Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't by John Jr. (books that read to you TXT) 📕

commonly believed. After accounting for the rise in crime reporting, we find that violent crime during the 1990s fell by about 10 percent more than the FBI’s statistics show. Property crimes fell by about 30 percent more. Furthermore, the rate of reporting of violent crimes surged by 46 percent from 1999 to 2002. This implies that official data on recent violent crime rates—which show crime rates leveling off after the drop of the 1990s—are particularly misleading. In reality, fewer crimes are occurring, but a higher percentage of them are being reported. 11

So what explains the fantastic plunge in crime rates during the 1990s? A lot of the individual pieces to this puzzle have been identified. Analysts have advanced a variety of plausible explanations, but it is not always clear how these fit together. Some stress law enforcement aspects such as increased arrest and conviction rates, longer prison sentences, “broken windows” police strategies, and the death penalty. Others emphasize different factors, including right-to-carry laws for concealed handguns, a strong economy, the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic, or affirmative action polices within police departments. It is even argued that legalized abortion has helped to stem crime. Many of these explanations may simultaneously be true, but there is lively debate about which factors are more important than others, and whether some policies actually did more harm than good.

So how do we evaluate the competing explanations? Before we identify the successful policies that reduced crime, let’s look at a few factors that had the opposite result.

What Increased Crime? Part I

Legalized Abortion

Out-of-wedlock births in the United States have climbed to an all-time high, accounting for nearly four in 10 babies born last year, government health officials said yesterday.

—Washington Post, November 200612

Nearly everyone agrees that the breakdown of families—to take one indicator, one-third of all births in the country and two-thirds of black births are now out of wedlock—is feeding into a destructive cycle of poverty, educational and developmental deficits, and incarceration.

—New York Times, July 200613

Of all the explanations for the drop in crime rates during the 1990s, perhaps the most controversial is its attribution to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision to mandate legalized abortion. The large number of women who began having abortions shortly after the Roe v. Wade decision were most likely unmarried, in their teens, or poor, the argument goes, and their children would have been “unwanted.” This indicates a high probability that these children, if born, would have grown up to be criminals. But because they were aborted, these children, who would have been teenagers entering their “criminal prime” in the early 1990s, were not around to commit the crimes expected of them. According to Freakonomics, abortion thereby became “one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history.” 14 An attention-grabbing theory, to be sure. But, as we shall see, a thorough analysis of abortion and crime statistics leads to a contrary conclusion—that abortion, in fact, increases crime.

Even before Roe v. Wade, supporters of abortion rights decried the crime and other social problems caused by “unwanted” children. Daniel Callahan summarized the argument in his 1970 book, Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality: “To withhold the possibility of a safe and socially acceptable abortion for unmarried women is to start the chain of illegitimacy and despair that will continue to keep poverty, crime, and poor mental health high on the list of pressing social problems.”15

The argument was reiterated in 1972 by the Rockefeller Commission on Population and the American Future. Established by Richard Nixon, the Commission cited research purporting that the children of women denied an abortion “turned out to have been registered more often with psychiatric services, engaged in more antisocial and criminal behavior, and have been more dependent on public assistance.”16

The Commission appears to have been greatly influenced by a study published in 1966 by Hans Forssman and Inga Thuwe.17 The two studied the children of 188 women who were denied abortions from 1939 to 1941 at the only hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden. They compared these “unwanted” children to another group—the next children born after each of the unwanted children at the hospital. The study found that the unwanted children were much more likely to grow up in adverse conditions, such as having divorced parents or being raised in foster homes. They were also more likely to become delinquents and have trouble in school. Unfortunately, the authors never investigated whether the children’s unwantedness caused these problems, or were simply correlated with them. Perhaps a family’s poverty was the real cause of these dysfunctions, and women who sought abortions were more likely to be poor.

Nevertheless, the argument became axiomatic among supporters of legalized abortion. During the 1960s and 1970s, before Roe v. Wade, abortion rights advocates attributed all sorts of social ills, including crime and mental illness, to unwanted children.18 Furthermore, they found that “unwanted children are more likely to be abandoned, neglected and abused,”19 and they tend to be “poorly fed, poorly housed and poorly clothed.”20 Weeding these poor, crime-prone people out of the population through abortion was therefore presented as a beneficial deed that would make society safer.

More recently, two economists—John Donohue and Steven Levitt—became the first analysts since Forssman and Thuwe to attempt to present systematic evidence that abortion reduces crime.21 They argued that the drop in crime rates during the 1990s was primarily due to the increase in the availability of legal abortion in 1970—when abortion was deregulated in five states22—and especially in 1973—when Roe v. Wade deregulated abortion in the remaining states. The effect, they claimed, was staggeringly large—the pair attributed up to “one-half of the overall crime reduction” and up to 81 percent of the drop in murder rates from 1991 to 1997 to the rise in abortions in the early-to-mid 1970s.23 If accurate, they had surely found the Holy Grail for reducing crime.

The theoretical link between “unwanted” children and crime is simple and powerful. Most people who oppose this thesis argue from a moral