Abortion and Crime, Revisited (Update)

0:00:04 Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner.
0:00:10 Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, the court’s 1973 ruling
0:00:16 that made abortion legal throughout the U.S. With this new ruling, the legality of abortion
0:00:18 was kicked back to the states.
0:00:23 Since then, 13 states have banned abortion and eight others have imposed more limited
0:00:24 restrictions.
0:00:29 This election day, November 5th, voters everywhere will be choosing a president and the voters
0:00:35 in 10 states will also be considering ballot measures that aim to protect abortion access.
0:00:39 Kamala Harris has said that if she becomes president, she would sign a bill to once again
0:00:41 make abortion legal nationwide.
0:00:44 Donald Trump’s position is less clear.
0:00:49 Harris says that Trump would sign a national abortion ban, but Trump has denied this and
0:00:52 said the issue should be left to the states.
0:00:57 Whatever the outcomes on election day, the fact is that abortion laws in the U.S. are
0:01:01 in the middle of a big shift with consequences that are hard to predict.
0:01:07 The law of unintended consequences isn’t really a law, but it is at least a principle
0:01:09 that we talk about a lot on this show.
0:01:15 And there was one particularly noteworthy unintended consequence of Roe v. Wade that
0:01:20 Steve Levitt and I wrote about in Freakonomics way back in 2005.
0:01:25 We revisited this topic in 2019 in an episode of Freakonomics Radio.
0:01:29 At that time, a lot of state legislatures, especially in the South and Midwest, were
0:01:33 already moving to restrict abortions.
0:01:37 Considering the state of play today, I thought it might be worth hearing that 2019 episode
0:01:38 again.
0:01:41 It’s called Abortion and Crime Revisited.
0:01:45 We have updated facts and figures throughout.
0:01:48 As always, thanks for listening.
0:01:52 When you think about unintended consequences, when you think about two stories that would
0:01:56 seem to have nothing to do with each other, it is hard to beat the stories we are telling
0:01:57 today.
0:02:02 The first one, if you follow the news even a little bit, should be familiar to you.
0:02:06 It concerns one of the most contentious issues of the day.
0:02:09 New developments in the escalating battle over abortion.
0:02:12 The last clinic in Missouri on the verge of closing today.
0:02:17 The battle goes back at least to 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court took up a case called
0:02:19 Roe v. Wade.
0:02:23 The Supreme Court today ruled that abortion is completely a private matter to be decided
0:02:27 by mother and doctor in the first three months of pregnancy.
0:02:32 A few years before Roe v. Wade, abortion had been legalized in five states, including New
0:02:34 York and California.
0:02:39 The Supreme Court made it legal in all 50 states, but lately, several states have been
0:02:41 pushing back, hard.
0:02:46 The Ohio governor signing today would critics condemn as the most restrictive abortion law
0:02:47 in the country.
0:02:50 Nearly a dozen states are now imposing new restrictions this year.
0:02:56 Meanwhile, if you go back 30 or 35 years, there was a totally different story dominating
0:02:59 media coverage and the political conversation.
0:03:06 Let us roll up our sleeves to roll back this awful tide of violence and reduce crime in
0:03:07 our country.
0:03:10 We must take back the streets.
0:03:15 If you weren’t around then, it’s hard to remember just how bleak the outlook was.
0:03:22 Crime had begun to rise in the 1960s, continued on through the ’70s and ’80s, and by 1990,
0:03:26 it seemed that everyone was scared everywhere, all the time.
0:03:32 Robberies, assaults, and even murder have replaced shoplifting, vandalism, and truancy.
0:03:35 Crime became a top priority among Democrats.
0:03:39 It doesn’t matter whether or not they were deprived as a youth.
0:03:40 And Republicans, too.
0:03:44 There are no violent offenses that are juvenile.
0:03:45 You rape somebody, you’re an adult.
0:03:47 You shoot somebody, you’re an adult.
0:03:50 Experts call them super predators.
0:03:55 Everyone agreed that violent crime was out of hand, that the criminals were getting younger,
0:03:58 and that the problem was only going to get worse.
0:04:03 There’s a tidal wave of juvenile violent crime right over the horizon.
0:04:05 But the problem didn’t get worse.
0:04:12 In the early 1990s, violent crime began to fall, and then it fell and fell and fell some
0:04:13 more.
0:04:18 After New York City, in 1990, there were more than 2,200 homicides.
0:04:22 In 2023, there were fewer than 400.
0:04:24 But it wasn’t just New York.
0:04:29 With a few exceptions, crime across the U.S. has plunged.
0:04:30 Why?
0:04:36 What led to this unprecedented and wildly unexpected turnaround?
0:04:41 Everyone had their theory, better policing, the reintroduction of capital punishment,
0:04:45 longer economy, the demise of the crack epidemic.
0:04:50 Meanwhile, a pair of academic researchers came up with another theory.
0:04:56 It was surprising, it was jarring, but it seemed to hold great explanatory power.
0:05:01 And he said, “Well, I think maybe legalized abortion might have reduced crime.”
0:05:07 If you’ve ever read Freakonomics, the namesake book of this show, you may recall this controversial
0:05:10 link between legalized abortion and the fall of crime.
0:05:15 Today on Freakonomics Radio, the story behind the research and evidence for the theory,
0:05:21 the challenges to its legitimacy, and the results of a new follow-up analysis.
0:05:27 It was completely obvious to us that a sensible thing to do 20 years later would be to look
0:05:31 and see how the predictions had turned out.
0:05:32 How did they turn out?
0:05:35 What does this mean for abortion policy?
0:05:36 What’s it mean for crime policy?
0:05:51 We’ll get to all that right after this.
0:05:57 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with
0:06:09 your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:06:15 From 1991 to 2001, violent crime in the U.S. fell more than 30 percent, a decline not seen
0:06:17 since the end of prohibition.
0:06:22 I was spending most of my waking hours trying to figure out this puzzle about why was it
0:06:28 that crime, after rising for 30 years from 1906 to 1990, had suddenly reversed.
0:06:33 But Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author, he is an economist at the University
0:06:34 of Chicago.
0:06:37 He’s always had an intense interest in crime.
