I'm not adverse to the specific hypothesis, but not a fan of Freakonomics and the size of the effect they claim seems surprising.
They appear to be claiming it accounts for all of the reduction in crime. This strikes me as somewhat implausible. Wouldn't better birth control be expected to show a similar impact, for similar reasons? (Though maybe the two correlate strongly in American politics?)
edit: a paper looking into that based on differential timing on legal changes
People who consistently use birth control tend to be less impulsive and more future-oriented than people who have to resort to abortion (a last-resort form of birth control). ie, the type of people who aren't your typical criminals. That would be the thinking, I suppose. For my part, I think mass incarceration is probably the main reason for crime going down.
Pretty much every criminal says they've learned more crime/techniques and could build their "network" in prison. So more prisoners would likely have effect of continuing/promoting crime.
Anyway - no birth control method (except abstaining) is 100%, even when you stack multiple different ways it can happen.
And some methods of birth control - like pill for woman and vasectomy for guys - can mess you up long term.
Women describe getting off the pill like completely changing their taste/smell senses, even brain/thinking ...etc (which sounds similar to what happens in/after pregnancy). When they give it to teenage girls (to "fix" their irregular cycle) they often gain weight..
And while vasectomy could be reversed, it's not guaranteed it would work.
^ There's a reason people recommend using two methods of birth control at any given time, but even then—freak accidents happen. Four nines isn't 0% :P
Also worth noting that there are about a million birth control pills on the market with different side effects... and different levels of efficacy. Progestin-only pills are popular because people tend to tolerate them well, but they're notably less effective than pills with estradiol in them. Sometimes that's a worthwhile trade-off!
Very sensible. While libertarian and anarcho-capitalist outfits like Reason and Freakonomics may have strange views (and sometimes held climate denial views), they do also sometimes offer uncomfortable, factual truths.
Unfortunately though, the US lacks a fair and equitable universal healthcare system and doesn't really care about imposing absurd externalities on individuals who lack health insurance or the means to side-step the narrowing separation between church and state. Birth control access isn't free or universal in the US. And, it would be unsurprising that a considerable fraction of lower-income women in physical relationships are less able to insist on using birth control at all times. It could also be that higher-income women worry more and have the means and assertiveness to make different choices.
Perhaps the root cause is when kids are born, regardless of public policies or personal choices, that aren't wanted, aren't loved, and lack sensible parental role models, they end up in worse circumstances and have more problems in life.
I used to volunteer as a guardian ad litem; you are an independent party who advocates for a child’s interests in family court (I had one during my parent’s divorce, and I wanted to pay it forward). Between that experience, and knowing that 40% of annual pregnancies both in the US and globally are unintended, you arrive at the conclusion that a lot of suffering is because of unwanted children existing through no fault of their own, and parents who are, quite frankly, either unequipped or willfully harmful and should’ve never been parents.
So now, I strongly advocate for anyone who even has a hint of not wanting to have kids to seek permanent birth control (vasectomy or bisalp). Could you possibly regret not having kids? Sure, we all grieve the loss of optionality and possibility. But having kids you don’t want or can’t take care of is far more regretful imho, for everyone involved.
> Perhaps the root cause is when kids are born, regardless of public policies or personal choices, that aren't wanted, aren't loved, and lack sensible parental role models, they end up in worse circumstances and have more problems in life.
> I used to volunteer as a guardian ad litem; you are an independent party who advocates for a child’s interests in family court (I had one during my parent’s divorce, and I wanted to pay it forward).
Woah, nice. I wouldn't know where to start without going to law school first.
I surmise the invention of cheap transportation combined with successive generations of mass communication like the internet demolished the central fixtures of local community and togetherness in the lives of most people. So not only do people move frequently, but they don't engage with people around them. This can't be healthy for individuals or families. Without the moderating and supportive forces local communities apply and provide on their members, people can gravitate towards hyper-individualism, odd beliefs, extremism, antisocial behaviors, isolation, and loneliness. As such, it becomes more difficult to socialize children properly, a society becomes paranoid with low trust, and it motives lashing out via crimes of desperation, despair, and malice. Healthy societies don't have rampant drug overdoses, mass shootings, droves of unhoused people, favelas, armored middle-class housing, $100M+ homes, or plunging net fertility rates overall.
> As a volunteer, you are responsible for gathering facts surrounding a child’s case, reviewing reports, finding out the child’s wants and desires, visiting a child’s home, school, or placement, and providing the court with an unbiased recommendation on what is required to serve the child’s best interests. The volunteer assists in providing the judge with the information needed and what the child wants, so the judge can decide what is in the child’s best interests.
Some forms of reversible birth control exist, but not all of them are.
Also, I don't think people who are torn between affording food and fuel can afford to thinking about, much less afford, permanent birth control.
