassment) hard-to-check-up-on statistical models.

In contrast, he's combined statistical incomprehensibility with the most simple-minded behavioral models -- he has repeatedly assumed, despite all the evidence from American studies cited above, that ghetto women decide whether or not to engage in unprotected sex and whether or not get an abortion or have an illegitimate child for the same reasons that would appeal to highly educated women of his own class. While Levitt's style of thinking about how women respond to legalized abortion has proven highly persuasive to the nonfiction book-purchasing class, it doesn't explain much at all about the behavior of the classes in which potential criminals are typically raised. A reader of mine who was an inner city social worker wrote:

Middle class types see poor unwed teenage mothers as Scum of the Earth and a Terrible Social Problem. But poor women don’t see themselves that way. Instead, they think of themselves as human beings facing the age-old challenge of getting along in the world -- and, if they're lucky, passing their genes on to the next generation.

Maybe the technical opacity of Dr. Levitt's analysis was necessary -- social phenomena are terribly complicated. But the impact of his behavior on the public and on much of his profession has been to encourage among his numerous fans not a critical engagement with the historical and sociological record, but an attitude of faith, a warm feeling that this really smart guy has Figured It All Out using Really Complicated Statistics and we should just take his word for it.

As a marketing strategy, the oracular approach of "Freakonomics" has been mind-bogglingly successful, but perhaps I may be forgiven for wondering whether it advances the cause of good social science.

All the data cited above can be found documented at http://isteve.com/abortion.htm

***Permalink***

Steve Sailer (www.iSteve.com) is a columnist for VDARE.com and the film critic for The American Conservative.

Analysis from iSteve.com, Graphs, Data and Links empirically analyzing economist Steven D. Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory as promoted in his bestseller Freakonomics. In short, Levitt's theory badly fails straightforward historical tests of plausibility; and his simplistic model of human behavior (abortion reduces unwanted births) is called into question by his own admission that the much larger effect of legalizing abortion was to increase unwanted pregnancies, thus making the effects highly uncertain.

I debated Dr. Levitt in Slate.com in August 1999 on "Does Abortion Reduce Crime? In 2005, Levitt turned down his publicist's request to debate me again.

"Pre-Emptive Executions" Now Available Online: The American Conservative is making my article on Levitt's theory now available free on-line. (My fairly positive review of the non-abortion parts of Freakonomics is here.) Here are two graphs from my article showing (left) that contra Levitt's theory, the first generation born after legalized abortion became the most violent juveniles in recent American history; and (right) that contra Levitt's theory that legalizing abortion would increase the wantedness of children, the illegitimacy rate soared.

Below are entries from my iSteve.com blog responding to additional issues brought up by reader discussions of my article.

I'm Shocked, Shocked to See This ... Well, whattaya know? It turns out that Steven D. Levitt's evidence for his famous abortion-cut-crime theory is based on two mistakes Levitt made. For years, people have been telling me that my simpleminded little graphs and ratios arguing that Levitt hadn't met the burden of proof couldn't possibly be right because Levitt's evidence was so much more gloriously, incomprehensibly complicated than mine, and Occam's Butterknife says that the guy with the most convoluted argument wins. Now, two economists have finally redone Levitt's work and found two fatal mistakes in it.

'Freakonomics' Abortion Research Is Faulted by a Pair of Economists
By JON E. HILSENRATH
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 28, 2005; Page A2

Prepare to be second-guessed.

That would have been useful advice for Steven Levitt, the University of Chicago economist and author of the smash-hit book "Freakonomics," which uses statistics to explore the hidden truths of everything from corruption in sumo wrestling to the dangers of owning a swimming pool.

The book's neon-orange cover title advises readers to "prepare to be dazzled," and its sales have lived up to the hype. A million copies of the book are in print. The book, which was written with New York Times writer Stephen Dubner, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 31 weeks and is atop The Wall Street Journal's list of bestsellers in the business category.

But now economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston are taking aim at the statistics behind one of Mr. Levitt's most controversial chapters. 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.

Long before he became a best-selling author, Mr. Levitt, 38 years old, had established a reputation among economists as a careful researcher who produced first-rate statistical studies on surprising subjects. In 2003, the American Economic Association named him the nation's best economist under 40, one of the most prestigious distinctions in the field. His abortion research was published in 2001 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, an academic journal. (He was the subject of a page-one Wall Street Journal story1 in the same year.)

The "Freakonomics" chapter on abortion grew out of statistical studies Mr. Levitt and a co-author, Yale Law School Prof. John Donohue, conducted on the subject. 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. He argues 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. [Emphasis mine.]

