freakonomics BY dreyes2313 Freakonomics At the time of Christmas Day of 1989 was when there was an overlap of crime rate. While in Romania the abortion Nicolae Ceausescu went out of power the crime rate in the United States was at its peak. Eventually in 1990 crime rate began falling, so fast that no one had a clue as to what was going on and what was the cause of this. In 1991 to 2001 there was 8 articles published as how law changes the crime rate. When in all reality only three can be shown to have contributed to the drop in crime.
Levitt believes that the rest of the articles are simply imagination. He also believes that one of the greatest causes of the crime drop does not appear on the list and also did not get any sort of mention on the newspaper. Levitt believes that one reason was the economy. Crime began in early 1990’s was caused by the unemployed. He stated that having a stronger Job market would make it less attractive for crimes to come up. During the 1990’s the unemployment rate fell by 2 percentage points; nonviolent crime, while fell by roughly 40 percent.
Levitt also believed that legalization of abortion was the real crime stopper. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime. He believed that the children born after Roe vs. Wade hit their adolescent years the crime began to fall. This meant if the mothers that did not want children and had those children were more likely to be the criminals, then the mothers that wanted children and were brought up with fathers were less likely to cause any crimes.
He tested this theory by looking at the effects. Measure the crime data in the five states that abortion was legal before the law changed. Which come to find out the crime rates did indeed drop. Levitt discusses number of correlations between a child’s personal circumstances and his school performance based on the ECLS data. Such as, students from rural areas tend to do worse than average. Meanwhile suburban children are in the middle of the curve, while urban children tend to score higher than average. He also states correlations that strongly affect test scores.
Such as students with highly educated parents, child’s parents spoke English in the household, parents are involved with child’s education, if there are many books in the house. All these facts seem to have a great deal to do with how children do well on test scores. One correlation is how if the child’s parents speak English at home vs. family of non-English speakers. He supports this correlation by the performance of Hispanic students in the ECLS study. Hispanics usually test poorly in test but later catch up.
Furthermore, there are several differences between cause nd effect and the correlations in the chapters 4 and 5. One is that the cause and effects the connections between a certain event and what has caused it, defines what cause is and what effect is in some particular case, whereas connection between two or more things. So the cause and effect in chapter 4 spoke about abortion and how woman who had unwanted children didn’t have those children led to less crime rate. And the correlation in chapter 5 data was all collected from test scores and shows how one thing is linked to rather than the effect.
