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

measure of abortion (their so-called “effective” abortion rate). However, they never do this for the estimates that break down the murder rates by the age of the murderer where it is possible to closely link the age of the murderer with whether abortions were legalized at the time of birth (“Further Evidence that Legalizing Abortion Lowered Crime: A Reply to Joyce,” Journal of Human Resources, 2004, 29-49).

26 Abortion Surveillance: Preliminary Analysis - United States, 1996, Centers for Disease Control, December 4, 1998, 1025-1028, 1035. “Homicide Trends in the United States,” Bureau of Justice Statistics (www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide), June 29, 2006.

27 The omission is curious, since it would have been easy to test a eugenics explanation, for example by measuring whether the drop in crime in the 1990s was still evident after accounting for the changing racial composition of the population. All my research on crime, including the link to abortion, controls for demographics.

28 A range of economists have noted Donahue and Levitt’s failure to test the eugenics approach. See Jonathan Klick, “Econometric Analyses of U.S. Abortion Policy: A Critical Review,” Fordham Urban Law Journal, March 2004.

29 George Akerloff, Janet Yellen, and Michael L. Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics , 1996, 277-317. See also Jonathan Klick and Thomas Stratmann, “The Effect of Abortion Legalization on Sexual Behavior: Evidence from Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” Journal of Legal Studies, June 2003, 407-433. Klick and Stratmann find that “a large increase in gonorrhea and syphillis rates [occurred] due to changing sexual behavior” as a result of abortion (p. 431). See also George Akerloff and Janet Yellen, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Births in the United States,” Brookings Policy Brief, August 1996 (http://www.heartland.org/pdf/24604a.pdf), 3.

30 Alberto F. Alesina and Paola Giuliano, “Divorce, Fertility and the Shot Gun Marriage,” Harvard University Institute for Economic Research Working Paper, No. 2117, June 2006. Alesina and Giuliano find that reducing restrictions on abortion increases out-of-wedlock births, but decreases births in two-parent families. See also Akerloff, Yellen, and Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing,” 277-317, and John R. Lott, Jr. And John Whitley, “Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births,” Economic Inquiry, Advanced Access published June 29, 2006, 19-20.

31 Akerloff, Yellen, and Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childrearing;” Akerloff and Yellen, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Births;” and Alesina and Giuliano, “Divorce, Fertility and the Shot Gun Marriage.”

32 Http://statistics.adoption.com/information/adoption-statistics-placing-children.htm. Interestingly, the peak year for adoptions was 1970, the year when abortion was granted unrestricted access in five states, including the two largest, California and New York. See George Akerloff, Janet Yellen, and Michael L. Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1996, 277-317. For other evidence on these trends see Department of Health and Human Services, “Report to Congress on Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing,” September 1995, p. 53 (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/wedlock.pdf).

33 Jay D. Teachman, Jeffrey Thomas, Kathleen Paasch, “Legal Status and Stability of Corresidential Unions,” Demography, 1991, 571-586. See also Britta Hoem and Jan M. Hoem, “The Disruption of Marital and Non-Marital Unions in Contemporary Sweden,” 61-93, in James Trussell, R. Hankinson, and J Tilton (eds.), Demographic Applications of Event History Analysis, (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1992).

34 A large portion of out-of-wedlock births are to teenage mothers. Without the increase in teenage births, the aggravated assault rate would have been about 20 percent lower than it was. See Jennifer Hunt, “Do Teen Births Keep American Crime High,” Journal of Law and Economics, October 2006, 533-566. The increased criminality among children born outside of wedlock is borne out in many other studies, although much of the research fails to separate out whether it is single parent families that lead to more crime or something else that causes both more single parent families and more crime. Examples of this research include: report by the Social Exclusion Unit, “Reducing Re-Offending by Ex-Prisoners” (2002). Http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:DVVPgqNYQHsJ; www.renewal.net/Documents/Policy%2520Guidance/Reducingreoffendingexprisoners.pdf 1; Sampson, R. J. (1987), “Urban black violence: The effect of male joblessness and family disruption,” American Journal of Sociology 93, 348-82; and Kellam, S. G., Adams, R. G., Brown, C. H., and Ensminger, M. E. (1982), “The long-term evolution of the family structure of teens and older mothers,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 44, 539-54.

35 Child Trends tabulations of data from the 2002 National Survey of America’s Families. See also Laura Meckler, “How a U.S. Official Promotes Marriage to Help Poor Kids,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2006.

36 “Oops-onomics,” The Economist, December 1, 2005. Levitt and Donohue thought they had accounted for whether states with low crime rates after the change in abortion laws already had low crime rates before the change. While Donohue and Levitt correctly described what test should be done, they carried out a different test. Another flaw is that they used changes in the abortion rate to explain changes in the total number of crimes in a state, not changes in the crime rate. For example, California and Louisiana may have had similar murder rates per 100,000 people in 1980 (14.5 and 15.7, respectively), but they had vastly different numbers of murder (3,411 and 661). The authors made a similar mistake in their arrest statistics, confusing the total number of arrests with the arrest rate.

37 Christopher L. Foote and Christopher F. Goetz, “Testing Economic Hypotheses with State-Level Data: A Comment on Donohue and Levitt (2001),” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper No. 05-15, November 22, 2005. Their Table 1, row 1, shows that adding the state-year fixed effects implies that abortion increases violent crime, though it isn’t statistically significant. Foote and Goetz accounted for the number of people in different states to measure the per capita rates of crime and abortion and they used the arrests per capita instead of the total number of arrests in a state. Doing so led to results implying a strong, statistically significant increase in violent crime from more abortion.

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