fatvegan

Stephen Levitt spends a lot of his time emphasising how important incentives are in pretty much everything we do. He maintains his freshness by continuing to apply this assumption to areas that people have tended not to.

So I think it's quite amusing that his most famous paper of all, the one linking the increased number of abortions to a drop in crime, actually debunks many of the previous theories that crime was related to incentive structures. It would be extremely hard to argue that not being aborted as a fetus is an incentive to commit crime when you grow up. The left rather despises him, so it's interesting that this particular paper supports the idea that social context dominates individual incentives in determining crime. I actually find it rather refreshing to hear clever economists (even ones I often disagree with), blaming our society's woes on something other than individual selfishness.