Freakonomics: You may recall Steven D. Levitt as the celebrated U. of Chicago economist who put forward the theory that legalizing abortion in the early 1970s lowered the crime rate in the late 1990s by pre-natally capital punishing a lot of bad apples.
I demolished Levitt's theory when we debated it in Slate back in 1999, but Levitt's still making it the centerpiece of his upcoming book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. He simply doesn't mention the objections I put forward six years ago -- most famously, that the first cohort born after the legalization of abortion, who, under his theory, should have been better behaved than the unculled previous cohort, instead went on the worst teen murder spree in American history during the early 1990s. That this group then committed fewer murders when they got older, as Levitt emphasizes, obviously can't be attributed to their having been culled by abortion -- instead, the real explanation is that a huge fraction of these fellows born in the late 1970s were by the time they became adults already in prison cells, wheelchairs, or coffins due to the crack wars of their teen years.
Amusingly, our debate is the first thing Google brings up if you enter: Levitt abortion crime. So, it's hard to imagine how Levitt thinks he can get away with it, but you can get away with a lot in today's flaccid intellectual environment.
Levitt's publicist contacted me about hyping his book, so I suggested to her that we could generate a lot of publicity for it if Levitt and I resumed our 1999 debate in print or online. She thought that was a great idea, so she immediately presented the proposal to Levitt. This time, however, he refused to debate me.
Why? Well, William F. Buckley was once asked why Robert F. Kennedy refused reputed invitations to appear on Buckley's Firing Line talk show. WFB replied, "Why does baloney reject the grinder?"
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