Freakonomics, Roe Effect

I’m still enjoying my Buckley Biography, and savoring it a bit. I’ve had the opportunity to hit a bookstore or two lately though, and picked up a book that I really wouldn’t recommend, but found to be a quick little read anyway. “Freakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner. Levitt is considered a bit of a young genius in economics, but what he really does is use the tools of the dismal science (largely statistical) to understand sets of data not normally analyzed using the questions he poses.

One of the interesting quotes to think about from the book is “Morality represents the way that people would want the world to work, whereas economics represents how it actually works. Economics is above all a science of measurement.”. I’m wondering if that isn’t a bit of a fallback position, since it seems that economic prediction has a pretty bad track record. Maybe they are going to settle for just trying to explain historical data.

He argues that one of the key reasons for the drop in crime in the ‘90s was the legalization of abortion. The kinds of kids most likely to grow up to be criminals were aborted, so we had less crime. It is a correlation that is surprising to people on both sides of the abortion issue, but what struck me about his analysis is how it mirrors a political analysis done by WSJ called “The Roe Effect”. Levitt talks of the kinds of babies that were never born because of abortion being likely criminals, the WSJ talks about them being likely Democrats.

Levitt asserts that the worst kinds of mothers … the poor, the addicted, the very young, the single, and the mentally disturbed are very likely to have abortions as long as it is fairly low cost. Legalizing abortion made it much lower cost, and the number of abortions that women in the high risk of crime classes went way up, and the number of live births went way down. Less babies of the wrong kind, means less criminals. While the media rarely puts it this starkly, the sorts of people that are likely to grow up to be criminals, are the same sort that are likely to grow up to be Democrats (providing you can get them out to vote).

The Roe effect asserts that most people that kill their unborn babies tend to be Democrats, and that dead babies never grow up to be Deaniacs, or even Hillary voters. It would seem to stand to reason that more strong supporters of abortion would be more willing to avail themselves of the actual procedure, and it would seem to go without saying that most strong supporters of abortion are Democrats. The assumption is that people who feel that it is wrong to kill the unborn would be more likely to carry the baby to term, have the child, and likely raise it in a home where may be some values beyond “if it feels good do it”, possibly even the concept of Religion, morals, value of life, and other issues that would increase the potential for the child to grow up as an evil Republican.

I’m not quite ready to give either theory as much credence as Levitt or WSJ do respectively, but another data point is another data point. While the left would tend to point to the WSJ as “known crackpots”, they are somewhat less inclined to do the same with Levitt, yet there is this same odd correlation that a dead baby who commits no crimes will clearly also not commit to voting for a Democrat. Democrats have a long history of being able to bring out the dead vote, but potentially they have silenced these voices too early for them to raise their tiny hands from their unmarked trash bin resting places to pull the “D” lever.