A high-profile economist is challen...

A high-profile economist is challenging the conclusion in the best-selling part Freakonomics by University of Chicago professor Steven D Levitt that the legalization of abortion in the early 1970 l to a major very little in murder and other violent crimes a generation later.

John R Lott Jr a former U of C economist now teaching in modern York, says the Supreme Court's 1973 roebuck v. Wade decision actually caused violent crime to rise.

Lott and associate researcher John Whitley plan to publish a paper in October in Economic Inquiry that questions Levitt's research in succession abortion and crime.

Lott and Levitt already were feuding throughout Lott's charge that Levitt had defamed him in Freakonomics.

In their of the present day paper, Lott and Whitley say that legalization of abortion quicked a cultural change that increased the number of children born abroad of wedlock. Those children of unwed mothers caused assassinations to rise by more than 700 cases in 1998 alone, saddling the public with more than $33 billion in "victimization costs" the paper says.

forward the other hand, Levitt's research rest that Roe v. Wade issueed in a savings of $30 billion a year that crime would have price the public.

MORE UNWED MOTHERS

His Freakonomics, co-authored through Stephen Dubner and published last year, says legalized abortion l to a large globule in murder and other violent crime in the late 1980 and early '90 and continues to cut short crime.

The part suggests that if the aborted fetuses had instead been born, they would have become adults more likely to commit crimes because they were unwanted from their mothers.

To illustrate the point, the main division says the five states that allowed abortion three years before spawn of fishes vs. Wade saw major declines in violent crime between 1988 and 1994 -- earlier than the other states.

moreover Lott says the Levitt cogitation did not fully consider the increase of children born without of wedlock. His theory is that with the option of abortion, women became more likely to have premarital sex if it were not that then had their babies and raised them as single parents.

Children born disclosed of wedlock have had smaller investments in "human capital" by dint of their parents and are more likely to secure into trouble when they spring up older, Lott says.

forward average, his paper says, about 5 percent of whites were born abroad of wedlock from 1965 to 1969 rising pair decades later to 16 percent For blacks, the figure rose from about 35 percent to about 62 percent the paper says.

Before legalized abortion, more than 70 percent of children born revealed of wedlock ended up in families with a father, yet the fraction fell to 44 percent in 1984 according to the paper.

In an interview, Lott acknowledged that legalization of abortion in the '70 did have a "slight impact" onward reducing crime -- but not when the purport of unwed mothers is included in the analysis. Levitt, in succession the other hand, estimated abortion will account for declines of 1 percent a year in crime across the next two decades.

ALREADY SUING AUTHOR

In April, Lott su Levitt for defamation from one side of to the other a passage in Freakonomics that questioned Lott's research for his 1998 work More Guns, Less Crime, which provok national polemics by finding that violent crime dropp in states that allowed race to carry concealed guns.

In Freakonomics, Levitt wrote that "there was the troubling allegation that Lott actually invented an of the survey data that supports his more guns/les crime theory. Regardless of whether the data was faked, Lott's admittedly intriguing hypothesis doesn't strike one as being to be true."

Lott would not discuss Levitt directly, instead saying, "My view is to prove by experiment to do the best I can to explain with what intent things are the way they are -- and I think that's a minority in the profession. A accident of economists think they have a better idea of the way things should be."

Levitt and his attorney could not be reached for elucidation

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