Freakonomics Steve Levitt Flashcards
Row versus Wade. So how did legalizing abortions diminish the crime rate?
As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of study has shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal.
People who cannot afford to have a child at this period in time but go ahead and have them anyway are raising the future criminals of society. Normally it’s a single-parent mother who has to work, no father, and nobody to supervise the children except for the local gangs that they later join. They want to be like their buddies in the gangs and they all have their initiation phases where they do destructive crimes even murder.
The real estate agent. When she sells her own house, the agent holds out for the very best offer. When she sells your house, she pushes you to take the first decent offer that comes along. Like a stockbroker commissions, she wants to make deals and make them fast. Why not? Her share of a better offer about $150 is too puny of an incentive to encourage her to do otherwise.
And incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing.
What ever the incentive, whatever the situation, Dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary.
The story of the worst kidnapping case ever. In 1987 7 million American children suddenly disappeared. It was the night of April 15 and Internal Revenue Service just changed the rule. Instead of just merely listing each dependent child tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number for each child. Suddenly 7 million children disappeared.
An analysis of the entire Chicago data reveals evidence of teacher cheating in more than 200 classrooms per year, roughly 5% of the total. This is a conservative estimate, since the algorithm was to identify only the most egregious form of cheating in which teachers systematically changed students answers.
As of 1920, about 13 out of every 100 black children died in infancy or roughly 20,000 children each year, compared to 28 people who were lynched in a year. As late as 1940 about 10,000 black infants died every year.
Between the years of 1890 to 1899 in America 1,111 blacks were lynched. Between the years 1960 to 1969 in America three blacks were lynched.
The day that a car is driven off the lot is the worst day in its life, for it instantly loses as much as a quarter of its value. This might seem absurd, but we know it to be true. A new car that was bought for $20,000 cannot be resold for more than perhaps $15,000. Why? Because the only person who might logically want to resell a brand new car is someone who found the car to be a lemon. So even if the car isn’t a lemon, a potential buyer assumes that it is. He assumes that the seller has some information about the car that he The buyer, does not have.
And what if the car is a lemon? The seller would do well to wait a year to sell it. By then the suspicion of lemons will have faded some people will be selling their perfectly good one year old cars and a lemon can blend in with them. Like sell them for more than it is truly worth.
A recent audit discovered that the police in Atlanta were radically under reporting crime since the early 1990s. The practice apparently began when Atlanta was working to land the 1996 Olympics. The city needed to shed its violent image and fast. So each year thousands of crime reports were either downgraded from violent and nonviolent or simply throwing away. Despite these continuing efforts there were more than 22,000 missing police reports in the year 2002 alone. Atlanta regularly ranks among the most violent American cities. P. 92.
You stay in a greater chance of dying while dealing crack in a Chicago housing project then you do while sitting on death row in Texas.
By the year 2000 more than 2 million people were in prison, roughly 4 times the number as of 1972.
There are enough guns in the United States that if you gave one gun to every adult, you would run out of adults before you ran out of guns.
The most famous gun control law is the Brady act, passed in 1993 which requires a criminal check and a waiting period before a person may purchase a handgun. This solution may have seemed appealing to politicians but to an economist it doesn’t make much sense.why? Because regulation of a legal market is bound to fail when a healthy black market exist for the same product. With guns so cheap and so easy to get, the standard criminal has no incentive to fill out the firearms application at a local gun shop then wait a week. Only about 1/5 of the criminals had bought they’re guns through a licensed dealer.
These two factors, childhood poverty in a single-parent household, are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future. Growing up in a single-parent home roughly doubles a child’s propensity to commit crime. So does having a teenage mother.
Birth conceptions rose by nearly 30%, but births actually fell by 6%, indicating that many women were using abortion as a method of birth control. Page 139.
One factor to look for would be a correlation between each states abortion rate and its crime rate. Sure enough, the states with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s experience the greatest crime drops in the 1990s.
To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime laundering factors in American history is needless to say jarring.
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. New York Times Magazine August 3, 2003.
A great Quote: “emotion is the enemy of rational argument.”
The data that revealed the black children who perform poorly in school do so not because they are black but because they tend to come from low income, low education households.
Why does this happen? One answer may lie in the fact that the school attended by the typical black child is not the same school attended by the typical white child and the typical black child goes to a school that is simply bad.
Consider this fact. The data reveals that black students in good schools don’t lose ground to their white counterparts, and black students in good schools out perform whites in poor schools.
Studies have shown that a child’s academic abilities are far more influenced by the IQs of his biological parents rather than the IQs of his adoptive parents and mothers who give up their children for adoption tend to have significantly lower IQs.
There is a clear pattern at play: once a name catches on among high income highly educated parents, it starts working its way down the Socio economic ladder.
Blank eof.
