Steven Levitt (Freakonomics) responds to Bill Bennett

http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/09/bill-bennett-and-freakonomics.html

Bill Bennett and I have a fair amount in common. We've both written about crime (his "superpredator" theory gets a quick discussion in Freakonomics), we have both thought a lot about illegal drugs and education (he was the original "drug czar" and is a former Secretary of Education), and we both love to gamble (although it seems I do it for much lower stakes and perhaps with greater success).

Now we also share the fact that we have made controversial statements about the link between abortion and crime.

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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.

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7) There is one thing I would take Bennett to task for: first saying that he doesn't believe our abortion-crime hypothesis but then revealing that he does believe it with his comments about black babies. You can't have it both ways.

back w/appropriate visual aids.

That was the most disturbing thing I have read in some time.

"It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites."

That seems like a sentence that is wide open to being interpreted in a variety of ways:

1) Is he saying that, on average, a higher percentage of the black demographic in the US is involved in crime compared to percentage of the white demographic in the US that is involved in crime?

2) Is he saying that, on average, a higher *number* of blacks is involved in crime than whites?

3) What does "crime involvement" mean, anyway? Does it mean "having a brush with the criminal justice system" or "being criminal?"

blacks is higher than whites. In many types of crimes it is, though I am not certain when white collar crime is included. However, I prefer to look at it when you adjust for poverty because crime rates among poorer people, at least for violent crime, are a good deal higher than for wealthier people. Since, on average, blacks have a larger percentage of their demographic in poverty than whites, a higher crime rate could well be expected. If whites had the same poverty rate as blacks, I should think crime rates would be identical.

and giving them an MBA probably kills more people in the world than some petty criminal. Just like giving them access to a vulnerable population to sell drugs too. And by them I am not talking about black people..we are talking about Afghanis, South Americans, & all other drug lords who could or could not be black.

How many have died because the USA doesn't have an adequate and more "efficient" natinal shared risk health care plan? What is it? 18,000 a year who die because of that?

Get real!