"There are no statistical grounds for believing that the hypothetical youths who were aborted as fetuses would have been more likely to commit crimes had they reached maturity than the actual youths who developed from fetuses and carried to term," the authors assert in the report. Their work doesn't represent an official view of the Fed.

Mr. Foote, 40, taught in Harvard's economics department between 1996 and 2002; served stints as an economist on the Council of Economic Advisers in 1994, 1995, 2002 and 2003; and served as an economic adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2003 and 2004.

Mr. Levitt counters that Mr. Foote is looking only at a narrow subset of his overall work on abortion and crime, so his results are of limited value, and not grounds for dismissing the whole theory. He acknowledges the programming error, but says taken by itself, that error doesn't put much of a dent in his work. (Mr. Foote's result depends on changing that formula and on the adjustment for per-capita arrests.) Moreover, Mr. Levitt says the abortion theory has held up when examined in other countries, like Canada and Australia, and when applied to other subjects, like drug use.

"Does this change my mind on the issue? Absolutely not," Mr. Levitt says. [More]

Some time ago, Dr. Levitt was confronted with a major life choice. He could adhere to the values of the scientist (to tell the truth) or take up the values of the celebrity (to tell people what they want to hear). He made his decision and ascended into celebrityhood. Levitt has followed, with tremendous financial success, the advice George W. Bush gave his ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz in 1999:

“He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake,” Herskowitz said. “That was one of the keys to being a leader.”

***

Levitt's response to the Freakonomics abortion-cut-crime theory scandal: Levitt blogs:

In contrast, John R. Lott, who came in for a half page of ad hominem abuse in Freakonomics, is feeling better than Levitt is today. He emails:

There are a lot more than two major mistakes in [Levitt and Donohue's] estimates. For example, it was wrong to assume that the number of legal abortions prior to legalization were zero. Also, using arrest rate data to make the breakdown of murders by age is also quite inferior to using the Supplemental Homicide Report.

Finally, I don't know if you noticed it, but after using the fixed effects and using the arrest rate the right way, this new paper actually gets a small but significant increase in violent from more abortions. This is exactly what I got and I believe it is for the same reasons that these authors do.

Financial economist and blogger Mahalanobis (Michael Stastny) writes:

Levitt's response is on his website (see here) where he notes

3 interaction variables are necessary to get the right sign and significance? I think that is very technically demanding. In my experience, interaction variables are kitchen sink type regressors that induce severe multicollinearity and give spurious results. It's like an economist saying his results only appear after doing 3-stage least squares. I have to think something's not really there if you can't normalize the data somehow and show in a simple graph that the pattern is there (in this case, say, by showing the change in arrest rates for abortion and non-abortion states for the relevant age cohort).

I'm partial to the opposite theory, that abortion would, if anything, increase the proportion of evil-doers: abortion is more common among forward-thinking moms who would be good moms, less common among bad moms who view life as a series of random events that happen to them.

Right. The reason that in his theory of American crime trends, Levitt cites European studies claiming that women who have abortions would make worse mothers than the ones who went ahead and had their children is because the American studies of the impact of abortion came to the opposite conclusion. (For some inexplicable reason, Levitt forgot to mention those more relevant American studies in Freakonomics.)

Trent and Griner's research, along with other studies undermining Levitt's central argument, was pointed out to Levitt by CCNY economist Ted Joyce in his response to Levitt & Donohue in the Journal of Human Resources, which was entitled "Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime?" Joyce summed up two reason why Levitt's theory didn't work. The second was:

My earlier response to the Freakonomics scandal is here.

***Permalink***

The single best debate over Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory: I invited Levitt to debate me over his theory in Slate.com in 1999. You can read our exchange here. (Bill Bennett cited this debate as his inspiration for his controversial remarks on abortion and crime.) This spring, Levitt's publicist recommended to him that we renew our debate to get more publicity for his book. Prudently, he refused to debate me further.

***

My response to the controversy over William Bennett citing Levitt's Freakonomics theory on abortion on September 28, 2005:

William Bennett blasted for citing Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics theory: Today, the mounting pressure finally burst over merely an abstract musing on the radio.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi immediately spoke on the floor of the House:

"Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to express my deep disdain and disgust for comments made yesterday by former Reagan Secretary of Education William Bennett on his radio call-in show. ... These are shameful words. I am appalled to have to say them on the floor of the House of Representatives. Secretary Bennett's comments reflect a narrow-minded spirit that has no place within American discourse."

