ABSTRACT
This brief concluding chapter examines how economists approach controversial social issues. A well-known economic study that finds a causation between the legalization of abortion in the 1970s and the drop in the crime rate in the 1990s is discussed to address how the public reacts to such a claim, and what the study’s value is from a public policy perspective. The chapter ends with a discussion of how economists approach social issues by the type of questions they raise, their undertaking of empirical studies, their various approaches to advising social policy, and their recognition of the ambiguities involved in identifying a social objective.
