Economist Steven Levitt has become the ELVIS of statistics by crunching numbers in unexpected ways and analyzing the results. He’s ruffled feathers on both ends of the political spectrum by arguing on the one hand that it is far more dangerous to own a swimming pool than a gun, and on the other that abortion reduces crime.
That’s right! We’ve all been enjoying a drop in crime thanks in part to the fact that we have been killing criminals in the womb.
This last theory seems to prop up the old truism that poverty causes crime. The two are statistically linked. What I have never heard discussed is to what extent crime causes poverty. Does he have his plow before his mule?
“We’ve all been enjoying a drop in crime thanks in part to the fact that we have been killing criminals in the womb.”
Which is ironic of course sense killing people is a crime. Seems to me we have seen an incredible increase in violent crime since Roe vs. Wade.
Levitt has empasized his argument is neither Pro-Choice nor Pro-Life. He notes that if one believes life begins at conception, then the number of homicides prevented would be trivial compared to the millions of abortions performed.
As another Elvis, he is an original.
A quibble from a statistician: it’s one thing to say that abortions and crime are correlated (or in this case, negatively correlated), but something really quite different to say that one _causes_ the other. We ourselves might infer causation, but statistics really has nothing to say about it.
You may know, for example, that there is also a strong correlation between crime and ice cream sales.
from Steve Sailer’s blog —
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/03/steven-d-levitts-abortion-cuts-crime.html
Steven D. Levitt’s Abortion Cuts Crime Theory Is Back
Freakonomics: You may recall Steven D. Levitt as the celebrated U. of Chicago economist who put forward the theory that legalizing abortion in the early 1970s lowered the crime rate in the late 1990s by pre-natally capital punishing a lot of bad apples.
I demolished Levitt’s theory when we debated it in Slate back in 1999, but Levitt’s still making it the centerpiece of his upcoming book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. He simply doesn’t mention the objections I put forward six years ago — most famously, that the first cohort born after the legalization of abortion, who, under his theory, should have been better behaved than the unculled previous cohort, instead went on the worst teen murder spree in American history during the early 1990s. That this group then committed fewer murders when they got older, as Levitt emphasizes, obviously can’t be attributed to their having been culled by abortion — instead, the real explanation is that a huge fraction of these fellows born in the late 1970s were by the time they became adults already in prison cells, wheelchairs, or coffins due to the crack wars of their teen years.
Amusingly, our debate is the first thing Google brings up if you enter: Levitt abortion crime. So, it’s hard to imagine how Levitt thinks he can get away with it, but you can get away with a lot in today’s flaccid intellectual environment.
Math can be a dangerous tool. Consensus seems to have formed that the primary cause of the crime drop in our most recent decade was the end of the heroine and cocaine epidemics.
So . . . if poverty causes crime, what causes poverty? The rich?
It’s at least an equally untenable, not to mention flat-out silly, assertion.
Let me get this straight:
Abortions over the past 40 years have removed persons from society who would have been criminals right?
So you’re saying that abortions kill persons right? (This is problematic to pro-abortion types because it acknowledges that abortions kill persons.)
So by condemning 30 some odd million persons to death we have reduced our crime rate somewhat.
Ok. So I suppose if I were to drop a few nukes (say New York City, L.A., Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, etc.) I could be lauded as the man who reduced crime rates by the highest amount ever in human history?
Interesting.
Really?
It would seem that the prescene of abortion would increase crime severely. Rape, for instance.
But criminals who don’t commit crimes don’t usually get entered into statistics. (unborn baby criminals aren’t criminals.)
So… we’ve killed some criminals in the womb. Except that people have free will and it isn’t determined ahead of time which of them will be criminals. And none of them have committed crimes at the point at which they were killed. So we’ve not killed any criminals… we’ve only killed potential criminals. And potential criminals, like potential persons, aren’t something we should be concerned with, so we shouldn’t kill them. But then again, if we effectively removed some criminals from the scene, and criminals are persons… then we’ve killed persons, right? I’m so confused!
For every criminal eliminated pre-actively, how many Einsteins and cancer eliminators and faster-than-light-drive inventors have we eliminated?
What an idiotic argument. But then he is a statistician. Remember, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Well, anyone who has taken a general stats class can tell you that correlation does not imply causation. This guy is making a rookie mistake, since poverty and crime are “related”, you can never, never, never!!! imply causation from the two.
My article “Pre-emptive Executions: Economist Steven Levitt contends that abortion reduces crime rates. The numbers tell a different story” in the May 9th issue of The American Conservative debunking the theory promoted last week in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times is now available online for free at:
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_05_09/feature.html