Also, can an agent choose their own mix, can we re-mix ourselves, or are we not free to choose?

for examples, does studying economics turn one into an arseholes, or are sociopaths attracted to it to excuse their inner arsehole?

who needs hard data, who? its obvious?

I actively rejected Mr Economy as a youth, while the econommists can point at me now as a free loading parasite, I no longer have any choice in the matter.

So, then, how did I ever think I could choose to make the world bettter by refusing Mr Economy?

Does it mean those who choose to choose and refuse, are irrelevant, that the only way to move is to choose an iPod like a consuming robot, and download the fileshared songs as some sort of compromise??

Who are the fools who choose virtue, and how did they get to be so dumb?

What was the incentive??

Empirically, there is not much more historical evidence that legalizing abortion drove homicide or the broader category of “serious violent crime (including rape, armed robbery, etc.) down than that it drove it up. (The crack crime wave began, geographically and demographically, among those who were the heaviest users of legal abortion in the 1970s.)

Theoretically, Levitt’s initially appealing model that legalizing abortion reduces unwanted births is heavily undermined by his own admission that the biggest effect of legalization was to increase unwanted pregnancies: as he says in Freakonomics, the birthrate fell by only 6% while the conception rate went up by almost 30%.

In summary, over the last six years, the Levitt-Donohue assertion theory has proven enormously appealing at first glance to academics and writers (as shown by all the softball reviews “Freakonomics” has gotten in prestigious publications by prominent reviewers who do zero independent research on his abortion-crime theory and just summarize Levitt’s arguments). On the other hand, those who have dug deeper into the data and thought harder about Levitt’s model of human behavior have tended to become increasingly skeptical.

Large assertions require large evidence, and Levitt hasn’t come close to meeting the burden of proof.

My position is that large assertions need large proof and Levitt hasn’t come anywhere close to meeting the burden of proof he has taken on. It appears to me that there is about as much historical evidence that legalizing abortion drove up serious violent crime and homicide as that it drove it down. And, I think, his theory that abortion would drive down crime is, while appealing on its face, is less persuasive the more you learn about the actual behavior of underclass women.

So, I would say that at present it’s about a wash. I’m skeptical that contemporary social science can actually answer this question with the data currently available, but I think that openly debating this question is an excellent learning tool. I’ve certainly learned far more about crime, abortion, and other important social issues in the half dozen years I’ve been thinking about this.

Regarding the new, not-yet-published papers by Joyce and Lott-Whitley, both Joyce and Lott emailed them to me and gave me permission to post on http://www.iSteve.com their abstracts. I would suggest asking them for copies.

Regarding Klick’s third party evaluation that the jury is still out, that came after, to use American baseball terminology, Levitt-Donohue had two at-bats (i.e., had issued their original paper and their response to criticism), while Joyce and Lott-Whitley had had only one (i.e., their latest papers are not considered by Klick). That, when Klick wrote, Levitt-Donohue had not pulled into a clear lead even though they had enjoyed two at-bats and their critics had only one suggests that the prospects of Levitt-Donohue ever meeting the burden of proof are not good.

But perhaps in Levitt-Donohue’s prospective third at-bat they will produce new, more persuasive evidence. For example, the American abortion rate fell in the 1990s, especially among non-Hispanic whites (from 19 in 1991 per 1,000 white women in their child-bearing years to only 11). This suggests, following Dr. Levitt’s logic, that the crime rate among 14-17 year old boys, especially among white boys, should start going up in the next few years. For some reason, though, I haven’t heard Dr. Levitt warning that we should start building new juvenile detention facilities to accomodate the coming crime wave from a generation who didn’t benefit as much from pre-natal culling as had previous cohorts.

As I’ve mentioned, you can learn a lot more about this important and informative subject at

http://www.iSteve.com/abortion.htm

And yes, John’s argument against Lott is an ad hominem argument, but it’s not an ad hominem fallacy. An ad hominem fallacy is when you offer some unflattering but irrelevant detail about a person in order to discredit them. But that’s not what is going on here. There are so many different specifications you can choose in econometrics that it is very easy to cheat and just show the ones that support your position. So any econometric paper requires to trust the author, and you can’t trust Lott.

