Another highly logical and empirically detailed defense of the facts and theory behind Dr. Levitt’s abortion-cut-crime theory!

Okay, you’ve convinced me. Dr. Levitt is right about everything and if you all take on faith everything he says, you’ll all follow him into bestselling authordom and media celebrityhood.

In contrast, Tim Lambert makes an interesting and constructive point about whether, under Levitt’s theory, the post 1991 decline in the abortion rate would have effects counter to the post 1969 increase.

Some pro-choice organizations lament the decline in abortions, arguing that is the result of the supply of abortionists (excuse me, reproductive service providers) being driven down by harassment and even murder. Plus, states have imposed some restrictions on abortion and funding. How much that hs limited the supply of abortions, I cannot say at present.

Or, it could be that the abortion rate has declined due to a return to moral traditionalism, as also seen in the fall in the crime rate, the leveling off of the illegitimacy rate, the popularity of fundamentalist Christianity, and so forth. At present, I don’t have a way to evaluate this quantitatively, but it seems not implausible and should be investigated further.

Or, it could reflect improvements in either contraceptive technology (e.g., long-lasting injections like Depo-Provera) or behavior (e.g., the return of the condom, due perhaps to fear of AIDS —by the way, Jonathan Klick found that legalizing abortion drove up the sexually transmitted disease rate by about 30%).

At this point, I can’t judge among these explanations (or other possible ones). In any case, since Levitt’s unwantedness model of how abortion would cut crime is so unrealistically simplistic—as he admits in “Freakonomics,” the birthrate only declined 6% after legalization while the pregnancy rate went up almost 30%—we would just be piling uncertainties on top of uncertainties.

So, since Levitt’s theory did such a poor job of predicting the past, I agree that it’s too much to ask it to predict the future.

So, here’s a challenge to Dr. Levitt to make a courageous prediction about the future, rather than the fail to explain the past.

According to the pro-choice Alan Guttmacher institute, the abortion rate fell during the 1990s. It fell especially among non-Hispanic whites, from about 19 per 1000 women during their child-bearing years in 1991 to only about 11 by 1999. See p. 8 of this PDF:

Does Dr. Levitt believe that this decline in abortion is going to drive up the juvenile crime rate, especially among non-Hispanic white youths, beginning in a a couple of years? That’s what the logic of his theory says. Should we start building more juvenile detention facilities to accomodate the coming wave of unaborted young criminals? If he really believes it, let him make a prediction that we can evaluate in a number of years.

Furthermore, gangsta rap actually became mainstream in the late 1990’s, as your theory predicts. Suddenly it all fits together:

1) In the 1980’s, mainstream music is Tears for Fears, the Cure, and Madonna.
2) The legality of abortion pervades white America, leading people to place less of a value on human life.
3) This naturally leads to a decline in social standards in white America, the best evidence of which is the popularity of Ludacris.
4) When you combine this with the Monica Lewinsky blowjob and Bill Clinton’s consequent cover-up, it comes as no surprise that the late 1990’s were marked by skyrocketing crime rates, economic unrest, and the dot-com boom.

Thanks for your insight.

A couple of points:

1) Are we talking about crime committed by users or crime committed by dealers? These are distinct types of crime. I believe an overwhelming proportion of drug crime is related to dealers, not users. If that’s the case, I don’t see why the nature of crack’s high is directly relevant.

2) Gangs compete for territory, but the idea that gangs run around “hooking” everybody on drugs is ridiculous. This is the talk of people who don’t actually use or buy drugs (people who don’t what they are talking about). Gangs sell drugs, and believe me they don’t have any problem finding buyers. They don’t need to actively try “hook” people.

I would guess more violence by dealers could occur with crack, relative to other drugs, if crack was substantially more profitable than other drugs. Perhaps the nature of crack’s high is indirectly relevant to this point… that is, perhaps crack is more profitable because buyers tend to buy more frequently and have relatively inelastic demand curves. I’m sure those plenty of other reasons why this crack could more profitable than other drugs.

On a side note, I almost always find it funny to hear/read people discuss drugs that have clearly rarely, if ever actually used drugs, purchased drugs, or been involved in drugs in any way.

I’m NOT saying only drug users should be involved in discussions of drugs (to make such a statement would be absurd). I am saying non-drug users should keep in mind they have zero experience with drugs and that most of their information probably comes from other people with a similar level of experience with drugs that also happen to have anti-drug biases.

The crack wars, which were fought by exceptionally young males, then spread nationwide as the first generation born after Roe v. Wade entered their mid to late teenage years. Both the homicide and “serious violent crime” rates for ages 17 and under peaked in 1993 and stayed very high in 1994, according to FBI statistics collected under highly different methodologies.