0:06:45 I had looked into all of the usual suspects, the policing and imprisonment, the crack epidemic,
0:06:52 but really you could not and you cannot effectively explain the patterns of crime, looking at the
0:06:58 kinds of components that people typically talk about when they try to understand why crime
0:06:59 goes up and down.
0:07:05 Levitt eventually wrote a paper called “Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s, Four Factors
0:07:08 that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not.”
0:07:13 The six factors that, according to his analysis, did not contribute to the crime drop, a strengthening
0:07:19 economy, the aging of the population, innovative policing strategies, gun control laws, right
0:07:24 to carry laws, and the increased use of capital punishment.
0:07:29 While each of these, in theory, might seem to have some explanatory power, Levitt found
0:07:30 they didn’t.
0:07:35 The relationship between violent crime and the greater economy, for instance, is very
0:07:37 weak.
0:07:41 Capital punishment, he found, at least is currently practiced in the US, simply didn’t act as
0:07:44 a deterrent against future crimes.
0:07:47 Then there were the factors he found did contribute.
0:07:53 The increase in the number of police, an increase in the number of criminals imprisoned, and
0:07:58 the decline of the crack cocaine trade, which had been unusually violent.
0:08:03 But these three factors could explain only a portion of the massive drop in crime, perhaps
0:08:05 only half.
0:08:11 It was as if there was some mysterious force that all the politicians and criminologists
0:08:14 and journalists weren’t thinking about at all.
0:08:20 I had the idea that maybe legalized abortion in the 1970s might possibly have affected
0:08:22 crime in the 1990s.
0:08:27 One day, paging through the statistical abstract of the United States, which is a kind of thing
0:08:31 that economists like Levitt do for fun, he saw a number that shocked him.
0:08:39 At the peak of US abortion, there were 1.5 million abortions every year.
0:08:41 That was compared to roughly 4 million live births.
0:08:47 The sheer magnitude of abortion surprised Levitt and he wondered what sort of secondary
0:08:48 effects it might have.
0:08:54 He wondered, for instance, if it might somehow be connected to the huge drop in crime.
0:08:59 And I had actually gotten obsessed with the idea and had spent maybe three weeks working
0:09:01 around the clock.
0:09:05 And I had decided that the idea wasn’t a very good one, that it didn’t make sense.
0:09:09 And I had a huge file of papers that I had put away and had moved on to another project.
0:09:15 Levitt, like a lot of researchers, was juggling a lot of projects with a lot of collaborators.
0:09:18 One of his collaborators was named John Donahue.
0:09:23 Yeah, and I’m a professor of law at Stanford Law School.
0:09:29 Donahue also had a PhD in economics, so he and Levitt spoke the same language.
0:09:34 Donahue was particularly interested in criminal justice issues, gun policy, sentencing guidelines,
0:09:35 things like that.
0:09:40 For instance, he found that minorities who kill whites received disproportionately harsher
0:09:42 sentences in Connecticut.
0:09:45 This research ultimately led to changes in that state.
0:09:52 Yeah, it clearly played a role in the initial legislative decision to curtail the death
0:09:58 penalty in Connecticut, as well as in the final Connecticut Supreme Court decision abolishing
0:09:59 the death penalty.
0:10:05 Donahue had been doing a lot of thinking about the rise in crime, starting in the 1960s.
0:10:08 He thought the drug trade was one big factor.
0:10:17 Yeah, it does seem that large illegal markets are important contributing factors to crime.
0:10:24 It was also a time of great flux around the Vietnam War, and of course, the Vietnam War
0:10:30 had multiple influences that contributed to social unrest.
0:10:36 At the same time, there was pressure going in the opposite direction to try to reduce
0:10:43 the harshness of punishment and perhaps pull back a little bit on elements of policing.
0:10:48 The combination of those factors, I think, exacerbated the crime rate.
0:10:54 One day, John Donahue and Steve Levitt were sitting in Levitt’s office.
0:10:58 I remember it like yesterday, John says, “You know, I have the craziest idea.
0:11:00 I mean, it’s like totally absurd.”
0:11:01 I said, “Oh, what is it?”
0:11:06 He said, “Well, I think maybe legalized abortion might have reduced crime in the 1990s.”
0:11:07 I said, “That’s so funny.”
0:11:11 I reached into my filing cabinet, pulled up this huge thick thing, and I slammed it down
0:11:12 on the desk.
0:11:13 Yeah, that’s right.
0:11:19 When I talked to Steve about it as is often the case, since he is such a creative mind,
0:11:22 he said, “Oh, yeah, I wondered about that.”
0:11:25 I said, “I had that same idea, but it’s not right.”
0:11:26 He said, “Well, what do you mean?”
0:11:30 And I walked him through my logic, and I hadn’t thought deeply enough about it, and I had
0:11:36 been focusing on the fact that when abortion became legal, there was a reduction in the
0:11:38 number of children born.
0:11:40 And John said, “Yeah, but what about unwantedness?”
0:11:43 And I’m like, “What do you mean, unwantedness?”
0:11:46 What did Donahue mean by unwantedness?
0:11:51 He was referring to the expansive social sciences literature, which showed that children born
0:11:56 to parents who didn’t truly want that child or weren’t ready for that child, those children
0:12:02 were more likely to have worse outcomes as they grew up, health and education outcomes.
0:12:06 But also, these so-called “unwanted kids” would ultimately be more likely to engage
0:12:08 in criminal behaviors.
0:12:13 Donahue had begun to put the puzzle together when he attended a conference.
0:12:19 And I heard a paper being presented at the American Bar Foundation by Rebecca Blank,
0:12:22 who’s a distinguished economist.
0:12:26 Blank spent nine years as Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
0:12:32 When we were making this original episode back in 2019, she declined our request for
0:12:33 an interview.
0:12:37 Blank died at age 67 in 2023.
0:12:42 And she was talking about who gets abortion in the United States.
0:12:47 That is, after Roe v. Wade, what were the characteristics of the women most likely to
0:12:49 get an abortion?
0:12:56 And she was highlighting that it was poor, young, unmarried, inner-city, minority women.
0:13:04 And as I was looking at the elements of crime in the U.S., there was quite an overlap between
0:13:10 the populations that were involved in this increase in crime with the group that she was
0:13:18 identifying as a group of women who were most likely to be experiencing higher rates of abortion.
