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by skybrian 824 days ago
I think that, much like with Thinking, Fast and Slow, anyone recommending it needs to add a caveat that some of the results didn't hold up.

Ideally, there were would be revised editions with mistakes corrected.

1 comments

The trouble with doing that for Freakonomics is that the work on abortions reducing crime, which has been proven wrong, is the first chapter and the centerpiece of the book. It's the thing that they use to exemplify the "freakonomics" approach in the rest of the book.
Yeah, it would be a major revision.
do you have links to the papers disproving that? That result is kind of the basis for the moral argument for allowing abortion for consensual fetuses for me. Without that result the cost/benefit looks terrible because the deflationary death spiral of the below replacement birthrate it helps cause is really, really bad.
Per Wikipedia [0], the Freakonomics analysis holds up. Levitt addressed the disagreement on a podcast as well [1].

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime...

[1]: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion-and-crime-revisite...