Also, you seem to be utterly certain that Levitt is wrong, but you cite Klick as an objective commenter and he doesn’t agree with you since he reckons the jury is still out.

If you are interested in an objective party overview of the state of the debate after Levitt-Donohue’s 2003 publication (but before these two new papers), here is Jonathan Klick’s paper: “Econometric Analyses of U.S. Abortion Policy: A Critical Review”
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=515562

Keep in mind that Klick’s paper was written with Levitt-Donohue serving last, so the fact that he didn’t find them to be winning raises severe doubts about how they will be seen as doing after Joyce’s and Lott-Whitley’s second responses are published.

No study that I am aware of has yet replicated Levitt-Donohue’s findings for American history. Levitt’s findings are highly dependent upon dubious assumptions to avoid having to face the fact that his theory fails disastrously basic tests of historical plausibility. Big assertions need big proof, and Levitt has so far failed to meet this burden of proof.

As I explained above, Joyce’s latest study is based on the assumption that the crack wave was a purely exogenous event. He tries to carefully remove the influence of the rise and fall of crack killings. When he does, he finds legalization of abortion had no impact on the murder rate.

Lott-Whitley, in contrast, assume that the murder rate during the crack crime wave that began as the first generation born after the legalization of abortion reached their crime-committing years may have been influenced by legalizing abortion. Under that assumption, they found that abortion drove up the murder rate.

Either assumption is questionable, but defensible.

What is not logically defensible is Levitt-Donohue’s assumption that legalizing abortion could only have driven down the murder rate, and couldn’t possibly have driven it up. That’s having your cake and eating it too.

You’ll notice that in “Freakonomics,” Levitt only wants to talk about the decline in crime in mid-1990s in relation to abortion, even though the effects of legalizing abortion during the 1970-1973 period on teenage crime would begin showing up by the mid-1980s. He never wants to talk, in his chapter on abortion, about the huge rise in serious violent youth (age 17 and under) crime that preceded the decline, and that struck first in the metropolises and among the demographic group that first partook heavily of legalized abortion. In the weird world of Freakonomics, the longer the lag between a putative cause (legalization of abortion) and its putative effect (a change in the crime rate), the more trustworthy is the theory of cause and effect.

The truth is that when Levitt and Donohue first wrote up a draft paper in 1999 announcing this theory, they failed to look at crime statistics for youths (for example, according to the FBI the worst year, both in absolute and relative terms, for “serious violent crime” by youths ages 12-17 was 1993), so they were totally unaware of the implausibility of their theory until our debate in Slate.com that summer. ( http://slate.msn.com/id/33569/entry/33571/ )But, by that point, their draft paper had been leaked to the Chicago Tribune and Levitt’s name was unalterably linked to his theory. He has defended it like a bulldog ever since, but he hasn’t come much closer to meeting a reasonable burden of proof.

Lott and Whitley’s paper assumes that the crack cocaine epidimic was caused by legalized abortion. Some may not find this assumption plausible.

The point is that any research reported by Lott is worthless and only serves to muddy the water for future researchers.

If you’re not aware of the chapter and verse on this, go here.

“If we are going to make progress in understanding how human beings actually behave, rather than how idealised social science models say they should behave, skill in extracting meaningful patterns from refractory data will be crucial.”

And that’s exactly why I’m disappointed that Dr. Levitt continues to push in his book and other venues a theory of how legal abortion would cut crime that Dr. Levitt himself knows is misleadingly simplistic.

For six years, Dr. Levitt has argued that abortion cuts crime by reducing the number of “unwanted” children who are born. Yet, the number of out-of-wedlock children soared, suggesting that wantedness by their fathers’ was definitely not increased. Indeed, legalizing abortion appears to have cut significantly the chance that a pregnant single woman can talk her boyfriend into marrying her.

