Showing posts with label Freakonomics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Freakonomics. Show all posts

April 26, 2014

"Does Abortion Prevent Crime?" Steven D. Levitt's opening statement to Steve Sailer in 1999 "Slate" debate

Below is the first of four parts of a 1999 debate in Slate between U. of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, and myself, Steve Sailer. We discussed Levitt's most celebrated theory: Did the legalization of abortion in 1969-1973 cause the crime rate to fall? 

I've decided to host this debate on my website because it is of some modest degree of historical importance as the first airing of one of the longer-running social science controversies of the 21st Century, and because Slate deleted our names from their posting of it during a website reorganization. Several years ago, Slate promised to restore our names, but hasn't done so yet. The absence of our names on Slate has made it hard for interested readers to find this using search engines.

E-MAIL DEBATES OF NEWSWORTHY TOPICS.
AUG. 23 1999 5:32 PM

Does Abortion Prevent Crime?

Part 1 of 4 of a debate between Steven D. Levitt and Steve Sailer




To read more on this topic, see Steve Sailer's 2005 posting after The Economist and the Wall Street Journal revealed that an attempted replication of Levitt's state-level analysis by Boston Fed economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz discovered that Levitt had made a fatal error in his computer code, which explains why Levitt's state-level findings didn't match my national-level analysis in 1999.
   
Complete debate: Part 1 (Levitt);   Part 2 (Sailer);   Part 3 (Levitt);   Part 4 (Sailer)
   

"Does Abortion Prevent Crime?" Steve Sailer's first response to Steven D. Levitt in 1999 "Slate" debate

Below is the second of four parts of a 1999 debate in Slate between U. of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, and myself, Steve Sailer. We discussed Levitt's most celebrated theory: Did the legalization of abortion in 1969-1973 cause the crime rate to fall? 

I've decided to host this debate on my website because it is of some modest degree of historical importance as the first airing of one of the longer-running social science controversies of the 21st Century, and because Slate deleted our names from their posting of it during a website reorganization. Several years ago, Slate promised to restore our names, but hasn't done so yet. The absence of our names on Slate has made it hard for interested readers to find this using search engines.

E-MAIL DEBATES OF NEWSWORTHY TOPICS.
AUG. 24 1999 3:30 AM

Does Abortion Prevent Crime?

"Does Abortion Prevent Crime?" Steven D. Levitt's response to Steve Sailer in 1999 "Slate" debate

Below is the third of four parts of a 1999 debate in Slate between U. of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, and myself, Steve Sailer. We discussed Levitt's most celebrated theory: Did the legalization of abortion in 1969-1973 cause the crime rate to fall? 

I've decided to host this debate on my website because it is of some modest degree of historical importance as the first airing of one of the longer-running social science controversies of the 21st Century, and because Slate deleted our names from their posting of it during a website reorganization. Several years ago, Slate promised to restore our names, but hasn't done so yet. The absence of our names on Slate has made it hard for interested readers to find this using search engines.


E-MAIL DEBATES OF NEWSWORTHY TOPICS.
AUG. 24 1999 9:30 PM

Does Abortion Prevent Crime?


  1. The arrival of crack led to large increases in crime rates between 1985 and the early '90s, particularly for inner-city African-American youths.
  2. The fall of the crack epidemic left many of the bad apples of this cohort dead, imprisoned, or scared straight. Consequently, not only did crime fall back to its original pre-crack level, but actually dropped even further in a "overshoot" effect.
  3. States that had high abortion rates in the '70s were hit harder by the crack epidemic, thus any link between falling crime in the '90s and abortion rates in the '70s is spurious.
If either assumption 1 or 2 is true, then the crack epidemic can explain some of the rise and fall in crime in the '80s and '90s. In order for your crack hypothesis to undermine the "abortion reduces crime" theory, however, all three assumptions must hold true.

