\doc\web\99\12\sai2.txt From: SteveSlr@aol.com Date sent: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 00:16:41 EDT To: h-bd@egroups.com Subject: [h-bd] Finale of Great Slate Debate on Abortion/Crime Steve Sailer here Below is the second half of the Steve Levitt vs. Steve Sailer Dialogue in Slate.com. I punted on trying to answer all his statistical arguments, partly because some were too abstruse for me, partly because I knew the readers would rather hear why, statistics aside, Levitt's common sensical ideal would or wouldn't work in reality. ----------------------- To: Steve Sailer From: Steven Levitt Subject: Let's test your alternative hypothesis It is so refreshing to have someone challenge our study based on the facts instead of the knee-jerk reactions I have been hearing and reading about in the press the last few weeks. The set of facts that you offer are indeed challenging to our theory: the late eighties and early nineties were periods of high inner city youth homicide, fueled by the crack epidemic, declining juvenile punishment, and the increased availability of handguns to kids. I would never deny that legalized abortion is only one factor among many that affects crime rates. According to our estimates abortion has had the effect of suppressing crime by about 1% per year over the last decade. Compared to the gyrations in the crime rate caused by other factors, this is pretty small stuff. But since the impact of abortion builds year after year as more cohorts of potential criminals are covered by legalized abortion (unlike factors such as crack which tend to rise and fade), eventually the impact of abortion begins to overwhelm the noise in the data. Because the time-series data is so volatile, I have always been more convinced by the cross-state changes in crime that we uncover (see my previous e-mail). In particular we find that by 1997 crime among those under age 25 had fallen much more sharply in high abortion states than low abortion states. The same was not true for crime among those 25 and over. I do not have the data at my fingertips to see what was happening across states to 17 year-olds in the early 1990's. This is clearly data I should gather and analyze. Your hypothesis that crack, not abortion, is the story provides a testable alternative to our explanation of the facts. You argue: 1) The arrival of crack led to large increases in crime rates between 1985 and the early 1990s, 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, and 3) States that had high abortion rates in the 1970's were hit harder by the crack epidemic, thus any link between falling crime in the 1990's and abortion rates in the 1970's 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 1980's and 1990's. 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 only fell by 2.6% 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 5 times bigger. Moreover, for violent crime and property crime, increases in these crime over the period 1985-1991 are actually associated with increases in the period 1991-1997 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 1970's hit harder by the crack epidemic in the 1990's? 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 1970s 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 state were among the ten states with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s. 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 lead to an "overshoot" in crime causing it to be lower than 1985, and even it had, the states with high abortion rates in the 1970's 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 1985-91 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 10-15 years. Also, the declines in crime should continue to be greater in high abortion states than low abortion states. What do you predict based on your crack theory? If you are willing to wait ten years, perhaps we can resolve this debate. Approximate number of words: 1000 Professor Steven D. Levitt Department of Economics University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 phone: (773) 834-1862 -------------------------------- To: Steven Levitt From: Steve Sailer I suspect that both the readers who have stuck it out with us this far, and the professors at Harvard, Stanford, and the U. of Chicago who heard you present your theory must be thinking roughly along these lines: "Well, I'm not sure I followed all the statistical details, but Professor Levitt's basic point is pure common sense. As long as abortion rids us of more fetuses likely to become gang members, it simply must reduce crime." That would explain why those high-powered academics forgot to point out to you that, contra your theory, when the first generation to "benefit" from being culled by legal abortion reached ages 14-17, they went on a homicidal rampage. (See FBI graph at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/oage.gif) Therefore, rather than mud wrestle in the numbers here, I'll privately send you my technical suggestions. In this essay, I'll step back and explain why this straight-forward insight might not actually work in practice. The widespread assumption that your theory must be correct reveals just how many people deep down believe, whether they admit it publicly or not, that "certain people" are just permanently more incorrigible than others. As a contender for the World's Least Politically Correct Human, I'm sympathetic. It's ironic, but because I've been arguing for years that genetic diversity affects society, I