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<font color="#cc0033" face="verdana, geneva, arial, sans serif"
size="-1"><b> <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E"
href="http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3960469"><
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3960469 ></a><br>
<br>
Unconventional wisdom</b></font>
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<font face="verdana, geneva, arial, sans serif" size="+1"><b>Curiouser
and curiouser</b><br>
</font><font color="#999999" face="verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif"
size="-2">
<div>May 12th 2005
<br>
>From The Economist print edition</div>
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<font face="verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif" size="-1"><b>Many
economists don't care whether sumo wrestling is fixed, or whether drug
dealers prefer to live with their mothers. It is their loss </b></font><br>
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<p><font face="verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif" size="-1">WHAT a shame
about that title. “Freakonomics” is bound to dampen the spirits of any
intelligent reader, suggesting an airport-ready, dumbed-down romp—the
back cover would inevitably call it a romp—through the bogus theories
of some semi-literate phoney economist. But that is not this book at
all. Steven Levitt is no “rogue economist”, still less a phoney one;
and his book, praise be, does not try to explore “the hidden side of
everything”. Far more intelligent, modest and orthodox than it
pretends, the book is a delight; it educates, surprises and amuses. It
shows, in fact, what plain old-fashioned economics can do in the hands
of a boundlessly curious and superbly skilled practitioner.</font></p>
<p><font face="verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif" size="-1">Mr Levitt is
a professor at the University of Chicago, and a winner of the John
Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economic Association every
two years to the best economist under 40. Not many rogue economists
achieve either distinction. Stephen Dubner, Mr Levitt's co-author, is a
contributor to the <i>New York Times</i> magazine, and presumably
responsible for the book's frequently tiresome breathlessness. And it
might be Mr Dubner's fault that the book often veers without due
process between being about Mr Levitt and being by him, which is
jarring. But the material triumphs over these flaws of style. Indeed,
the material is quite fascinating.</font></p>
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<p><font face="verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif" size="-1">Mr Levitt's
speciality is to spot interesting questions that arise in apparently
unrelated fields—questions that it may not even have occurred to anyone
else to ask—and then answer them with dazzling ingenuity. The man's
curiosity is unbounded in two complementary senses. He finds intriguing
anomalies in extraordinarily arcane places—for instance, in sumo
wrestling and in alternative spellings of the name Jasmine, to name
just two topics examined in this book. And then he digs for
explanations with total disregard for the demands of political
correctness. You might say that he rejoices in being politically
incorrect, except that he seems not to care much one way or the other.</font></p>
<p><font face="verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif" size="-1">One of his
best-known, and in some quarters notorious, findings concerns America's
falling crime-rate during the 1990s. Towards the end of that decade,
confounding the expectations of most analysts, the teenage murder rate
fell by more than 50% in the space of five years; by 2000, the book
notes, the overall murder rate was at its lowest for 35 years. Other
kinds of crime fell too. Why? Some gave the credit to economic growth;
others to gun control; still others to new methods of policing, or to
greater reliance on imprisonment, or to increasing use of the death
penalty, or to the ageing of the population.</font></p>
<p><font face="verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif" size="-1"> Mr Levitt
goes carefully through these various explanations, checking them
against the evidence. He finds that some of them do offer a partial
explanation (more jail time, for instance), whereas others do not
(greater use of the death penalty, new policing methods). But the most
intriguing finding was that one of the most powerful explanations had
not even been broached. That explanation was abortion. </font></p>
<p><font face="verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif" size="-1">The reasoning
is simple enough. In January 1973, the Supreme Court made abortion
legal throughout the United States, where previously it had been
available in only five states. In 1974, roughly 750,000 women had
abortions in America; by 1980, the number was 1.6m (one abortion for
every 2.3 live births). “What sort of woman was most likely to take
advantage of <i>Roe v Wade</i>?” the book asks. “Very often she was
unmarried or in her teens or poor, and sometimes all three...In other
words, the very factors that drove millions of American women to have
an abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been
born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives...In the early
1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after <i>Roe v Wade </i>was
hitting its late teen years—the years during which young men enter
their criminal prime—the rate of crime began to fall.”</font></p>
<p><font face="verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif" size="-1">The theory is
the easy part, once you dare to articulate it. Testing it is quite
another matter. But the book moves methodically and persuasively
through the statistical evidence. It turns out, for instance, that
crime started falling earlier in the states that legalised abortion
before <i>Roe v Wade</i>; that the states with the highest abortion
rates saw the biggest drops in crime (even controlling for other
factors); that there was no link between abortion rates and crime
before the late 1980s (when unborn criminals, as it were, first began
to affect the figures); and that a similar association of crime and
abortion has been found in other countries.</font></p>
<p><font face="verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif" size="-1">The book
ranges over cheating teachers, corrupt sumo wrestlers and lying on-line
daters. It asks, among other things, whether Trent Lott is more racist
than the typical contestant on “The Weakest Link”. It examines
parallels between estate agents and the Ku Klux Klan. It asks why drug
dealers tend to live with their mothers. Always it finds questions that
are mischievously intriguing in themselves but that also shed light on
broader matters as well—and then it finds ingenious ways of answering
them.</font></p>
<p><font face="verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif" size="-1">“Freakonomics”
looks in particular detail at racial aspects of parenting, which is
where those variant spellings of Jasmine (or Jazmyne, or Jazzmin, and
so on) come in. Examining the data, Mr Levitt tabulates the “blackest”
names (Imani tops the list for girls, DeShawn for boys) and the
“whitest” (Molly and Jake). Using all his ingenuity in finding and
exploring data, he then examines whether being given a distinctively
black or white name affects one's prospects in life. Does it?
Surprisingly, perhaps, no. A boy named Jake will tend to do better than
one called DeShawn, but that is because he is less likely to have been
raised in a low-income, low-education, single-parent household, and not
because the name itself confers any advantage.</font></p>
<p><font face="verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif" size="-1">So much for
boys' names; what about book titles? Does a stupid title herald a
worse-than-average book? Probably—if only because books with bad titles
tend to be written by intellectually disadvantaged authors. But if a
really clever author were to write a book and give it a really stupid
title, it might turn out as well as this one.</font></p>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice
Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
Alternate: < fortean1 at msn.com >
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Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB *
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TLCB Web Site: <a
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veterans, Allies, CIA/NSA, and "steenkeen" contractors are welcome.]</pre>
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