0:13:24 And so that got me thinking about, could abortion actually influence crime rates?
0:13:28 Did that initial thought even make you a little uncomfortable?
0:13:33 Because it’s pretty obvious to just about anyone that that’s sort of a third-rail idea,
0:13:34 yes?
0:13:41 I knew that this would be very, you know, electric to some individuals.
0:13:48 But for me, I was really interested in, you know, studying the impact on crime that we
0:13:51 were observing at that particular moment.
0:13:58 And so it didn’t inhibit me at all because I thought there is an issue here, and it’s
0:14:02 sort of useful to be able to figure out what the truth is.
0:14:09 How did the population of women who were having abortions change from before Roe v. Wade or
0:14:14 really from before abortion was legalized state-by-state to afterwards?
0:14:16 Yeah, that’s a great question.
0:14:21 And of course, there’s much that we don’t know about what was happening before because
0:14:26 of the illegal nature of abortion in most states.
0:14:30 But we can sort of infer from the changes that did occur and the fact that, you know,
0:14:39 some states legalized in 1970 and became avenues for travel to have abortions done.
0:14:44 We can sort of piece together who was traveling to have abortions and see how things changed
0:14:47 when then abortion became legal everywhere.
0:14:55 And so one thing that we did see is that affluent women did travel to have abortions in the
0:15:04 period between 1970 when New York legalized and 1973 when Roe v. Wade was decided.
0:15:12 But it involved travel and expense, and therefore it was too much of an impediment for the group
0:15:18 of women that we are most interested in, which are the ones who are usually at the lower
0:15:24 end of the socioeconomic scale and did not have the opportunity and resources that would
0:15:26 permit them to travel.
0:15:30 So then John and I just spent a little bit of time making back of the envelope calculations
0:15:34 of how important this unwantedness effect could be.
0:15:36 And it was really shocking.
0:15:39 Remember, the magnitude of abortion was huge.
0:15:44 At its peak, there were 345 abortions for every 1,000 live births.
0:15:50 And so when you took the magnitude and you interacted with this very powerful unwantedness
0:15:55 effect that’s been documented elsewhere, it actually suggests to us that abortion could
0:16:00 be really, really important for reducing crime 15 or 20 years later.
0:16:02 The mechanism was pretty simple.
0:16:07 Unwanted children were more likely than average to engage in crime as they got older.
0:16:12 But an unwanted child who was never born would never have the opportunity to enter his criminal
0:16:14 prime 15 or 20 years later.
0:16:19 Donahue and Levitt created a tidy syllogism.
0:16:21 Unwantedness leads to high crime.
0:16:24 Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness.
0:16:28 Therefore abortion led to lower crime.
0:16:30 But syllogisms are easy.
0:16:31 What about evidence?
0:16:37 So it’s not that easy to convince people that there’s a causal impact of legalized abortion
0:16:41 on crime because this is certainly not a setting in which I’m never going to be allowed to
0:16:47 say run a randomized experiment in which I decide who does or doesn’t get abortions.
0:16:53 And so instead, what we have to do by necessity is to look at a collage of evidence.
0:16:58 So a bunch of different, all quite imperfect sources of variation that allow us to get some
0:17:04 sense of whether there might be some causality between legalized abortion and crime.
0:17:09 So Levitt and Donahue set out to assemble this collage of evidence.
0:17:16 The first one we look at relates to the fact that before Roe vs. Wade, there were five states
0:17:21 who had already legalized abortion in some way, shape, or form.
0:17:26 And these were New York, California, Washington, state, Alaska, and Hawaii.
0:17:32 So unfortunately, not the states you would want to say are a representative set of states.
0:17:33 Because why?
0:17:34 Well, they’re all liberal.
0:17:36 I mean, so Alaska and Hawaii is weird.
0:17:37 They’re not very helpful at all.
0:17:40 New York and California are on the cutting edge.
0:17:44 Now one thing that’s really important to stress is that the states that legalized abortion
0:17:49 earlier didn’t just get a five-year head start on the legalization of abortion before Roe
0:17:50 v. Wade.
0:17:55 They actually were states that had many, many more abortions, a much higher abortion rate
0:17:56 than the other states.
0:18:03 So if you look at the data now, these states even today have abortion rates that are almost
0:18:07 double the abortion rates of the rest of the U.S., which again, I think points out how
0:18:10 poor it is as a natural experiment.
0:18:14 Given that limitation, it wouldn’t be enough to just measure the crime rate in the early
0:18:17 legalizing states and compare them to the rest of the states.
0:18:19 You’d want a more precise measurement.
0:18:23 So we divide states into three equal-sized groups, the highest abortion rate states,
0:18:26 the medium abortion rate states, and the lowest abortion rate states.
0:18:30 And then we just look at those three groups and we track them over time.
0:18:32 What happened to crime?
0:18:36 And so we’re able to look and see, well, is it really true that the highest abortion
0:18:41 states and the lowest abortion states had similar crime trends when you expected them
0:18:43 to have similar crime trends?
0:18:46 And it turns out in the data that that’s exactly right.
0:18:52 We found that there was roughly a 30% difference in what had happened to crime between the
0:18:58 highest abortion states and the lowest abortion states by 1997.
0:19:02 That seemed to be firm evidence in support of the thesis.
0:19:07 Now Donahue and Levitt looked at crime data state by state by age of offender.
0:19:14 So the nice thing in the data that we had available was we could look at arrest rates
0:19:18 by single age of individual.
0:19:24 So if I’m born in 1972 in Minnesota, well, I’d probably live a pretty similar life to
0:19:31 someone who’s born in 1974 in Minnesota in terms of other things like policing or drugs
0:19:34 or other things in the environment.
0:19:39 But the difference is that those who were born in 1974 were exposed to legalized abortion.
0:19:41 Those who were born in 1972 weren’t.
0:19:46 And we find numbers there that are completely consistent with the rest of our analysis,
0:19:52 that those who were born just a few years apart do much less crime than those who were
0:19:54 born in the earlier years.
0:20:00 Because the abortion rates were rising so sharply in the 70s, these cohorts were coming
0:20:04 into their crime ages in a stacked fashion.
