tlambert | January 15, 2004I've been nominated for another blog award. This one is for Best NSW Blog. I don't you should take such awards too seriously, but they do provide a way to find interesting blogs to read, so check them out.
tlambert | January 15, 2004Lott has a post (scroll to 1/10/04 entry on his blog) on the meaningless poll that discussed earlier. Lott's headline is: A BBC Poll Shows that Most British Want a Law authorizing homeowners to use any means to defend their home from intruders
Of course, as I explained earlier phone-in polls are not at all representative of the population. Nor in any case was there majority support for the shoot a burglar law, which received 37% of the votes.
Lott links to a post by Eric Rasmussen, who also seems to think that the poll is representative of public opinion in Britain.…
tlambert | January 15, 2004Michael Peckham has an interesting post looking at Bellesiles and Lott and how they relate to other research frauds. He thinks that they might serve as examples that deter others from research fraud.
tlambert | January 9, 2004
R2 values using county-level 1977-2000 (Corresponds to Lott's corrected Table 3a)
Violent Crime
Murder
Rape
Aggrvtd Assault
Rbbry
Prprty Crimes
Auto Theft
Brglry
Lrcny
R2 without any shall-issue variable
0.86
0.81
0.76
0.80
0.91
0.81
0.84
0.81
0.80
R2 (Single dummy variable model)
0.86
0.81
0.76
0.80
0.91
0.82
0.85
0.81
0.80
R2 (Spline model)
0.86
0.81
0.76
0.81
0.91
0.82
0.85
0.81
0.80
R2 (Hybrid model)
0.86
0.81
0.76
0.81
0.91
0.82
0.85
0.81
0.80
Values that have increased when the shall-issue variable is added are in bold.
My thanks to David Powell for computing these values.
tlambert | January 9, 2004 In a post on his blog Keith Burgess-Jackson wrote: First, studies by law professor John Lott and others show that private gun-ownership reduces crime rates. This may be counterintuitive, but it's true. There would be more crime than there is if guns were banned.
In an attempt to set him straight, I emailed him and pointed out that Lott's studies had been refuted by better and more extensive work by Ayres and Donohue and gave him a link to my comments on Lott. Instead of responding to any of the points I made, he replied: You sound like a gun-hater.
I wrote back: "…
tlambert | January 9, 2004 Brad DeLong quotes the Economist on "rabidly anti-gun" Steve Levitt: If you browse through the working papers circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research (at www.nber.org) you will find that in 2003 alone Mr Levitt wrote or co-wrote seven. His topics included the effect of school choice on educational results; the causes and consequences of distinctively black names; the effect of legalised abortion on crime; how to test theories of discrimination using evidence from the television programme, "The Weakest Link"; the gap in test results between blacks…
tlambert | January 6, 2004 I'm one of the nominations for best single issue blog over at Wampum's Koufax weblog awards. Google tells me that Koufax is left-arm pitcher, so translating it to cricket that's the equivalent of a Wasim Akram award. (Sorry, I was at the SCG yesterday to farewell Steve Waugh and have cricket on the brain at the moment.) Anyway, it is an honour to be on the same list as so many excellent blogs.
Update: I also got nominated for best series. With 346 posts on Lott in 2003, I'd have a lock on most obsessive if that was a category.
tlambert | January 5, 2004 Site Meter says that I have now had 100,000 visits to this blog in just under a year. My thanks to everyone who has dropped by. It's gratifying to see such interest in my writings.
tlambert | January 3, 2004 Last month I detailed how Lott posted at least six and probably ten five-star reviews of his books to Amazon.com. Well, it may be that Lott isn't the only conservative author who does this. Someone posting as "A reader from New York, NY" (which is where Coulter lives), has posted many five-star reviews of Ann Coulter's books at Amazon.com. Each of these reviews is actually a detailed response to points raised in negative reviews. The writing style is similar to Coulter's and the reviewer seems to have an uncanny insight into Coulter's thought processes…
tlambert | January 2, 2004 Glenn Reynolds links approvingly to a post by Thomas Lifson on the results of a BBC phone-in and email poll that allowed people to propose a new law that they would like to see passed. The winning proposal was a law that would allow home-owners to use any means to defend their home from intruders. Stephen Pound, the MP who agreed to put forward the proposal, said that it was "unworkable". Lifson's comment on all this was:
MP Pound's disdain for popular opinion is typical of not only British, but Western European elites, who consider themselves, and the…
tlambert | December 31, 2003Will Baude has asked Julian Sanchez 20 questions, including a couple about Lott. When asked if Lott is a liar or not, he wrote: That depends on whether you count as a liar someone who's convinced himself that he's telling the truth: I think he may have. I guess there's no rock solid proof that he's lied, just some highly suspicious circumstantial evidence... let's just say that at this point, if I read him claiming that there are 60 seconds in a minute, I'd want to double-check it.
