Film claims abortion/crime link 'unimpeached'
I've watched half of the film (yawn). It's pretty boring. If you've read the books, you know what's here. There's really no need for a film.
What irks me is the absurd claim that Leavitt's theory that abortion lowers crime rates is "unimpeachable" to this day, when, in fact, it's been impeached by experts in various fields.
The Wall Street Journal ran a story at the time where a couple of economists pretty much blew his theory apart/.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113314261192407815-7O0CuSR0RArhWpc9pxaKd_paZU0_20051228.html?mod=tff_article
Leavitt admits to making errors in this chapter, based on the WSJ piece but denies the theory is debunked.
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/everything-in-freakonomics-is-wrong/
The Economist ran a different story where they attacked the theory
DEC 3, 2005-
http://www.economist.com/node/5246700?story_id=5246700 (you must be a member to access the article). I just accessed it via lexis nexis and this is some of what they reported:
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"Messrs Donohue and Levitt claim to control for such effects in the final test of their paper. That exercise is meant to facilitate comparisons such as: did arrests of 20-year-olds in New York in 1992 diverge from those of 18-year olds in the same state and year? This automatically takes account of anything going on in the Empire state that year (such as a crack epidemic) that would have affected 18-year-olds and 20-year-olds alike. The principal difference between the two age groups is that one was born after the Supreme Court legalised abortion and the other before.
It was a good test to attempt. But Messrs Foote and Goetz have inspected the authors' computer code and found the controls missing. In other words, Messrs Donohue and Levitt did not run the test they thought they had—an "inadvertent but serious computer programming error", according to Messrs Foote and Goetz
Fixing that error reduces the effect of abortion on arrests by about half, using the original data, and two-thirds using updated numbers. But there is more. In their flawed test, Messrs Donohue and Levitt seek to explain arrest totals (eg, the 465 Alabamans of 18 years of age arrested for violent crime in 1989), not arrest rates per head (ie, 6.6 arrests per 100,000). This is unsatisfactory, because a smaller cohort will obviously commit fewer crimes in total. Messrs Foote and Goetz, by contrast, look at arrest rates, using passable population estimates based on data from the Census Bureau, and discover that the impact of abortion on arrest rates disappears entirely. "I am simply not convinced that there is a link between abortion and crime," Mr Foote says."
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So, Leavitt's claim that abortion accounts for half of the crime drop is, at best, halved to 25% of the cause, and at worst it's blown to bits completely and had little to no effect on crime rates.
Besides- in the movie (I think the stats match the book, but it's been a while), he claims that new policing strategies account for ZERO % in the drop in crime. That's absurd in too many ways to count without ANY data. His argument is that crime was dropping BEFORE the new policing strategies were put into place...but that doesn't necessarily mean it had NO effect on crime. Maybe crime started to drop right before the new policing strategies, so that these new strategies only cut crime by 40% instead of the 50% claimed for abortion? It's a lazy claim to make period...policing had absolutely no effect on crime rates because the rates started to lower before they were enacted. There's just no way to possibly make that argument.
So, that irks me. Of course his theory is impeachable, and the movie makes no mention of the several studies done to debunk his theory. If they can't even get that fact straight, what else in the film is inaccurate?