Stephen Dubner

He worked with him.

Right.

And he just said, none of that makes any sense.

I don't know what you're talking about.

I was convinced that we were right.

So I ended up writing in the New York Times a column that explained this mistake we'd made.

But that's what journalists do.

That's what writers do.

If you get had or if you make a mistake, you have to admit it.

So anyway, that was a long way of saying that I don't think there's anything in Freakonomics that we would do really differently for the people we were then.

But you would agree, right?

I agree.

And I think a good example of that is probably the most famous claim from the book about the relationship between legalized abortion and crime.

There are kind of two tracks of that.

The first track is that Steve Levitt and this guy, John Donahue, who's now at Stanford, I believe, a legal scholar, had done this paper before I met Levitt.

This is how Levitt kind of got on the map.

that showed a causal relationship between the legalization of abortion and the crime rate.

It's not a complicated argument.

It takes a long time to describe it, only because there's a kind of collage of evidence that goes into making it up.

But the argument essentially is that abortion often serves as, I was going to say, a form of birth control.