tlambert | December 30, 2003 The New York Post has an article that claims that Baghdad has a lower murder rate than New York. The source, of course, is John Lott. Lott advances the numbers released by the 1st Infantry Division and deliberately conceals the contradictory data from the Baghdad morgue that shows that Lott's numbers are far far too low.
tlambert | December 30, 2003 Earlier I commented on Lott's op-ed where claimed that Albuquerque and O'Hanlon got the Baghdad murder rate wrong. In an update on his blog, Lott writes:Update: Michael O'Hanlon, a co-author of one of the articles that I commented on in my Investors' Business Daily piece, was helpful in getting to the bottom of these claims. First, he responded quickly and was not defensive when I asked him for his sources on the Baghdad murder rate. Second, in an e-mail he told me that he had himself tried to contact the Defense Department to obtain their estimates…
tlambert | December 28, 2003 On his blog, John Ray makes a remarkable claim: "Greenies" are wrong about ozone depletion. He writes:
In 1991, the Greenies got everyone to ban CFC chemicals. CFCs were the normal gases that has always been used to make refrigerators and air conditioners work. CFCs even used to put the puff in all our aerosol cans. The ban was because CFCs supposedly destroyed earth's ozone layer and caused the ozone "hole" over Antarctica. So the hole has of course shrunk by now, right? Wrong! As this U.N. report shows, the hole is as big as ever! Another…
tlambert | December 22, 2003 The last time I looked at the reviews of More Guns, Less Crime at Amazon.com I noted how, after a negative review was posted, Lott would post a five-star review to push the negative review off the front page. On December 11, someone posted a negative review of More Guns, Less Crime, pointing out that several of the reviews were written by Lott. The very next day two five-star reviews were posted, pushing the negative review down the page.
Powerful evidence for reducing crime, December 12, 2003 Reviewer: Greg Kopp (see more about me) from Garfield…
tlambert | December 22, 2003Say Uncle writes:
Lott's credibility issues have essentially damaged any real positive impact his research may have had on the gun debate. It's a pity Lott and I are on the same side.
He's not as bad as Bellesiles (who Tim is hard on as well) but when comparing fraud with sloppiness, no one really wins. Tim is right, Lott is on Lott's side.
In comments, Kevin Baker (of Smallest Minority) agrees with Say Uncle.
tlambert | December 19, 2003 A new edition of Arming America has just been drafted and Michael Bellesiles has written a response to his critics, excerpted at HNN. I read it, and do not find it even slightly persuasive. It sort of reminds me of some of Lott's defences. Anyway, HNN has comments from James Lindgren, Jerome Sternstein, Clayton Cramer that go into some of the specifics.
tlambert | December 17, 2003 Last time I commented on Lott's claims about the Baghdad murder rate, I noted his pathological refusal to admit that he was wrong about the rate. Even though dozens of newspapers have reported that there are hundreds of murders each month in Baghdad (see the table with some of the stories at the end of this post), Lott insisted that the one single report he found that claimed that there were only 24 murders in October must be right and all the others must be wrong. He has now drafted on op-ed repeating his claim and complaining that the New York…
tlambert | December 16, 2003Ken Miles links to my posts on Lott's anonymous reviews and writes: Tim Lambert has destroyed any possible remnants of John Lott's credibility.
tlambert | December 15, 2003 Howard Nemerov has a post defending Lott and responding to Chris Mooney's Mother Jones article. Unfortunately, he gets his facts wrong, leaves out inconvenient facts and indulges in fallacious arguments. I'll go through his post and correct these, but first some general comments.
Even though his article is a response to Chris Mooney's article Nemerov does not link to Mooney's piece. If he did, his reader's might have been able to discover how badly Nemerov misrepresents the article.
Nemerov tries to pretend that the dispute is just about politics. He doesn't mention any critic…