Even worse for Levitt’s simplistic theory, he admits in “Freakonomics” that: “Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent …” In other words, legalizing abortions has led to tens of millions of unwanted pregnancies in America that wouldn’t have happened without legalization.

Levitt himself told Tim Harford, one of the contributors to this forum, that:

“One in four of the pregnancies which took place were just because people were lazy,” he says. “That’s a lot. That’s a lot of abortions.”

So, who ended up getting born out of all those unintended pregnancies. We really don’t know. The pro-choice Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that almost half of all pregnancies are unintended, and that out of every 100 unintended pregnancies, 13 end in miscarriages, 47 in abortions, and 40 in live births. So, Levitt’s tidy little model is radically unsatisfactory for understanding such a complicated and quasi-random process.

But he continues to push his model because it’s highly persuasive in getting people to believe his abortion-cut-crime theory, even though the historical evidence on abortion’s impact is thoroughly mixed.

One of my readers who was an inner city social worker before becoming a lawyer wrote to me:

A couple of further observations on abortion and crime:

First, it’s fascinating to see Conventional Wisdom taking shape right before my eyes. Usually the process is not nearly so obvious, and has to be pieced together after the fact.

Second, reading about Levitt’s theory that abortion cuts crime by culling unwanted babies reminds me of that old Elvis Presley song called “In the Ghetto.” It went:

As the snow flies
On a cold and gray Chicago morn
A poor little baby child is born
In the ghetto
And his mama cries
Cause if there’s one thing that she don’t need
It’s another hungry mouth to feed
In the ghetto

Remember that one? It’s the one where The King showed how sensitive and politically aware and stuff he was.

What the fans of Elvis and Levitt fail to get is that poor women don’t necessarily see their situation the same way middle class folks do. They may actually love their little bastard babies!

Middle class types see poor unwed teenage mothers as Scum of the Earth and a Terrible Social Problem. But poor women don’t see themselves that way. Instead, they think of themselves as human beings facing the age-old challenge of getting along in the world—and, if they’re lucky, passing their genes on to the next generation.

Unbelievable, I know. But bear with me for just a minute and try to see it from their point of view.

If you’re a young underclass woman, one of the first things you notice is that there are not many marriage-worthy men in your social milieu. A whole lot of them are unemployed or in prison or dead. [For example, in New York City, there are 36% more black women than black men.]

So even though you may want to get married, you figure your prospects are pretty dim. If you wait to marry before having children, you probably won’t have children.

You might as well have them now because, well, why wait? You’re not getting any younger. More to the point, your mother and other female relatives are not getting any younger. And since they’re the ones you’ll have to rely on for child care and support, it’s important to have your kids before they develop Type II diabetes and kidney failure and all the other health problems that tend to afflict black underclass folks more than white privileged types.

Will having kids hold back your career? Well, if you have an IQ of 80 and are looking for a reason to drop out of high school anyway, then no.

You’ve probably already figured out that your prospects of a good job are dim, and getting dimmer by the day, especially with immigrants flooding in by the millions to take the few jobs you’re qualified to do.

So for you, its not a choice of a ghastly life as a welfare mother or good life in the ‘burbs. Fate and the immigration mavens have already decreed that you will get mostly crumbs from America’s bounteous economic table. The only choice you have is between a crummy life with kids or a crummy life without kids.

Your lack of career prospects just makes having kids look that much more attractive. Children are about the only thing you can produce that people will view as being truly valuable.

Besides, if you can’t count on a spouse for love and companionship, kids become doubly important because they’ll be the only family you’ve got.

So becoming a single mother makes quite a bit of sense to you. You realize it’s a scary prospect and a hard life, but what are your options?

You may not exactly be looking to get pregnant, but when it happens—well, is it really all bad? Lots of others have done it before you. In fact, in your neighborhood, girls who have babies out of wedlock are becoming the norm.

The only people who can’t seem to grasp what is going on here are the Really Smart Guys. Even though it should be getting pretty obvious by now, especially since the black illegitimacy rate is close to 70 percent. Admittedly, most of these out of wedlock pregnancies may not have been “planned” or “intended” in any sense that a middle class observer could understand. But that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily “unwanted.”

