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This is about Card's recent WorldWatch essay, "Freakonomics: Or You Have to Find the Facts Before You Can Face Them". I very much appreciate the point of view expressed in the subtitle. But I have a question about the facts.
Card opens by discussing the question of why crime fell in the 1990's, rather than "continu[ing] to rise in the radical way it had in the 1970's and 1980's." (This is an lead-in to Levitt and Dubner's interesting theory about the connection between abortion and crime-reduction.) But the data I find on the Department of Justice web page indicates that there was no such crime increase in the 70's and 80's. Here are their graphs on rates of violent crime and property crime: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/viort.htm http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/house2.htm
They show property crime steadily decreasing since 1973, and violent crime holding about steady from '73 to '93. Does anyone know where the claim about the radical crime increase comes from?
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