Freakonomics: A Theoretical Analysis

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While Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner deal with highly controversial topics in Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, their structured approach reveals the pair’s awareness of the sensitivity of their material. After introducing a data set, the authors offer possible causes before disproving them and then verifying that the final, contentious explanation numerically supports the data. Levitt and Dubner’s carefully organized build-up to a conclusion allows the pair to avoid offending many readers by undermining opposing arguments and appealing to the audience’s sense of reason.
The book’s fourth chapter, “Where have All the Criminals Gone?” in particular, includes several subjects the authors acknowledge
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They introduce their argument with a syllogism: the legalization of abortion after Roe v. Wade “led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime” (140). Instead of expanding upon this synopsis, Dubner and Levitt investigate whether abortion is responsible for lower crime rates or simply a coincidence. By doing so, they make their argument more credible because while a syllogism may be a fallacy, data is factual and harder to discredit. Dubner and Levitt circumvent readers’ moral protests by providing evidence to prove abortion caused crime rates to drop which, unlike reason alone, are difficult to easily ignore or dismiss. Indeed, in the five states which legalized abortion prior to Roe v. Wade, crime rates began “to fall earlier than [those of] the other forty-five states and the District of Columbia.” Still, readers predisposed to disagree that abortion could be positive might dispute that the data means anything more than that “those early legalizers simply got lucky.” Aware of this, Dubner and Levitt supply additional figures which show “the states with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s experienced the greatest crime drops in the 1990s” and that abortion rate had no relation to crime rate “before the late 1980s--when the first cohort affected by legalized abortion was reaching its criminal prime” (141). Additionally, Dubner and Levitt mention a few studies in other countries that also found “a similar link between legalized abortion and crime”

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