Freakonomics Twentieth Anniversary Edition by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Author:Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner [Levitt, Steven D. & Dubner, Stephen J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2025-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

LOST OR DAMAGED BODY PART COMPENSATED WEEKS OF PAY

FINGER (FIRST) 36

FINGER (SECOND) 29

FINGER (THIRD) 21

FINGER (FOURTH) 17

THUMB (MASTER HAND) 63

THUMB (OTHER HAND) 54

HAND (MASTER) 168

HAND (OTHER) 155

ARM (MASTER) 208

ARM (MASTER) 208

ARM (OTHER) 194

TOE (GREAT) 28

TOE (ANY OTHER) 9

FOOT 125

NOSE 35

EYE 157

KIDNEY 117

LIVER 347

PANCREAS 416

HEART 520

MAMMARY 35

OVARY 35

TESTIS 35

PENIS 35–104

VAGINA 35–104

Now, for the sake of argument, let’s ask an outrageous question: what is the relative value of a fetus and a newborn? If faced with the Solomonic task of sacrificing the life of one newborn for an indeterminate number of fetuses, what number might you choose? This is nothing but a thought exercise—obviously there is no right answer—but it may help clarify the impact of abortion on crime.

For a person who is either resolutely pro-life or resolutely pro-choice, this is a simple calculation. The first, believing that life begins at conception, would likely consider the value of a fetus versus the value of a newborn to be 1:1. The second person, believing that a woman’s right to an abortion trumps any other factor, would likely argue that no number of fetuses can equal even one newborn.

But let’s consider a third person. (If you identify strongly with either person number one or person number two, the following exercise might strike you as offensive, and you may want to skip this paragraph and the next.) This third person does not believe that a fetus is the 1:1 equivalent of a newborn, yet neither does he believe that a fetus has no relative value. Let’s say that he is forced, for the sake of argument, to affix a relative value, and he decides that 1 newborn is worth 100 fetuses.

There are roughly 1.5 million abortions in the United States every year. For a person who believes that 1 newborn is worth 100 fetuses, those 1.5 million abortions would translate—dividing 1.5 million by 100—into the equivalent of a loss of 15,000 human lives. Fifteen thousand lives: that happens to be about the same number of people who die in homicides in the United States every year. And it is far more than the number of homicides eliminated each year due to legalized abortion. So even for someone who considers a fetus to be worth only one one-hundredth of a human being, the trade-off between higher abortion and lower crime is, by an economist’s reckoning, terribly inefficient.

What the link between abortion and crime does say is this: when the government gives a woman the opportunity to make her own decision about abortion, she generally does a good job of figuring out if she is in a position to raise the baby well. If she decides she can’t, she often chooses the abortion.

But once a woman decides she will have her baby, a pressing question arises: what are parents supposed to do once a child is born?

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