“You call this economics? U. of C.’s `freakonomist’ poses provocative questions, then lets the numbers speak for themselves”
Steven Levitt, the University of Chicago economist who co-authored the runaway best seller “Freakonomics,” is again courting controversy.
Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston recently took aim at one of Levitt’s most debated research topics — a 2001 paper he co-authored that argued there was a link between 1970s abortion legalization and a 1990s drop in crime rates. That abortion-crime research filtered to a wider audience this year as a part of the book “Freakonomics,” which debuted in April.
Christopher Foote, a Boston Fed senior economist, along with Christopher Goetz, a research assistant, uncovered a computer programming error in the original research by Levitt and co-author John Donohue. Foote and Goetz also argue that the Levitt-Donohue study should have counted arrests on a per-capita basis. Once these two issues are accounted for, the economists contend that the statistical evidence for Levitt and Donohue’s abortion-crime argument is significantly weakened if not eliminated entirely.
Levitt says he found the programming error “embarrassing” but says he stands by his research. He has responded to the new findings in his blog, www.freakonomics.com/blog. There, Levitt concludes: “No doubt there will be future research that attempts to overturn our evidence on legalized abortion. Perhaps they will even succeed. But this one does not.”
Levitt says debate is a natural part of his job. Still, he has some reservations about his new celebrity.
“Now what happens is that every time someone writes a paper criticizing me, it is front page news,” Levitt said of the Foote-Goetz report.
“It is a strange way to do research. But I really can’t complain. Certainly, I brought it on myself.”