So, let's look at the assumptions one by one and see how they fare.
  1. Did the arrival of crack lead to rising youth crime? Yes. No argument from me here.
  2. Did the decline in crack lead to a "boomerang" effect in which crime actually fell by more than it had risen with the arrival of crack? Unfortunately for your story, the empirical evidence overwhelmingly rejects this claim. Using specifications similar to those in our paper, we find that the states with the biggest increases in murder over the rising crack years (1985-91) did see murder rates fall faster between 1991 and 1997. But for every 10 percent that murder rose between 1985 and 1991, it fell by only 2.6 percent between 1991 and 1997. For your story to explain the decline in crime that we attribute to legalized abortion, this estimate would have to be about five times bigger. Moreover, for violent crime and property crime, increases in these crimes over the period 1985-91 are actually associated with increases in the period 1991-97 as well. In other words, for crimes other than murder, the impact of crack is not even in the right direction for your story.
  3. Were high-abortion-rate states in the '70s hit harder by the crack epidemic in the '90s? Given the preceding paragraph, this is a moot point, because all three assumptions must be true to undermine the abortion story, but let's look anyway. A reasonable proxy for how hard the crack epidemic hit a state is the rise in crime in that state over the period 1985-91. Your theory requires a large positive correlation between abortion rates in a state in the '70s and the rise in crime in that state between 1985 and 1991. In fact the actual correlations, depending on the crime category, range between -.32 and +.09 Thus, the claim that high-abortion states are the same states that were hit hardest by crack is not true empirically. While some states with high abortion rates did have a lot of crack (e.g., New York and D.C.), Vermont, Kansas, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Washington were among the 10 states with the highest abortion rates in the '70s. These were not exactly the epicenters of the crack epidemic.
So, what is the final tally? Two of the key assumptions underlying your alternative hypothesis appear to be false: The retreat of crack has not led to an "overshoot" in crime, causing it to be lower than 1985, and even if it had, the states with high abortion rates in the '70s do not appear to be affected particularly strongly by the crack epidemic. Moreover, when we re-run our analysis controlling for both changes in crime rates from 1985 to 1991 and the level of crime in 1991, the abortion variable comes in just as strongly as in our original analysis.

Crack clearly has affected crime over the last decade, but it cannot explain away our results with respect to legalized abortion.

The best test of any theory is its predictive value. The abortion theory predicts that crime will continue to fall slowly for the next 10 to 15 years. Also, the declines in crime should continue to be greater in high-abortion states than in low-abortion states. What do you predict based on your crack theory? If you are willing to wait 10 years, perhaps we can resolve this debate.
To read more on this topic, see Steve Sailer's 2005 posting after The Economist and the Wall Street Journal revealed that an attempted replication of Levitt's state-level analysis by Boston Fed economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz discovered that Levitt had made a fatal error in his computer code, which explains why Levitt's state-level findings didn't match my national-level analysis in 1999.

Complete debate: Part 1 (Levitt);   Part 2 (Sailer);   Part 3 (Levitt);   Part 4 (Sailer)
   

"Does Abortion Prevent Crime?" Steve Sailer's 2nd response to Steven D. Levitt in 1999 Slate debate

Below is the fourth and final part of a 1999 debate in Slate between U. of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt, co-author of the 2005 bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, and myself, Steve Sailer. We discussed Levitt's most celebrated theory: Did the legalization of abortion in 1969-1973 cause the crime rate to fall? 

I've decided to host this debate on my website because it is of some modest degree of historical importance as the first airing of one of the longer-running social science controversies of the 21st Century, and because Slate deleted our names from their posting of it during a website reorganization. Several years ago, Slate promised to restore our names, but hasn't done so yet. The absence of our names on Slate has made it hard for interested readers to find this using search engines.

E-MAIL DEBATES OF NEWSWORTHY TOPICS.
AUG. 25 1999 3:30 AM

Does Abortion Prevent Crime?


