FREAKANOMICS ON CRIME AND ABORTION

This picture of an almost empty commuter bus reminds me of a particular chapter in the book I’m reading, Freakanomics. It's about the sudden drop in crime rate in America which completely baffled many social scientists and law enforcement officials. That is, until an unconventional-thinking economist came up with a mind-boggling theory. In fact, the Wall Street Journal dubbed this man, Steven Levitt, the Indiana Jones of economics.

A most recent winner of the John Bates Clark award for the best economist under the age of 40, Levitt‘s success as ascribed by this financial broadsheet, as having a lot more to do with his wit, pluck and disregard for conventional wisdom; not as a specialist of technical information for the select few.

“His genius is to take a seemingly meaningless set of numbers, ferret out the telltale pattern and recognize what it means,” according to this Wall Street Journal article. Through such method, Levitt outlined the cause which resulted to the drastic drop in crime in the United States.

During the 1990s, the Clinton administration along with many criminologists and socio-political scientists unanimously issued a dismal forecast that the entire country was facing a future steep in crime. Accumulated data was so compelling that odd makers were putting their money on the criminals.

“We know we’ve got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around, or our country is going to be living with chaos,” President Clinton declared. However, contrary to the common prediction by these learned men, the crime rate fell instead.

The reversal was indeed astounding — the teenage murder rate alone, expected to surge at 100 percent, dropped more than 50 percent within five years. By 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to its lowest level in thirty-five years, including the rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft. The stumped criminologists, relying upon conventional wisdom, grappled to explain this unexpected shift; only to come up with highly inaccurate and erroneous conclusions.

And then came Steven Levitt who pinpointed this drastic decrease in crime to a woman in Dallas who was then a 21-year-old uneducated destitute; an alcoholic and drug addict who had given up for adoption her two children. Her name was Norma McCorvey.

In 1970, she found herself pregnant again; all she wanted was an abortion. Without intending to, she also dramatically altered the course of events that affected the entire United States of America.

Abortion was illegal in Texas where Norma McCorvey resided, as well as in the entire United States during that time. There were, however, powerful people who adopted her cause and made her lead plaintiff to a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalize abortion. They named the Dallas County district attorney, Henry Wade, as defendant. To protect her privacy, her name was disguised as Jane Roe.

The case ultimately found its way all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court; hence Roe versus Wade.

On June 22, 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ms. Roe, paving the way for legalized abortion throughout the country. Ironically, too late to get an abortion when the ruling came out, Norma McCorvey gave birth, but put the child up for adoption. In the succeeding years, she would renounce her allegiance to legalized abortion crusade and become a pro-life activist.

Millions of American women most likely to resort to abortion in the wake of the Roe vs. Wade were indigent, uneducated, unmarried teenage mothers whose children, if born, would have been more likely than average to become criminals. But due to Roe vs. Wade, these children weren’t being born.

According to Levitt’s theory, “this powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.”

Again, Levitt based his findings on numbers and data, but what the link between abortion and crime tells him is this: “when the government gives a woman the opportunity to make her own decision about abortion, she generally does a good job of figuring out if she is in a position to raise the baby well. If she decides she can’t, she often chooses the abortion.” On the other hand, should a woman decide to have the baby, a pressing question arises: “what are parents supposed to do once a child is born?”

This entry was created to briefly illustrate the unorthodox manner in which this famed economist, Steven Levitt, goes about drawing his conclusions. It wasn’t intended to allude to a personal perspective on the subject of abortion.

Freakanomics is a good read which I recommend to those who appreciate articulate, though a roguish style of deductive reasoning.



*Many thanks again to Minotte’s Notes for offering to get me a copy of this book in San Francisco when I thought none was available locally. I did, however, found it at a local National Bookstore.

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