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean issued the following statement:

"Bill Bennett's hateful, inflammatory remarks regarding African Americans are simply inexcusable. They are particularly unacceptable from a leader in the conservative movement and former Secretary of Education, once charged with the well being of every American school child. He should apologize immediately. This kind of statement is hardly compassionate conservatism; rather, Bennett's comments demonstrate a reprehensible racial insensitivity and ignorance. Are these the values of the Republican Party and its conservative allies? If not, President Bush, Ken Mehlman and the Republican Leadership should denounce them immediately as hateful, divisive and worthy only of scorn.

So, what horror of horrors did Bennett blurt out? The Washington Post reports:

Bennett Under Fire for Remark on Crime and Black Abortions

Democratic lawmakers and civil rights leaders denounced conservative commentator William J. Bennett yesterday for suggesting on his syndicated radio show that aborting black children would reduce the U.S. crime rate.

The former U.S. education secretary-turned-talk show host said Wednesday that "if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Bennett quickly added that such an idea would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do." But, he said, "your crime rate would go down." ...

Bennett's comments came Wednesday, during a discussion on his talk show "Morning in America." A caller had suggested that Social Security would be better funded if abortion had not been legalized in 1973 because the nation would have more workers paying into the system.

Bennett said "maybe," before referring to a book he said argued that the legalization of abortion is one of the reasons the crime rate has declined in recent decades. Bennett said he did not agree with that thesis.

"But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down," Bennett said, according to an audio clip posted on Media Matters for America's Web site. "That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, you know, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

That's it? It's a symptom of the September Sickness that has afflicted our elites all month that the repressed frenzy finally broke over that.

There are two somewhat separate logical issues to which Bennett is referring. The first is the utterly theoretical question of the impact on crime of aborting every black baby (since African-Americans made up 50.8% of homicide offenders in 2002 according to federal statistics, it would obviously be large), while the second is the much-admired Freakonomics theory that legalizing abortion in the 1970s reduced crime in the 1990s. Bennett, obviously, opposes both ideas on moral grounds.

As for the first, Democrat Brad DeLong sensibly points out:

His caller said: "Abortion is bad because it has worsened the financing of Social Security." Bennett says: "Stay focused. We're anti-abortion not because we think that abortion is a means that leads to bad ends like a higher Social Security deficit; we're anti-abortion because abortion is bad; make arguments like 'abortion is bad because it increases the Social Security deficit' and other people will make arguments like 'abortion is good because it lowers the crime rate' and we'll lose sight of the main point."

Bennett is attempting a reductio ad absurdum argument.

(This first question can be further divided into two logical approaches: the effect of aborting an particular group on the total number of crimes versus the effect on the crime rate per capita. In the first case, prenatal genocide would obviously reduce the total number of crimes committed by reducing the number of people, just as it would reduce the number of scientific discoveries, acts of heroism, etc. As Stalin said while signing death sentences, "No man, no problem."

The effect on the national crime rate per capita, however, depends on whether the per capita crime rate for a group is above or below the national average. For example, getting ride of all Asian Americans would raise the national per capita crime rate because Asians are imprisoned a rate barely than 1/5th that of non-Hispanic whites and 1/33rd that of African-Americans.)

As for the second, ABC reported:

In an interview with ABC News, Bennett said that anyone who knows him knows he isn't racist. He said he was merely extrapolating from the best-selling book "Freakonomics," which posits the hypothesis that falling crimes rates are related to increased abortion rates decades ago. "It would have worked for, you know, single-parent moms; it would have worked for male babies, black babies," Bennett said.

Bill, Bill, Bill, that's what you get for reading the softball reviews of Freakonomics in the NYT, the WSJ, the WP, and the LAT instead of reading iSteve.com, where you would have learned that economist Steven D. Levitt's ultrapopular but slapdash abortion-cut-crime theory disastrously failed to predict even the past.

Bill, if you'd gone to the source for statistical social analysis instead of all those credulous, innumerate mainstream sources, you would have known that when abortion was legalized over 1970-1973, the homicide rate of 14-17 year old black males, rather than declining, more than quadrupled in the decade from 1983 (when all living 14-17 year olds were born in the last prelegalization years of 1965-1969) to 1993 (when they were born in the high abortion years of 1975-1979, when the nonwhite abortion rate peaked in 1977 -- see page 8 of this report for abortion trends).

You can go look for yourself at the homicide graphs that Levitt was too slipshod in his research methods to look at when he came up with his theory in 1999. Go to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics page here and page down to the second set of four graphs, which show homicide offending rates by age by race by sex.