To read more on this topic, see Steve Sailer's 2005 posting after The Economist and the Wall Street Journal revealed that an attempted replication of Levitt's state-level analysis by Boston Fed economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz discovered that Levitt had made a fatal error in his computer code, which explains why Levitt's state-level findings didn't match my national-level analysis in 1999.
   
Complete debate: Part 1 (Levitt);   Part 2 (Sailer);   Part 3 (Levitt);   Part 4 (Sailer)
    

October 25, 2010

Freakonomics: The Movie

From my review in Taki's Magazine:
The new documentary Freakonomics harkens back to the good old days of 2005. Remember when economists, having permanently perfected the economy, graciously allowed their attention to wander to crime fighting, sumo wrestling, baby naming, and other fields not traditionally enlightened by their insights? University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt teamed up with journalist Stephen J. Dubner to compile one of the Housing Bubble era’s biggest airport-bookstore bestsellers: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explains the Hidden Side of Everything. Levitt and Dubner have now recruited some prominent documentarians to anthologize five disparate chapters of Freakonomics.

The most entertaining is the segment by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) on those not fully thought-through first names with which some African-Americans have saddled their babies ever since the late 1960s’ Black Pride movement. For example, scholars have counted 228 varietals of “Unique,” including “Uneek” (a fine name for a future rodent exterminator). ...

Are black children’s lives permanently damaged by all this parental originality? In 2005, Levitt and Dubner rather callously concluded that, in effect, if your parents named you “M’qheal” rather than “Michael,” your bigger problem is likely your last name. You are evidently descended from some mighty poor decision-makers.

Spurlock, however, adds a useful coda from another social scientist who mailed out résumés under white and black first names that were otherwise identical. Job applications bearing Ghetto Fabulous monikers are more likely to go straight into Human Resources Departments’ circular files. So, African-American parents: For the sake of your kids’ careers, please resist your whimsical urges. (Somebody should study the impact of the science-fictiony first names that Mormons dream up, such as D’Loaf, Zanderalex, and ElVoid.)

Read the whole thing there.

In other pop-sociology movie news, check out VideoGum's 2009 article "Malcolm Gladwell's Blink Vying for Legendary Worst Movie of All Time Status," including an important update on who is now attached to star in Blink. (Try to guess!)

March 30, 2010

Carrots without sticks

From the New York Times, an article on an experimental program in NYC that had been very popular among economists: using carrots (but no sticks) to get the poor to behave better.
City to End Program Giving Cash to the Poor

An unusual and much-heralded program that gave poor families cash to encourage good behavior and self-sufficiency has so far had only modest effects on their lives and economic situation, according to an analysis the Bloomberg administration released on Tuesday.

The three-year-old pilot project, the first of its kind in the country, gave parents payments for things like going to the dentist ($100) or holding down a full-time job ($150 per month). Children were rewarded for attending school regularly ($25 to $50 per month) or passing a high school Regents exam ($600).

When the mayor announced the program, he said it would begin with private money and, if it worked, could be transformed into an ambitious permanent government program.

But city officials said Tuesday that there were no specific plans at this time to go forward with a publicly financed version of the program. In an announcement at BronxWorks, a nonprofit social services agency, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg pointed to a few examples of success: High school students who met basic proficiency standards before high school tended to increase their attendance, receive more class credits and perform better on standardized tests; more families went to the dentist for regular checkups.

But the elementary and middle school students who participated made no educational or attendance gains. Neither did high school students who performed below basic proficiency standards before high school. ...

The program was certainly expensive: Mr. Bloomberg and Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services, traveled to Mexico to learn more about Oportunidades, the welfare program there on which the New York City effort was based.

About $40 million in private donations, including from Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation, was collected to finance the effort, called Opportunity NYC Family Rewards. Two years into the program, more than $14 million had been paid out to 2,400 families. An additional $10.2 million is for operating costs, and $9.6 million for research and evaluation.

