Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and
Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t
by John Lott
(Regnery, 275 pages, $27.95)
Freedomnomics is John Lott’s free market retort to the
wildly popular book, Freakonomics — that pastiche of thin
analysis that skims over topics as diverse as sumo wrestling, real
estate rip-offs, used car prices, and children’s names.
In particular, Lott disputes the most explosive claim in Levitt
and Dubner’s work — that Roe v. Wade was a major factor
in the stunning drop in crime in the 1990s. That huge assertion,
based on four pages of analysis that included the negative impact
of Communist Romania’s no-abortion policy, could easily have been
labeled “fewer blacks, less crime.”
Lott argues, by contrast, that the Supreme Court’s legislative
fiat in 1973 actually increased crime by boosting out-of-wedlock
births and single-parent households. These crime-correlated
statistics exploded in the 1970s and '80s as social sanctions
against extra-marital sex disappeared and as the legal but odious
option of abortion was rejected by millions of now-pregnant
unmarried women.
If abortion isn’t the life-saving procedure that Levitt and
Dubner suggest it is, other factors must have caused crime rates to
plummet during the last decade of the 20th century. Accordingly,
Lott provides evidence that the reinstitution of capital punishment
in the early '90s explains some of the drop — a conclusion that
coincides with the findings of other analysts and confirms what
most folks, including criminals and police officers, sense
intuitively — that people go out of their way to avoid being
killed. Stated otherwise: harsher penalties, less crime.
The incarceration of more criminals is Lott’s next explanation
for lower crime rates. Only among academics, the author notes,
would it seem strange that “more inmates” results in “less
criminality.” Individuals who rob banks, Willie Sutton might have
noted, can’t engage in that illicit activity when they don’t have
access to the place where the money is kept.
Lott’s third explanation for the '90s crime recession is, not
unexpectedly, more guns among law-abiding citizens — a proposition
to which Lott devoted his well-known 1998 book, More Guns, Less Crime. In this regard Lott
notes that “for the first eight to nine years that concealed-carry
laws are in effect, murder rates fall by an average of 1 to 1.5
percent per year, while robbery and rape rates decline by about 2
percentage points.”
The beefing up of municipal police forces also helped to reduce
crime in the '90s — especially in places like New York City, where
a precipitous decline in murders coincided with a 50% increase in
police officers and improvements in the quality of recruits. These
elevated recruitment standards, Lott notes, reversed the general
degradation in force quality that was often associated with
“affirmative action” hiring policies.
Concerning traditional economic topics, Lott is much more
business friendly that his Freakonomics counterparts.
While Levitt and Dubner compare real estate agents to Klan members
(with inside information) and warn consumers that “many experts use
their information to your detriment,” Lott emphasizes the economic
value of reputation and provides data that contradicts or mitigates
Levitt and Dubner’s unflattering assertions about used car prices
and real estate agents. Lott even provides a plausible market-based
explanation for high wine and liquor costs at restaurants.
Among other topics that Lott analyzes in 194 pages of text are
the following: the 2000 Presidential vote in Florida (Bush wins!),
the vote-depressing effect of measures that make voting (and vote
fraud) easier, the left-bias of mainstream media, and the idea that
a correlation exists between the cost of political campaigns and
the size of government. With respect to the last point, the author
notes that all the House, Senate, and Presidential candidates in
2004 spent a mere $2.17 billion for the privilege of dispensing a
trough of 2.23 trillion federal dollars. Meanwhile, that same year,
Proctor & Gamble spent $3.9 billion on advertising. The logic
of this unwelcome campaign finance tale is simple: more government,
more campaign dollars.
Another hornet-stirring correlation that Lott considers is one
between female voting and big government — a linkage greatly
attenuated by marriage and the responsibilities of parenthood. Lott
also notes that felons, even more than unmarried and divorced
women, vote overwhelmingly for Democrats — a fact that explains
the ardor Democrat leaders are exhibiting to restore the “voting
rights” of victimizers.
Perhaps the most revealing anecdote in Lott’s book occurs in the
introduction. Here the author discusses the severe professional
pressures that were brought to bear against him because of his work
on behalf of a property tax elimination measure in Montana. The
relevant correlations in this case involved more taxes, more money
for government-funded educators, and more intimidation of
professors who don’t go along with the program. Put succinctly:
more state subsidies, less speech.
In sum, Freedomnomics is just the sort of product one
would expect from an author whose book begins with the assertion,
“The free market works,” and whose economic analysis starts with
these words, “If something becomes more costly, people will do less
of it.” Such frankness would have resonated with the late Merryle
Rukeyser, a blunt talker who once repeated these no-nonsense
definitions on his son’s popular financial program: “A liberal is
someone who’s liberal with other people’s money, and a reactionary
— that’s someone who can count.”
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in
Oceanside, California. He is a regular columnist for San
Diego’s North County Times and his book reviews have
appeared in the American Enterprise, Touchstone,
and the California Republic website. See his blog,
Richard Kirk on Ethics: Musing With A
Hammer.
