[sy2]

A few months ago I read the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubler. Great book, highly recommend it to anyone.

Anyways, one of the chapters deal with the proposed link between abortion and the dramatic decrease in expected crime rates in the late 80's and 90's. Levitt and John Donahue III also wrote a paper on the issue for the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Abstract:
We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

The abstract can be found here and links to a PDF of the actual text of the paper is at the bottom of that page.

In a nutshell, from what I remember from Freakonomics, crime rates in New York (I think it was NY, they focused on 1 city in particular in the book) were expected to be incredibly high during the late 80's and early 90's. Everyone was predicting that things were going to get out of control and that New York would be a bastion of evil and crime. However, in the late 80's, when the first aborted children would have been entering adulthood, crime suddenly decreased - and dramatically.

Tons of theories were put forward about why crime dropped so dramatically: NY had hired more cops, which did account for some decrease, but couldn't have accounted for such a drop; some people said the upturning economy was the cause and there were more reasons.

What Levitt proposes is that the people who got the first abortions in New York were precisely the same people most likely to raise criminals. They were poor, young, uneducated, and became pregnant out of wedlock, all of which were prime indicators of which mothers would raise criminals. When those women got abortions, they're children obviously couldn't grow up to be criminals and so, right when those kids would have been coming of age, the crime rate dropped significantly.

Moral issues regarding abortion aside - and I know that's tough to do for many - what does everyone think of this? Is Levitt secretly politically motivated (which I didn't think so after reading the book) or are these legitimate findings from a legitimate study? Does it make sense to you?

[sy2]

Here's another article written about the paper linked above.
http://www.slate.com/id/33569/entry/33571/

This article is also by Levitt and appears to be a bit easier reading. From the second paragraph:

The theoretical justification for our argument rests on two simple assumptions: 1) Legalized abortion leads to fewer "unwanted" babies being born, and 2) unwanted babies are more likely to suffer abuse and neglect and are therefore at an increased risk for criminal involvement later in life. The first assumption, that abortion reduces the number of unwanted children, is true virtually by definition. The second assumption, that unwanted children are at increased risk for criminal involvement, is supported by three decades of academic research. If one accepts these two assumptions, then a direct mechanism by which the legalization of abortion can reduce crime has been established. At that point, the question merely becomes: Is the magnitude of the impact large or small?

[linskyjack]

I think that abortion is one variable. I think that there are a bunch of other variables, some that you mentioned (ie. the economy) Another important variable is the "new policing" introduced in the late 80's that Giuliani made famous. They read studies that showed that their was a correlation between lprositituion, pan-handling and quality of life crimes and violent crime. They began to pick up and prosecute these petty criminals and lo and behold, there was a decrease in violent crime. It seems that the quality of life criminals (I think that is what Giuliani and Bratton called them) had an effect on the rate of violent crime.

[Mulderator]

Well, given that most aborted babies would have grown up to be Democrats, thereby reducing the number of votes and allowing Republicans to make significant gains, that clearly explains the drop in crime. Republicans care more about victims rights--Democrats care more about the criminal's rights!

That's as good an explanation as any for the correlation.

[redivivus]

Originally Posted by Mulder

Well, given that most aborted babies would have grown up to be Democrats, thereby reducing the number of votes and allowing Republicans to make significant gains, that clearly explains the drop in crime. Republicans care more about victims rights--Democrats care more about the criminal's rights!

That's as good an explanation as any for the correlation.

Top notch.

[linskyjack]

Originally Posted by Mulder

Well, given that most aborted babies would have grown up to be Democrats, thereby reducing the number of votes and allowing Republicans to make significant gains, that clearly explains the drop in crime. Republicans care more about victims rights--Democrats care more about the criminal's rights!

That's as good an explanation as any for the correlation.

Can you ever make a post without using the word Democrat? Trust me, the majority of inner-city fetuses, if allowed to incubate, would most likely grow up not to vote at all. Then again, out in the burbs, plenty would end up being Republicans. By the way, most Democrats are pro-choice----If they wanted to raise a group of future little Democratic voters, why would they be for abortion--thats using your bizzare logic.

[Mulderator]

Originally Posted by linskyjack

Can you ever make a post without using the word Democrat? Trust me, the majority of inner-city fetuses, if allowed to incubate, would most likely grow up not to vote at all. Then again, out in the burbs, plenty would end up being Republicans. By the way, most Democrats are pro-choice----If they wanted to raise a group of future little Democratic voters, why would they be for abortion--thats using your bizzare logic.