So, poor people got $14 million and middle-class administrators and researchers got $19.8 million? And what happened to the other $6.2 million in donations?

While most behavioral changes were not large, the cash provided to the families had a short-term effect: Those who participated earned, on average, more than $6,000 a year in the first two years. Largely as a result, those participating families were 16 percent less likely to live in poverty.

The families used the money to pay for basic living expenses, school supplies, electronic equipment and going to the movies, among other things.

More than 80 percent of the families were led by a single parent, 43 percent had three or more children and just over half of the parents held jobs. All lived in low-income areas in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan....

Ms. Gibbs said many families had been perplexed by the guidelines that were laid out for them. Cash payments were eventually eliminated for actions like getting a library card and follow-up visits with a doctor.

“Too many things, too many details, more to manage in the lives of burdened, busy households,” Ms. Gibbs said, standing next to the mayor on Tuesday. “Big lesson for the future? Got to make it a lot more simple.”

A good lesson to learn.

The city has been somewhat sensitive about the results of the program. Ms. Gibbs and other city officials cautioned that the report released on Tuesday reflected only initial results, and said that they were in line with other early results from similar conditional cash transfer programs in Latin America.

A program in Mexico that bribes peasant moms to not pull their kids out school and put them to work after 4th grade in the fields but instead keep them in school through 8th grade so they can learn enough math to be carpenters would appear to be less vulnerable to diminishing marginal returns. In contrast, a program in America where a goal is, say, to keep kids from dropping out after 10th grade and have them learn enough math in 11th and 12th grade to get a fancy Regents' diploma would have a big diminishing marginal returns challenge.

On international tests of schoolchildren, Mexican-Americans average quite a bit higher scores than Mexicans, which suggests that Mexico has a long way to go to improve education. By the way, Mexico has a single national schoolteachers' union that is so powerful that teachers' jobs in government schools are becoming hereditary. Mexico has been like the old Soviet joke about how they pretend to teach us and we pretend to study.

But the whole concept of diminishing marginal returns appears to be off limits for thinking about education.

“There have never been these overnight, miraculous turnarounds,” Ms. Gibbs said. “These are programs that are working on deeply entrenched, long-term behaviors.”

One Brooklyn family who participated in the program said they collected more than $7,610 in two years. Janice Dudley and her 16-year-old daughter, Qua-neshia Darden, of East New York, said they received rewards for school attendance, good test scores and receiving regular medical checkups.

How much would it cost to bribe new mothers not to name their daughters "Qua-neshia?" Whatever it costs, it would probably be worth it. What employer could read the name "Qua-neshia" on a resume without betting that if he hires her, she'll sue for racial discrimination the first time she doesn't get the promotion she wants?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

January 29, 2010

ESPN fires writer for going there

Paul Shirley, a 6'10" white basketball journeyman and sportswriter, got fired from ESPN for blogging on FlipCollective that he wouldn't be donating to Haiti "for the same reason that I don't give money to homeless men on the street. Based on past experiences, I don’t think the guy with the sign that reads 'Need You’re Help' is going to do anything constructive with the dollar I might give him."

That reminds me of the Two Minutes Hate directed at William Bennett about the same period of time after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans for referring to Steve Levitt's Abortion-Cuts-Crime theory on the radio. I wrote:
Ever since New Orleans, the hysteria among the political and media elite has been building: Who among us bigshots will crack first and allude to the elephant in the living room?

Also, I'm reminded of the 2003 incident when Michael Eisner fired ESPN columnist Greg Easterbrook for mentioning "Jewish [movie] executives" in denouncing a slasher film in his blog on the The New Republic:
Easterbrook was widely excoriated both for terminal unhipness and for supposedly resurrecting the myth that Jews control the media. Disney supremo Michael Eisner, however, did control Easterbrook's other employer, ESPN, which immediately fired him. Most commentators opined that Easterbrook had it coming.

