The author is fundamentally dishonest in his presentation of data on abortion and crime rates. He distorts the data badly.
I don't follow the assertion that the author in dishonest. I would agree that he identifies correlations, and that correlations are not the same as causality. But I did not see him claiming that his correlations were causal, only that they were contrary to conventional wisdom about causes. You could accuse him of being suggestive since he disproves one hypothesis leaving the reader open to accept an unproved alternative, but I didn't take that as dishonesty.
That's not what I'm talking about.
For those who haven't completed the book, his claim is that crime fell in the US starting in 1991, eighteen years after
Roe. In order to further prove his link he tries to show that crime rates declined in the states that legalized abortion on their own before
Roe. The five states that did so were California, New York, Colorado, Hawai'i, and Alaska.
The author shows that from 1988 and 1994, crime rates improved faster in these states than in the nation at large. He takes the data point of 1994 and the data point of 1988 and compares the two.
The author leaves the reader thinking that this decline in crime rates occurred in each of these five states and that it starts in 1988. He doesn't say it explicitly, but that's what everyone will assume. This is not true, and the author knows that this is not true yet he chooses to leave the reader with this impression anyway. In reality, there is only a drop in crime that exceeds the national numbers because of New York's crime rate in 1993-1994.
If you examine the data year by year instead and state by state instead of by taking two distant data points for five states whose data is disimilar, here is what you'll learn.
In California, crime rates roughly track the national average each year.
In Hawai'i, crime rates roughly track the national average each year.
In Colorado, crime rates go up down up down, in a roller coaster type pattern.
In Alaska, crime skyrockets.
In new York, crime is dramatically high from 1988 to 1992, then dramatically drops in 1993-94.
Crunch the numbers and you'll see that the entire advantage these five states have comes entirely from New York during 1993-94. And I shouldn't have to explain what caused crime to drop in New York in 1993-94 (Hint: Its not abortion).
Only by considering these states collectively instead of individually do you get the trend the author talks about, but this is the wrong way to examine the data (And as an accredited economist, we must assume the author kows that and intentionally disregards proper procedure). If I were in an elevator with Bill Gates, our average net worth would be $25 billion, but that grossly distorts the wealth of the people in the elevator. Same with this book.
Not one of these states, if examined individually and year to year, shows the trend the author talks about. Not one. Examine the data and you'll see. The author intentionally misleads the reader as to what the data shows.
