| John Lott | |
|---|---|
John Lott |
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| Born | May 8, 1958 |
| Alma mater | UCLA |
| Occupation | Author, political commentator |
John Richard Lott Jr. (born May 8, 1958) is an American academic and political commentator. He has previously held research positions at academic institutions including the University of Chicago, Yale University, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Maryland, College Park, and at the non-academic conservative American Enterprise Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA, and his areas of research include econometrics, law and economics, public choice theory, industrial organization, public finance, microeconomics, labor economics, and environmental regulation.
Lott is an author in both academia and in popular culture. A political conservative,[1][2][3][4] he is a frequent writer of opinion editorials, has published over 90 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals related to his research areas, and has authored five books, including More Guns, Less Crime, The Bias Against Guns, and Freedomnomics.
Outside of academia, Lott is best known for his participation in the gun rights debate, particularly his arguments against restrictions on owning and carrying guns.
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Lott studied economics at UCLA, receiving his B.A. in 1980, M.A. in 1982, and Ph.D. in 1984. Lott has held positions in law and economics at several institutions, including the Yale Law School, Stanford, UCLA, the Wharton Business School, Texas A&M University, and Rice University. Lott was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission (1988–1989). He spent five years as a visiting professor (1994–95) and as a fellow (1995–99) at the University of Chicago. Lott was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (2001–2006). He left AEI for SUNY Binghamton.[5] From July 2007 to 2010, Lott was a senior research scientist with the University of Maryland Foundation at the University of Maryland, College Park.[6][7]
Lott has published over ninety articles in academic journals, as well as five books for the general public. Opinion pieces by Lott have appeared in such places as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune. Since March 2008 he has been a weekly columnist for Fox News.[8] He has also appeared frequently on television and radio shows.
In terms of total academic journal output from 1990 to 2000 adjusted for journal quality, John Lott ranks 26th worldwide among economists, and in terms of total academic journal output in journal pages published he was 4th. In terms of citations in the same period, he ranks 86th.[9][10]
Among economics, law, and business researchers, Lott's research is the sixth most downloaded on the Social Science Research Network.[11] Nobel laureate Milton Friedman said that "John Lott has few equals as a perceptive analyst of controversial public policy issues."[12] Newsweek also referred to Lott as "The Gun Crowd's Guru."[13]
Lott has produced research, authored opinions, and stirred up controversy in many areas with his economic analysis of certain issues.
In an article written with David B. Mustard[14] and Lott's subsequent books More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns, Lott presents a statistical argument for the claim that allowing adults to carry concealed weapons significantly reduces crime in America. He supports this position by an exhaustive tabulation of various social and economic data from census and other population surveys of individual United States counties in different years, which he fits into a large multifactorial mathematical model of crime rate. His published results generally show a reduction in violent crime associated with the adoption by states of laws allowing the general adult population to freely carry concealed weapons.
The work was immediately controversial, drawing large amounts of support and opposition. Numerous academics praised Lott's methodology, including Florida State University economist Bruce Benson,[15] Cardozo School of Law professor John O. McGinnis,[16] and University of Mississippi professor William F. Shughart.[17] The book also received favorable reviews from academics Gary Kleck, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell.[18]
Other reviews claimed that there were problems with Lott's model. In the New England Journal of Medicine, David Hemenway argued that Lott failed to account for several key variables, including drug consumption, and that therefore the model was flawed;[19] however, Lott's book did account for other variables such as cocaine prices.[20] Others agreed, and some researchers, including Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue, claimed that the model contained significant coding errors and systemic bias.[21] Gary Kleck considered it unlikely that such a large decrease in violent crime could be explained by a relatively modest increase in concealed carry,[22] and others claimed that removing portions of the data set caused the results to still show statistically significant drops only in aggravated assaults and robbery when all counties with fewer than 100,000 people and Florida's counties were both simultaneously dropped from the sample.[23]
In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences conducted a review of current research and data on firearms and violent crime, including Lott's work, and found "no credible evidence that the passage of right-to-carry laws decreases or increases violent crime."[24] James Q. Wilson dissented from that opinion, and while accepting the committee's findings on violent crime in general,[25] he noted that the committee's own findings in several tests showed "that shall-issue laws drive down the murder rate".[26]
Referring to the research done on the topic, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that while most researchers support Lott's findings that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime, some researchers doubt that concealed carry laws have any impact on violent crime, saying however that "Mr. Lott's research has convinced his peers of at least one point: No scholars now claim that legalizing concealed weapons causes a major increase in crime."[27] As Lott critics Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III pointed out: "We conclude that Lott and Mustard have made an important scholarly contribution in establishing that these laws have not led to the massive bloodbath of death and injury that some of their opponents feared. On the other hand, we find that the statistical evidence that these laws have reduced crime is limited, sporadic, and extraordinarily fragile."[28]
Using data from 1870 to 1940, Lott and Larry Kenny studied how state government expenditures and revenue changed in 48 state governments after women obtained the right to vote. Women were able to vote in 29 states prior to women's suffrage and the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Lott found that the impact of granting of women's suffrage on per-capita state government expenditures and revenue was startling.[29]
His research indicates that women's suffrage had a bigger impact on government spending and taxes in states with a greater percentage of women. Even after accounting for variables such as industrialization, urbanization, education and income, per capita real state government spending, which had been flat or falling during the 10 years before women began voting, doubled during the next 11 years. The increase in government spending and revenue started immediately after women started voting in national elections and 19 additional state elections.[30]
Lott argues in both More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns that media coverage of defensive gun use is rare, noting that in general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news stories. In More Guns, Less Crime, Lott writes that "[s]ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police".
