tlambert | May 6, 2003William Sjostrom gamely defends Lott against the charge that he anonymously accused Levitt of being "rabidly antigun".
tlambert | May 5, 2003Archpundit has some thoughtful comments on Mark Kleiman's post. Ryan Barrow has a short comment. Glenn Reynolds would like someone else to check to see if the Ayres and Donohue are correct about the coding errors. I think the way that Lott persistently ducks the question gives a strong indication where the truth lies.
Tom Spencer comments on Maltz's rebuke of Lott.
tlambert | May 4, 2003Brian Linse comments on Mark Kleiman's post and suggests that people should write to the University of Chicago Press and ask them to investigate Lott. Tom Spencer also comments on Kleiman's post, as do Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias.
Lott has just published an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune entitled "Gun control advocates' credibility on line". This op-ed is largely recycled from one published a couple of weeks ago in the Columbus Dispatch. He cites research by Olson and Maltz that he alleges shows that concealed carry reduced gun carrying by criminals: Other…
tlambert | May 3, 2003In his email to Mark Kleiman, Lott accused Ayres and Donohue of lying:However, the Stanford Law Review allowed Ayres and Donohue to add an addition to their piece commenting on all this. They said that:"It is important to note that what we now refer to as the PW response has already been widely circulated as a draft, whose first author is John Lott. Moreover, Lott has repeatedly told the press and/or publish to the Internet that Ayres and Donohue have simply misread their own results. But after seeing this Reply to the original Lott, Plassmann, and Whitley paper, Lott asked the Stanford…
tlambert | May 2, 2003Mark Kleiman has written a must read post covering the recent developments and concluding:
defenders of gun rights should stop citing Lott as an authority
the University of Chicago Press should conduct a formal enquiry into the existence of the 1997 survey
the AEI should conduct an enquiry into Lott's professional ethics Mark both spoke to Lott and posted a long email. Yet again, Lott does not admit to making any coding errors. In fact he comes close to denying making such errors when he writes: Ayres and Donohue's attacks on the quality of our data are not only…
tlambert | May 1, 2003Still nothing from Lott on whether he concedes or denies the charge of coding errors.
In the mean time, let's examine his other claim: "Ayres and Donohue have simply misread their own results." This is a remarkable claim. Lott is saying that crime went down but somehow Ayres and Donohue read a decrease as an increase. If you look through the Lott/Plassman/Whitley (I'll just abbreviate this to Lott) paper to find the basis for this, you find they are referring to Ayres and Donohue's figures 3a to 3e. Figure 3b shows murder, with virtually no change…
tlambert | April 30, 2003One more quote from yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education article: Mr. Lott also points out that because the claim of coding errors appears in a law review, it has not been subject to review by third-party scholars, as would have been the case in a peer-reviewed economics journal.
It has been weeks since Lott saw the claim of coding errors. It would have taken him a few minutes to check for the existence of the errors and not much longer to see if correcting the errors reverses his results as Ayres and Donohue claim. He must know full…
tlambert | April 29, 2003David Glenn has an article (subscription required) in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the Ayres/Donohue/Lott dispute. Here are the responses from Lott and Whitley to the allegation of coding errors: Mr. Lott replies that the alleged coding errors are irrelevant to the larger debate. "Whether one believes the regressions in the Plassmann and Whitley piece or not, just looking at Ayres and Donohue's own results -- you can't look at the graphs that Plassmann and Whitley have of Ayres and Donohue's results and not see a significant drop in violent crime."
"The basic results are not…
tlambert | April 28, 2003John Quiggin comments on the collateral damage the Lott affair has inflicted on Lott's allies and supporters. Chris Lawrence has an update to his earlier post. Tapped has a brief summary of the latest installment in the saga.
Julian Sanchez and Kevin Drum mention Lott's response, posted by Glenn Reynolds. Lott says that reason that he removed his name from the paper was because of an editorial dispute with the Stanford Law Review: When I agreed to do the paper for the Stanford Law Review that responded to Ayres and Donohue's attack on my work, I got a promise…
tlambert | April 27, 2003 skippy comments on Lott's "coding errors". Tom Spencer thinks that Lott's days are numbered. Mike Spenis has written off Lott.