Uhhh--my post was tongue in cheek. The entire study is total speculation--there is most likely no correlation between the abortion rate and crime dropping.

This is the type of nonsense I have to deal with on a regular basis--money grubbing plaintiffs who try to pin everything that's wrong with them on someone else--I have had idiots who tried to claim they got cancer from a car accident simply because they got diagnosed after the accident!

[redivivus]

Originally Posted by Mulder

Uhhh--my post was tongue in cheek. The entire study is total speculation--there is most likely no correlation between the abortion rate and crime dropping.

This is the type of nonsense I have to deal with on a regular basis--money grubbing plaintiffs who try to pin everything that's wrong with them on someone else--I have had idiots who tried to claim they got cancer from a car accident simply because they got diagnosed after the accident!

In all honesty, there is likely a correlation though this singular study will not support it so much. Most people having abortions are people who are not ready to have children. They are not ready to raise their children, and probably have not set up their lives yet. They were not very smart to get pregnant in the first place if they didnt want a child, and so we can assume that the child would not get raised as well as we would all like. This may be related to the crime rate -- i would suspect it is to a subtle extent. Perhaps the p1MpiN father has to steal to support the child.

[sy2]

Originally Posted by Mulder

Uhhh--my post was tongue in cheek. The entire study is total speculation--there is most likely no correlation between the abortion rate and crime dropping.

This is the type of nonsense I have to deal with on a regular basis--money grubbing plaintiffs who try to pin everything that's wrong with them on someone else--I have had idiots who tried to claim they got cancer from a car accident simply because they got diagnosed after the accident!

Did you read it? Levitt is a very respected economist and the data is overwhelmingly, although not 100%, on his side.

That second link I gave is a nice back-and-forth between Levitt and someone else who thinks the crack epidemic is more responsible for the dramatic decrease, although the second guy pretty much entirely dodges Levitt's rebuttal. Pretty good read and I would argue that although the degree to which abortion has lowered the crime rate is arguable, the proposal that abortion has resulted in lower crime rates seems pretty rock solid, and entirely logical.

[redivivus]

Originally Posted by sy2

Did you read it? Levitt is a very respected economist and the data is overwhelmingly, although not 100%, on his side.

That second link I gave is a nice back-and-forth between Levitt and someone else who thinks the crack epidemic is more responsible for the dramatic decrease, although the second guy pretty much entirely dodges Levitt's rebuttal. Pretty good read and I would argue that although the degree to which abortion has lowered the crime rate is arguable, the proposal that abortion has resulted in lower crime rates seems pretty rock solid, and entirely logical.

Im pretty sure it was actually the aids epidemic. But good point here is that crime rates vary greatly and that there is low statistical power in this type of confounded analysis.

[Mulderator]

Originally Posted by sy2

Did you read it? Levitt is a very respected economist and the data is overwhelmingly, although not 100%, on his side.

No and there is no need to--its like the people who tell me about the overwhelming evidence of aliens visiting the earth (and trust me--they have the evidence and the scientists).

Quite simply, there is absolutely no way anyone can correlate abortion with a drop in crime rate! because there is absolutely no way to correlate it. In other words, no one can possibly determine that aborted babies would be more likely to commit a crime than those that survive or to what extent and even if they could, you would have to be able to isolate all the other variables (of which there are many). In the end it is speculation--you'd never get it introduced in evidence in court.

BTW--this does not mean there is no correlation, just that you can never prove it.

[sy2]

Originally Posted by redivivus

Im pretty sure it was actually the aids epidemic. But good point here is that crime rates vary greatly and that there is low statistical power in this type of confounded analysis.

Crime rates do vary, but they dropped across the board in the late 80's and early 90's.

This is a great summation of the arguments, from Levitt himself at the link above:

First, we demonstrate that crime rates began to fall 18 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion across the nation, just the point at which babies born under legalized abortion would be reaching the peak adolescent crime years. In my opinion, this is the weakest of our four data analyses. In a simple time series, many factors are negatively correlated with crime. Furthermore, the world is a complicated place and it would be simplistic to believe that legalized abortion could overpower all other social determinants of crime.

Second, we show that the five states that legalized abortion in 1970--three years before Roe vs. Wade--saw crime begin to decrease roughly three years earlier than the rest of the nation. This is a bit more convincing to me but still far from conclusive.

Third, we demonstrate that states with high abortion rates in the mid-1970s have had much greater crime decreases in the 1990s than states that had low abortion rates in the 1970s. This relationship holds true even when we take into account changes in the size of prison populations, number of police, poverty rates, measures of the economy, changes in welfare generosity, and other changes in fertility. This is the evidence that really starts to be convincing, in my opinion.

