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FREAKONOMICS A ROGUE ECONOMIST EXPLORES
LEVITT S., DUBNER S. wydawnictwo: PENGUIN , rok wydania 2005, wydanie I cena netto: 140.00 Twoja cena 133,00 zł + 5% vat - dodaj do koszyka In Freakonomics Steven Levitt asks a series of provocative and profound questions about
contemporary living and helps us to see the familiar world through a completely original
lens. He examines everything from education to traffic jams, from food to guns, from
sports to getting elected, from betting to parenting, pushing back the boundaries of
economics along the way. Levitt turns conventional economics on its head, stripping away
the jargon and calculations of the ‘experts’ to explore the riddles of everyday life.
He reaches some astonishing conclusions, showing us that Freakonomics is all about how
people get what they want.
Extract
Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of
attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared
out of his skin.
The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly—a graph plotting the crime rate
in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile—and it
seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it. Death by gunfire, intentional and
otherwise, had become commonplace. So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and
rape. Violent crime was a gruesome, constant companion. And things were about to get even
worse. Much worse. All the experts were saying so.
The cause was the so-called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere. Glowering from
the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-thick government reports. He
was a scrawny, big-city teenager with a cheap gun in his hand and nothing in his heart but
ruthlessness. There were thousands out there just like him, we were told, a generation of
killers about to hurl the country into deepest chaos.
In 1995 the criminologist James Alan Fox wrote a report for the U.S. attorney general that
grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers. Fox proposed optimistic and
pessimistic scenarios. In the optimistic scenario, he believed, the rate of teen homicides
would rise another 15 percent over the next decade; in the pessimistic scenario, it would
more than double. ‘The next crime wave will get so bad,’ he said, ‘that it will make
1995 look like the good old days.’
Other criminologists, political scientists, and similarly learned forecasters laid out the
same horrible future, as did President Clinton. ‘We know we've got about six years to
turn this juvenile crime thing around,’ Clinton said, ‘or our country is going to be
living with chaos. And my successors will not be giving speeches about the wonderful
opportunities of the global economy; they'll be trying to keep body and soul together for
people on the streets of these cities.’ The smart money was plainly on the criminals.
And then, instead of going up and up and up, crime began to fall. And fall and fall and
fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with
every category of crime falling in every part of the country. It was persistent, with
incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely unanticipated—especially by
the very experts who had been predicting the opposite.
The magnitude of the reversal was astounding. The teenage murder rate, instead of rising
100 percent or even 15 percent as James Alan Fox had warned, fell more than 50 percent
within five years. By 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to its
lowest level in thirty-five years. So had the rate of just about every other sort of
crime, from assault to car theft.
Even though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop— which was in fact well
under way even as they made their horrifying predictions—they now hurried to explain it.
Most of their theories sounded perfectly logical. It was the roaring 1990s economy, they
said, that helped turn back crime. It was the proliferation of gun control laws, they
said. It was the sort of innovative policing strategies put into place in New York City,
where murders would fall from 2,245 in 1990 to 596 in 2003.
These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging, for they attributed the
crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives. If it was gun control and clever
police strategies and better-paying jobs that quelled crime—well then, the power to stop
criminals had been within our reach all along. As it would be the next time, God forbid,
that crime got so bad.
These theories made their way, seemingly without question, from the experts' mouths to
journalists' ears to the public's mind. In short course, they became conventional wisdom.
There was only one problem: they weren't true.
There was another factor, meanwhile, that had greatly contributed to the massive crime
drop of the 1990s. It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young
woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey.
Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually causes
a hurricane on another, Norma McCorvey dramatically altered the course of events without
intending to. All she had wanted was an abortion. She was a poor, uneducated, unskilled,
alcoholic, drug-using twenty-one-year-old woman who had already given up two children for
adoption and now, in 1970, found herself pregnant again. But in Texas, as in all but a few
states at that time, abortion was illegal. McCorvey’s cause came to be adopted by people
far more powerful than she. They made her the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit
seeking to legalize abortion. The defendant was Henry Wade, the Dallas County district
attorney. The case ultimately made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, by which time McCorvey’s
name had been disguised as Jane Roe. On January 22, 1973, the court ruled in favor of Ms.
Roe, allowing legalized abortion throughout the country. By this time, of course, it was
far too late for Ms. McCorvey/Roe to have her abortion. She had given birth and put the
child up for adoption. (Years later she would renounce her allegiance to legalized
abortion and become a pro-life activist.)
So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in
recorded history?
As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even
close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment
is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women
most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade—poor, unmarried, and teenage
mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get—were often
models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been
much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these
children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect:
years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the
rate of crime began to plummet.
It wasn't gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted
the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of
potential criminals had dramatically shrunk.
Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the
media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause?
Hardback
242 pages
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