Dismal Science
By John D. Mueller
Posted: Thursday, April 6, 2006
Freakonomics asks all kinds of interesting questions but, like modern economics generally, is ill-equipped to provide the right answers to those involving gifts or crimes. Its authors famously -- but wrongly -- claim, for example, that legalizing abortion lowered homicide rates 15-20 years later by eliminating infants who would have become murderers. In fact, it raised the homicide rate almost at once by turning their fathers back into men without dependent children.
Freakonomics relies on the "economic approach to human behavior," which blinds it to the near-perfect trade-off between homicide and economic fatherhood -- something easily observed by economists using the original "human approach to economic behavior" of Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas.
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