Might be worth mentioning my grandmother was intentionally, involuntarily sterilized by a US Navy surgeon in the late 1950's without informed consent during a "routine" hernia repair operation.
I think it's a personal choice. I like kids so I'm on the side of more reproduction by people who can afford them and who would be good parents. The net fertility rate is cratering in most countries in the global north.
For a review from 2009 that I think does a good job of summarizing the views of economists (though it's not my research area): https://www.nber.org/papers/w15098
"Such models provide little support for the Donohue and Levitt hypothesis in either the US or the United Kingdom."
"The underlying theory is straightforward. Children who are unwanted at birth are at risk of a range of adverse life outcomes and commit much more crime later in life. Legalised abortion greatly reduced the number of unwanted births. Consequently, legalised abortion will reduce crime, albeit with substantial lags."
"Many people would prefer that our hypothesis not be true—perhaps not recognising that the core finding is that when women can control their fertility the life outcomes of their children are greatly enhanced."
Really well-done article I thought, and I always appreciate the Economist for inviting people to write who they start beef with. :)
>Exposure to lead in the environment might, perhaps, be the next best hypothesis. But as we showed in our 2020 paper, when one controls for both environmental lead and abortion, the coefficient on abortion remains large while the coefficient on environmental lead is greatly reduced and loses statistical significance.
Their analysis about lead relies on a single study by Reyes. Far from robust. Additionally, if lead results in more violent people, then it's no wonder that reducing the births of people in lead polluted environments would have an effect on crime. What they would need to do to tease our lead, would be to find places with no to little lead pollution and show that abortions resulted in lower crime, which they do not seem to do.
Studies by Mielke and Zahran (2012), and Feigenbaum and Muller (2016) provide further evidence that lead is the main culprit in crime reduction.
Lead seems to be the reason, not abortion rates. Levitt and Donohue don't engage seriously with the Lead hypothesis as there are many compelling studies supporting Lead. They only engage with the weakest research. I'm not impressed. I worry that Levitt and Donohue are just adding wood to racist fires and their work will be used by bigots, fascists, and racists around the world. It's irresponsible work.
Why do you think their work is irresponsible? Is it still irresponsible if they're right? Should people only engage in anti-racist inquiry, or do you think they should just self-censor if they get the 'wrong' result?
I don't find Levitt and Donohue very persuasive, but Levitt does seem very data-driven.
He answers your question in the same paragraph that he states they're irresponsible:
> Lead seems to be the reason, not abortion rates. Levitt and Donohue don't engage seriously with the Lead hypothesis as there are many compelling studies supporting Lead. They only engage with the weakest research.
The accusation is that they are ignoring research that might disprove their point, while at the same time are using weak research that they can easily refute to try to downplay the stronger arguments they refuse to engage with. Now I personally haven't read the paper, so I do not know if this is true, but it does answer the question you asked as to what OP thinks is irresponsible.
OP's accusation is that they Levitt and Donohue are irresponsible because the ideas they're investigating could be "used" by "fascists" and "racists".
Parent is questioning the idea that scientific inquiry should be restricted because it might reveal facts or open ideas that harm a preferred political program.
You are not answering that question. You're just talking about the quality of research, which isn't really the point here. It's whether the research should be done/allowed at all if it could harm a particular political ideology.
> Like the timid lady who, after a lecture on the Darwinian doctrine of man, said to her daughter, “Let us hope it is not true, my dear; or if it is, let us hush it up.”
> It's whether the research should be done/allowed at all if it could harm a particular political ideology.
I mean, I think that's kind of what OP was saying. Just go a little more extreme: Would it be responsible to publish science that you knew for certain would be used by others to justify genocide, even when there were other, better supported ideas to explore? I think we can agree that it would not be responsible. So where does the line get drawn? I don't know--I'm not going to draw it.
And let's not reduce big baddies like racism and fascism down to mere "political ideology". We're not talking about tax policy here.
I've had this exact conversation on HN before and I expect several people to come in saying that the only moral choice is to publish research without consideration of its effects or uses.
This is part of a particular strain of scientism that holds that "science" is or can be apolitical, so finds acknowledgments of the actual social-political world that it inhabits as heretical.
It’s infuriating to hear a developer say “hey, I’m fine with building the Torment Nexus because it’s an interesting technical problem and that’s all that matters!” Ethics should be a required undergrad course for software engineers.
It's infuriating to hear a scientist say, "Science should be shaped to match our politics, not the other way around."
Once we give up on finding the actual truth then we're on the road to hell, as demonstrated so many times by past societies that put ideology ahead of truth.
And if you think the truth leads to you committing genocide, I think you have some of your own moral development to do. If your belief in human dignity is conditional on people being the all the same, your belief in human dignity is very weak.
