Pete The Elder

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September 30, 2005

Freaky Bennett

Bill Bennett got some flack this week for talking about a hypothetical situation where aborting black babies would reduce the crime rate, even though it seems like Bennett was saying this would be a bad thing to do. This is very similar to the Freakonomics argument I discussed here.

Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame posted his thoughts on Bennett's statement here and included a full transcript of what Bennett said. He writes:

2) Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics. It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets). In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement. Empirically, what matters is the fact that abortions are disproportionately used on unwanted pregnancies, and disproportionately by teenage women and single women.

Ramesh Ponnuru has a good response to Levitt's post at the corner:

People fall into confusion all the time when they ignore the fact--which Levitt, to his credit, mentions in his book--that the legalization of abortion increased the conception rate by 30 percent (while causing the birth rate to drop by 6 percent). Many times I have heard pro-lifers make comments about how there would be 40 million more taxpayers if not for Roe. That sort of comment is what spurred Bennett's discussion. There are a lot of flaws with this type of reasoning--Bennett was, in my view, absolutely right to note that it is a distraction from the decisive moral issues--but what's important here is to remember that not every abortion represents a child who would have been conceived absent legalization. The flip side also holds true: As paradoxical as it sounds, there are children who would never have been born without legal abortion.

So the effect of legal abortion is to change the mix of people in the next generation somewhat and to reduce its numbers somewhat. We have no reason to be certain that the net effect is to reduce the number of children in crime-prone groups. For example, it could in theory be that the effect of abortional choice is to reduce the number of kids born to middle-class, married black couples while raising the number of kids born to poor black single mothers--in which case it could raise the crime rate. Whether it's true depends on the validity of Levitt's empirical claims; its truth can't simply be deduced. (I am at work on a book that deals with this question, among others.) Bennett's hypothetical, in which all black babies are somehow aborted, isn't open to the same objections.

Another interesting response to Levitt's abortion/crime theory can be found here, which quotes a lot from James Q. Wilson:

You would never know it from this book, but not only have these claims been criticized, but several scholars have offered rival theories. On the issue of abortion rates alone, the economists John Lott and John Whitley have written that, even before Roe, many anti-abortion states allowed abortion if the life or health of the mother was at risk; in these states, there were at least as many abortions per 1,000 live births pre-Roe as in states that had made abortion legal. Why, then, attribute falling crime rates to legalized abortion?

Levitt and Donohue have rejoined that, in those states where abortions were still nominally illegal, it was well-to-do white women who mainly availed themselves of the loopholes in the system. But there is no evidence of this; to the contrary, black women were over-represented among those having abortions in such states.

Now look at homicide rates by the age of suspected offenders. In the late 1990s, roughly a quarter century after Roe, the murder rate was falling for offenders aged twenty-six and older -- a class of offenders much too old to have been affected by Roe one way or the other. As for the youngest offenders, those between sixteen and twenty, their murder rates had jumped up in the early 1990s, probably because of involvement in the crack cocaine trade. Again, no Roe effect.

I suspect targeted abortions could lower the crime rate in the future, but then so could the targeted killings of groups of adults and teenagers along with forced group amputations and sterilizations, and a whole other host of policies most moral people would be opposed to. I think that was the part of the point of Bennett's argument: just because something could potentially be an effective means to a good end does not make it moral policy. Both means and ends matter as do motivations and virtue. Which ones matter the most and in what proportion is the tricky part and economics only helps us determine part of how effective the means are not whether they are moral.

Bennett would probably be in less trouble if he had avoided race since it is very hard for public figures to have an honest, open discussion about race in this country if anyone talking includes conservative ideas. Bennett should have instead said that aborting all male babies would lower the crime rate since males are more likely to commit every crime in this country, except for prostitution and running away from home. At least that is what the author of Demonic Males claimed.

Related to this is an interesting question: How do all these theories apply to China and its crime rates? If the Demonic Males theory is right and human males are predisposed to be more likely to commit crimes than women and if China's one child policy makes it more likely that males are a much larger portion of the population than females because of targeted abortions (and the related infanticide) of girl babies, then what will be the effect on China's future crime rate?

On a side note when talking about crime in these discussions I think it is important to talk about rates, not individual instances. How many murders per ten thousand people is a more important statistic in these discussions then the total number of murders committed.

Posted by Pete at September 30, 2005 06:09 PM

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Posted by: The Assimilated Negro at September 30, 2005 06:58 PM