Michael Maltz on Lott

Mark Kleiman has posted an email from Michael Maltz with some comments on Lott and his research. An extract:

It seems that most of Lott's critics and supporters forgot about what I feel is the most damaging lie he told while hiding behind the skirts of his fictitious Internet persona Mary Rosh: s/he described himself as "a chaired professor" at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Had s/he forgotten that he was never even awarded as much as a stool? One can be disgusted by his unfairly lashing out at his critics while in drag, calling them liars who hide behind fictitious personas (I wonder where he got that idea from?), but this lie within a lie takes the cake. How can any of his supporters defend this?

He also misrepresented himself in front of the Nebraska Legislature, calling himself a professor when he was the John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics; see his testimony here.

Maltz also points out some more suspicious analysis by Lott

Well over a year ago I sent a data file showing the extent of this missing data to Lott, and he countered by saying that I didn't take into account that most of the counties with high missing data have low populations. He was right: but taking population into account just reduced the number of problematic states from 21 to 15 (just to use some benchmark, I called a state problematic if more than 10 percent of its observations---county-years---had more than 30 percent missing data; weighting by population, 21 drops to 15).

Lott then reanalyzed the data after eliminating the 16 worst states from his analysis. He doesn't explain why he dropped 16 states (why not 15, or 17? forget sensitivity analysis!), nor does he state why he dropped whole states instead of problematic counties, nor does he make any provision for the remaining errors (which are still plentiful) in the remaining states' counties.

Now maybe Lott was just being lazy and did not try a different number of states or different ways to deal with the problem, but his conduct in changing his model to bring his results back after correcting the coding errors removed his results suggests that he tried the possibilities and just presented the one that cast his thesis in the best light.

This is why all of Lott's econometric research is now worthless. It is not enough to check his data to see if he made more coding errors. It is not enough to rerun his regressions to see if he did them right. You have to look at all the other reasonable ways to model the data to see whether he has just cherry-picked the models that give the results he wants to get. At that point, you might as well do the whole research yourself from scratch.

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