Abortion In Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics

What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents? Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner raises these thought provoking questions to exhibit the many hidden aspects of everything from why drug dealers live with their parents to how abortion has lowered the rates of crimes in cities. The book has gained a considerable amount of fame since publication. Many people enjoy reading the books due to readers being hooked by the compelling questions the authors ask and aid with findings and facts. There has been multitudes of people praising the book for what it contains such as the Washington Post Book World, who commented by saying “An engaging and always interesting
The article states that Messrs Donohue and Steven D. Levitt “did not run the test they thought they had—an ‘inadvertent but serious computer programming error’” (Oops-onomics). Economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz looked into the facts and test of Donohue and Levitt in order to recognize if their conclusion was correct. Their evidence and tests were not run correctly, which reduces the number of abortions that lowered crime rates by almost one-half. Furthermore, the article also states that Donohue and Levitt “seek to explain arrest totals (e.g., the 465 Alabamians of 18 years of age arrested for violent crime in 1989), not arrest rates per head (i.e., 6.6 arrests per 100,000)” (Oops-onomics), which helps support the claim there is less crime taking place, because “a smaller cohort will obviously commit fewer crimes in total” (Oops-onomics). Additionally, when Foote and Goetz used arrest rates per head for their research, the amount of crime rose, disproving Donohue and Levitt’s claim that abortions help stop crime. That being said, Levitt and Dubner’s inferences drawn from an insufficient amount of evidence, leads many critics to accuse them of hasty