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| Steven Levitt |
Levitt graduated from Harvard in 1989 and then obtained his Ph.D in economics from MIT in 1994. He now teaches at the University of Chicago as the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor. In 2004 he won the John Bates Clark Medal for being by the American Economic Association for being the most promising economist under 40. Levitt's work on various economic topics include crime, politics and sports. The most prolific of his research topics is the impact of legalized abortion on the United States crime rate. Levitt has said,
"The numbers we're talking about, in terms of crime, are absolutely trivial when you compare it to the broader debate on abortion. From a pro-life view of the world: If abortion is murder then we have a million murders a year through abortion. And the few thousand homicides that will be prevented according to our analysis are just nothing—they are a pebble in the ocean relative to the tragedy that is abortion. So, my own view, when we [did] the study and it hasn't changed is that: our study shouldn't change anybody's opinion about whether abortion should be legal and easily available or not. It's really a study about crime, not abortion."
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| Steven Levitt Teaching at the University of Chicago |
It is studies like this that take economics to a different place in society. Levitt has brought the study of economics to a new place and has shown the value of finding correlations within data is a better way to make choices. We shouldn't let our bias get in the way, we need to simply look at the facts. That is something that Levitt offers up in every study he authors, and that is something I admire and respect.