Tools like statistical significance and correlation. These tools were developed by a known eugenicist R.A. Fisher to compare populations which is what Levitt and Donohue use here. Their table referencing Reyes work to tease out Lead and show abortion has more statistical significance uses the EXACT TOOLS that Fisher would use. These are tools used by charlatans who pushed IQ and other complete quack ideas on the general population.
All you have to do is study the mathematics to understand why. For example, why use correlation at all here? Correlation assumes a LINEAR relationship. No such justification is made in their paper of why a linear relationship should exist here.
Those pushing things like correlation to IQ have the same problem as IQ is a non-linear relationship. Are these ideas appropriate to other problems? Yes, correlation and statistical significance are useful tools when applied to the right problems. But they are not appropriate here.
Unfortunately most have a basic course in statistics and have no knowledge about the history of these tools. So they get convinced by charlatans who wow them with statistics.
Statistics are great tools to lie with because so few people understand what things like 'correlation' mean and things like statistical significance. So they see papers like this and get wowed.
In other words, justifying abortion as a way to control crime is disgusting and you can thread the needle from eugenics to Levitt and Donahue. Abortion should be justified on it's merits of reducing suffering of women, not some way to reduce crime.
While there's a lot of interesting information in your comment to unpack and look further into, I can't help but laugh that you managed to write all of that without answering the main question of the parent comment.
>Even if the statistical tools were developed by eugenicists, does that mean we shouldn’t use them?
> Those pushing things like correlation to IQ have the same problem as IQ is a non-linear relationship. Are these ideas appropriate to other problems? Yes, correlation and statistical significance are useful tools when applied to the right problems. But they are not appropriate here.
Or the so-called crack wars[1], whose effect on criminal violence is so huge that whatever the effect size of lead or abortions was, it’s absolutely dwarfed to the point where it isn’t practically analyzable.
Between 1984 and 1989, the homicide rate for Black males aged 14 to 17 more than doubled, and the homicide rate for Black males aged 18 to 24 increased nearly as much. During this period, the Black community also experienced a 20–100% increase in fetal death rates, low birth-weight babies, weapons arrests, and the number of children in foster care.
The problem is the claim that the crack wars would have been even worse without aborting future crack warriors is impossible to size. It ruins any baseline.
Ideally, we would be able to tease out the effect of abortion, lead-paint, AND the interaction (lead-paint x abortion). If an interaction model better explains the data, then we should be open to not rejecting it.
They didn't try that. They also didn't engage with other literature showing link with lead and crime at a micro level. In other words, they didn't seriously counter the lead hypothesis, which is stronger than their work.
Is there any data on how the availablity of abortion affected crime when it wasn’t associated with reproductive freedom?
Chinas one-child policy made abortion available, and compulsory. Plenty of countries legalized abortion in context that assumed men would decide for women - India and Japan, for example.
Doe legalizing abortion reduce crime if a woman needs her husbands permission? Or a commanding officer can order a subordinate to have an abortion?
> Consistent with our theory, looking at arrest data, which reveal the age of the offender, the declines in crime were concentrated among those born after abortion became legal.
This seems to be confusing correlation with causation.
Aren't there many other possible causes to explain the decrease in crime?
For example, couldn't the decrease in crime (overall) be attributable to the fact that, due to better technology and policing methods, more criminals get caught, deterring future would-be criminals as well as removing their support and educational network and means of organization?
That, and RICO, which has certainly decimated Cosa Nostra in the U.S., to the point that current and former members admit that the Italian/Sicilian Mafia will likely cease to exist as a significant organization in the near future.
As well, the web arose during the 90's and caused profound societal changes, and the percentage of people carrying cash or available places holding cash has dropped every year since the 90's. Even bank robberies, which dominated crime in Los Angeles in the 80's, have largely disappeared.
Technology helps both sides. It leaves behind those unwilling to change.
None of the other issues moves the needle. The italian mafia lost power that was grabbed by other groups who might have committed more crimes. Cashless societies get bank cards stolen or cards read as you purchase. Dangers a cash only society didn't have.
DNA would have the biggest impact. Abortion matches the stats/timeline.
It's shocking to me that they just saw two partially aligned curves that confirmed their biases and then wrote a best-selling book (yes, I bought a copy as well) selling their admitted "hypothesis" while completely ignoring or giving short shrift to any alternative hypotheses or other possibilities for why those two curves seemed to be in alignment.
This seems, to me, to violate scientific ethics. And now they write an article in the Economist, of all places, defending their terrible science.
Freakonomics took a few outrageous "things you didn't know about X" headlines and made a fortune selling fool's gold.
