The Decree

This week, The Economist asks Did Levitt get it Wrong?

Higher abortion rates from the 1970s onwards thus help to explain why crime rates fell in America about two decades later.

A new paper contends Levitt and Donohue's statistical techniques, providing a chink in the Freakonomics armour. Whether the data is best manipulated by one or the other, the theory is certaintly fascinating. The Economist article points out (as did Levitt, but it's not acknowledged), that this is all nothing more than a repeat of analysis first made in Romania. The Economist points out that:

In 1966 Nicolae Ceausescu, the country's dictator, banned abortion. A kind of Roe v Wade in reverse, this decision had a much bigger effect on childbearing in Romania, where women had relied heavily on termination as a form of family planning. The birth rate rose from 1.9 to 3.7 children per woman in the space of a year. A forthcoming study by Cristian Pop-Eleches, of Columbia University in New York, explores how these extra 1.8 children fared in later life. Mr Pop-Eleches offers “some suggestive evidence” that children of a given background born after the ban may have grown up to commit more crimes than those born just before—although again this may have as much to do with the changing times in which they lived.

A Romanian might well refer to this generation as the Children of the Decree. And it doesn't take much knowledge of Romanian history to point out the following: The Roe vs Wade decision may have led to a reduction in crime in America, but the Ceausescu decree led to a generation that caused a fucking revolution.