Seen from this perspective, poor women who have abortions are likely to be the strivers and achievers. They’re the ones who see some prospect of improving their lives, and realize it may hold them back if they have five kids by four fathers. They’re the ones who are trying, in their own way, to make good.

Inability to grasp what is wrong with Levitt’s argument seems to be a case of “I’ll see it when I believe it.” Maybe all the bright guys who can’t believe what’s going on in the underclass world should ditch Elvis and listen to Fantasia Barrino [last year’s American Idol and an unwed mother herself] sing:

Nowadays it’s like a badge of honor
To be a baby mama…
Cause we the backbone of the ‘hood.

A quick Google search would show that this theory has more critics than just Dr. Lott, and that it disastrously fails basic tests of plausibility. For example, the first cohort born after the legalization of abortion committed about three times as many murders as 14-17 year olds as the last cohort born before legalization.

For instance, Dr. Ted Joyce, an economist with the National Bureau of Economic Research and Baruch College, City University of New York, has published an in-depth critique of the Levitt-Donohue theory.

And, in a not-yet-published paper, Joyce tries hard to remove the effects of crack crime from the data. Here’s part of his abstract:

“In this paper, I conduct a number of new analyses intended to address [Levitt and Donohue’s] criticisms of my earlier work.

“First, I examine closely the effects of changes in abortion rates between 1971 and 1974. Changes in abortion rates during this period were dramatic, varied widely by state, had a demonstrable effect on fertility, and were more plausibly exogenous than changes in the late 1970s and early 1980s. If abortion reduced crime, crime should have fallen sharply as these post-legalization cohorts reached their late teens and early 20s, the peak ages of criminal involvement.

“It did not.

“Second, I conduct separate estimates for whites and blacks because the effect of legalized abortion on crime should have been much larger for blacks than whites, since the effect of legalization of abortion on the fertility rates of blacks was much larger.

“There was little race difference in the reduction in crime.

“Finally, I compare changes in homicide rates before and after legalization of abortion, within states, by single year of age. The analysis of older adults is compelling because they were largely unaffected by the crack-cocaine epidemic, which was a potentially important confounding factor in earlier estimates.

“These analyses provide little evidence that legalized abortion reduced crime.”

And here is the abstract of the not-yet-published response paper by economists John R. Lott and John Whitley replying to Levitt and Donohue. They find that abortion increased the murder rate:

“Previous empirical work linking abortions and crime [i.e., Levitt and Donohue’s] has assumed, with the exception of five states, that no abortions took place prior to the Roe v. Wade decision in January 1973. In fact, abortion data from the Centers for Disease Control indicate that states which allowed abortions prior to the Roe v. Wade only when the life or health of the mother was in danger actually had higher abortion rates than some states where it was legal. The use of data from the Supplemental Homicide Report also allows the direct linkage between the current age of the murderer and the abortion rate when those murders were born.).

“One more abortion per 1,000 females age 15-44 (i.e., about four percent of the average) is associated with between a 0.12 to 0.9 percent increase in murders in any given year. Similar estimates are obtained using abortions per 1,000 live births. Linear estimates indicate increased annual victimization costs by at least $3.2 billion.”

One of the differences between Joyce’s approach and Lott-Whitley’s approach is that Joyce assumes the crack war of the late 1980s and early 1990s waged in sizable measure by urban teens born soon after the rise in urban abortion rates in the early 1970s was an “exogenous” event while Lott-Whitley are assuming the legalization of abortion and the subsequent growth in the murder rate during the crack wars might be related.

Both Joyce’s and Lott-Whitley’s approaches seem defensible ways to explore a hugely complex social phenomenon. What’s not reasonable is Dr. Levitt’s cherry-picking approach, in which he assumes that legalizing abortion isn’t responsible for any of the increase in murders at the beginning of the crack wars but is responsible for some of the decrease of murders at the end of the crack wars. That’s called having your cake and eating it too.

To learn more about the abortion-crime controversy, please see

http://www.iSteve.com/abortion.htm