From the WSJ (Debating Freakonomics):
It's round two in the Freakonomics brawl.
Last week, two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston posted a working paper that took issue with a controversial chapter in the best-selling book Freakonomics. That chapter draws a link between the legalization of abortion in the 1970s and the decline in crime two decades later.
The Boston Fed economists found flaws in one of several statistical tests conducted by Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt. Now, Mr. Levitt is firing back. He says he's rerun the numbers and found the Boston Fed researchers haven't measured abortion accurately enough to prove their point.
"No doubt there will be future research that attempts to overturn our evidence on legalized abortion. Perhaps they will even succeed," Mr. Levitt says on his Web site. "But this one does not."
Statistical debates like this never get settled overnight, if at all. Christopher Foote, the lead Boston Fed researcher in the debate, says he's studying Mr. Levitt's response, and should have a counter-punch ready within "a couple of days."
A side note: I’m always blown away by the sheer magnitude of the comments made at the Freakonomics blog by the abortion-cut-crime critic Steve Sailor. So far, his comments on this post amount to 22 double spaced pages (12 point, Times Roman font, 1” margins) and 5882 words.
That’s a lot of writing.
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