All I can say is that if Walt Disney were alive today, he'd be spinning in his cryogenic preservation chamber.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 11, 2009

Reviews of Books I Didn't Read: SuperFreakonomics

I've been skimming a few books at the book store. Here's one:
SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

It must annoy U. of Chicago economist Levitt -- in a fuming all the way to the bank kinda way -- that he gets compared to Malcolm Gladwell a lot, when anybody just flipping idly through their respective books ought to be able to notice that Levitt is a lot smarter.

My impression after a half hour is that SuperFreakonomics is very competently done. I didn't see anything implausible, in contrast to the way you can't read Gladwell for 3 minutes without stumbling upon something that sounds just plain wrong. (SuperFreakonomics elicited much angry response because it expresses some skepticism about Climate Change dogma, but I don't know anything about climate, so I skipped those parts.)

Really, the appropriate comparison isn't Levitt to Gladwell, it's Dubner to Gladwell. Dubner is better with words than numbers, so he found somebody who is better with numbers than with words to team up with. Dubner doesn't make anywhere near as much money as Gladwell does winging it alone, but Dubner's not making himself into a laughing stock either.

Yet, from my idiosyncratic point of view, SuperFreakonomics seemed a little dull. I learned, for example, that prostitution offers a convenient way for lazy women to earn a living. But I didn't see anything on topics of much interest to me. For example, Levitt's work with Roland Fryer isn't mentioned in the index.

Now that I think about it, that might be intentional. Consider it from Levitt's point of view. He's a rational, risk-averse economist. He knows his book will make a lot of money no matter what he puts in it. So, maybe Levitt figured, "What do I need Heckman and Sailer punching holes in my reputation for, anyway? I'll just stay away from subjects where they know more than I do, and we'll all be happy."

In contrast, Gladwell has a natural born kamikaze pilot's instinct for lashing back at criticism from exactly the wrong people: "Pinker? Murray? Posner? Sailer? Bring 'em on!"

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 18, 2009

You don't say!

Steven D. Levitt's and Stephen Dubner's new surefire bestseller ¡SuperFreakonomics! is being widely anathematized for exhibiting signs of heretical doubts about Global Warming or Climate Change or whatever it's called these days.

In his defense, Dubner blogs on the New York Times in Global Warming in SuperFreakonomics: The Anatomy of a Smear:
Yes, it’s an ancient cliché: a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. But it’s still accurate.

Gosh, Steve and Steve, you don't say!

Funny how Levitt became a global celebrity for theorizing in 1999 that legalizing abortion cut crime, even though juvenile homicide rates for teens born in the half decade following legalization were several times higher than for teens born in the half decade preceding legalization, as I pointed out in our debate in Slate in August 1999.

A half dozen years later, he made that theory the centerpiece of Steve's and Steve's Freakonomics despite having no plausible refutation other than it was all based on very complicated statistics that little me wouldn't understand. Then, late in 2005, Boston Fed economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz tried to replicate Levitt's findings and found he had simply made two technical mistakes in his programming that made a hash of his results.

By then, however, Steve and Steve's lie had traveled all the way round the world and their permanent celebrity status was assured.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 3, 2009

Not enough exclamation points!

There's something that just doesn't feel right about Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner denying themselves an exclamation point in the title of their sequel to their 4 million-selling 2005 book Freakonomics.

C'mon, Steve and Steve, you deserve an exclamation point:
SuperFreakonomics!

Heck, you've also earned yourselves one of those upside down Spanish exclamation points in front:
¡SuperFreakonomics!

Steve and Steve's new book with the sadly understated and excessively tasteful title SuperFreakonomics will be out October 20. (Maybe they're reserving the exclamation point for the Broadway musical adaptation? I mean, why not? After all, Malcolm Gladwell got $1,000,000 for the movie rights to Blink.)