was one of the few to notice in this particular case that crime has risen and fallen not because we are aborting the poor and black and unwanted, but because of that staple of genteel liberal commentary, Cultural Forces (e.g., crack). Your "differential fertility" logic has a fascinating history. That the poor outbreed the rich was noted at least as long ago as Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations." A long line of both conservative and progressive nail-biters have worried that a bourgeoisie that's self-disciplined and responsible enough to use abstinence or contraception will someday be demographically swamped by a working class too sexually indulgent and disorganized to prevent pregnancies. The "eugenicists" feared the spread of the lower orders' inadequate genes, while the "euculturalists" dreaded their cruder culture. And agnostics on the subject realized that while disentangling nature and nurture was extremely difficult (only with the advent of twin and adoption studies have we made much progress), the precise mechanism mattered surprisingly little. Whether from genes or upbringing or both, people who are too irresponsible or incompetent to prevent most unwanted pregnancies tend to have fairly irresponsible or incompetent children. Thus, many unreligious right-wingers and WASP Progressives (e.g., Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood) supported abortion as the antidote to the bad demographic effects of contraception. Abortion would allow the working class to tidy up its mistakes. This logic implies that legalized abortion should reduce illegitimacy. And since illegitimacy is closely linked to crime, therefore abortion must reduce crime. Right? Yet, abortion and illegitimacy both soared during the Seventies, and then the youth violent crime rate also soared when the kids born during that decade hit their teens. How come? In theory, legal abortion reduces murder by being, in effect, "pre-natal capital punishment." But, first, it's not very efficient. Like Herod, we have to eradicate many to get the one we want. While genes and upbringing do affect criminality, there's so much randomness that predicting the destiny of individual fetuses is hard. Second, what if besides a contraceptive-using bourgeoisie and an abortion-using working class, there also exists an underclass to whom, in the words of Homer Simpson, "Life is just a bunch of things that happen?" What if in the Seventies members of the underclass didn't effectively use either contraception or abortion, but, being too destitute or distracted or drunk or drugged, they just tended to let shit happen all the way to the maternity ward? And what if the legalization of abortion gave them an excuse to be even less careful about avoiding pregnancy? In fact, in your paper you cite evidence that 60%-75% of all fetuses aborted in the Seventies would never have been conceived without legal abortion. If that's what happened across all classes, the increase in careless pregnancies specifically among the underclass might have been so big that it negated the eugenic or euculturalist effects of abortion. Thus, legalizing abortion would have thinned the ranks of the respectable black working class but not the black underclass. Its cultural influence would therefore have mounted. Just compare the working class black music of the Sixties (e.g., Motown) to the underclass gangsta rap of the late Eighties, which spread the lethal bust-a-cap code of the East Coast and West Coast crack dealers across America. Third, legalizing abortion finished off the traditional shotgun wedding. Earlier, the Pill had shifted responsibility for not getting pregnant to the woman. Then, legal abortion relieved the impregnating boyfriend of the moral duty of making an honest woman out of her. This would drive up the illegitimacy rate. Finally, even more speculatively, but also more frighteningly, the revolution in social attitudes that excused terminating the unborn may also have helped persuade violent youths that they could be excused for terminating the born. To conclude, you ask for my prediction on crime trends. Because you failed to use data that focused precisely enough on particular generations, (e.g., the highly violent group born after Roe v. Wade in 1975-1979), your model has consistently failed to even predict the past. For example, in utter contrast to your logic, the murder rate for 14-17 year olds even in the low crime year of 1997 was 94% higher than it was for 14-17 year olds in 1984. Yet, over the same span, the murder rate for 25-34 years olds (born pre-legalization) has dropped 27%. (See FBI table at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/oage.txt) Thus my faith in your theory's ability to forecast the future is limited. Last week in the Human Biodiversity discussion group, the polymath Gregory Cochran (who was the co-subject of the February 1999 Atlantic cover story on his new Darwinian theory of disease) responded to your prediction that crime will fall slowly for another 10-15 years, assuming all else is equal: "A counter-prediction: that all else will not be equal. Social changes are more important to crime trends than abortion, they're still ongoing, and they're likely to dominate." At some point in the future when black teens no longer remember much about the previous generation's self-inflicted crack wound, somebody will invent a new drug. Then we'll be back on another drug-epidemic-driven crime roller-coaster. -- Steve Sailer