cute fuzzy bunny
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Mephistopheles said:I am VERY sceptical that a causal relationship can be bourne out here.
There are a lot of things that you can infer over a 15-20 year period, but they did it by state, where a particular state had legalized abortion sooner than others, and did a broad range of time periods, by state, by county, by city. Of the things in the book, it was as reasonable a data set as I've seen.
Basically, per capita, any way you sliced it (state/county/city), high abortion rates = lower crime rates ~15-20 years later.
By the way, this is not to support or take away from the whole abortion issue on either side, its simple data. And it does make sense...unwanted children are probably not going to grow up to be your best citizens.
Another assertion they made had a better example though. They found that in couples who had children later in life (>30), the children had a better chance of being 'successful' vs couples who were younger when they had their first child. Makes sense. Weird part was that they found that parents who had a child young (~20), then had another much later (~30-40), neither child enjoyed that beneficial "success" thing. Their thesis was that theres something in parents who wait that makes them better parents. My analysis is that people are creatures of reusable learning, and the parents that had a young child developed their child rearing skills then and then simply re-used that less optimal learning with the second child, while parents who developed their child raising skills when older (and presumably wiser) did a better job.
Theres always more than one way to work up the reasons for a correlation, but find me one alternative to the original.