Fourth, we show that the abortion-related drop in crime is occurring only for those who today are under the age of 25. This is exactly the age group we would expect to be affected by the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s. That is where our paper stops. Our paper is a descriptive exercise attempting to explain why crime fell. While our paper highlights one benefit of allowing women to determine whether or not to bring pregnancies to term, we make no attempt to systematically analyze the many possible costs and benefits of legalized abortion. Consequently, we can make no judgment as to whether legalized abortion is good or bad. In no way does our paper endorse abortion as a form of birth control. In no way does our paper suggest that the government should restrict any woman's right to bear children. Although these are the most interesting issues for the media to discuss, our paper actually has very little to say on such topics.

Here is Levitt's Wiki page and a blurb about his career so far (the guy's pretty young!):

He attended St. Paul Academy and Summit School, graduated from Harvard University in 1989, and received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1994. He is currently the Alvin H. Baum Professor in Economics and the director of the The Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago. In 2003 he won the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded bi-annually by the American Economic Association to the most promising U.S. economist under the age of 40. In April 2005 Levitt published his first book, Freakonomics (coauthored with Stephen J. Dubner), which became a New York Times bestseller. Levitt and Dubner also started a blog (www.freakonomics.com).

[Mulderator]

Actually, all you have to do is go back and check the political campaigns. Republicans like Duekmejian and Wilson rode "tough on crime" to political victories--3 strikes your out was a huge factor in Wilson's election and re-election in California. Democrats were perceived (and rightfully so) as being soft on crime and Republicans made significant gains exploiting that perception. But things actually changed as well and now it is political suicide for any candidate to be perceived as soft on crime. The most logical reason for drop in crime rates is the societal change in attitudes--in the 60s and 70s, crime was pretty much accepted--that's the way it was--but grass roots movements like MADD and a host of other have gotten a lot of legislation passed to effect the crime rate. Also, the makeup of the supreme court changed significantly in the 70s and 80s--many of the bed-wetting liberal decisions of the 60s and 70s handcuffing law enforcement were reversed or loosened up. All of that is far more likely the reason for the drop in crime rate.

[sy2]

Originally Posted by Mulder

No and there is no need to--its like the people who tell me about the overwhelming evidence of aliens visiting the earth (and trust me--they have the evidence and the scientists).

Quite simply, there is absolutely no way anyone can correlate abortion with a drop in crime rate! because there is absolutely no way to correlate it. In other words, no one can possibly determine that aborted babies would be more likely to commit a crime than those that survive or to what extent and even if they could, you would have to be able to isolate all the other variables (of which there are many). In the end it is speculation--you'd never get it introduced in evidence in court.

BTW--this does not mean there is no correlation, just that you can never prove it.

It may not get into court, but using those standards I doubt most studies would. You could argue that any study concerning human interactions, society, and the passage of time is going to fail to account for ALL of the variables.

The point is that the biggest variable don't appear to account for the massive drop and there are multiple correlations in different areas that lend a lot of weight to the authors' argument.

Will we ever know, 100% sure, for a fact, anything considering possible human behavior and motivation? I doubt it, unless we're talking about the most simplistic of actions in the most simplistic of circumstances. In the mean time, we can draw the most reasonable conclusions we can from the data available and do the best we can. That being said, these guys make a very good argument.

[Mulderator]

Originally Posted by sy2

The point is that the biggest variable don't appear to account for the massive drop and there are multiple correlations in different areas that lend a lot of weight to the authors' argument.

I don't know how you can say that--the societal attitude towards crime change dramatically in the 80s and 90s. Talk to district attorneys and criminal defense attorneys that were practicing in the 70s. They will tell you how if you were a first offender, there was little chance you'd go to jail. Cops completely looked the other way on drug crimes. Hell, just about everyone I knew as smoking pot and God knows what else witout the least concern for getting arrested. My brother actually got arrested for pot and the charges were dropped (this was the late 70s) by the DA.

By the 80s, it had completely reversed itself--the war on drugs by law enforcement was in full swing and they had realized then if they could get to the kids younger and take a very tough attitude on drugs, they could stop kids from using it and IT WORKED!!! (and remember that a large percentage of crime is drug related). Today, all my daughter's friends treat any person that uses drugs as a social outcast--a poriah--hell, when I was in school, the druggies were heroes (they're still heroes to the liberals! ).

So just the change in the attitude towards drugs is a big factor, not to mention the change in attitude on crime in general.