0:20:11 And we could identify which abortion rates were associated with each particular age.
0:20:16 And the higher the abortion rate was for each age, the greater the crime drop occurring.
0:20:21 So as you’re putting together this collage of evidence, what did it feel like to see
0:20:26 the strength of this evidence of the link between legalized abortion and crime?
0:20:33 Did it immediately suggest policy or political or health care follow-ups?
0:20:39 Steve and I I think both had this sense of something really unusual has suddenly happened
0:20:42 in crime in the United States.
0:20:45 And we really just want to understand what that is.
0:20:50 I really wasn’t thinking very much about the way in which this would be received.
0:20:55 I really just want to understand is this a factor that has altered the path of crime
0:20:59 in the United States?
0:21:03 David and Donahue would go on to publish their paper, “The Impact of Legalized Abortion
0:21:09 on Crime” in the May 2001 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
0:21:10 What happened next?
0:21:20 That’s coming up after the break.
0:21:26 Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50% of the recent drop in crime.
0:21:32 That was the stark finding of a study published in 2001 by Steve Levitt and John Donahue.
0:21:36 But even before the paper was published, their findings hit the news.
0:21:44 It was a whirlwind of reaction and some of it was a little unnerving because people were
0:21:50 reading into the study things that we certainly did not intend.
0:22:00 People who are in favor of right to life were upset because our argument seemed to be endorsing
0:22:04 the idea that legalized abortion had positive effects.
0:22:10 But many people who believed in the right to choose, they were also upset because we were
0:22:16 kind of saying, “Well, you’re killing these fetuses, so they never get a chance to grow
0:22:17 up to be criminals.”
0:22:21 The number of death threats that I got from the left was actually greater than the number
0:22:23 of death threats I got from the right.
0:22:28 Because the other thing that emerged out of the media coverage is that it very quickly
0:22:33 became a question of race, even though really our paper wasn’t about race at all.
0:22:40 Some people started to say that we were trying to go back to the times where people were
0:22:48 pushing for control of the fertility of certain groups and maybe even racial groups.
0:22:51 That was certainly not anything that we even considered.
0:22:57 We were just trying to figure out when public policy had changed in this profound way, did
0:23:00 it alter the path of crime.
0:23:05 We certainly weren’t eugenicists, as some people initially argued.
0:23:09 Initially, perhaps, but recently too.
0:23:15 In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down an abortion-related appeal from Indiana, but
0:23:21 Justice Clarence Thomas, in an accompanying opinion, wrote, “Some believe that the United
0:23:26 States is already experiencing the eugenic effects of abortion.”
0:23:28 His citation?
0:23:29 Freakonomics.
0:23:34 “Whether accurate or not,” he continued, “these observations echo the views articulated
0:23:40 by the eugenicists and by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger decades earlier.”
0:23:48 I actually think that our paper makes really clear why this has nothing to do with eugenics.
0:23:53 In our hypothesis, what happens is that abortion becomes legal, women are given the right to
0:23:59 choose, and what our data suggests is that women are pretty good at choosing when they
0:24:03 can bring kids into the world who they can provide good environments for.
0:24:08 The mechanism by which any effects on crime have to be happening here are the women making
0:24:10 good choices.
0:24:15 I think that’s such a fundamental difference between women making good choices and eugenics,
0:24:21 which is about the state, say, or some other entity forcing choices upon people, almost
0:24:22 couldn’t be more different.
0:24:29 Still, the Donahue-Levitt argument linking abortion and crime was disputed on moral grounds,
0:24:33 on political grounds, and on methodological grounds.
0:24:39 I assume there was a torrent of critiques and other academics trying to publish papers
0:24:41 saying we were wrong.
0:24:46 One critique came from Christopher Foot and Christopher Getz, two economists who were
0:24:49 then with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
0:24:56 They argued that Donahue and Levitt’s paper contained a coding error, which, when corrected,
0:24:58 blunted their findings.
0:25:04 So in general, I don’t mind challenges to my work, but I hate it when the challenges
0:25:10 take the form of mistakes, and that is an awful, awful feeling to have made a mistake,
0:25:12 which we did in this case.
0:25:15 What exactly was this error, and how did that happen?
0:25:22 So John Donahue and I started working on this paper probably in, I don’t know, 1996, and
0:25:27 it finally came out in 2001, and when you write an academic paper, you go through a
0:25:31 refereeing process, and the refereeing process we went through was especially brutal.
0:25:34 So an enormous effort of time.
0:25:38 Look, we were tired and we were burned out, and one of the last things in those referee
0:25:45 reports said you should add a table to your paper that looks very specifically by single
0:25:47 year of age.
0:25:52 So we initially, when we submitted our paper, had six tables in the paper, and we had thought
0:25:56 of doing something that looked very specifically by single year of age, but we hadn’t done
0:25:57 it.
0:26:00 We suggested we do it, and it was actually a really good, sensible suggestion.
0:26:07 And so what we did was, in a very tired, quick way, we added table seven to our paper, which
0:26:11 turns out supported our paper, but we didn’t try very hard.
0:26:13 We didn’t really do it right.
0:26:18 We just threw something together, and it worked, and so it turned out what Foot and Gets then
0:26:24 were responding to was that what we said we did in table seven wasn’t actually exactly
0:26:25 what we did.
0:26:29 So we had included a particular set of interactions.
0:26:31 We had actually run those regressions.
0:26:36 Just when the numbers got translated into the table, a different set of columns got put
0:26:37 into the table.
0:26:44 The error was almost more in the description of the paper rather than an actual mathematical
0:26:45 error.
0:26:52 So we had said that we had controlled for state year effects in our paper, which is sort
0:26:59 of an econometric point of terminology when it was only a state effect that we had controlled
0:27:00 for.
0:27:07 And so it did weaken the result, although it did not fundamentally alter the conclusion.
0:27:11 I didn’t feel like the Foot and Gets critique was very damaging to the hypothesis.
0:27:18 It was certainly damaging to me and my reputation, because I had made those mistakes.
0:27:21 But the hypothesis, I think, comes through in flying colors.
