The chart below shows the trend in the U.S. homicide rate starting in the 1950s. As you can see, the U.S. homicide rate began to soar in the 1960s, stayed high throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and then plunged dramatically starting in the 1990s.
And it wasn’t just homicide: crime rates of all kinds took a sharp dive in the 1990s.
How do we explain that? Did criminals simply vanish from the face of the earth overnight?
The most famous—and most widely accepted—explanation for the sharp drop in crime in the 1990s was proposed by economist Steven Levitt in the runaway bestseller Freakonomics.
His argument was that the drop in crime in the 1990s owed itself to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision legalizing abortion. From then on, children whom no one would otherwise have wanted to raise, and who would mostly have become criminals as adults, simply weren’t born, because unwilling or unfit mothers could now choose abortion. If those children had been born, they would have reached the age when they were most likely to become criminals right around the 1990s (possibly).
The theory sounds extremely counterintuitive at first, but the more you think about it, the more it seems to make sense. No wonder people spent years treating it as the best case study of economics’ astonishing powers of insight.
But our old friend Steven Pinker argued that, if you thought about it a little more carefully, you’d find the claim didn’t really stand up.
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker wrote:
“To be fair, Levitt … provided a clever statistical analysis of correlation to demonstrate this connection. For example, before 1973, abortion had already been legalized in a few states, and those same states were the first to see crime rates decline. But these statistics compare the two ends of a long, assumption-laden, and strained causal chain—the first link being legalized abortion and the last link being a drop in crime twenty years later—while ignoring every link in between.”
Those links include several assumptions: that abortion led to fewer unwanted children, that unwanted children were more likely to become criminals, and that the first generation of young people filtered through abortion would lead the decline in crime in the 1990s. But there are other explanations for the correlation between the two—for example, in the liberal states that legalized abortion first, the drug epidemic also arrived and ended earlier—and the intermediate links in the chain are either extremely fragile or simply nonexistent.”
Pinker then offered several counterarguments. The most powerful one, I think, is this:
If legalized abortion after 1973 was the main cause of the decline in crime, then the decline should have begun with the youngest group and gradually risen with age: the older the group, the higher its crime rate. For example, the 16-year-olds in 1993 were born in 1977, after abortion had become widespread, so their crime rate should have been lower than that of the people who were 16 in 1983. Those children were born in 1967, when abortion was still illegal.
“But the facts were exactly the opposite. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the first generation born in the era of legal abortion reached the legal age. They not only failed to lower the homicide statistics; they brought unprecedented chaos.” Instead, crime rates first began to decline among the older people born before abortion was legalized, and then the decline spread to the younger age groups.
So how did Pinker explain the decline in violence that began in the 1990s? He thought two factors were especially important.
First, the state, as a machine for suppressing violence, became stronger and more effective starting in the 1990s.
In the early 1990s, Americans had finally grown tired of robbery, vandalism, and drive-by shootings, and the state began strengthening the criminal justice system in several ways. One of the most visible ways to improve the efficiency of the state apparatus was to expand the police force. President Clinton backed legislation that added 100,000 police officers across the United States. The visibility of police doubled, creating a powerful deterrent on the streets.
Second, the backlash against order that had begun in the 1960s—the hippie movement and the like—finally burned out in the 1990s, and mainstream values that favored order and civility returned.
It began with some of the ideas sweeping through the West during the various movements of the 1960s losing their appeal (many of the hippies’ old claims looked both childish and stupid by then). As a result, the hippies’ former ideal of ignoring order and rejecting civilization—which contained a great deal of violence—began to fall out of favor. The civilizing process returned to its proper course, and at last the world began to quiet down.
Psychologists vs. economists—which side’s explanation do you find more convincing?
References:
Steven Pinker (2015). The Better Angels of Our Nature. CITIC Press.
Note
- This short popular-science essay was written as part of the content accompanying the “Psychology Crash Course” series Zhichao Wei: Psychology Crash Course, published on the now-shuttered platform Fatuan. The original link no longer exists.
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