I'm looking forward to a nostalgic revival of the Freakonomics Frenzy of 2005, back when economists, having solved, once and for all, how to manage the economy had therefore allowed their attention to wander to imperializing lesser fields, such as criminology. Levitt didn't actually have to know boring stuff like crime rate trends in the U.S. over the last few decades before publicizing his abortion-cut-crime theory, because he was ... an economist!

Those were good times, good times ...

October 20, 2007

Levitt weighs in on James D. Watson

In his Freakonomics blog on the New York Times, economist Steven D. Levitt issues a stirring defense of freedom of speech and scientific inquiry. Well, no, actually, Levitt sidesteps that whole tarpit and instead complains that he, Levitt, should have gotten more publicity.

James Watson, Black Intelligence, and New Research by Fryer and Levitt

Nobel Laureate James Watson got into trouble recently for expressing the opinion that blacks are less intelligent than whites.

If you look at almost all existing data from standardized tests in the United States, there is indeed a sizable black-white test score gap. Whether the gap is due to genetic differences is a hotly debated academic question.

Roland Fryer and I have done some research on this topic which we think is potentially quite interesting and important — although we seem to be the only ones with this opinion at present. (The paper was rejected yesterday by the American Economic Review on the second round of review, and a search of Google Scholar reveals only two citations to the working paper version released in early 2006.)

In my work with Fryer, we analyzed a newly available nationally representative survey of children ages two and under, done by the Department of Education. Included in this study are tests of mental ability around a child’s first birthday. While you might think it would be impossible to capture anything meaningful at such a young age, it turns out that these measures of one-year-olds’ intelligence are somewhat highly correlated with IQ scores at later ages, as well as with parental IQ scores.

The striking result we find is that there are no racial differences in mental functioning at age one, although a racial gap begins to emerge over the next few years of life.

So what does this mean for the genetics vs. environment debate? Quoting from our abstract, “the observed patterns are broadly consistent with large racial differences in environmental factors that grow in importance as children age. Our findings are not consistent with the simplest models of large genetic differences across races in intelligence, although we cannot rule out the possibility that intelligence has multiple dimensions and racial differences are present only in those dimensions that emerge later in life.”

Like all research, our study has its flaws and limitations. I have to say, however, that I imagined a lot of reactions to this paper, none of which were utter indifference on the part of academics and the popular press. But that was the reaction we got.

I just did a study of lactose tolerance among one-year-olds, and guess what? I didn't find any racial differences! They were all lactose tolerant. So all those stories you hear about how East Asians don't have a gene for lactose tolerance are just racist myths! I proved it with science!

I also did a study of one-year-olds' ability to slam dunk on a ten foot basket. Once again, there were no racial differences. None of them could dunk. I even lowered the basket to six feet and still there were no racial differences in dunking. So, when you watch the NBA and there are all these blacks guys slam dunking, that's just racism. Who are you gonna believe, science or your lying eyes?

Then, I got a bunch of Kenyan and Ethiopian highlander one-year-old babies together with some other babies and timed them in the marathon. As always, there were no racial differences. Not a single baby of any origin finished the 26.2 mile run. So, the next time the top ten finishers at a big marathon are eight Kenyans and two Ethiopians, don't believe it!

You don't want to end up like James D. Watson, suspended from running the laboratory that you have built up over the last 39 years for political incorrectness, do you?

Seriously, I always love how the New York Times is oh-so-skeptical about IQ testing in general, except when it supports something they like, and then credulity is the order of the day. Look, there is no IQ test for 1-year-olds. What Levitt did in this paper is look at a test of infant liveliness (e.g., how often the infant babbles) that has a fairly low but positive correlation with childhood IQ (a correlation which is, by the way, quite common. Indeed, it's hard to find a behavioral measure that is not at all correlated with IQ -- drumming ability is the most famous example of something with no IQ correlation, as all the Drummer Jokes told by high IQ rockers like Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger, and David Bowie might suggest.)

So, this test of liveliness of 8 to 12 month olds doesn't show the differences seen among older children on IQ tests! If that isn't stop the presses news, I don't know what is.

