So, some folks have figured out that Levitt, himself, is not interested in making generalizations about crime, abortion, and race. Not the way Bennett would have it, anyway. You can read Levitt on the issue at his blog entry, Bennett and Freakonomics, as well as at Slate, where he says this about race, abortion, crime, and the way the media distorted the research (surprise!):
"As an aside, it has been both fascinating and disturbing to me how the media have insisted on reporting this as a study about race, when race really is not an integral part of the story. The link between abortion and unwantedness, and also between unwantedness and later criminality, have been shown most clearly in Scandinavian data. Abortion rates among African-Americans are higher, but overall, far more abortions are done by whites. None of our analysis is race-based because the crime data by race is generally not deemed reliable."
We have also written about this elsewhere when someone asked about race and crime statistics. That entry and email list post was an address to other reasons why crime statistics aren't reliable.
Why does Levitt say that the numbers aren't reliable? There's this little matter of the difference between crime rates and clearance rates. There's more, but limited time and space.
Let's take the numbers for 1995, since that's what came up in the first page of google hits.
*) Nationwide, the crime index clearance rate was 21% overall. *) The clearance rate for violent crimes was 45 %
More at the link above.
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