The main reason Levitt's theory didn't work in reality was because the larger impact of legalizing abortion was to drive up the number of unplanned pregnancies. Levitt himself wrote in Freakonomics that following Roe, “Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent …” The most unremarked but remarkable historic fact about legalizing abortion was how pointless it turned out to be: mostly it just caused the very problem -- unwanted pregnancies -- it was purported to cure.

I pointed this out to Levitt in 1999 in our debate in Slate, but he went ahead and left all these inconvenient facts out of Freakonomics six years later. Misleading the public has made him a rich man, but he has to live with his conscience.

I laid all this out in even more monomaniacal detail last Spring, and I apologize to my long-term readers for taking up their time then and now.

One thing I've noticed is that the pro-lifers have shown almost zero interest in the fact that Levitt's theory isn't empirically valid. Strikingly, many of them want it to be true in order to prove the purity of their moral intentions: Even though legal abortion would lessen the chance of me being murdered or mugged, I'm still against abortion on principle.

Well, swell, but that's just moral vanity. Whatever happened to "the truth shall set you free"?

David Brock's Media Matters, which mostly broke the story, claimed:

Bennett's remark was apparently inspired by the claim that legalized abortion has reduced crime rates, which was posited in the book Freakonomics (William Morrow, May 2005) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. But Levitt and Dubner argued that aborted fetuses would have been more likely to grow up poor and in single-parent or teenage-parent households and therefore more likely to commit crimes; they did not put forth Bennett's race-based argument.

That's disingenuous, almost as disingenuous as Dr. Levitt.

Levitt's original draft paper with John J. Donohue in 1999 specifically referred to the higher rates among blacks of both abortion (which currently is about five times higher than among non-Hispanic whites) and crime (blacks are currently incarcerated at a rate 7.2 times the non-Hispanic white per capita rate) as one of the reasons why legalizing abortion should have cut crime. The New York Times reported in 1999:

"Most of the reduction," Dr. Levitt and Dr. Donohue write, "appears to be attributable to higher rates of abortion by mothers whose children are most likely to be at risk for future crime." Teen-agers, unmarried women and black women, for example, have higher rates of abortion, the researchers note, and children born to mothers in these groups are statistically at higher risk for crime in adulthood.

Levitt took out the reference to the much higher abortion and crime rates of blacks when he published Freakonomics. Instead, abortion was now supposed to work just by getting rid of "unwanted" fetuses, even though he admitted that legalization vastly increased the number of unwanted fetuses.

But let's get real. Last Spring, when Levitt was the toast of American intellectual life, everybody who was proclaiming his wonderfulness knew deep down that his abortion-crime theory was still based in large measure on aborting black fetuses, but nobody would come out and say it.

I was the only one who kept pointing out the new emperor of the bestseller lists had no empirical clothes, but nobody cared, because the unwritten message of Freakonomics -- no black, no crime, as Stalin might have said -- seemed so convincing.

But since you aren't supposed to discuss the higher black crime rate in public, our national immune system defenses against bogus ideas couldn't resist Levitt's lie.

Have you noticed lately how America is knee-deep in lies and they're just getting deeper? See, once you start denouncing people for telling the truth, you just have to lie and lie and lie some more. Every truth leads to more truths, but once you start down the path to lying, every lie means you need to lie again.

God, I am sick of lies.

P.S. On an unrelated note, here's my 2003 article about Bill Bennett's gambling.

***

One more point on the Bennett Freakonomics brouhaha: One of the logical distinctions that needs to be made in thinking about the purely hypothetical effect on crime of a prenatal genocide of an entire ethnic group is:

Are we talking about what would be the impact on the total number of crimes in the country?

Or are we talking about the impact on the national per capita crime rate?

Steven D. Levitt, author of the abortion-cut-crime theory, tries to glide past the nasty racial implications of his theory by claiming on his blog:

... if you prohibit any group from reproducing, then the crime rate will go down)...

But that's not true. If all future Asian-Americans were aborted, the national crime rate, as measured in per capita terms, would go up because the Asian-American crime rate is below the national average. (Asian-Americans in 2001 were incarcerated per capita only 22% as often as whites and only 3% as often per capita as African-Americans.)

For ethnic groups with higher than average crime rates, the opposite would be true.

Now, please don't claim I'm advocating genocide. Indeed, for six years, I've been a voice crying in the wilderness saying that Levitt's theory that abortion-cut-crime turns out not to be true when you look at the actual historical record in any detail, which Levitt failed to do when he concocted it. The murder rate of the group with the highest abortion rate did not decline -- instead, it more than quadrupled.