Attempting to quantify this phenomenon, in the first edition of the book, published in May 1998, Lott wrote that "national surveys" suggested that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack." In that same paragraph he also wrote that "[s]ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police." The higher the rate of defensive gun uses that do not end in the attacker being killed or wounded, the easier it is to explain why defensive gun uses are not covered by the media without reference to media bias. Lott argued that there is media bias, but, given that other estimates were available, the number that he was using was actually biased against the claim that he was making. Lott cited the figure frequently in the media, including publications like the Wall Street Journal[31] and the Los Angeles Times.[32]
In 2002, he repeated the study, and reported that brandishing a weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 95% of the time. Other researchers criticized his methodology, saying that his sample size of 1,015 respondents was too small for the study to be accurate and that the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80 percent.[33] Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz's 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.[34] Lott explained the lower rates found by others was at least in part due to the different questions that were asked.[35] The other surveys all asked people to recall events over the previous five years, while Lott had only asked people about events that had occurred during just the previous year. Lott used the higher estimate because it was biased against his claim of media bias. The survey questions have also been made available for years to anyone who would have liked to replicate the survey themselves.
Together with John Karpoff and Eric Wehrly at the University of Washington, Lott has worked to show the importance of government regulations through both legal and regulatory penalties and the weaknesses of reputational penalties in reducing pollution.[36] Firms violating environmental laws suffer statistically significant losses in the market value of firm equity. The losses, however, are of similar magnitudes to the legal penalties imposed; and in the cross section, the market value loss is related to the size of the legal penalty.
With Kevin Hassett at the American Enterprise Institute, Lott has investigated media bias.[37] Their research looking at newspaper headlines after the release of government economic data on GDP, unemployment, number of jobs, durable good sales, and retail sales suggests that American newspapers tend to give more positive coverage to the equivalent economic news when Democrats are in the Presidency. They offered a solution to the problem of how to objectively measure what the actual news story was and then obtain an objective measure of how it was covered by newspapers. Their results showed a smaller though similar effect from Democrats controlling Congress.
Lott finds that when hiring standards are lowered in the process of recruiting more minority officers, the overall quality of all officers is reduced and crime rates are increased. The most adverse effects of these hiring policies have occurred in the most heavily black populated areas. There is no consistent evidence that crime rates rise when standards for hiring women are changed, and this raises questions about whether norming tests or altering their content to create equal pass rates is preferable. The paper examines how the changing composition of police departments affects such measures as the murder of and assaults against police officers.[38]
With John Whitley at the University of Adelaide, Lott has considered crime rates and the possible influence of laws which place abortion decisions with the pregnant person other than boards of physicians. They acknowledge the old 1960s argument that abortion may prevent the birth of "unwanted" children, who would have relatively small investments in human capital and a higher probability of crime. On the other hand, their research suggests that liberalizing abortion rules correlates with an increase in out-of-wedlock births and single parent families. In turn, they argue that this increase in single parent births implies the opposite impact on investments in human capital (i.e., average investment per child decreases under their argument). Using the correlation between children in poverty and in single parent homes with crime they build an argument that liberalization of abortion laws increased murder rates by around about 0.5 to 7 percent.[39]
In June 2008 an opinion piece by Lott about compact fluorescent light bulbs was featured on the FOX News website.[40] The article was written from the point of view that Congress was making a mistake by mandating the use of compact fluorescent bulbs. Lott points to the United States Environmental Protection Agency estimates of the health hazards associated with compact fluorescent lamps and that the costs of cleaning up broken bulbs far outweigh the benefits. His reasons include: that the costs of compact fluorescent bulbs largely balance off their increased life expectancy, but that the EPA claims that compact fluorescent bulbs are dangerous if broken, as they can cause mercury poisoning in those who breathe the air near a broken bulb, and that the bulbs are difficult to dispose of and transport. Lott blames the Democratic congress for the decision, saying:
"When one looks at the problems with these bulbs, it becomes very understandable why people aren’t rushing to own them. Possibly people are a little smarter than the Democrat controlled congress that passed these rules."
