Levitt And Dubner's Freakonomics

Conventional wisdom would argue that all crack cocaine dealers make an obscene amount of money. Despite the danger of dealing drugs in Chicago (or anywhere for that matter), many people still do it. Lower paying jobs generally have a large supply pool, and higher paying jobs generally have a smaller supply pool. Realizing that these crack dealing organizations and gangs operate like a normal business flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that crack dealers are all rich. The American idea of working hard and eventually becoming successful is what the lower level dealers believe in and what makes them stay in that horrible job. There is a multitude of lower level jobs to fill, but there is a significantly smaller number of higher paying jobs available. The people in charge would like things to stay as

Levitt and Dubner focus on this correlation in chapter four of Freakonomics. Beginning with Nicolae Ceausescu, the leader of Romania, who made abortion illegal, they identify the ramifications of Ceausescu’s actions that eventually lead to his losing control of Romania. The generation of children who would have been aborted grew up miserable, poor, and less successful than children before them. The opposite is essentially what happened in the United States. Instead of an abortion ban leading to more crime (as in Romania), the legalization of abortion led to a drop in crime. A strong economy, increased gun laws, and the threat of capital punishment were all cited as causes for this sudden decrease in crime, but the authors of the book assert that it was because of abortion becoming legal in Roe v. Wade in 1973. The type of woman to typically have an abortion is unmarried, poor, or a teenager. If the child was born, he would most likely turn to crime at some point in his life as one consequence of his