For an explanation of why the black violent crime rate shot up among the cohort born after legalization of abortion, see here.

***Permalink***

Levitt, you duplicitous son-of-a-gun: Today, responding to Bill Bennett's controversial citation of his theory that legalizing abortion cut crime, economist Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the bestseller Freakonomics, asserted on his blog that "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." Indeed, Levitt left out any mention of the much higher abortion and crime rates found among blacks from his best-selling book. However, his 2001 academic paper with John J. Donohue contains this passage:

Fertility declines for black women are three times greater than for whites (12 percent compared to 4 percent). Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions. Under the assumption that those black and white births eliminated by legalized abortion would have experienced the average criminal propensities of their respective races, then the predicted reduction in homicide is 8.9 percent. In other words, taking into account differential abortion rates by race raises the predicted impact of abortion legalization on homicide from 5.4 percent to 8.9 percent.

[Thanks to James Taranto --SS.]

In other words, race accounts for 39% of the putative Levitt Effect on supposedly reducing homicides. You can judge for yourself whether 39% is "not an important part."

It's also interesting to note that Levitt, the toast of the media business, wrote the verboten words: "Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths..." When will the point-and-sputter brigades that are currently roasting Bill Bennett for merely vaguely implying that blacks have a higher crime rate go after the sainted Freakonomist?

In the wake of the crucifixion of Bill Bennett for mentioning one of the major aspects of Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory, I'd like to ask how come the entire respectable world gave Levitt's Freakonomics book tongue-baths last spring, praising him for his "courage" in pushing his abortion-crime theory. For example, the NYT gave his book two rave book reviews, a rave op-ed column, and they hired him to write a regular "Freakonomics" column for the NYT Magazine! (Can you say "conflict of interest"?)

So, why didn't the Levitt Effect actually happen in the real world? Why didn't this conventional piece of eugenic and/or eucultural reasoning work? First, as I pointed out to Levitt in 1999, the crack wars happened in between the data points he looked at in 1985 and 1997. (Ironically, on the rare occasions when Levitt now deigns to answer his critics, he emphasizes the impact of crack, which he was barely cognizant of until I explained it to him in our Slate debate.) The Levitt Effect, if it even exists, was overwhelmingly swamped by much more powerful forces.

But, it's quite possible that legalizing abortion boosted the black violent crime rate among those youths born after legalization in 1970-1973. To see why that's quite possible, it's important to focus on the realism of that assumption Levitt made in 2001 when he wrote:

Under the assumption that those black and white births eliminated by legalized abortion would have experienced the average criminal propensities of their respective races ...

What if, instead, among blacks, aborted fetuses had instead been more likely to grow up in well-run homes and become solid law-abiding citizens? To a white college professor like Levitt, that seems inconceivable, but it actually is rather plausible. As I told him in 1999:

[Your] logic implies that legalized abortion should reduce illegitimacy. And since illegitimacy is closely linked to crime, therefore abortion must reduce crime. Right? Yet, abortion and illegitimacy both soared during the '70s, and then the youth violent-crime rate also soared when the kids born during that decade hit their teens. How come?

In theory, legal abortion reduces murder by being, in effect, "prenatal capital punishment." But, first, it's not very efficient. Like Herod, we have to eradicate many to get the one we want. While genes and upbringing do affect criminality, there's so much randomness that predicting the destiny of individual fetuses is hard.

Second, what if besides a contraceptive-using bourgeoisie and an abortion-using working class, there also exists an underclass to whom, in the words of Homer Simpson, "Life is just a bunch of things that happen"? What if in the '70s members of the underclass didn't effectively use either contraception or abortion, but, being too destitute or distracted or drunk or drugged, they just tended to let s*** happen all the way to the maternity ward? And what if the legalization of abortion gave them an excuse to be even less careful about avoiding pregnancy? In fact, in your paper you cite evidence that 60 percent to 75 percent of all fetuses aborted in the '70s would never have been conceived without legal abortion. If that's what happened across all classes, the increase in careless pregnancies specifically among the underclass might have been so big that it negated the eugenic or euculturalist effects of abortion.

Thus, legalizing abortion would have thinned the ranks of the respectable black working class but not the black underclass. Its cultural influence would therefore have mounted. Just compare the working-class black music of the '60s (e.g., Motown) with the underclass gangsta rap of the late '80s, which spread the lethal bust-a-cap code of the East Coast and West Coast crack dealers across America.