0:27:25 And by the time Donahue and Levitt corrected their work and found that the correction did
0:27:30 not weaken their hypothesis, the headlines had already been written.
0:27:35 And so people made a lot of, oh, there’s a mathematical error here, which wasn’t quite
0:27:36 right.
0:27:41 We really in some ways lost the media battle because we looked stupid, because we had made
0:27:42 the mistake.
0:27:46 The headline in The Economist, Oopsonomics.
0:27:51 In The Wall Street Journal, Freakonomics’s abortion research is faulted by a pair of
0:27:52 economists.
0:27:56 It was fun for people to jump on the bandwagon of attacking just because nobody really liked
0:27:57 the hypothesis in the first place.
0:28:02 And so the silver lining on Foot and Gets pointing out the mistake, it then actually
0:28:06 gave us the opportunity to go back and take care of the measurement error that was in
0:28:09 the data and to actually think sensibly about it.
0:28:14 And so when we did table seven the right way, even correcting for that mistake we made in
0:28:20 the initial paper, the results are actually stronger than ever.
0:28:26 To be fair, you can understand why the Levitt and Donahue argument is an uncomfortable argument,
0:28:29 no matter where you stand on abortion or a crime.
0:28:35 It attaches a positive outcome to an inherently unhappy input.
0:28:43 It creates an awkward pairing of an intimate, private decision with a public utilitarianism.
0:28:49 So even while their argument was empirically strong and their cause and effect mechanism
0:28:55 plainly logical, it might be discomforting to fully embrace it, especially when other
0:28:59 more comforting theories present themselves.
0:29:03 My name is Jessica Walpole-Reyes and I am a professor of economics at Amherst College
0:29:09 and I study the effects of environmental toxicance on social behavior.
0:29:12 One toxicant Reyes focused on was lead pollution.
0:29:18 There is a huge literature on how lead is toxic to humans.
0:29:23 Lead has cognitive health and behavioral effects.
0:29:30 So lead is associated with reductions in IQ, it’s associated with increased behavior problems
0:29:31 in children.
0:29:38 It also has health effects, cardiovascular effects, renal effects, and it’s just really,
0:29:39 really bad.
0:29:45 So bad that lead could be a causal factor in criminality, in other words, exposure to
0:29:50 lead in childhood could lead to criminality in adulthood.
0:29:55 Two big sources of environmental lead in the old days were gasoline and paint.
0:29:59 And the reason I was thinking about lead was I was pregnant with my son and we lived in
0:30:03 this really old house and we needed to move, right?
0:30:09 I knew that lead was bad, but I started thinking about, huh?
0:30:14 As with the abortion thesis, which used Roe v. Wade as a natural experiment, Reyes’s
0:30:17 lead idea had a similar fulcrum point.
0:30:22 So yeah, lead was taken out of gasoline under the authority of the EPA under the Clean Air
0:30:25 Act in the early 1970s.
0:30:28 The EPA mandated a timetable.
0:30:34 That timetable was changed a little and delayed, but it ended up that lead was phased out of
0:30:37 gasoline from 1975 to 1985.
0:30:42 There are some important kind of corporate political dynamics.
0:30:45 So the different companies did this differently.
0:30:49 It wasn’t driven by state policy, and that’s really important that it wasn’t driven by
0:30:54 state policy because that helps provide a valid natural experiment so that you have
0:30:59 different states experiencing different time patterns of lead exposure.
0:31:04 Like Donahue and Levitt, Reyes was able to assemble a collage of evidence linking the
0:31:11 removal of lead in different places and different times with the decline of crime in each place.
0:31:15 She published her findings in 2009, arguing that the removal of lead under the Clean Air
0:31:23 Act was “an additional important factor in explaining the decline in crime in the 1990s.”
0:31:28 Did her paper refute the Donahue-Levitt conclusions about abortion and crime?
0:31:31 My paper does not refute their conclusions.
0:31:34 To the contrary, it actually reaffirms them.
0:31:41 I include their abortion measure in my analysis, and I find that the abortion effect is pretty
0:31:47 much unchanged when one includes the lead effect, that the two effects are operating
0:31:53 relatively independently and that each one is of similar magnitude when you do or don’t
0:31:55 account for the other.
0:32:00 So what that means is that from my perspective, I think both stories are true, and we can
0:32:04 hold both of them side by side.
0:32:08 It doesn’t make sense to look for a single explanation for a decline in crime.
0:32:10 There are lots of explanations.
0:32:15 So Jessica wrote a really interesting and careful paper that tries to look at patterns
0:32:18 in leaded gasoline and relate them to crime.
0:32:19 Steve Levitt again.
0:32:24 And I’d actually distinguish between the very thoughtful, careful work that she did from
0:32:27 some of the other work on lead, which I think is not nearly so good.
0:32:33 It’s funny that people argue, oh, there can only be one cause to why crime went down.
0:32:35 And if lead’s true, then there can’t be abortion.
0:32:39 But look, the world is complex, and there could be many things going on.
0:32:45 Indeed, this is how many academic researchers and lots of other scientists generally think
0:32:46 about the world.
0:32:49 It’s called multivariate causality.
0:32:56 That is, almost no effect has only a single cause all the time, which is why percentages
0:32:57 and probabilities are useful.
0:33:01 They express the magnitude of various causes.
0:33:02 But here’s the thing.
0:33:09 A lot of people who drive the public conversation these days, especially politicians and journalists,
0:33:14 they don’t seem very comfortable with the notion of multivariate causality.
0:33:16 Why not?
0:33:23 It may simply be that this versus that stories make for better headlines and campaign slogans.
0:33:28 Maybe it’s because a lot of people who wind up in journalism and politics are not, shall
0:33:34 we say, numerically inclined to the point where percentages and probabilities are a
0:33:36 bit intimidating.
0:33:41 In any case, what’s a layperson to do if you’re trying to make sense of a debate over complex
0:33:43 issues like this?
0:33:44 I think it’s really hard.
0:33:51 I think it’s really hard for a layperson to be able to watch a scientific debate or social
0:33:57 scientific debate, especially one that’s being mediated through newspapers and magazines
0:34:02 and blogs, so much being lost in translation, and figure out what’s really true.
0:34:05 It’s not even easy for me as an academic.
