The Tipping Point + Freakonomics re: crime

[En Passant]

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My big problem with all of these theories is they fail to take into account natural cultural maturation. The black communities (let's be honest what we're talking about here) in all the major cities in the country have steadily growing up out of a fairly chaotic situation since the great migration to cities from the rural south. It only makes sense that the situation will become more stable over time.

Another cultural maturation is racial relations. Which no matter what anyone says are improving all the time as more and more communities become integrated, and more and more blacks make it to the middle class. And stuff like the Rodney King riots make everyone take a step back and reflect on how to avoid a repeat.

Also common sense suggests to me the stabilization of the crack situation is the biggest single contributor to this particular crime drop. Crack hit NYC hard in the mid 80s. You have crackheads going nuts and gangsters fighting over new turf and distribution channels. By the 90s most of the crackheads are dead, in jail or reformed, and the stream of new crackheads coming online is nothing compared to the 80s. And the gangsters have established turf and distribution.

And finally didn't the economy improve a ton by the mid 90s? And hasn't this been historically the single biggest factor in crime levels?

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But we aren't talking about the black community. We are talking about the poor community, not just blacks.

Also, there are many factors for why the crime rate droped. The authors are saying Roe v. Wade is the biggest reason.

[suzzer99]

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But we aren't talking about the black community. We are talking about the poor community, not just blacks.


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If it makes you feel better we can pretend there are multi-ethnic gangs comitting all these crimes like in the movies. Or we can just continue to speak in code like everyone in the public eye always does, while everyone else knows exactly what they mean. The fact is the bulk of the "poor community" is going to made up of minorities. So a crime problem is going to be largely a problem in minority communities - statistcally.

Now I didn't specifically address latinos, which certainly have crime/gang issues. But no more or less than any other immigrant community in NYC since the early 1800s. The black situation is different because of its radically different history. So it's not surprising that it doesn't play out the same, and maybe takes a little longer to cool off.

Note: the above theories are mostly based on my experience, interactions and observations in different cities that I've lived in and consider to be on different steps of the cultural ladder as far as race relations and integration.



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Also, there are many factors for why the crime rate droped. The authors are saying Roe v. Wade is the biggest reason.

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How exactly do they rule out the improved the economy and stabilization of crack as being the biggest contributor?

[kurosh]

PM from lippy about this since he's banned from OOT
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Having read both the books I had the same exact question. I happened to be taking a Criminal Justice class at the time and talked to my professor. He adamantly disagreed with the Freakonomics theory and gave me a myriad of reasons, mainly a more organized and systemic approach to criminal justice, to show the drop in crime rate.

Further, I asked around in a few legal/CJ type forums and the debate was incredibly polarized.

Basically, there is no consensus.


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[edtost]

a big part of the freakonomics argument, iirc, was that states which legalized abortion in the few years before roe v wade had their early 90's crime drop begin the appropriate amount of time before everyone else.

NT!: the freakonomics section probably seems poorly written/cited because it is basically a simpler rewrite of one of levitt's papers; if you're looking for something more academically rigorous, he has pdf's of the original papers up on his website at chicago.

edit to add:

suzzer: see above, the papers freakonomics is based on go into more detail about the econometric methods used to control for and measure other causes of the decline.

[NT!]

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Isn't it basically a footnote of economics that people often don't act rationally, but assuming rationality creates the most accurate predictive models?


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In some fields, certainly. In decision theory, certainly not.

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Probably true, but basing laws and policies off irrational behavior assumes that people are idiots and don't know what they want, which is pretty insulting to the sovereign of our nation.

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i know the thread has detoured from this point a bit, but it's a big leap from NOT assuming rationality when identifying trends (which is what i was talking about) and actively making policy based on an expectation of irrational behavior. i don't think that's a good idea. what i am suggesting is merely that we can't draw conclusions using the assumption of rational behavior when it doesn't necessarily apply.

i think the idea of expanding 'rational' to mean 'whatever the consumer thinks he wants' dilutes it beyond the point of being very meaningful, as others have said. it would seem that unintended consequences would throw a wrench in this idea too. once you expand rational to that loose of a definition, it encompasses things like culture, media programming, etc, which economics is not nearly as well equipped to explain.

[rwesty]

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My big problem with all of these theories is they fail to take into account natural cultural maturation. The black communities (let's be honest what we're talking about here) in all the major cities in the country have steadily growing up out of a fairly chaotic situation since the great migration to cities from the rural south. It only makes sense that the situation will become more stable over time.

Another cultural maturation is racial relations. Which no matter what anyone says are improving all the time as more and more communities become integrated, and more and more blacks make it to the middle class. And stuff like the Rodney King riots make everyone take a step back and reflect on how to avoid a repeat.

Also common sense suggests to me the stabilization of the crack situation is the biggest single contributor to this particular crime drop. Crack hit NYC hard in the mid 80s. You have crackheads going nuts and gangsters fighting over new turf and distribution channels. By the 90s most of the crackheads are dead, in jail or reformed, and the stream of new crackheads coming online is nothing compared to the 80s. And the gangsters have established turf and distribution.

And finally didn't the economy improve a ton by the mid 90s? And hasn't this been historically the single biggest factor in crime levels?

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We're not talking about only the black communities. Thinking that crack in NYC was the cause of a majority of crime is borderline retarded. Basically everything you wrote appears to be wrong.

[suzzer99]

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.

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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.

[elus2]

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With no knowledge of either book...

The biggest factor for the crime rate tends to be the size of the male population aged 19-25. That I gues supports the abortion theory, but I kinda doubt there were enough to actaully swing things.

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His hypothesis is closer to "young women who are forced to have children early on will be raising future cell block inmates" and "women given the choice to have children later in life where presumably they have the ability to raise their children in a better environment (with a father, being able to afford food and books etc.) will raise kids that will tend to grow up with 'normal' lives".

So with legalized abortion we see a shift of the population by a few years and you have a decrease in the population of children who grew up in disadvantaged homes.

[manpower]

I really don't understand why this needs to be polarized. If Levitt is going to come out and say the effect of the abortion theory is maybe 1 percent, then what's there to argue? I'm pretty sure the actual analysis has stood up to some pretty intense scrutiny. The 'smart policing' theory is a little more difficult to measure and tenuous, but I don't see the problem. It's plausible, at the least, and it's not like these answers are exclusive of one another.

Also, I'm surprised no one has followed up with the lead argument, which might have had a bigger impact on crime than either of the two we've been sitting here arguing about.

here's a pdf
here's an article

[DannyOcean_]

but crack is so gooooooood.