This is a tour de force of reporting on empirical research in an area that could hardly be of greater social importance. Drum deserves 100x more attention for this than he got for breaking the Romney 47% video in September.
Someone inspected Donohue and Levitt's code and found a bug that meant they hadn't controlled for what they claimed they had. "Fixing that error reduces the effect of abortion on arrests by about half, using the original data, and two-thirds using updated numbers."
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 22.9 ms ] threadConcidentally via http://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/22/scientific-american... from a couple weeks ago, here's a link to Reyes' paper on the lead/crime theory:
http://www3.amherst.edu/~jwreyes/papers/LeadCrimeBEJEAP.pdf
And here's a striking critique of the Freakonomics abortion/crime theory, which I suppose most people here have heard of:
http://www.economist.com/node/5246700?story_id=5246700
Someone inspected Donohue and Levitt's code and found a bug that meant they hadn't controlled for what they claimed they had. "Fixing that error reduces the effect of abortion on arrests by about half, using the original data, and two-thirds using updated numbers."
But yeah, Kevin Drum does great work.
> And here's a striking critique of the Freakonomics abortion/crime theory, which I suppose most people here have heard of:
I have not heard of this! Thank you for sharing!