0:34:10 I think there’s a much more intelligent way to discuss social scientific research than
0:34:11 is done now.
0:34:19 Right now, maybe the most interesting way to portray an idea is to talk about the hypothesis,
0:34:24 and then, almost absent a lot of discussion of data, ask people to make a judgment about
0:34:26 whether the hypothesis is true.
0:34:30 I actually think we should flip that discussion on its head.
0:34:35 If we want intelligently people to be able to make good choices about what they believe
0:34:42 and don’t believe, then the basic premise has to start not necessarily from the hypothesis,
0:34:43 but from the data.
0:34:49 If the way that social science was reported was to say, “Here are the five facts that
0:34:53 are true about the world,” and then what those mean are up to people to agree upon.
0:34:57 That’s never the way that discussions happen, maybe because it’s not interesting, maybe
0:35:02 because it’s a little too complicated, maybe it takes too much time, but I think there’s
0:35:09 actually a lot less disagreement about facts than about the interpretation of the facts.
0:35:15 I believe that for an educated layperson, given a set of facts, they can make a better judgment
0:35:20 about how to interpret those facts than the current way the media treats things, which
0:35:24 is to often not talk about the facts, but just to talk about the interpretations and
0:35:32 often to focus on really extreme emphasis on minor differences.
0:35:37 With that in mind, Steve Leavitt and John Donahue have added a new set of facts to the
0:35:39 abortion conversation.
0:35:44 They went back to their original abortion crime analysis from roughly 20 years ago and
0:35:47 plugged in the updated data.
0:35:51 Coming up in a minute, we’ll hear what they found and what sort of policy recommendations
0:35:52 it may suggest.
0:36:05 We’ll be right back.
0:36:11 In 2001, the economist Steve Leavitt and the economist/legal scholar John Donahue
0:36:16 published a paper arguing that the legalization of abortion in the U.S. in 1973 accounted
0:36:22 for as much as half of the nationwide reduction in crime a generation later.
0:36:23 Here’s Leavitt.
0:36:30 The abortion hypothesis is quite unusual among typical economic ideas in that it makes really
0:36:35 strong and quite straightforward predictions about what should happen in the future.
0:36:40 The reason it has a characteristic is because we knew already when we published our paper
0:36:47 in 2001 how many abortions had been performed and because there’s a 15 to 20 year lag between
0:36:52 performing the abortion and the impact on crime, we could already make strong predictions
0:36:57 about what would happen to crime 15 to 20 years later.
0:37:04 It was completely obvious to us that a sensible thing to do 20 years later would be to look
0:37:08 and see how the predictions had turned out.
0:37:11 You and John Donahue did revisit this study.
0:37:13 You just released an update to that 2001 paper.
0:37:18 This one’s called the impact of legalized abortion on crime over the last two decades.
0:37:22 Did your prediction turn out to be true, false, somewhere in the middle?
0:37:30 When we revisit the exact same specifications, but looking from 1997 to 2014, it turns out
0:37:33 that a very similar pattern emerges.
0:37:39 The states that had high abortion rates over that period, that 30 year period, have crime
0:37:45 rates that have fallen about 60% more than the states that had lowest abortion rates.
0:37:49 These are really massive changes.
0:37:57 Go and behold, the results were substantially stronger than they were in the 2001 paper.
0:38:01 That was an interesting and noteworthy finding.
0:38:09 The amazing thing and the thing that really almost gives me pause is how enormous our
0:38:14 new paper claims the impact of legalized abortion is because the cumulative effect over the
0:38:19 last 30 years, if you just look at our numbers, suggests that abortion might explain something
0:38:24 like 80% or 90% of the entire decline in crime.
0:38:29 The effects implied by our data are so big that I actually think it will make people
0:38:35 more rather than less skeptical about what’s going on because it’s almost mind boggling
0:38:40 that a factor that’s so removed from the usual set of things that we think about influencing
0:38:43 crime may have been such an enormous factor.
0:38:47 What would have happened if you’d found the opposite that the impact of abortion on crime
0:38:50 20 years later had disappeared?
0:38:52 This is your most famous research.
0:38:54 What do you think you would have done?
0:38:55 I don’t know.
0:38:59 Human nature says maybe we would have tried to hide that, like people make bad predictions
0:39:03 try to hide it, but I would hope that we would have published the paper anyway because the
0:39:07 thing is if we didn’t publish it, someone else would have published it.
0:39:10 One of my first rules of doing research is when you find out you’re wrong, it’s much
0:39:15 better to kill your own theory than have someone kill your theory.
0:39:22 A lot has changed since 1973 beyond abortion policy and abortion laws, access to birth
0:39:29 control and many other factors that may intersect or not with crime causal factors.
0:39:34 I am curious whether you feel in your new paper, you do make clear that the effect is
0:39:38 larger now, turned out to be larger than you had predicted.
0:39:44 Do you think it will continue to hold forth or is the world, this complex world we live
0:39:51 in changing enough so that the effect of abortion on crime will diminish over time?
0:39:54 There are lots of moving parts to this story.
0:40:02 One moving part is that there are other technologies for terminating pregnancies other than therapeutic
0:40:05 abortions that may play a bigger role.
0:40:13 For example, you can actually go online and buy pills that can induce miscarriages.
0:40:21 You might be seeing some movement in those directions and presumably the greatest thing
0:40:26 that could happen in this domain is if you would eliminate unwanted pregnancies in the
0:40:35 first place, but American policy has not been nearly as effective in achieving that goal.
0:40:42 A country like the Netherlands which has really tried to reduce unwanted pregnancies has probably
0:40:49 had the right approach in dealing with the issues that our research at least raised.
0:40:54 They have much, much lower rates of abortion even though abortion is completely legal in
0:40:59 the Netherlands, but they want to stop the unwanted pregnancies on the front end.
0:41:07 I think almost everyone should be able to agree that that is the preferable way to focus
0:41:09 policy if one can.
0:41:14 It’s worth noting that the term “unwanted pregnancy” is probably way too imprecise
0:41:18 to describe the individual choices made by individual people.
0:41:24 There are, of course, many reasons why a given woman may decide to have or not have a baby.