One can always object that correlation doesn't equal causation. They talk in the article about controlling for certain variables as best one can. You don't get to run double-blind experiments on societies, but as they say in the article, this is about as close as one gets. Your idea about the web is certainly interesting, and could be explored further, but it doesn't strongly account for why a specific age group is effected and why areas with higher abortion access are more effected while low access areas are less effected. Etc. Etc.
Taken as a whole, the data do seem to make a strong case for their theory.
If Books Could Kill: Freakonomics is a biased but stil enjoyable podcast episode that touches this topic as part of the whole book
History is full of instances where new scientific theories were resisted by those who found them inconvenient. By and large, history hasn’t been kind to the resisters.
Quite tone-deaf, makes me mistrust their results even more (although I’m in support of abortion) it almost reads as a threat
It seems less like a threat than an observation about how conservative science can be sometimes. From what I recall their problem with the book is that the studies were cherry picked and overlooked overlapping factors like lead, drug wars, and relied on sloppy statistics.
This is an uncomfortable and divisive topic, and as such, shrouds rationality. For instance, if you believe that the subject of this matter is morally wrong, then you should rationally also be able to fully accept evidence that your particular beliefs lead to a negative outcome. If you are both arguing about the outcome of your beliefs, and unwilling to change them with evidence, then you’re either holding a rationally delusional belief, or engaging in deception to trick rational thinkers into adopting your morals. Let’s just be honest about why you are arguing for or against an analytical result.
I’m not saying that their study conclusions are correct; I’m just saying that acceptance or rejection of the claim should not be related to moral beliefs. It is, in my understanding of most religions, a pillar of faith to accept negative outcomes in adherence to scripture. It is easier, I think, to accept the self-flagellation form of this edict, than to accept burden onto others, and in this case, a wide social effect that seems incongruent with the aspirations of the faith itself. If they are right, are you wrong? That’s your burden.
I want to be clear that I am not taking a universal stance on the topic nor the analysis, nor religion. My personal experiences related to these topics are moderately severe, and it would probably not be productive to bring that here.
Well, if you accept as a given (for the sake of argument) that permitting rampant abortion tangibly reduces crime, then there are different conclusions that you can draw.
For example, if you believe that very few people are "born bad" (which I don't believe is a challenging assertion... Psychopathy exists and all that, but even that can be steered into productive ends), then incarcerations are a failure of the system to steer those with troubled or unwanted beginnings into productive lives regardless.
The anti-abortion people, instead of fighting abortion, should be pushing for better support of young people who grew up in troubled or unwanted environments. Then and only then, once that is in place, can the restriction of abortion commence IMHO without resulting in more societal harm.
Unfortunately, the same people pushing to ban abortion are the people who would stand in the way of social supports like this, trying to have their cake and eat it too, because it costs money. Or perhaps because they, uncharacteristically unempathetically and dehumanizingly, see people as falling into only 2 camps, "hardworking Americans" and "criminals"
Lastly, both incarceration and child rehabilitation should be judged based on recidivism, and new ideas should be attempted if that number is inadequate, and at least in the US, they're not.
> The anti-abortion people, instead of fighting abortion, should be pushing for better support of young people who grew up in troubled or unwanted environments.
I have not seen or heard a single conservative politician come out in support of single mothers, early childhood healthcare, or even free school lunches. So yes, it appears the people in power are unable to advocate for both.
Republicans in the US view abortion and social safety nets as problems to be solved at the same time. Paraphrasing my experience being indoctrinated: those nets are costly and only those worthless others use them anyway.
> you should rationally also be able to fully accept evidence that your particular beliefs lead to a negative outcome. If you are both arguing about the outcome of your beliefs, and unwilling to change them with evidence, then you’re either holding a rationally delusional belief, or engaging in deception to trick rational thinkers into adopting your morals.
That's a very utilitarian point of view, and most people are demonstrably not utilitarian. The point of moral beliefs is not necessarily to lead to better overall outcomes on average for everybody.
It seems disingenuous to start off a comment admitting that something is a complex subject and then doing a long-winded vaguebook-style one-sided criticism; it's not convincing at all.
Crime will be going up regardless of any statistical effect abortion had because of the far greater impacts of climate change and the ensuing impoverishment of the population.
Wait, did I read that right? Are you actually suggesting that climate change is the cause of rising crime rates? If so, please explain, because I would honestly like to know how you reached that conclusion.
"The temperature-aggression hypothesis posits that individuals experiencing physiological heat stress are more likely to read personal interactions as aggressive than individuals not experiencing heat stress with subtle shifts toward more violent responses, accordingly."
Yes you did, this is not a novel idea and I was referring to the near future, not the present (although some inflation is indoubedly caused by climate change)
Over the medium term, climate change will result in more failed crops, which will then result in increased food insecurity which will lead to increased crime.
Could you please stop posting ideological flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