And the wave of crack violence was worst among the group with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s: urban blacks. The non-white abortion rate, according to the Alan Guttmacher institute peaked in 1977, and was already at it’s long term level by 1976, so the timing fits much better for the theory that abortion increased violent crime than Levitt’s now-famous theory that it cut violent crime.

Correlation isn’t proof, but there seems to be about as much evidence for the proposition that legalizing abortion increased the murder and serious violent crime rates as for Dr. Levitt’s theory that abortion decreased it.

Why was there this geographical and demographic correlation between the usage of legal abortion and the crack violence wave? Dr. Levitt has tried to ignore this correlation for six years. He has tried to define the question surrounding abortion’s effect as only whether it played a role in the decrease in crime in the mid-1990s and avoided the whole question

Perhaps legalizing abortion had a corrosive effect on urban black culture.

To speculate: First, legalization tended to kill off marriage by removing the moral burden on the impregnating boyfriend to marry the girl because she could now get an abortion with the full approval of the law. Levitt claims that legalizing abortion increased the “wantedness” of the babies who were born, but it sure didn’t improve how much the fathers wanted them: the illegitimacy rate soared. As Levitt himself points out, being raised in a single parent home seems to double the chance of being a criminal.

Second, legalizing abortion, according to Levitt himself, drove down the birthrate by only 6% but increased the pregnancy rate by almost 30%. In other words, it vastly increased the rate of unwanted pregnancies. Let’s think about the impact on respect for life among young males. If you live in a culture where role models tell you that the proper response to an inconvenient unborn baby is an abortion, does that have an impact on your attitude toward the proper resonse to inconvenient business rivals?

Third, let’s look at the effects of legalizing abortion on urban blacks from a selectionist point of view. Both Levitt and I are much more selectionist in our thinking than is politically correct today—i.e., as you’ll see from his chapter on parenting techniques, he believes who the parents are is more important than what they do. Obviously, a big part of the sub rosa appeal of Levitt’s abortion-cut-crime theory is that blacks get more abortions than other groups, a point he made in his original 1999 paper with Donohue, although he dropped in later versions.

But which blacks were getting abortions? According to the Alan Guttmacher institute, almost as many unintended pregancies end up in a birth as in an abortion, so the effect on the wantedness of the babies actually born is much more uncertain than it sounds like in “Freakonomics.” It is quite likely in fact that legalized abortion culled proportionally more middle class and working class blacks, while underclass blacks tended to just have the babies. Thus, legalized abortion could have lowered the social standards of blacks. Indeed, if you compare the kind of music that blacks youths were listening to in 1970 (e.g., James Brown, Marvin Gaye) to the kind of music they were listening to in 1993 (gangsta rap, which celebrates the ethos of the crack dealer), it does appear that the social standards of blacks declined, which would be in line with this theory.

You can learn a lot that Levitt doesn’t want you to know about the relationship between abortion and crime at

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

He said pot made you mellow. Heroin was a real rush. Cocaine was a fast high. Speed was this, downers were that, acid was the other thing.

Crack, though, he said was “Satan.”

According to him, he had only used crack a few times, and it had been years, but he would be driving down the road and suddenly, he’d think, “Boy, I’d sure love some crack right now.” It just never let you go.

Is it that hard to believe that someone in such an incredibly dangerous line of work would have a very high discount rate? If I didn’t really expect to live past 30, I think (at 26 years old) that I’d severely discount even mid-term, let alone long-term future returns.

If that’s true it makes sense that there would be abnormally intense competition for the early above-MC returns, since they’re the only returns anyone was even thinking about. Abnormally intense competition in illegal drug markets manifests as violence.

Moreover, this cycle would feed itself: intense competition would escalate violence, which would reduce life expectancy, which would intensify short-run competition.

I’m assuming here that we’re talking about a new technology that launches into the market, creates monopoly-level returns for early movers, and then turns into a more-or-less perfectly competitive commodity market fairly quickly (See, e.g., computer RAM, only faster). Which sounds like what you’re assuming.

A few minutes after taking cocaine, one experiences a certain exhiliration and feeling of lightness. One feels a certain furriness on the lips and palate, followed by a feeling of warmth in the same areas; if one now drinks cold water, it feels warm on the lips and cold in the throat. One other occasions the predominant feeling is a rather pleasant coolness in the mouth and throat.During this first trial I experienced a short period of toxic effects, which did not recur in subsequent experiments. Breathing became slower and deeper and I felt tired and sleepy; I yawned frequently and felt somewhat dull. After a few minutes the actual cocaine euphoria began, introduced by repeated cooling eructation. Immediately after taking the cocaine I noticed a slight slackening of the pulse and later a moderate increase.

It might be that the high and actual symptoms are of call and pleasure while the withdrawal is violent.