Levitt
tlambert | June 3, 2006William Ford has the latest news on Lott's lawsuit against Levitt: Levitt and HarperCollins have filed motions to dismiss the case. Some new snippets of information(from the Joint Initial Status Report):
Lott wrote Levitt on January 11, 2006 requesting that he correct his claims that Lott
invented some survey data and that other scholars have been unable to replicate Lott's results. Lott, through his counsel, wrote Defendants on March 17, 2006 and demanded that (i) all future printings of Freakonomics correct the alleged defamatory statement; and (ii) the correction be in the form of a…
tlambert | May 31, 2006The LA Times publishes Jon Wiener on Lott's lawsuit:
But Lott is not suing those who have said some of his pro-gun research was "invented," "faked" or "cooked." The lawsuit turns on the definition of "replicate," from the "Freakonomics" sentence about how other scholars have tried and failed to "replicate his results." Lott maintains "replicate" means "analyze the identical data in the way Lott did." Because nobody tried to do that, he argues, "Freakonomics" is wrong. Most people, however, understand "replicate" to mean something like "confirm."
Lott's reputation has indeed been "seriously…
tlambert | April 20, 2006David Glenn's article get discussed by Henry Farrell (lots of comments there), Ted Frank and King.
Lott finally mentions the lawsuit on his blog. No comments there, so far.
tlambert | April 20, 2006David Glenn has a stellar article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Lott's lawsuit. (Free access only for five days.) Glenn writes:
The passage concludes with these 60 words:
Then there is the troubling allegation that Lott actually invented some of the survey data that support his more-guns/less-crime theory. Regardless of whether the data were faked, Lott's admittedly intriguing hypothesis doesn't seem to be true. When other scholars have tried to replicate his results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring down crime.
It is easy to see why Mr. Lott might find…
tlambert | April 20, 2006More interesting analysis of Lott's lawsuit from Ted Frank. First, after looking at the examples of the use of "replicate" he concludes:
I appear to have been too generous to Lott's complaint when I first criticized it.
Then Ben Zycher, who once mounted a defence of Lott consisting of nothing more than unsupported assertions and insults directed at Lott's critics, popped up in comments to support Lott with an unsupported assertion:
In the context of refereed economics journals, "replicate" has one meaning only: The use of an author's data and model to ensure that falsification of findings…
tlambert | April 18, 2006
William Ford has two interesting posts analysing the key premise of Lott's lawsuit: that "replicate" can only mean to analyse exactly the same data in exactly the same way.
He looks at the scientific literature on the meaning of replicate and finds that it is used in several different ways. He quotes Paul Sniderman on the different meanings:
Replication in sense 1 involves the use of the same data set, procedures of measurement, and methods of estimation to verify the accuracy of reported results. Replication in sense 2 involves the use of the same data, but not the same methods of…
tlambert | April 15, 2006
Here's an interesting timeline:
31 March: Lott's abrupt departure from the American enterprise institute.
10 April: Lott files his lawsuit alleging that Levitt has defamed him.
12 April: First Anniversary of Freakonomics publication.
I think all three events are connected.
There is a one year statute of limitations on libel, so April 11 was the last day he could sue Levitt. There are many reasons why AEI might want to let Lott go, but none of them are new. So it may well be that Lott's determination to sue Levitt was the last straw and caused his dismissal.
The AEI's refusal to…
tlambert | April 12, 2006
Ted Frank has your must read blog post on Lott's lawsuit against Levitt. He has a copy of the complaint and an explanation from Lott:
When a book sells well over a million copies this goes beyond a mere debate among academics. To say that other scholars have been unable to replicate one's work is the same thing as fraud. I and other academics have written Levitt asking him to fix his claim. He has been unwilling to do so. I have people approaching me frequently asking if it is true that other scholars can not even replicate my research. Apparently the numerous academic articles in places…
tlambert | April 11, 2006The Chicago Tribune reports:
A scholar known for his work on guns and crime filed a defamation lawsuit Monday against University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, co-author of the best-seller "Freakonomics."
John Lott Jr. of Virginia, a former U. of C. visiting professor, alleges that Levitt defamed him in the book by claiming that other scholars had tried and failed to confirm Lott's conclusion that allowing people to carry concealed weapons reduces crime. Publishers Weekly ranked "Freakonomics" eighth this week for non-fiction hardcover books.
According to Levitt's book: "When other…
tlambert | December 10, 2005Steve Levitt has a post with a detailed response to Foote and Goetz's paper. They construct a new, better, measure of abortions under which more abortions are associated with less crime. They conclude:
The results we show in this new table are consistent with the impact of abortion on crime that we find in our three other types of analyses we presented in the original paper using different sources of variation. These results are consistent with the unwantedness hypothesis.
In comments to Levitt's post Steve Sailer raises objections that do not impress me in the slightest but Daniel Davies…
tlambert | December 2, 2005Back in 2003, Ayres and Donohue found some coding errors in Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime" data. They found that if you corrected his errors, Lott's results went away. Lott's reaction to this? Well, for four months he refused to admit to the existence of the errors. When he finally admitted to the errors, he changed his model to bring back his results, making a clumsy effort to try to hide the changes he made.
Fast forward to 2005. Now Foote and Goetz have found a coding error in a paper by Donohue and Levitt. The Economist reports:
But Messrs Foote and Goetz have inspected the authors'…
tlambert | May 20, 2005 Steve Levitt has replied to Lott's review of Freakonomics: Now let's talk about John Lott for a minute. Along with John Whitley, he wrote a paper on abortion and crime. It is so loaded with inaccurate claims, errors and statistical mistakes that I hate to even provide a link to it, but for the sake of completeness you can find it here. Virtually nothing in this paper is correct, and it is no coincidence that four years later it remains unpublished. In a letter to the editor at Wall Street Journal, Lott claims that our results are driven by the particular measure of abortions that we used in…
tlambert | September 15, 2004 Glenn Reynolds writes Here's some helpful advice for CBS: "A source lies to you, and you find it out, you burn him. Period."
Damn straight. So, Professor Reynolds, who was the anonymous source who lied to you, falsely claiming that Steve Levitt was "rabidly antigun"?
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 | August 3, 2003 Brad Delong points us to a New York Times profile on "rabidly anti-gun" Steven Levitt. The whole thing is worth reading, but this part is especially interesting to me:
The year after he was hired, his wife gave birth to their first child, Andrew. One day, just after Andrew turned a year old, he came down with a slight fever. The doctor diagnosed an ear infection. When he started vomiting the next morning, his parents took him to the hospital. A few days later he was dead of pneumococcal meningitis.
... And not surprisingly for a scholar who pursues real-life subjects, the…
tlambert | May 6, 2003William Sjostrom gamely defends Lott against the charge that he anonymously accused Levitt of being "rabidly antigun".
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, 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…
tlambert | April 23, 2003Some responses to Glenn Reynolds' post yesterday: Tbogg considers Reynolds to be washing his hands and changing the subject. Tom Spencer observes that it is dishonest of Reynolds to respond to criticism without providing a link to that criticism. Roger Ailes reckons that Reynolds is being unfair to Lott by calling him "disingenuous" for not mentioning Levitt's denial of the "rabidly antigun" charge. After all, Reynolds did not bother correcting the article and it unreasonable to expect Lott to have read the correction on Reynolds' weblog. However, it is reasonable to…