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a given state’s abortion rate and its crime rate before the late 1980s—when the

first cohort affected by legalized abortion was reaching its criminal prime—

which is yet another indication that Roe v. Wade was indeed the event that

tipped the crime scale.

There are even more correlations, positive and negative, that shore up the

abortion-crime link. In states with high abortion rates, the entire decline in crime

was among the post-Roe cohort as opposed to older criminals. Also, studies of

Australia and Canada have since established a similar link between legalized

abortion and crime. And the post-Roe cohort was not only missing thousands of

young male criminals but also thousands of single, teenage mothers—for many

of the aborted baby girls would have been the children most likely to replicate

their own mothers’ tendencies.

To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in

American history is, needless to say, jarring. It feels less Darwinian than Swiftian;

it calls to mind a long ago dart attributed to G. K. Chesterton: when there aren’t

enough hats to go around, the problem isn’t solved by lopping off some heads.

The crime drop was, in the language of economists, an “unintended benefit” of

legalized abortion. But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious

grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a

public good.

Indeed, there are plenty of people who consider abortion itself to be a violent

crime. One legal scholar called legalized abortion worse than either slavery (since

it routinely involves death) or the Holocaust (since the number of post-Roe

abortions in the United States, roughly thirty-seven million as of 2004,

outnumber the six million Jews killed in Europe). Whether or not one feels so

strongly about abortion, it remains a singularly charged issue. Anthony V.

Bouza, a former top police official in both the Bronx and Minneapolis, discovered

this when he ran for Minnesota governor in 1994. A few years earlier, Bouza had

written a book in which he called abortion “arguably the only effective crime-

prevention device adopted in this nation since the late 1960s.” When Bouza’s

opinion was publicized just before the election, he fell sharply in the polls. And

then he lost.

However a person feels about abortion, a question is likely to come to mind:

what are we to make of the trade-off of more abortion for less crime? Is it even

possible to put a number on such a complicated transaction?

As it happens, economists have a curious habit of affixing numbers to

complicated transactions. Consider the effort to save the northern spotted owl

from extinction. One economic study found that in order to protect roughly five

thousand owls, the opportunity costs—that is, the income surrendered by the

logging industry and others—would be $46 billion, or just over $9 million per

owl. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, another study estimated the amount

that the typical American household would be willing to pay to avoid another

such disaster: $31. An economist can affix a value even to a particular body part.

Consider the schedule that the state of Connecticut uses to compensate for work-

related injuries.

LOST OR DAMAGED BODY PART

COMPENSATED WEEKS OF PAY

Finger (first)

36

Finger (second)

29

Finger (third)

21

Finger (fourth)

17

Thumb (master hand)

63

Thumb (other hand)

54

Hand (master)

168

Hand (other)

155

Arm (master)

208

Arm (other)

194

Toe (great)

28

Toe (any other)

9

Foot

125

Nose

35

Eye

157

Kidney

117

Liver

347

Pancreas

416

Heart

520

Mammary

35

Ovary

35

Testis

35

Penis

35–104

Vagina

35–104

Now, for the sake of argument, let’s ask an outrageous question: what is the

relative value between a fetus and a newborn? If faced with the Solomonic task

of sacrificing the life of one newborn for an indeterminate number of fetuses,

what number might you choose? This is nothing but a thought exercise—

obviously there is no right answer—but it may help clarify the impact of abortion

on crime.

For a person who is either resolutely pro-life or resolutely pro-choice, this is a

simple calculation. The first, believing that life begins at conception, would likely

consider the value of a newborn versus the value of a fetus to be 1:1. The second

person, believing that a woman’s right to an abortion trumps any other factor,

would likely argue that no number of fetuses can equal even one newborn.

But let’s consider a third person. (If you identify strongly with either person

number one or person number two, the following exercise might strike you as

offensive, and you may want to skip this paragraph and the next.) This third

person does not believe that a fetus is the 1:1 equivalent of a newborn, yet neither

does he believe that a fetus has no relative value. Let’s say that he is forced, for

the sake of argument, to affix a relative value, and he decides that 1 newborn is

worth 100 fetuses.

There are roughly 1.5 million abortions in the United States every year. For a

person who believes that 1 newborn is worth 100 fetuses, those 1.5 million

abortions would translate—dividing 1.5 million by 100—into the equivalent of a

loss of 15,000 human lives. Fifteen thousand lives: that happens to be about the

same number of people who die in homicides in the United States every year.

And it is far more than the number of homicides eliminated each year due to

legalized abortion. So even for someone who considers a fetus to be worth only

one one-hundredth of a human being, the trade-off between higher abortion and

lower crime is, by an economist’s reckoning, terribly inefficient.

What the link between abortion and crime does say is this: when the government

gives a woman the opportunity to make her own decision about abortion, she

generally does a good job of figuring out if she is in a position to raise the baby

well. If she decides she can’t, she often chooses the abortion.

But once a woman decides she will have her baby, a pressing question arises:

what are parents supposed to do once a child is born?

Levitt found that the support at the University of Chicago went beyond the

scholarly. The year after he was hired, his wife gave birth to their first child,

Andrew. One day, just after Andrew turned a year old, he came down with a

slight fever. The doctor diagnosed an ear infection. When he started vomiting the

next morning, his parents took him to the hospital. By the following day he was

dead of pneumococcal meningitis.

Amidst the shock and grief, Levitt had an undergraduate class that needed

teaching. It was Gary Becker—a Nobel laureate nearing his seventieth birthday—

who sat in for him. Another colleague, D. Gale Johnson, sent a condolence card

that so moved Levitt that he can still cite it from memory.

