<p>jimbob--since when does a "book worth reading" need to be a treatise on economics?</p>
<p>:D</p>
<p>you expect someone (a novice) to even quarter way finish apostol's book before the summer is over? i myself can have better luck memorizing the bible and the koran in mandarin. unless you don't mean working through the problems alone. i don't think apostol is too wordy anyway; i like him.</p>
<p>
[quote]
that seems like a funny reason to be dissatisfied with a book
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The book didn't captivate me because I had heard the arguments before. How is that funny or strange?</p>
<p>fool -- but didn't the arguments captivate you the first time you heard them? perhaps for someone else, it is the first encounter with them. that's why it's part of a general list of book recommendation -- not a list of recommendations tailored specifically to you and mindful of your past experiences.</p>
<p>Well, they should be. :D</p>
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[quote]
What? It seems to me that this is utterly false -- if the notion that abortion reduced crime is common, it's only because Steve Levitt's work, mostly publicized through Freakonomics, made such an impact. Could you cite a single specific statement (in a newspaper, magazine, Internet forum post, TV show, anything) made prior to the publication of Donohue and Levitt's famous abortion/crime paper* to suggest that abortion contributed to the drop in crime?
[/quote]
Consider [url=<a href="http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_2_59/ai_54099140%5Dthis%5B/url">http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_2_59/ai_54099140]this[/url</a>] article by Dr. Henry Morgentaler, a "prominent Canadian abortion provider." It lays out the basic argument that abortion has led to decreased crime rates, although Morgentaler doesn't present strong statistical evidence of this (he refers to decreasing crime rates in the US and Canada over the preceding six years as supporting his hypothesis, but clearly they could be due to other factors).</p>
<p>The article is dated March 1999 and is "adapted from an editorial that appeared in numerous Canadian newspapers on November 5, 1998," so it appears to predate the initial publication of Donohue and Levitt's work, which seems to have been around August 1999. Furthermore, Morgentaler says he "predicted a decline in crime and mental illness thirty years ago when I started my campaign to make abortion in Canada legal and safe," and he had clearly expressed such ideas by 1996, as evidenced by [url=<a href="http://groups.google.com/group/alt.abortion.inequity/msg/1fb3550aaea30d09?hl=en&%5Dthis%5B/url">http://groups.google.com/group/alt.abortion.inequity/msg/1fb3550aaea30d09?hl=en&]this[/url</a>] Usenet post referring to him. So this idea of a link between abortion and crime rates clearly did exist prior to the Donohue/Levitt study, although that study provided much better evidence for it and undoubtedly brought it increased attention.</p>
<p>Wow. That is very enlightening. I was wrong. Donohue and Levitt didn't have the original idea first.</p>
<p>The funny thing is that if I'd read this then, I would have probably dismissed it as some crackpot nonsense.</p>