Time running out for Lott

No new developments in the Lott case today. This is bad news for Lott. The Chicago Tribune story was published a week ago. If Lott had a dozen students doing interviews for a month in 1997, you would expect them to have told their friends about what they were doing. If each interviewer told three different friends about it, we have a pool of about 50 people who could tell us about the survey or put us in contact with someone who could. I would guess that roughly one third of these, about 16 people, would still be in the Chicago region. The Chicago Tribune claims to reach 46% of college graduates in the Chicago region, so you would expect 46% of 16 or about seven of these people to have seen the article. None of them have come forward. The numbers here are only approximate so this is not dispositive, but this points to Lott not having done a survey.

Tags

More like this

Ron Grossman has a story about Lott and his survey in the Chicago Tribune. I have three comments on the story: This is the first newspaper article that mentions that Lott is looking for the students who conducted his survey and it's in a Chicago newspaper. You would expect that some…
Jim Lindgren has two posts about John Lott. First, on Lott's lawsuit against Levitt he concludes: I think that Freakonomics is misleading in its juxtaposition of different studies, a juxtaposition that might bring one to conclude that the reason that the main More Guns, Less Crime research was not…
In Lott's latest response, he changes his story again. He originally told Lindgren that hadn't discussed the survey with anyone at the time. Now he has recalled the name of an economist he discussed it with at the time. Unfortunately, when Julian Sanchez contacted this…
[Note: This is a copy of a document found at this link on John Lott's website on May 13, 2003. I have added critical commentry, written in italics like this. Tim Lambert ] With some recent attacks on me in a variety of places from the Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune to numerous other…