0:41:28 So if you’re thinking about policy ideas, probably makes sense to consider all these
0:41:31 reasons and the nuances attached to each.
0:41:37 That said, so-called “unwanted pregnancies” have been falling in the US.
0:41:43 Consider teenage pregnancies, the vast majority of which are unplanned if not necessarily unwanted.
0:41:49 The teen pregnancy rate has declined by more than 75% in the past 30 years.
0:41:52 The abortion rate has also fallen significantly.
0:41:57 The peak, you will recall, there were around one and a half million abortions a year compared
0:41:59 to four million live births.
0:42:01 That was in 1990.
0:42:06 As we noted earlier, some states have banned abortion lately and some states have upcoming
0:42:10 votes on whether to keep abortion legal.
0:42:15 Back in 2019, when I spoke with Steve Levitt and John Donahue, I asked them to talk about
0:42:19 the link between abortion laws and crime.
0:42:27 So if indeed these states are making abortions much harder to get than our study, our hypothesis
0:42:33 unambiguously suggests that there will be an impact on crime in the future.
0:42:41 You can imagine that if a state were to really clamp down on abortions, but neighboring states
0:42:47 permitted abortion, you would get some of this traveling to an abortion provider.
0:42:55 But since that would tend to have a disproportionate effect on lower socioeconomic status, you might
0:43:03 see exactly the problem that we have identified, that the children that are most at risk because
0:43:09 their unwanted pregnancies would be the ones most likely to be born once these restrictions
0:43:10 are imposed.
0:43:18 On the other hand, I don’t think anyone who is sensible should use our hypothesis to change
0:43:22 their mind about how they feel about legalized abortion.
0:43:24 So it really isn’t very policy relevant.
0:43:30 If you’re pro-life and you believe that the fetus is equivalent in moral value to a person,
0:43:33 well, then the trade-off is awful.
0:43:35 What does he mean by an awful trade-off?
0:43:40 Remember, there are still around a million abortions a year in the US.
0:43:45 And John Donnelly and I estimate maybe that there are 5,000 or 10,000 fewer homicides
0:43:46 because of it.
0:43:51 But if you think that a fetus is like a person, then that’s a horrible trade-off.
0:43:58 So ultimately, I think our study is interesting because it helps us understand why crime has
0:43:59 gone down.
0:44:04 But in terms of policy towards abortion, I think you really misguided if you use our
0:44:08 study to base your opinion about what the right policy is towards abortion.
0:44:09 So let me ask you this.
0:44:16 If someone wants to use this research to consider policy, you’re implying that the policy that
0:44:21 they should think about is not abortion policy, but some kind of child welfare policy.
0:44:22 What would that be?
0:44:27 I mean, that’s obviously a much less binary and much harder question, but what kind of
0:44:28 policy would be suggested?
0:44:34 So I think there are two policy domains for which this research is important.
0:44:36 Let me start actually with the obvious one, which is crime.
0:44:41 We spend enormous amounts of money on police and prisons and other programs.
0:44:47 We incarcerate millions of people, and much of the justification for that comes from the
0:44:51 idea that those are effective policies for reducing crime.
0:44:56 So I think that’s actually the most obvious implication of our paper, that if it’s really
0:45:02 true that most of the decline in crime is due to legalized abortion, then it brings real
0:45:09 caution to the idea that a super aggressive kind of policing and incarceration policy
0:45:12 is necessarily the right one to pursue.
0:45:17 But the second one really does relate to the idea that if unwantedness is such a powerful
0:45:23 influencer on people’s lives, then we should try to do things to make sure that children
0:45:24 are wanted.
0:45:30 You could at least begin to think about how you would create a world in which kids grow
0:45:36 up more loved and more appreciated and with brighter futures.
0:45:38 And is that better early education?
0:45:44 Is that permits for parents or training for parents or minimum incomes?
0:45:46 Who knows what the answer really would be.
0:45:51 But there’s a whole set of topics, I think, which are not even on the table.
0:45:56 Leavitt, how do you work generally or most often?
0:46:00 Do you have a thesis and go looking for data to support or dispute the thesis?
0:46:05 Or do you look for interesting data and see what hypothesis emerges?
0:46:10 It turns out in this particular case, John Donoghue and I had a hypothesis and then
0:46:12 we went to the data.
0:46:15 But that’s pretty rare in economics and social sciences.
0:46:20 Often either you start with the data or a set of patterns and then you build a theory
0:46:21 back from that.
0:46:25 Or often what happens is you have a theory, you have a hypothesis and you go to the data
0:46:26 and then you’re wrong.
0:46:28 But you’ve still looked at the data.
0:46:32 You still have a lot of interesting patterns in the data and then you go back and you reconstruct
0:46:34 a new hypothesis based on what you’ve seen.
0:46:40 And actually one of the things that troubles me most about the way that academic economics
0:46:45 happens is that there’s this complete fiction in the way we write our papers and that economists
0:46:51 write up our research as if we rigorously follow the scientific method, that we have
0:46:56 a hypothesis and then we come up with a set of predictions and then we test those predictions.
0:47:00 And then the role must always come true by the time we write the paper because you only
0:47:04 include as your hypothesis the one that is supported.
0:47:08 Even if it turns out it’s your seventh hypothesis and your first six got rejected.
0:47:12 When you’re doing research, you’re somewhat attached to your hypothesis, but you need
0:47:15 to try to keep it at arm’s length.
0:47:20 That again is Jessica Walpole-Reyes who wrote about the link between crime and lead pollution.
0:47:22 You should be trying to figure out what is true.
0:47:29 So I think that the complexity of what we do, the fact that we use all of these econometric
0:47:35 techniques to figure out these complex situations, makes it suspicious to people.
0:47:38 It’s sort of like this magic thing we’re doing and then we come out with results.
0:47:44 So I completely understand that and the number of times people have said, “Well, correlation
0:47:45 isn’t causation.”
0:47:46 Yes, we know.
0:47:48 That’s what we do.
0:47:52 We take things, we start with the correlation, we’re like, “Huh, I wonder if that’s causal.
0:47:54 How can I figure out is that causal?
0:48:00 Where can I find some variation in something that drives the thing that I want to see if
0:48:01 it affects?”
