survey
tlambert | February 27, 2003I came across this quote from Lott in a May 28, 1999 article by Jeff Jacoby:
"There are 15 national surveys that have been conducted by academics as well as polling organizations like the Los Angeles Times and Gallup, and their average estimate indicates that people use guns defensively well over two million times each year. My own survey put the defensive uses at about 2.1 million in 1997."
I thought that this could potentially help Lott. If the source for the quote was something that Lott wrote before Duncan raised questions about the 98% statistic in…
tlambert | February 25, 2003The ad that Lott said was placed in the December University of Chicago Magazine has appeared in the February 2003 issue: (The delay was apparently caused by a mix up.)
Attempting to reach two people who worked on and helped coordinate others on a survey given by John Lott while they were undergraduates at the University during the beginning of 1997. Some questions about verifying the survey need to be answered. Please call 202.862.XXXX.
(I've replaced part of the number with Xs---if you are one of the two students that Lott seeks, email me and I will send you the number.)
tlambert | February 23, 2003Kevin Drum observes that even an 11-year-old kid seems to understand the problem of having too small a sample size in a poll. The Sunday paper here printed a supplement giving property auction clearance rates by suburb. Except, of course, for those suburbs where there had been less than 20 auctions, where it printed "nsr" (not statistically reliable). An 11-year-old gets it, the Sunday paper gets it, why doesn't Lott?
tlambert | February 22, 2003John Quiggin concludes that "with a high degree of confidence that no survey was ever undertaken", but suggests that declining ethical standards at the American Enterprise Institute mean that Lott will keep his job for now.
tlambert | February 21, 2003No 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…
tlambert | February 19, 2003Over at the History News Network, Clayton Cramer has a post where he comments on the parallels or lack of same between the Lott and Bellesiles affairs:
1. There were legitimate questions raised about the 1997 survey, most notably by Tim Lambert. Proving that the survey didn't take place is impossible, unlike Bellesiles' problems, which often involved documents that were easy to find.
It's also easy to find out what "national surveys" and Gary Kleck's study say. Lott's claims here are wrong and he won't even admit to making them.
2. Lott has managed to scrape together…
tlambert | February 16, 2003Ron 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 of the students who conducted the survey would still be in Chicago and hence likely to see the article. Also, with two million readers, you would expect about twenty of them to have participated in the survey. If nobody comes forward after this article, then that is…
tlambert | February 14, 2003Another letter has been sent to the Washington Post, and by an amazing coincidence makes the same error about the Post article as the previous ones:
A column appearing in the Post yesterday (Feb. 11, "Fabricated Fan and Many Doubts") implies that economist John Lott made up the claim that a computer malfunction destroyed data from his research on gun control. At the time Lott was engaged in this research, we were colleagues at the University of Chicago Law School. I clearly recall John relating the computer data-loss incident to me then---many years before the current controversy…
tlambert | February 13, 2003In response to this story in the Washington Post, Lott has apparently orchestrated a letter writing campaign. Eugene Volokh has posted the four letters. Julian Sanchez points out that all four letters make the same incorrect claim: that the Washington Post is questioning whether Lott had a disk crash. In fact, the article is questioning whether Lott lost his survey in the crash.
In his letter, John Whitley also makes a couple more errors:
I am not an expert on the Dr. Bellesiles case, but my understanding is that there was little or no contemporaneous corroborating…
tlambert | February 10, 2003Otis Dudley Duncan makes an important point: whether or not Lott actually did some sort of survey, Lott is guilty of scientific misconduct. Duncan has uncovered the case of a Dr Duan, who was suspended for two years for publishing a study for which the supporting data had been lost.
tlambert | February 8, 2003 kuro5hin has a story on Lott/Rosh. There is even an on-line poll. At the time of writing the results were:
John Lott is..
.. a fraud.
50%
.. a good researcher who made some mistakes.
5%
.. victim of a vast left-wing conspiracy.
13%
.. transgendered.
30%
Of course, the results from an on-line poll like this have no more scientific validity than Lott's 98% statistic.
