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Originally Posted by JumpinJesus
I haven't read Freakonomics so I don't know how they made the correlation, but I find these kinds of deductions bothersome in that anybody can make any correlation between any two events and make a loose causality relationship.
For example, I could say that replacing sugar with high fructose corn syrup in Coca Cola helped lead to me having high cholesterol simply because one event preceeded the other. And while there may be some correlation, it is impossible to say that one was a direct cause of the other. We can always take stastistical information and make it say whatever we want it to say for a particular effect.
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If you replaced sugar with high fructose corn syrup in area A before area B then found that the average cholesterol rates in area A went up before they did in B, well then, that may be something you want to look into.
It doesn't make much sense to me to fancy yourself a reasonable person and to also be skeptical of information that you haven't exposed yourself to. I understand what you're saying though, because I generally would tend to agree. If you read the book, though, the authors do make a reasonable argument as to why the conventional wisdom(innovative policing, the economy, etc...) on the falling crime rates of the nineties is mostly unsupported by any kind of data. They don't attribute it solely to abortion, they also mention the increased number of prisons and a larger number of police on the streets.
It also is plausible that abortion might lower the crime rate, since being an unwanted child generally increases your chances of becoming a criminal. Just like being raised by a poor unwed teenage mother increase your chances of becoming a criminal and being addicted to post season dissapointment increases your chances of being a viking fan. It is as simple as reducing the size of one group that happens to produce a lot of criminals.