Lott has done research supporting the conclusion that most of the large recent increases in campaign spending for state and federal offices can be explained by higher government spending.[41] Lott has also done research supporting the conclusion that higher quality judges, measured by their output once they are on the court (e.g., number of citations to their opinions or number of published opinions), take longer to get confirmed.[42]
Lott has advocated government deregulation of various areas, and has also been published in the popular press taking positions in support of the U.S. Republican Party and President George W. Bush on topics such as the validity of the 2000 Presidential Election results in Florida.[43]
On April 10, 2006, John Lott filed suit[44] for defamation against Steven Levitt and HarperCollins Publishers over the book Freakonomics and against Levitt over a series of emails to John McCall. In the book Freakonomics, Levitt and coauthor Stephen J. Dubner claimed that the results of Lott's research in More Guns, Less Crime had not been replicated by other academics. In the emails to economist John McCall, who had pointed to a number of papers in different academic publications that had replicated Lott's work, Levitt wrote that the work by several authors supporting Lott in a special 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics had not been peer reviewed, Lott had paid the University of Chicago Press to publish the papers, and that papers with results opposite of Lott's had been blocked from publication in that issue.[45]
A federal judge found that Levitt's replication claim in Freakonomics was not defamation but found merit in Lott's complaint over the email claims.[46]
Levitt settled the second defamation claim by admitting in a letter to John McCall that he himself was a peer reviewer in the 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics, that Lott had not engaged in bribery (paying for extra costs of printing and postage for a conference issue is customary), and that he knew that "scholars with varying opinions" (including Levitt himself) had been invited to participate.[47] The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote that Levitt's Correction Letter "offers a doozy of a concession." [48]
The dismissal of the first half of Lott's suit was unanimously upheld by The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on February 11, 2009.[49]
An anti-gun organization set up a website pretending to be run by Lott.[50][51] The website was run and emails sent out under Lott's name to claim that Lott opposed legislation designed to limit suits against gun makers and that Lott had reconsidered his position on how individuals could sell guns, positions that Lott had not taken.[52] "E-mails from visitors questioning whether or not the site was actually run by Lott were responded to with messages signed by 'John Lott,' arguing that the site was, in fact, run by the academic well known for his research into the reductions in violent crime resulting from citizens carrying concealed handguns. But comments on the site and claims made in e-mails purportedly from Lott were inconsistent with his research and beliefs and some emails had Lott suggesting ways for people to evade gun control laws."[51]
In the course of a dispute with Otis Dudley Duncan in 1999-2000,[53] Lott claimed to have undertaken a national survey of 2,424 respondents in 1997, the results of which were the source for claims he had made beginning in 1997.[54] However, in 2000 Lott was unable to produce the data, or any records showing that the survey had been undertaken. He said the 1997 hard drive crash that had affected several projects with co-authors had destroyed his survey data set,[55] the original tally sheets had been abandoned with other personal property in his move from Chicago to Yale, and he could not recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Following extensive publicity, James Hamilton, a retired detective in Tennessee, came forward saying that he had taken the survey. David Gross, a former city prosecutor and former NRA board member came forward to say that he had been interviewed for a gun survey, and he thought that he was interviewed in the spring of 1997, probably by people working for Lott.[56] Critics alleged that the survey had never taken place,[57] but Lott defends the survey's existence and accuracy, quoting on his website colleagues who lost data in the hard drive crash.[58]
Rutgers University sociology professor Ted Goertzel[59] considered use of econometrics to establish causal relationships by Lott (and by Lott's critics Levitt, Ayres and Donohue) to be "fundamentally flawed" junk science.[60] The National Academy of Sciences panel that reported on several gun control issues in 2004 looked at Right-To-Carry laws in Chapter 6 and endorsed neither the Lott & Mustard (1997) level and trend models as definite proof nor the Ayres & Donohue (2003) hybrid model as definite refutation of Lott's thesis: the majority of panel concluded that econometrics could not decide the issue, suggesting instead alternate research, such as a survey of felons to determine if RTC changed their behavior.[61] The criminologist on the NAS panel, James Q. Wilson, wrote a dissent from the econometricians' conclusion. Wilson noted in the report that all their estimates on murder rates supported Lott's conclusion on the effect of RTC on murder.[62] The Committee responded that "[w]hile it is true that most of the reported estimates [of the policy on murder rates] are negative, several are positive and many are statistically insignificant."[63] They further noted that the full committee, including Wilson, agreed that there was not convincing evidence that RTC policies had an impact on other kinds of violent crime.
As part of the dispute surrounding the missing survey, Lott created and used "Mary Rosh" as a fake persona to defend his own works on Usenet and elsewhere. After investigative work by blogger Julian Sanchez, Lott admitted to use of the Rosh persona.[57] Sanchez also pointed out that Lott, posing as Rosh, not only praised his own academic writing, but also called himself "the best professor I ever had".[64]
Some commentators accused Lott of transgressing normal practice, noting that he praised himself while posing as one of his former students,[65][66] and that "Rosh" was used to post a favorable review of More Guns, Less Crime on Amazon.com. Lott has claimed that the "Rosh" review was written by his son and wife.[66]
"I probably shouldn't have done it—I know I shouldn't have done it—but it's hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously," Lott told the Washington Post in 2003.[66]