Steven Levitt and John Donohue defend the abortion-crime hypothesis
economist.com
economist.com
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
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.
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!
This hypothesis is strongly challenged by the fact that crime has also dropped in other developed countries that do not have mass incarceration.
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.
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.
Nailed it.
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.
https://guardianadlitem.org/volunteer-with-guardian-ad-litem...
I'll have to think about it in the future because I'm currently caring for elderly parents.
Many thanks to opening my eyes to new ways to volunteer.
"Such models provide little support for the Donohue and Levitt hypothesis in either the US or the United Kingdom."
Related: Levitt did a podcast recently that got a lot of attention, where he looks back on his career and discusses his retirement at age 58, and discusses this topic: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steven-d-levitt-freako...
"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. :)
Executing unwanted children (or adults) after birth might also reduce crime, but it's hard to test the hypothesis in an ethical manner.
From the article.
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.
I don't find Levitt and Donohue very persuasive, but Levitt does seem very data-driven.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
E.g. Some people think the lack of affirmative action is racism. Some people think the presence of affirmative action is racism.
Once you actually try to think about issues instead of label them, you'll realize that these are indeed matters of political ideology.
Go past the thought-stop sneer words and investigate what people actually want and mean.
Even if the statistical tools were developed by eugenicists, does that mean we shouldn’t use them? How would you restrict their use?
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.
Here is a good article from Nature about Fisher and his history on eugenics. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-020-00394-6)
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
Taken as a whole, the data do seem to make a strong case for their theory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
Can we not advocate for two things at once?
Let's be honest in our data collection then we can debate.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.