the freako-betrayal of Bill Bennett

Just a quick thought on Freakonomics, which was highly recommended to me long before Bennett's astronomical faux pas. First, it's an excellent read, and blows away "conventional wisdom" on a host of issues that only an economist can love. Bennett's mistake is that he's one of those guys who tries his best to make other people's arguments his own, and in this case he blew it because he was incapable of carrying forward the pertinence of Levitt's point. Instead, he came off sounding like a blathering racist. And his backpedaling to cover his ass was equally embarassing. I quickly realized that Freakonomics was going to end up being my favorite book of 2005... and I've read some good ones. It should be said though, in this book Levitt doesn't carve up crime statistics based on white vs black (not necessarily, though there is some discussion on this). In the chapter "Where Have All the Criminals Gone?" the point that Levitt makes, and the one that betrayed Bennett's verbosity and word-wasting is rather simple, if not somewhat controversial without obscuring it by adding 'blackness' to the equation: an unintended benefit of Roe v. Wade was that otherwise unwanted, destitute and uncared-for children were not born, and therefore (obviously) were not contributing 'their share' to crime rates in the 1990s. As the book explains in much greater detail, Levitt's correlation is not a function of race but rather strictly abortion rates. Bennett screwed the pooch. It was one of those situations where Bennett would have been much better off if he would have just kept his mouth shut.