Chris Lawrence agrees that there were coding errors but argues that is easy to make such errors. I agree that such errors are easy to make, but, he did it twice, and the errors seem to systematically favour his position. Another thing that strikes me when I read Ayres and Donohue's paper is that they report many regression results, some of which are favourable to the "more guns, less crime" thesis, but more of them are not. The…
tlambert | April 26, 2003 Several people have commented on the latest developments. Atrios has resolved that Lott is a liar and a fraud. Kevin Drum has his usual nice summary. Jesse Taylor isn't really interested because he believes that Lott has already been discredited. Julian Sanchez and Chris Lawrence are reluctant to draw conclusions yet.
I think we have, however, enough information to draw some conclusions. There really were coding errors in the data Lott used for his NAS panel presentation. Mustard seems to have conceded this when he withdrew a graph based on that data. And…
tlambert | April 26, 2003Kevin Drum provides a nice summary of Friday's long posting about weighting.
Cosma Shalizi tells us that his wife's boss is on the NAS Panel on firearms. Right now I'm thinking of a line of clothing emblazoned with: "I got smeared by Glenn Reynolds and all I got was this lousy t shirt". Someone who got more than that is Steve Levitt, who has just been awarded the John Bates Clark medal.
tlambert | April 25, 2003This is a long post, so I'll start with two summaries. One sentence summary: It looks as if Lott might have been caught cooking his "more guns, less crime" data.
One paragraph summary: Ian Ayres and John Donohue wrote a paper that found that, if anything, concealed carry laws lead to more crime. Lott, (along with Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley) wrote a reply where they argued that using data up to 2000 confirmed the "more guns, less crime" hypothesis. In Ayres and Donohue's response to that paper, they found that Lott's data contained numerous coding errors that…
tlambert | April 25, 2003A few days ago I observed that Lott had changed his story from his original, unworkable, claim that he had used 1836 categories (sex, race, age and state) to weight his data to the claim that he had used just six (sex and race). If this is indeed the scheme he used then two things follow:
He has incorrectly calculated the brandishing number for his 2002 survey.
It is impossible for him to have obtained a 98% brandishing number for his 1997 survey. Here are the details:
In his new book, Lott tells us the brandishing number he gets after weighting:"the survey I…
tlambert | April 25, 2003Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief of Science has an editorial (subscription required) in the April 18 edition entitled "Research Fraud and Public Policy". Here is some of it: Michael Bellesiles, of Emory University, supported the gun control case with a book called Arming America. Part of his argument was that guns were rare at much earlier times in U.S. history. Challenged on that claim, he failed to produce the data, claiming that an office flood had destroyed his records. Emory empaneled a committee of scholars to investigate, and its report questioned Bellesiles "scholarly…
tlambert | April 25, 2003I was mistaken when I suggested that the email Dooher sent Reynolds was a hoax. I emailed Dooher asking him if he had written the letter and when I didn't get a reply, because of the weird stuff about goatees and because he got every single fact wrong (including the claim about the study director having a goatee) I decided that it was a hoax. Dooher eventually replied, apologizing for his mistakes and asking Reynolds to remove his email. Reynold's spin? OK, so they had Lott speak, but maybe they were planning a biased study and Dooher talked them out of…
tlambert | April 24, 2003David Kaun, who is Professor of Economics at University of California Santa Cruz has an article over at BuzzFlash discussing Lott's More Guns, Less Crime.
tlambert | April 24, 2003It would seem that some wag has had some fun at poor Professor Reynolds' expense. Reynolds has an update with an email supposedly from one Brendan Dooher that reads: I worked with the study director at the National Academy of Sciences (he is actually in the National Academy of Engineering) when I was a Fellow there last year. I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the study is heavily biased. I made myself persona non grata there over my year because of my conservative (but always scientifically based) views. The committee's first meeting had…