Third, legalizing abortion finished off the traditional shotgun wedding. Earlier, the pill had shifted responsibility for not getting pregnant to the woman. Then, legal abortion relieved the impregnating boyfriend of the moral duty of making an honest woman out of her. This would drive up the illegitimacy rate.

Finally, even more speculatively, but also more frighteningly, the revolution in social attitudes that excused terminating the unborn may also have helped persuade violent youths that they could be excused for terminating the born.

One of my readers who was an inner city social worker strongly endorses this theory that abortion hollowed out the black middle class. She says that in her experience, the black women who had abortions tended to be the "strivers," while the ones who had children out of wedlock instead were the less intelligent, less organized, and less ambitious

Recently, she pointed out to me that some data reported by Charles Murray in the September 2005 issue of Commentary from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth contradicts Levitt's assumption:

Now I'm soooooo confused! As you point out, Charles Murray in his article "The Inequality Taboo," has "calculated that 60% of the babies born to black women who began participating in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth in 1979 were born to women with IQs below the black female average of 85.7. Only 7% were born to black women with IQs over 100."

But wait, weren't all those [low IQ, lower class] women having abortions? That's what genius economist Steven Levitt says in his super-brilliant book *Freakonomics,* where he tells us that abortion cut crime substantially because it kept hordes of little ghetto marauders from being born. Well, OK, Levitt doesn’t exactly put it that way, but we all know what he means (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

If we are to believe Murray's figures, then it would seem that the black women who had abortions must actually have been the *brighter* ones -- whose children (had they been born), would statistically have been less likely to commit crimes than those born to lower-IQ women.

Could this mean that Levitt is, ahem, wrong?

***Permalink***

New Facts on Abortion-Crime: There are two problems with Steven D. Levitt's popular theory (brought back into prominence by Bill Bennett's remarks) that legalizing abortion lowered the crime rate: it didn't work in historical reality and it doesn't even work in theory.

His theory, at least in the expunged version presented in Freakonomics (as opposed to the more race-based eugenic version in his 2001 academic paper) rests on the claim that abortion is more likely to get rid of "unwanted" fetuses, who would be more likely to grow up to be bad guys.

One difficulty with this theory is that legalizing abortion greatly increased the number of unwanted pregnancies (by almost 30%, according to Levitt), and not all of those ended up being aborted, so what the net effect was in terms of "pre-conception wantedness" is extremely uncertain.

But the second problem is the question of "unwanted by whom?" I've argued since 1999 that the use of legalized abortion is more likely to appeal to upwardly mobile women, and thus will tend to make society more, not less, underclass. Studies by the team of Katherine Trent and Eve Powell-Griner support my intuition. A criminologist writes me:

I am surprised that there isn't more research examining the predictors of abortion. I wonder if academics avoid it because the truth takes away from the "Cider House Rules" myth of abortion-users being incest victims. What little research I can find portrays abortion as a choice of an economically-minded woman. ... Kathy Trent looked at 500,000 pregnancies and found that risk of abortion rises with education among single women... She did find that, whereas unmarried blacks keep their babies more than unmarried whites, married black women are more likely to get an abortion than married whites. Trent suggests that married black women are more likely to be breadwinners than married whites--babies get in the way of bringing home the bacon. These findings do not seem consistent with Levitt's assumption that abortions are concentrated among those people most likely to produce criminals.

Trent and Griner's research, along with other studies undermining Levitt's central argument, was pointed out to Levitt by CCNY economist Ted Joyce in his response to Levitt & Donohue in the Journal of Human Resources, which was entitled "Did Legalized Abortion Lower Crime?" Joyce summed up two reason why Levitt's theory didn't work. The second was:

Second, analysts, I being one, have tended to overestimate the selection effects associated with abortion. A careful examination of studies of pregnancy resolution reveals that women who abort are at lower risk of having children with criminal propensities than women of similar age, race and marital status who instead carried to term. For instance, in an early study of teens in Ventura County, California between 1972 and 1974, researchers demonstrated that pregnant teens with better grades, more completed schooling, and not on public assistance were much more likely to abort than their poorer, less academically oriented counterparts (Leibowitz, Eisen, and Chow 1986).

Studies based on data from the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) make the same point (Michael 2000; Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders 1999). Indeed, Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders (1999) found that teens who abort are similar along observed characteristics to teens that were never pregnant, both of whom differ significantly from pregnant teens that spontaneously abort or carry to term.

