The best and the brightest? 14 August 2005

On "The Interview" (BBC World Service) there was - what else? - an interview with Steven Levitt, often described as the most impressive and interesting young economist in the US. He asks concrete questions about everyday decision making by individuals and claims to have proven a few curious things: that swimming pools are more dangerous to kids than guns, that car seats are not safer for kids than seat belts, etc. His most famous theory is that legalized abortion has helped reduce crime rates by decreasing the number of unwanted children, a major predictor of criminality. This theory has been criticized on empirical grounds (the availability of legalized abortion has in fact increased the number of pregnancies, so the link between abortion and unwantedness is not clear-cut), but this is beside the point. To me, what seems interesting is that this stellar economist demonstrates a syndrom paifully familiar from my own classes - the inability of most young minds/brains now to relate to broader issues and to think in abstract (particularly moral) categories. He described himself as completely apolitical, "not an agenda type of person," and seems to think that the only good social science is applied science (a year or two ago there was an article in the New York Times about the teaching of science in US high schools; it said that since kids no longer had the interest or patience to sit through lessons in basis science, they were increasingly being taught applied science - for example, forensic science). When asked about the death of their first child at one, he spoke unemotionally about how he and his wife had probably erred on the side of perseverance and had moved on to have 4 children, including two girls adopted in China (as he explained, in China baby girls left for adoption tend to have a superior genetic profile as compared to the US). There may, in fact, be a link between excessive affect inhibition/regulation and the empiricist lack of transcendence and wider concerns in someone as Levitt - otherwise, a very clever young guy, the type of productive scholar coveted by prestigeous research universities (he is at Chicago). Oh, I forgot: of course, Levitt appeared on BBC World Service as part of the promotion for his new book.