Yesterday I finished Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. It’s an entertaining and thought-provoking read. At roughly 200 pages it’s a quicker read than you might think, due to the flowing editorial style in which it is written. It claims to have no unifying theme, but it does; it’s that the world doesn’t work the way we think, and they can prove it with numbers.

Our public policy and debate are shaped by a belief that we understand the cause and effect of things like education, expertise, parenting, crime, and punishment, and we rarely examine this cultural consensus. The authors of this book apply economic analysis techniques to some surprisingly non-economical data in order to perform such an examination—mostly for the sake of curiosity than to prove some burning idealism, which frankly makes their conclusions more trustworthy. It’s hard to be objective when you’re deeply committed to the numbers coming out one way or another.

One of the most startling correlations they discovered, the one you have probably already heard, is the one between abortion and the crime rate—namely, that legal abortions reduce crime. It appears that an unwanted child is more liable to grow up criminal. There are several reasons why this comes across as surprising, mostly because nobody expected the crime rate to fall, and when it did, they attributed it to almost everything else. But the only strong correlation was to legal abortion.

For someone like myself, with a pro-life position, this is disturbing but not destroying. After all, the fact that abortion is effective at lowering crime doesn’t make it moral. Lots of perfectly gruesome policies are effective. The authors themselves say that it “feels less Darwinian than Swiftian”, recalling “A Modest Proposal”, and so it does. The authors point out gingerly at the end of the chapter that the “cost” of each prevented homicide is something like 350 abortions. You’d better be very sure that those fetuses aren’t even a little bit human, at that rate.

Economics is amoral, of course, but we try to use the mechanisms it describes in order to effect a higher degree of public morality. “Sin taxes” on cigarettes, tax breaks for charitable contributions, free public education, and so on. How well do they work?

Although the authors profess that they find themselves especially attracted to questions related to cheating, crime, and cronyism, a certain optimism keeps showing up. A bagel vendor who works on the honor system finds that even when cheating is highest, 87% of the customers don’t cheat. The Internet really does empower people against inequities based on withholding information. Efforts to remove sexism and racism from our society seem to have worked. The stakes for a parent aren’t as high as we are repeatedly terrified into thinking they are.

And most drug dealers don’t make more than McDonald’s employees, because drug cartels are run like McDonald’s, except with guns and murder. You’re not missing out after all!