Blogroots also mentions the unmasking of Rosh. The High Road (a pro-gun message board) has a discussion on Lott. I think this comment is interesting:
My problem with Lott now is his "the dog ate my…
tlambert | February 7, 2003John Quiggin has a thoughtful post on the parallels between the Bellesiles and Lott affairs. Meanwhile, Charles Murtaugh, responding to this Tapped piece reckons that there is an important difference: there are pro-gun people like Michelle Malkin criticizing Lott, but there weren't pro-control people criticizing Bellesiles. He's wrong. Consider, for example, this Wall Street Journal article by Kimberley Strassel on Bellesiles:
It's worth pointing out that not all of these professors have an obvious political agenda. Jim Lindgren, Gerald Rosenberg, Erik Monkkonen and Randolph…
tlambert | February 5, 2003Michelle Malkin writes an excellent article on the Lott affair. And if you think that she is one of those mysterious people out seeking revenge for Bellesiles, you should look at this 1998 article where she praises Lott.
Atrios explains why he cares about Lott. He quotes Sullywatch:
We forget now how much there was an all-out effort (kind of like a certain recent special prosecution) to throw anything they could find at Bellesiles until it stuck, and finally one thing relatively marginal to the whole thesis of the book did.
I can't agree with this statement. If…
tlambert | February 4, 2003Atrios points us to Tim Noah's article at Slate. After the Washington Times whitewash, and the US News and Washington Post completely ignoring Lott's survey, we at last have a mainstream media article that gets to the heart of the matter.
One interesting feature that bears repeating because it is hard for it to sink in because it seems so unlikely: Lott will not admit that he attributed the 98% figure to "national surveys". Look at what he tells Slate:
"A lot of those discussions could have been written more clearly."
Lott is saying that this sentence does not…
tlambert | January 29, 2003 ArchPundit continues to ponder on Lott's amateurish surveys. One further point you might like to consider: If the surveyors in Lott's 2002 survey were aware that it was vital for Lott to reproduce his low firing rate result, then that introduces a strong source of interviewer bias. People often answer questions with the answer that they think will most please the interviewer. If Lott's interviewer's gave the impression, either consciously or unconsciously that they did not want to hear the person that they had fired the gun, then the results will…
tlambert | January 28, 2003Mark Kleiman has a excellent summary of the recent developments. Mark ends with a plea to gun-rights folks ---they should consider cutting Lott loose. (I would add, either that, or defend him---right now, Lott's side is losing the argument by default.)
Archpundit has reply from Lott to his earlier critique of Lott's methodology. ArchPundit makes some excellent points when he compares Lott's survey to Kleck's. Just one small point: I analysed Kleck's data and found that the percent firing in the 1 year recall frame was almost identical to that in the 5 year frame.…
tlambert | January 27, 2003Lott has made some more responses to some of the questions asked and comments made. First, he has responded to my remaining questions I asked a while ago. Let's see how he went:
Why did Lott repeatedly make false claims that the 98% figure came from other studies and from Kleck?
Lott says:
As to attributing things, in op-eds or talks I simply don't go through and explain where every statistic that I mention comes from.
This isn't an answer at all. I didn't ask why he didn't give a source, I asked why he gave an incorrect source many times.
Even Lott cannot possibly be…
tlambert | January 26, 2003James Lindgren makes some interesting points in the comment section to this Jane Galt post. First, he comments on this Lott claim about his tax returns:
As to deducting these costs on my income taxes, my 1997 tax form, which I have shared with many others, shows that $8,750 was deducted for research assistants (the heading was under "legal and professional services"). We do not keep the supporting documents past the three years required by the IRS and the $8,750 does include the expenses for other projects. On the other hand, I am sure that I did not keep track of all of my…
tlambert | January 25, 2003Julian Sanchez is on the case again. This time he has a bit more detail from Mustard. The key point is that Mustard is "fairly confident" that Lott told him in 1997 that he had done a survey. This suggests that Lott didn't invent the survey in 1999 to explain his 98% figure. Well, this makes me lean more towards Lott having done a survey, but it's still not conclusive. Mustard isn't sure about being told in 1997. All this back and forth is making me dizzy. I'm not going to express another opinion on whether he did a survey until I see Lindgren's new report…