A FEW years ago, a young economist named Steven D. Levitt became briefly notorious for collaborating on a research paper that contained a strikingly novel thesis: abortion curbs crime. What Levitt and his co-author claimed, specifically, was that the sharp drop in the United States crime rate during the 1990's -- commonly attributed to factors like better policing, stiffer gun laws and an aging population -- was in fact largely due to the Roe v. Wade decision two decades earlier. The logic was simple: unwanted children are more likely to grow up to become criminals; legalized abortion leads to less unwantedness; therefore, abortion leads to less crime.
...''Freakonomics,'' written with the help of the journalist Stephen J. Dubner, is an odd book. For one thing, it proudly boasts that it has no unifying theme. For another, each chapter begins with a quotation from the under-author (Dubner) telling us how great the over-author (Levitt) is: a ''master of the simple, clever solution,'' a ''noetic butterfly'' (!), ''genial, low-key and unflappable,'' etc. Yet a little self-indulgence can be tolerated in a book as instructive and entertaining as this one. (''Freakonomics'' grew out of a profile Dubner wrote about Levitt in The New York Times Magazine, where I am also a contributor, but we've never met.) [thanks, Sharon]
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