The media sensation, Freakonomics, was partially successful because it was so scandalous. It suggested that abortion, which was legalized in the 1970s and rose to the level of 1 mm per year by the 1980s, had a significant effect on explaining the decline in violent crime rates in the 1990s. The author speculated that abortion had cut down on the number of unwanted babies and that this trend created a higher ratio of children born into supportive environments. (The author studiously avoided any suggestion that any disparate racial impact of abortion had any effect on crime either way).
This thesis is shaky on its face, however. So much violent crime in particular is correlated with things like illegitimacy, poverty, and ethnicity. To speak plainly, young men in general, and young poor minorities in particular, commit a lot of crime, especially in both cohorts when they lack a father. Yet so many abortions are had (and still had) by middle class whites for whom the scandal of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, delaying college and high school matriculation is unthinkable, even though marriage or adoption are highly realistic outcomes for unwanted and unexpected pregnancies by middle class whites. Many of these abortions are paid for by and encouraged by parents that prioritize avoiding the shame and embarrassment of a pregnancy above doing the difficult, but moral, thing in carrying a child to term. While abortions skyrocketed in the 1970s and 80s, black illegitimacy skyrocketed in parallel. Any effect of abortion on unwanted babies suggests this trend was not seriously arrested and that the presence or not of a father is far more important than the extent to which a child is wanted among those who might choose abortion.
Steve Sailer reports that the jig is up; this overrated study is based on a variety of false premises and mathematical calculations that have since been discredited (even when the authors said that the original data-set was bogus and that a more refined state-by-state data set on crime and abortion should be used instead). Dills and Miron in a study based on the same data set write:
Donohue and Levitt (2001) (DLI) consider the hypothesis that U.S. legalization of abortion in the early 1970s caused much of the decline in crime in the 1990s. Foote and Goetz (2006) (FG) show, however, that one key result in DLI contained a coding error; dummies for state-year interactions were inadvertently omitted from the regressions. FG demonstrate that correcting this error, along with estimating the regressions using arrest rates rather than arrest levels, suggests virtually no effect of legalized abortion on crime.
Donohue and Levitt (2006) (DLII) acknowledge the coding error and agree that correcting the mistake and using arrest rates suggests no effect of legalized abortion on crime. DLII argue, however, that use of an improved abortion measure and an instrumental variable revives or even strengthens their original result…
Our conclusion is that the kind of analysis considered in Table VII of DLII does not suggest a quantitatively important effect of legalized abortion on crime. The best case for such an effect is the IV results in columns (6) and (7); these imply that abortion legalization explain 24-25.9% of the 1991-1998 decline in violent crime and 7.1-8.1% of that in property crime. None of these coefficients is statistically significant at conventional levels, however, and the results in column (8) suggest they rely on an implausible mechanism relating abortion to crime. . .
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Sailer has been claiming “the jig is up” for a long time now, without much success. http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/
Note that the link above is over a year old.
As for the Dills/Miron analysis, I happen to know Angela Dills — she was a year behind me in high school and we rode on the same bus every day. She doesn’t have any link to this study you mention on her webpage, so please provide a link if you could. But I will say that the language you posted doesn’t really disprove Levitt’s thesis so much as throw some lukewarm water on it.
Me, I don’t care one way or the other. I don’t think anybody’s view of abortion has changed. It’s just an interesting correlation being pointed out, and it provokes interesting discussion.
I have no qualifications to review the data sets or not as accurate, somewhat accurate, or otherwise. But Levitt’s thesis is very provocative, and it’s obviously able to be used by some to provide support for legal abortion on the basis of a quasi-eugenecist account of how abortion provides social benefits. If that thesis is wrong, at least one arrow in the pro-abortion quiver is gone. The fact that Levitt has apparently responded to these critics by changing his data sets and original point repeatedly is noteworthy. As for Dill riding behind you on the bus, that says nothing one way or the other about her intellect or qualifications, though it does make for a good conversation starter if this ever comes up at a cocktail party. Seriously.
Well, it does tell you that she’s a fairly young economist, not an old hand with a raft of papers and books behind her. And again, she doesn’t have this study posted anywhere on her website, and neither does Miron, so I’d like to see a link to what you’ve quoted.
The “pro-abortion” crowd has not been glomming on to Levitt’s thesis like you seem to think they should. If anything, that crowd has been mightily disturbed by it, since the implication is that society is better off with fewer babies born in high-risk areas, which typically translates into inner-city minority populations. In other words, conservatives worry that ANY good side-effect from abortion is too much to bear, while progressives worry that their support of abortion has unwittingly exposed unsavory inclinations of their constituency, and resulted in a decline in the size of that constituency to boot.
It’s all interesting debate, but it doesn’t speak much to the issue of abortion itself.
Frankly I’m more concerned with how this slipshod study discredits law and economics and its techniques than I am with its impact on the abortion debate. Though, I am wary of eugenicist defenses of abortion or any other policy, I agree that the race-related implications of this study are too much for liberal supporters of abortion to bear. As a conservative (and as a person with a conscience) I acnowledge that low IQ poor people may commit more crime, but that’s part of the challenge of living as a human being: to look after and provide for such people throug our own actions and, when necessary, a safety net.
Anyway, here’s the link (which is avialable at isteve.com too):
http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/miron/papers/Comment_on_DL_FG.pdf
How does Levitt’s theory have anything to do with law and economics?
It seems to me the basic application of retrospective econometric regression analysis to social phenomena affected by legal changes to determine the positive or negative impact of those policies. It’s no different than John Lott’s study of gun control, or the study of the effect of “Megan’s Laws” on property values, or any number of other things that Law and Economics’ scholars do.
In that case, practically every economic analysis is “law and economics” because there’s law and public policy for damn near everything. Seems inapt to me. Certainly, Levitt’s thesis tells us nothing about how the law should handle abortion, because right now abortion is an issue of constitutional interpretation, not economics.
In any case, I’ve spoken with both Levitt and Dills. Levitt doesn’t think the critique affected the strength of his argument, and that the data is even stronger now on his side than before. Dills said only that the discussion has delved into the minutiae of data examination. Taken together, it doesn’t look like the Dills/Miron critique is quite the harpoon through the white whale of Levitt’s thesis that you would like it to be. But I’m sure the debate shall rage on nonetheless.