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| Visions & Revisions |
Unconventional Wisdom
07/01/2005
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Why do so many drug dealers live with their mothers? What do real estate agents
have in common with the Ku Klux Klan? What circumstances lead both school
teachers and sumo wrestlers to cheat? In his new book Freakonomics: A Rogue
Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven Levitt, a University of
Chicago professor and economist, tackles these and a host of other unorthodox
riddles that more conventional thinkers often leave unasked. Using the tools of
economics and endless reams of data, Levitt and his coauthor, Stephen J. Dubner,
unearth answers that are as surprising as they are controversial. Levitt spoke
to Worth features editor Douglas McWhirter about the practical realities of Roe
v. Wade, the social decline of girls named Britney and why truth and trouble so
often go hand in hand.
Though you are an economist, you often ask and answer the kinds of questions
that normally fall to sociologists, psychologists and political scientists. This
does not seem at all like the “dismal science.”
 I don’t think of economics as a subject matter of topics. I think of it as a
set of strategies and approaches for understanding the world.
The way I look
at it is that economics got dealt a great set of tools and a lousy set of
topics. The tools of economics have been very valuable in understanding the
complex workings of the economy. I try to use these tools to tackle some of the
more interesting topics that other disciplines have traditionally owned.
Many people would rather not discuss some of the topics you take up in your
book—abortion, crime, race and class, among others.
A lot of the conventional wisdom of how we view the world is dictated by what
we want the world to look like, as opposed to how it really is.
In my work,
I cast aside any sense of political correctness, any emphasis on morality
and ethics, and try to describe the world as it is. Sometimes when you follow
that path, it takes you to places that can be disconcerting, even freaky. I do
not go looking for trouble, but I am also not afraid to look in places where
trouble might be hiding.
Trouble was definitely hiding in the statistical connection you and your
colleague John Donohue made in 2001 between legalized abortion and the national
decrease in crime. What question did you hope to answer in studying this most
contentious topic?
We come at abortion from a perspective that is completely different from
other people. We are not asking whether abortion is right or wrong, or whether
it should be legal or not. We use abortion simply to try to understand why there
was a decrease in the crime rate in the ’90s. This drop in crime was amazingly
large, and if you look at the other explanations for why this happened, none of
them really works. As surprising as this may seem, legalized abortion in the
1970s—both from a theory perspective and from the data—is an important
explanation of why crime fell in the ’90s.
The idea is pretty simple:
Unwanted children are at risk of becoming criminals when they grow up. Legalized
abortion reduced the number of unwanted children. When you put those two
together, legalized abortion should reduce the amount of crime. When you go to
the data, it is really quite compelling that the patterns we see are quite
consistent with this idea.
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