0:48:08 I still find it really difficult to explain fully what we are doing when we are separating
0:48:10 correlation from causation.
0:48:13 And I even find it like my family, I can’t convince them.
0:48:15 They’re like, “Yeah, well, you know, whatever.”
0:48:20 I mean, they sort of buy it after a while, but it takes a long time and I think it’s
0:48:23 reasonable for people to say, “I don’t know what you’re doing.
0:48:26 You’re doing something complicated and fancy.”
0:48:30 And then you’re saying you’ve done something that seems implausible.
0:48:34 What we should do, I think, is first just settle on the facts.
0:48:38 I think a great approach is not to say, “Here’s my hypothesis.”
0:48:40 A great approach is to say, “Here’s what we know about the world.
0:48:41 Here are the seven facts.”
0:48:45 I wonder if we take it away from this abortion crime issue specifically, though, and think
0:48:50 about any other really contentious issue, climate change, income inequality, gun control,
0:48:51 et cetera.
0:48:58 And you see how people make very, very strident arguments often, as you said, not really using
0:49:00 a fully considered set of the data.
0:49:04 I wonder if it has to do with the fact that the issues themselves and the causal mechanisms
0:49:09 underneath them are actually kind of less important to people than the tribal affiliation
0:49:11 with a position.
0:49:13 I think there’s a lot of validity to that argument.
0:49:20 I think that many of these contentious issues you noted, they’re ultimately not so much
0:49:23 about utilitarian arguments.
0:49:25 And I think that’s fair.
0:49:29 Obviously, it matters a lot to know whether humans are actually responsible for climate
0:49:34 change because it’s silly to radically change everyone’s behavior if we’re not responsible
0:49:35 for it.
0:49:40 So there’s an enormously important role for science in understanding those causal mechanisms.
0:49:45 But in terms of the public debate and what people believe, I think you’re absolutely
0:49:52 right that oftentimes what we believe is driven not by the exact facts, but by our conception
0:49:58 of what kind of person we are or how we want the world to be to discussion about right
0:49:59 or wrong.
0:50:03 And it would be useful if people remembered and were able to put, “Okay, I’m putting my
0:50:08 right and wrong hat on as I talk about this,” or “I’m putting my scientific hat on as I
0:50:11 talk about exactly how much the world is warming.”
0:50:17 And those are both very important conversations to have where I think we get lost is when
0:50:24 we are having a conversation which confounds scientific and right and wrong issues or confuses
0:50:27 them or mixes them.
0:50:30 And it’s hard for people to make that distinction.
0:50:35 I know that you pride yourself, Levitt, on not being a right or wrong guy.
0:50:42 But I am curious how being the author of this theory and paper has informed, if not changed,
0:50:48 the way you think about the issue, particularly of children, of wantedness and unwantedness.
0:50:50 And for the record, we should say that you have six kids.
0:50:54 So plainly, you’re in the pro-kid camp and you want them.
0:51:03 Has this entire arc of the story, the early paper, the dispute, your re-litigation of it,
0:51:08 has this changed at all your thinking about the nature of why people have children and
0:51:11 what we do with them after we have them?
0:51:13 So that’s a pretty profound question.
0:51:16 Let me answer a very narrow aspect of that question.
0:51:22 So if there’s one thing that comes out of our research, it is the idea that unwantedness
0:51:25 is super powerful.
0:51:31 And it’s affected me as a father in the sense that I think when I first was having kids,
0:51:35 I didn’t feel maybe so obligated to make children feel loved.
0:51:41 And it’s interesting that now as I go through a second round of kids, I am not trying to
0:51:43 teach my kids very much.
0:51:46 I’m just trying to make them feel incredibly loved.
0:51:51 And it seems to me that that’s a pretty good premise for young kids.
0:51:52 And look, I don’t know.
0:51:54 Is that because I wrote this paper on abortion and crime?
0:51:55 Maybe partly.
0:51:56 Maybe partly not.
0:51:59 It does seem to me a very powerful force.
0:52:05 And there is something so incredibly tragic to me about the idea that there are kids out
0:52:08 there who aren’t loved and who suffer.
0:52:13 And look, it’s backed up, I think, by our data that that feeds them to tough things in life.
0:52:17 I really think I’ve gotten very mellow in old age.
0:52:19 I was, it was funny.
0:52:25 I was, I was like a super rational, calculating kind of person.
0:52:31 And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve just gotten very soft and friendly and nice.
0:52:38 And I never would have imagined that I would be so accepting of my teenagers and their
0:52:44 various foibles, but it’s funny, you know, I, I’m a really different person than I used
0:52:45 to be.
0:52:50 Um, is this a product of just aging or something else?
0:52:51 I don’t think so.
0:52:55 I think sometimes when people get older, they get mean and sometimes they get nice.
0:52:59 And I’m not sure why I got nice instead of mean, but I somehow became more human.
0:53:00 Yeah.
0:53:01 You know me.
0:53:03 And like, I’m not exactly a complete human.
0:53:07 Like I’m lacking some of the basic things that many humans have.
0:53:11 But I think somehow I’m growing more human traits over time, don’t you think?
0:53:12 I do.
0:53:13 I do.
0:53:14 I definitely do.
0:53:17 I guess what’s the causal mechanism, honestly?
0:53:18 Maybe it’s you, Dubner.
0:53:24 Maybe it’s hanging around with you and your great humanity has set it to rub off on me.
0:53:29 I doubt it, but I’ll take credit for it.
0:53:33 That was our 2019 episode abortion and crime revisited.
0:53:37 We will be back very soon with a new episode of Freakonomics Radio.
0:53:39 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:53:44 And if you can, someone else to Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:53:50 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish
0:53:52 transcripts and show notes.
0:53:57 This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski and updated by Teo Jacobs.
0:54:02 Our staff also includes Dalvin Aboulagi, Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne,
0:54:07 Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston,
0:54:12 John Schnars, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neal Karuth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Sarah
0:54:13 Lilly.
0:54:16 The theme song is “Mr. Fortune” by the Hitchhikers.
0:54:19 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:54:25 As always, thank you for listening.
0:54:27 I’m frenetic from the morning, so I have to slow myself down.
0:54:31 I’m on something like other planets.
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