Nor is favorable selection limited to teens. Unmarried women that abort have more completed schooling and higher AFQT [the military's IQ test for applicants for enlistment] scores than their counterparts that carry the pregnancy to term (Powell-Griner and Trent 1987; Currie, Nixon, and Cole 1995).

In sum, legalized abortion has improved the lives of many women by allowing them to avoid an unwanted birth. I found little evidence to suggest, however, that the legalization of abortion had an appreciable effect on the criminality of subsequent cohorts.

Surely, Levitt must have read Joyce's response to his paper. If so, Levitt knew that his central theoretical argument was extremely dubious, but he didn't mention any of that when he pushed his "unwantedness" theory in Freakonomics this year, to vast acclaim and buckets of money. (Freakonomics is currently the #2 bestseller on Amazon.com).

Isn't it about time for the economics profession to conduct an inquiry into the professional ethics, such as they are, of Dr. Steven D. Levitt? How much ethical leeway should a scholar have in intentionally misleading the public in order to make money and become a celebrity?

So, what are the odds that the Golden Boy will ever be put on the spot by his profession or the media over his theory? A million to one? Too many important people have too much invested in the maintenance of Levitt's glamour. Levitt's media apotheosis is the most exciting thing to happen to an economics professor in years, so the profession has a vested interest in preserving his reputation.

In the unlikely event that Levitt is ever pinned down and forced to explain, Levitt's defense, logically, would have to be that his theory is still plausible because of raw racial eugenic logic: Sure, when all else is kept equal, the women who got abortions were more likely to raise law-abiding children than their equivalents who went ahead and had the babies, but (to quote Levitt and Donohue's 2001 paper):

"Fertility declines for black women are three times greater than for whites (12 percent compared to 4 percent). Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions."

In other words, Levitt would have to argue that: Even though the quality of the upbringing of the next generation of black youths went down because of legalization, the brute fact is that legal abortion still reduced the ratio of black births to white births. If you assume that blacks from upwardly mobile families are still more criminally inclined than whites from downwardly mobile families, then even though legalization lowered the average quality of the black population, it decreased the quantity of blacks so much relative to the quantity of whites that the average quality of Americans overall went up because abortion reduced the black share of the population!

Personally, I think legalization was bad for America overall because of the impact it had on lowering the quality of African-American upbringings. An awful lot of black kids who would have been raised to be strivers got aborted, so the ones who got born had more careless upbringings on average. Thus, legalization contributed, in some measure, to the the decline in African-American culture, symbolized by the popularity since the late 1980s of an entire musical style devoted to boasting about how murderous the rapper is. Interestingly, both gangsta rap and the crack business that it celebrated, emerged in the late 1980s out of the two major states that legalized abortion in 1970: California and New York. Coincidence? Maybe ... maybe not.

The bottom line is that we're all in this together, white and black, and something that lowers the quality of one of our communities, such as legalized abortion apparently did to blacks, hurts all of us.

***Permalink***

Levitt on Bennett: On his Freakonomics blog, economist Steven D. Levitt, the main promoter of the old theory that legalizing abortion cut crime, writes:

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.

C'mon, Steven, try being frank about your abortion-crime theory for once. Your widely circulated draft paper in 1999 argued that one reason abortion should have cut crime is because blacks, per capita, have more abortions and commit more crimes. (See this NYT story from 1999 for the details). You dropped that reference later to stay out of trouble.

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).

Oh, boy ... where to begin?

- "Except homicide"? -- That reminds me of the old joke: "Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"

- The homicide gap existed long before crack was invented in the 1980s. Back in 1976, the first year of separate black and white data in the Bureau of Justice Statistics website, the black homicide rate per capita was 9.5 times the white rate.

- Further, I'm highly dubious that the racial aspect of homicide is all that different. In the important new report "The Color of Crime, 2005," the incarceration rate is broken out for a variety of crimes by ethnicity. (The authors from the New Century Foundation split out Hispanics from whites, unlike many of the other crime statistics, which makes them more accurate and the black to white ratio even higher because Hispanics are imprisoned, overall, 2.9 times more per capita than non-Hispanic whites.)

Judging from the graph in Fig. 9 of "The Color of Crime, 2005," (I don't have the exact data), the black to non-Hispanic white ratio for incarceration for murder is 8.3 to 1. But for all crimes overall, blacks are imprisoned 7.2 times more often than whites, so the difference between homicide and everything else in terms of racial skew isn't that great. (By the way, blacks are incarcerated 33 times more than Asian-Americans!)

