Wow.
From Slate on the Freakonomics argument:
http://www.slate.com/id/33569/entry/33575/
"The problem with your abortion/reduced-crime theory is not that it encourages abortion or eugenic reasoning or whatever, but that it's largely untrue. Your biggest methodological mistake was to focus on the crime rates only in 1985 and 1997. Thus, you missed
the 800-pound gorilla of crime trends: the rise and fall of the crack epidemic during the intervening years.
Here's the acid test. Your logic implies that the babies who managed to get born in the '70s should have grown up to be especially law-abiding teens in the early '90s. Did they?
Not exactly. In reality, they went on the worst youth murder spree in American history. According to FBI statistics, the murder rate for 1993's crop of 14- to 17-year-olds (who were born in the high-abortion years of 1975 to 1979) was a horrifying 3.6 times that of the kids who were 14 to 17 years old in 1984 (who were born in the pre-legalization years of 1966 to 1970). (Click here to see the graph.) In dramatic contrast, over the same time span the murder rate for those 25 and over (all born before legalization) dropped 6 percent.
...
Why, then, is this generation born in 1975 to 1979 now committing relatively fewer crimes as it ages? It makes no sense to give the credit to abortion, which so catastrophically failed to keep them on the straight and narrow when they were juveniles.
Instead, the most obvious explanation is the ups and downs of the crack business, which first drove violent crime up in the late '80s and early '90s, then drove it down in the mid and late '90s. That's why the crime rate has fallen fastest exactly where it had previously grown fastest as a result of crack--in the biggest cities (e.g., New York) and among young black males. This generation born right after legalization is better behaved today in part because so many of its bad apples are now confined to prisons, wheelchairs, and coffins. For example, over the last two decades the U.S. has doubled the number of black males in prison, to nearly 1 million."
This is from a guest columnist arguing with Steven Levitt.
NOW, this is from Mr. Levitt himself in a rebuttal:
http://www.slate.com/id/33569/entry/33678/
"The set of facts that you offer is indeed challenging to our theory: The late '80s and early '90s were periods of high inner-city youth homicide,
fueled by the crack epidemic, declining juvenile punishment, and the increased availability of handguns to kids. I would never deny that legalized abortion is only one factor among many that affect crime rates. According to our estimates, abortion has had the effect of suppressing crime by about 1 percent per year over the last decade. Compared with the gyrations in the crime rate caused by other factors, this is pretty small stuff. But since the impact of abortion builds year after year as more cohorts of potential criminals are covered by legalized abortion (unlike factors such as crack, which tend to rise and fade), eventually the impact of abortion begins to overwhelm the noise in the data."
Yep, crack, no effect on crime. I guess he now qualifies as borderline retarded. As in - can't make change, or understand the label on a prescription.
Seriously though I suggest everyone read the exchanges in these articles. I think some of you may be misinterpreting the extent of Levitt's claims. It sounds to me like their only point was the abortion explains a heretofore unknown component of the drop in the crime rate. Not necessarily that Roe v Wade is the primary reason crime fell dramatically in the early 90s.
Google "crack crime 80s". Apparently there's lots of borderline retarded people out there making the same argument. I'll just take your word for it that everything else I wrote is wrong.