Indeed, the highest IQ children (Northeast Asians) do the worst on this test of infant vivacity. With a typical Freakonomic leap of faith, Levitt and Fryer suggested that this shows that IQ differences aren't genetic but are caused by environmental differences, presumably between age 1 and the earliest ages at which IQ tests are semi-reliable.

Of course, all Levitt actually did was show that this test of infant liveliness is a racially biased predictor of IQ. Why is it racially biased? Well, there are lots more ways for something to go wrong than to go right, but one obvious possibility is that the test of infant alertness might measure traits that differ on average between the races, but aren't related to IQ differences between the races. For example, within a race, babies that babble more turn out to be a little bit smarter on average than more taciturn babies. Yet, Asian infants don't babble as much on average as other babies, but that doesn't mean they'll turn out to have lower IQs on average than babies from races that babble more. But pointing out that this test of babies is racially biased is not as sexy a story as claiming it shows Nurture Triumphs Over Nature.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 11, 2007

Jim Manzi reviews the Levitt-Lott feud

In National Review, Jim Manzi reviews economist John R. Lott's Freedomomics and takes a look at Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics as well:
"Levitt wrote that Roe is "like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually creates a hurricane on another." He ought to be more careful with his similes: Surely he knew that he was echoing meteorologist Edward Lorenz's famous evocation of a global climate system--one that had such a dense web of interconnected pathways of causation that it made long-term weather forecasting a fool's errand. The actual event that inspired this observation was that, one day in 1961, Lorenz entered .506 instead of .506127 for one parameter in a climate-forecasting model and discovered that it produced a wildly different long-term weather forecast. This is, of course, directly analogous to what we see in the abortion-crime debate: Tiny changes in the data set yield vastly different results. This is a telltale sign (as if another were needed) that human society is far too complicated to yield to the analytical tools that Lott and Levitt bring to bear. Nobody in this debate has any reliable, analytically derived idea of what impact abortion legalization has had on crime. "
I didn't know that about the famous "butterfly in Brazil" effect, but that is what I've been saying about Levitt's abortion-crime theory since 1999: it's beyond the power of contemporary social science to determine.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 30, 2007

Will the NYT ever report anything bad about their blogger Steve Levitt?

Here's the abstract of a paper in press by economist Ted Joyce, followed by Joyce's cogent explanation of why it's important to keep harping on this subject.


A Simple Test of Abortion and Crime
Ted Joyce
Baruch College and Graduate Center
City University of New York
and
National Bureau of Economic Research

Forthcoming in Review of Economics and Statistics

A Simple Test of Abortion and Crime

Abstract

I replicate Donohue and Levitt’s results for violent and property crime arrest rates and then apply their data and specification to an analysis of age-specific homicide rates and murder arrest rates. The coefficients on the abortion rate have the wrong sign for two of the four measures of crime and none is statistically significant at conventional levels. In the second half of the paper, I present alternative tests of abortion and crime that attempt to mitigate problems of endogeneity and measurement error. I use the legalization of abortion following the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade in order to exploit two sources of variation: between-state changes in abortion rates pre and post Roe, and cross-cohort differences in exposure to legalized abortion. I ind no meaningful association between abortion and age-specific crime rates among cohorts born in the years just before and after abortion became legal.

I. Introduction

The debate as to whether legalized abortion lowers crime leaped from academic journals to mainstream discourse with the huge success of Freakonomics.1 In the Chapter titled, “Where Have All the Criminals Gone?” Levitt and Dubner summarize academic work by Levitt and coauthor John Donohue, which shows that a one-standard deviation increase in the abortion rate lowers homicide rates by 31 percent and can explain upwards of 60 percent of the recent decline in murder.2 If one accepts these estimates, then legalized abortion has saved more than 51,000 lives between 1991 and 2001, at a total savings of $105 billion. But the policy implications go beyond crime. If abortion lowers homicide rates by 20 to 30 percent, then it is likely to have affected an entire spectrum of outcomes associated with well-being: infant health, child development, schooling, earnings and marital status. Similarly, the policy implications are broader than abortion. Other interventions that affect fertility control and that lead to fewer unwanted births—contraception or sexual abstinence—have huge potential payoffs. In short, a causal relationship between legalized abortion and crime has such significant ramifications for social policy and at the same time is so controversial, that further assessment of the identifying assumptions and their robustness to alternative strategies is warranted.