Levitt and Johnson, an agricultural economist in his eighties, began talking

regularly. Levitt learned that Johnson’s daughter was one of the first Americans

to adopt a daughter from China. Soon the Levitts began proceedings to do the

same, a girl they named Amanda. In addition to Amanda, they have since had a

daughter, now three, and a son, nearly one year old. But Andrew’s death has

played on, in various ways. The Levitts have become close friends with the

family of the little girl to whom they donated Andrew’s liver. (They also donated

his heart, but that baby died.) And, not surprisingly for a scholar who pursues

real-life subjects, the death also informed Levitt’s work.

He and Jeannette had joined a support group for grieving parents. Levitt was

struck by how many children had drowned in swimming pools. They were the

kind of deaths that don’t make the newspaper—unlike, for instance, a child who

dies while playing with a gun.

Levitt got curious, and went looking for numbers that would tell the story. He

wrote up the results as an OpEd for the Chicago Sun-Times. It featured the sort

of plangent counterintuition for which he has become famous: “If you both own

a gun and have a swimming pool in the backyard, the swimming pool is about

100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”

—THE N EW Y ORK T IMES M AGAZINE, AUGUST 3, 2003

5

What Makes a Perfect Parent?

Has there ever been another art so devoutly converted into a science as the art of

parenting?

Over the recent decades, a vast and diverse flock of parenting experts has arisen.

Anyone who tries even casually to follow their advice may be stymied, for the

conventional wisdom on parenting seems to shift by the hour. Sometimes it is a

case of one expert differing from another. At other times the most vocal experts

suddenly agree en masse that the old wisdom was wrong and that the new

wisdom is, for a little while at least, irrefutably right. Breast feeding, for example,

is the only way to guarantee a healthy and intellectually advanced child—unless

bottle feeding is the answer. A baby should always be put to sleep on her back—

until it is decreed that she should only be put to sleep on her stomach. Eating

liver is either a) toxic or b) imperative for brain development. Spare the rod and

spoil the child; spank the child and go to jail.

In her book Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About

Children, Ann Hulbert documented how parenting experts contradict one

another and even themselves. Their banter might be hilarious were it not so

confounding and, often, scary. Gary Ezzo, who in the Babywise book series

endorses an “infant-management strategy” for moms and dads trying to

“achieve excellence in parenting,” stresses how important it is to train a baby,

early on, to sleep alone through the night. Otherwise, Ezzo warns, sleep

deprivation might “negatively impact an infant’s developing central nervous

system” and lead to learning disabilities. Advocates of “co-sleeping,” meanwhile,

warn that sleeping alone is harmful to a baby’s psyche and that he should be

brought into the “family bed.” What about stimulation? In 1983 T. Berry

Brazelton wrote that a baby arrives in the world “beautifully prepared for the

role of learning about him-or herself and the world all around.” Brazelton

favored early, ardent stimulation—an “interactive” child. One hundred years

earlier, however, L. Emmett Holt cautioned that a baby is not a “plaything.”

There should be “no forcing, no pressure, no undue stimulation” during the first

two years of a child’s life, Holt believed; the brain is growing so much during

that time that overstimulation might cause “a great deal of harm.” He also

believed that a crying baby should never be picked up unless it is in pain. As

Holt explained, a baby should be left to cry for fifteen to thirty minutes a day: “It

is the baby’s exercise.”

The typical parenting expert, like experts in other fields, is prone to sound

exceedingly sure of himself. An expert doesn’t so much argue the various sides

of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one side. That’s because an expert whose

argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn’t get much attention. An

expert must be bold if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into

conventional wisdom. His best chance of doing so is to engage the public’s

emotions, for emotion is the enemy of rational argument. And as emotions go,

one of them—fear—is more potent than the rest. The superpredator, Iraqi

weapons of mass destruction, mad-cow disease, crib death: how can we fail to

heed the expert’s advice on these horrors when, like that mean uncle telling too-

scary stories to too-young children, he has reduced us to quivers?

No one is more susceptible to an expert’s fearmongering than a parent. Fear is in

fact a major component of the act of parenting. A parent, after all, is the steward

of another creature’s life, a creature who in the beginning is more helpless than

the newborn of nearly any other species. This leads a lot of parents to spend a lot

of their parenting energy simply being scared.

The problem is that they are often scared of the wrong things. It’s not their fault,

really. Separating facts from rumors is always hard work, especially for a busy

parent. And the white noise generated by the experts—to say nothing of the

pressure exerted by fellow parents—is so overwhelming that they can barely

think for themselves. The facts they do manage to glean have usually been

varnished or exaggerated or otherwise taken out of context to serve an agenda

that isn’t their own.

Consider the parents of an eight-year-old girl named, say, Molly. Her two best

friends, Amy and Imani, each live nearby. Molly’s parents know that Amy’s

parents keep a gun in their house, so they have forbidden Molly to play there.

Instead, Molly spends a lot of time at Imani’s house, which has a swimming pool

in the backyard. Molly’s parents feel good about having made such a smart

choice to protect their daughter.

But according to the data, their choice isn’t smart at all. In a given year, there is

one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States.

(In a country with 6 million pools, this means that roughly 550 children under

the age of ten drown each year.) Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for

every 1 million-plus guns. (In a country with an estimated 200 million guns, this

means that roughly 175 children under ten die each year from guns.) The

likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000) versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus)

isn’t even close: Molly is roughly 100 times more likely to die in a swimming

accident at Imani’s house than in gunplay at Amy’s.

But most of us are, like Molly’s parents, terrible risk assessors. Peter Sandman, a

self-described “risk communications consultant” in Princeton, New Jersey, made

this point in early 2004 after a single case of mad-cow disease in the United States