For robbery, the black-white ratio looks like about 14.8 to 1, or nearly 2 to 1 over the homicide rate, so Levitt is clearly wrong about homicide being the only exception.

Aggravated assault looks like about 7.3 to 1. Other violent crimes are lower (rape is about 3.0 to 1), but the overall violent crime incarceration ratio is about 7.1 to 1, not too different from the homicide ratio.

Strikingly, the non-violent incarceration ratio is just as bad, also in the 7 to 1 rate. This is driven in part by drug offenses, which are in the 12.5 to 1 area. But, blacks are incarcerated for non-drug property crimes about 5.1 times the white rate.

Blacks even get themselves thrown in jail for white collar crimes disproportionately: 4.0 times more often for fraud, 5.1 times more often for "Bribery / Conflict of Interest," 3.2 times for racketeering, and even 2.9 times more often for embezzlement. I suspect you'd have to go all the way to high end white collar crimes like anti-trust violations and insider trading to find ones where whites have higher per capita rates.

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.

First of all, for the purpose of discussing whether or not the Levitt Effect of abortion driving down the crime rate works in part by aborting more black fetuses per capita than white fetuses, these kinds of attempts at "underlying explanations" are largely irrelevant. (The real objection to the Levitt Effect is that, judging from the historical record, it didn't work at all.)

Second, I find this highly dubious. Levitt doesn't cite any research supporting this. And even if he did, I've found that when I go an read his reports, his track record for veracity in his claims that prior research supports his views is dubious.

A criminologist emails me:

Levitt is so arrogant, he thinks he can just imagine a study just as valid as one that someone actually does. To my knowledge no study exists that he describes that explains away the racial gap in serious crime. Studies of minor delinquency have done this, but criminologists know that white and black rates of misbehaviors like smoking pot are similar. The only study I can think of examining serious crime that controlled for SES was Marvin Wolfgang's famous cohort study of all males born in Philadelphia in 1945. (The final sample ended up being around 10,000). He reported that high-Socio-Economic Status blacks were 4 times more likely to be chronic offenders than high-SES whites. High SES blacks were 4 times more likely to have raped, robbed, or committed an aggravated assault. Family structure would probably not have been an issue among high-SES families, especially among blacks. Wolgang concluded that, "Race strongly related to delinquency status regardless of SES level."

Third, this is the kind of thing "explaining away" that gives correlation analysis such a bad odor with the public. As Colby Cosh pointed out, on the "Daily Show," John Stewart rightly grilled Levitt on exactly how you "control for" other variables, and Levitt couldn't come up with a trustworthy answer.

You can make all sorts of things disappear by "controlling" for variables that are closer to symptoms than causes. For instance, you can make the average height gap between the Dutch and the Japanese disappear by "controlling for" inseam length of the pants hanging in their closets.

What Levittt has done is pick three variables that currently correlate closely with being black and used them as a proxy for blackness. This is the opposite of Occam's Razor, which says you ought to be biased in favor of the fewest number of explanatory variables.

Fourth, Levitt's three variables sound extremely dubious historically. Think about that 9.5 to 1 difference in homicide rates between whites and blacks back in 1976. Most of those killers in 1976 were born in the 1940s and 1950s, when over 80% of black children were being born to married women. And during the Baby Boom, lots and lots of white babies were being born to teenage mothers.

Yet, the homicide rate went shooting up in 1965, just when the illegitimacy rate went shooting up too. We didn't have to wait a generation to get the effects of rising illegitimacy on crime, we saw them instantly. That's because a major effect of society deciding to allow sex without marriage is on the young men who now don't need to get a job so they can get married so they can have sex. They can hang around, do a few crimes, and still have a girlfriend.

In summary, Levitt is one slippery operator.

***Permalink***

More on Bill Bennett, abortion, and crime: The New York Times reports today:

White House Criticizes Bennett for Remarks
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MAREK FUCHS

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 - The White House distanced itself today from the comments of a prominent Republican who said on a recent radio program that the nation's crime rate could potentially be reduced through aborting blacks.

The White House called the comments, made by William J. Bennett, the former Republican secretary of education, off base. The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said that President George W. Bush "believes the comments were not appropriate."

Mr. Bennett has said the remarks were taken out of context, noting that he immediately said such abortions would be "reprehensible."

Mr. Bennett, who served as drug czar for the president's father, came under fire from Democratic Congressional leaders on Thursday for the comments, which were made on a his radio show, "Bill Bennett's Morning in America," earlier this week.

"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down," Mr. Bennett said in the broadcast. "That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

In a radio broa