Steven Levitt in Slate

Levitt does battle against Steve Sailer in a week long exchange in Slate. Here is the link to Levitt's initial salvo on Monday.

What I most enjoy about the exchange is the way Levitt contemplates Sailer's critique and then dissects its.

Your hypothesis that crack, not abortion, is the story, provides a testable alternative to our explanation of the facts.

He then proceeds to define a testable hypothesis and, no surprise, rejects it.

Crack clearly has affected crime over the last decade, but it cannot explain away our results with respect to legalized abortion.

If you have the patience to digest the details of the exchange, it is revealing. Levitt's approach epitomizes how economists are trained to approach a problem.

Add Levitt to my list of people I think are really neat. Previous honorees include the one and only Xeni Jardin and the unquenchable Michiko Kakutani. Time to go saw some logs.