FREAK-TV: ‘All the Death Threats Came From the Left’

There’s a new Freakonomics video today, the third and final installment of Levitt talking about his academic research, co-authored by John Donohue, that linked a rise in legalized abortion to a drop in crime. (You can access Parts 1 and 2 in the thumbnail images beneath the video player.)

In this piece, Levitt talks about the initial, stormy reaction to the abortion/crime research. As it turned out, this reaction continued to play out for years.

Just to show how dumb we are, we very nearly didn’t bother to include the abortion/crime argument in Freakonomics, since we felt it had been so broadly discussed in the media. But in the end we relished the opportunity to place it in the broader context of the 1990s crime drop, which allowed us to write about the abortion/crime link with a thoroughness that is often missing from media portrayals of it.