The New York Times more or less sets the agenda for the rest of the news media. If the NYT decides a story is fit to print, much of the the rest of the press will soon decide, what do you know!, that the topic deserves coverage. But if a tree falls in the forest and the NYT doesn't cover it ... This means the NYT has a particular responsibility to avoid giving in to conflicts of interest, which they have clearly succumbed to over the last two years in their refusal to report on any of the controversies swirling around their star columnist turned blogger Steven D. Levitt.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 7, 2007

Bad timing

The New York Times brings Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics blog on-board as an official NYT feature right at the moment we get to see Levitt's embarrassing "letter of clarification" in settlement of John Lott's defamation case against him!

Will the NYT ever report on this latest story involving their valuable asset? In 2005, the NYT, unlike the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, didn't report on Christopher Foote's and Christopher Goetz's discovery that their columnist's famous abortion-cut-crime theory was based on two errors Levitt had made.

So, probably not. As I wrote in the Washington Times in my review of Lott's anti-Levitt Freedomnomics: "Someone should write Celebrityonomics: Why Being Famous Beats Being Right."

As for defamation lawsuits, the Mahalanobis blog has some interesting reflections:


I have a lot of legal experience recently as a defendant, so in the Levitt vs Lott defamation spat, I found myself sympathetic to the defendant, Levitt. Levitt's admission that he said things to the effect that Lott was manipulating his results, and just plain dumb, I figured was his rightful opinion. Heck, if we are to make it illegal to have bad opinions, we would all be in jail. ... People have to learn to live with the fact that no one but Kim Jong-Il or Fidel Castro get 100% approval ratings. In sum, that someone thinks you are dumb or corrupt is so common it is hardly worth a legal remedy.

I had read the one sentence from Freakonomics that Lott found offensive, and was unmoved, as was the judge. But I just read the email that Levitt wrote to John McCall, where he asserts in a private e-mail that Lott's work published in a volume of the Journal of Law and Economics was a puff piece, bought and paid for by Lott or his puppet masters. As Levitt is a powerful person in economics (Editor of the highly respected Journal of Political Economy), whose opinion is therefore important to other people, with power comes responsibility. He is not a politician, so I think he should be free to say whatever he wants in public, no matter how mean or petty. To the extent he slanders or libels someone in public, its good advertising, because no one gets really mad when someone says 2+2=5, they get mad when you make good points.

But private correspondence is more problematic. If behind the scenes a powerful man is slandering someone, there's no accountability, it generates damages, and basically constitutes a conspiracy. This is especially so in this case because Levitt appears to have acted in bad faith, misstating known facts about things like whether something was refereed, ...

Another reminder that economists, like everyone else, are all too human. I hope Levitt takes this lesson to heart.


Personally, I might favor the law affording people a "one defamation margin of error:" if Levitt had more than once emailed somebody with this kind of thing, it would constitute a pattern. At present, however, all we know is that he did this once. (Another concern about suing over private emails is that a satirical statement not intended seriously might be taken literally, although that doesn't seem to apply here.)

Finally, to add some context, here's a paragraph from an earlier David Glenn article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:


"A participant in the conference told The Chronicle last year that Mr. Levitt's characterization of the issue as not peer-refereed was an exaggeration but not an outrageous untruth. Other participants, however, insisted that the issue was vigorously peer-reviewed. They said they had the impression that their work would have been rejected if they had not dealt with the reviewers' concerns."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer