John Lott

John Lott

John Richard Lott Jr. (born May 8 1958) is a visiting senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park and has held research positions at numerous institutions, including the University of Chicago, Yale University, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the American Enterprise Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA, and his research interests include econometrics, law and economics, public choice theory, industrial organization, public finance, microeconomics, and environmental regulation.

Lott is also a well-known author in both academia and in popular culture. He 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.

A frequent writer of opinion editorials, Lott has become most well-known outside of academic econometrics for his participation in the gun rights debate, particularly his arguments for allowing Americans to freely own and carry guns. He is also known for taking strong economic positions on topics regarding the government, politics, and other world issues.

The number of defensive gun uses range from 1.5 million to 3.4 million per year, with the best estimate of around 2 million times. By contrast, the number of gun crimes from similar surveys is about 450,000 times per year.

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Academic career

Lott studied economics at UCLA, receiving his B.A. in 1980, M.A. in 1982, and Ph.D. in 1984. He spent several years as a visiting professor and as a fellow at the University of Chicago.

Lott went on to work at other institutions, including the Yale University School of Law, Stanford, UCLA, the Wharton Business School, Texas A&M University, and Rice University, and was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission (1988–1989), before taking a position at the American Enterprise Institute. In 2006, he left AEI. As of 2008, he is a visiting senior research scientist in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Maryland, College Park.

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.

In terms of total academic journal output from 1990 to 2000, John Lott ranks 26th worldwide among economists, and in terms of citations in the same period, he ranks 86th.

Lott's work

Lott has produced research, authored opinions, and stirred up controversy in many areas with his economic analysis of important issues.

Concealed weapons and crime rate

In his books More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns, Lott presents statistical evidence 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, Cardozo School of Law professor John O. McGinnis, and University of Mississippi professor William F. Shughart. The book also received favorable reviews from gun-rights researcher Gary Kleck, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell.

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. Others agreed, and some researchers, including Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue, claimed that the model contained significant coding errors and systemic bias. Gary Kleck considered it unlikely that such a large decrease in violent crime could be explained by a relatively modest increase in concealed carry, and others claimed that removing portions of the data set caused the results to change dramatically.

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 that "there is no credible evidence that 'right-to-carry' laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime." James Q. Wilson dissented from that opinion, and while accepting the committee's findings on violent crime in general, he argued that all of the Committee's own estimates confirmed Lott's finding that right-to-carry laws had an effect on murder rate.

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."

Women's Suffrage and Government Growth

Academics have long pondered why the government started growing precisely when it did. The federal government, aside from periods of wartime, consumed about 2 percent to 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) up until World War I. It was the first war that the government spending didn't go all the way back down to its pre-war levels, and then, in the 1920s, non-military federal spending began steadily climbing. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal — often viewed as the genesis of big government — really just continued an earlier trend. What changed before Roosevelt came to power that explains the growth of government? Similar changes were occurring around the world. Lott's answer is women's suffrage. A good way to analyze the direct effect of women's suffrage on the growth of government is to study how each of the 48 state governments expanded after women obtained the right to vote. Women's suffrage was first granted in western states with relatively few women — Wyoming (1869), Utah (1870), Colorado (1893) and Idaho (1896). Women could vote in 29 states before women's suffrage was achieved nationwide in 1920 with the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. If women's suffrage increased government, our analysis should show a few definite indicators. First, women's suffrage would have a bigger impact on government spending and taxes in states with a greater percentage of women. And secondly, the size of government in western states should steadily expand as women comprise an increasing share of their population.

Even after accounting for a range of other factors — such as industrialization, urbanization, education and income — the impact of granting of women's suffrage on per-capita state government expenditures and revenue was startling. Per capita state government spending after accounting for inflation had been flat or falling during the 10 years before women began voting. But state governments started expanding the first year after women voted and continued growing until within 11 years real per capita spending had more than doubled. The increase in government spending and revenue started immediately after women started voting.

Media bias and defensive gun use

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." He cited the figure frequently in the media, including publications like the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. However, critics challenged the statistic, and in the book's second edition, the phrasing was changed to indicate that the percentage came from a study Lott himself had conducted. Critics then contended that he never actually performed the study, and when asked for proof, Lott responded that a bookcase fell on his computer and the documentation of the study was lost.

Lott defended himself on his website and continued to cite the statistic. 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 was too small for the study to be accurate and that the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80 percent.

Environmental regulations

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. 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.

Media Bias

In work with Kevin Hassett at the American Enterprise Institute, they provided a systematic measure of media bias.[1] They solved 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 suggest that American newspapers tend to give more positive news coverage to the same economic news when Democrats are in the Presidency than for Republicans. When all types of news are pooled into a single analysis, their results are highly significant.

Affirmative action in police departments

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.

Abortion and crime

In work with John Whitley at the University of Adelaide, Lott has work that looks at the impact of abortion legalization on crime rates.[2] 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 legalizing abortion increases out-of-wedlock births and single parent families, which implies the opposite impact on investments in human capital and thus crime. They find evidence that legalizing abortion increased murder rates by around about 0.5 to 7 percent.

Other areas

Lott has done research showing that most of the large recent increases in campaign spending for state and federal offices can be explained by higher government spending. Lott has also done research finding 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 much longer to get confirmed.

Lott has examined the beneficial aspects of 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.

Controversy

Mary Rosh online persona

In early 2003, some critics suggested that Lott had 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, but insists that he had not done anything academically unusual, let alone unprofessional.

Lott's opponents, however, maintain that several uses of his nom de plume transgressed normal practice, arguing that he praised himself while posing as one of his former students, 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.

Defamation suit

On April 10, 2006, Lott filed suit against Steven Levitt and HarperCollins Publishers for defamation. 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, and in a series of email communications to economist John McCall, Levitt said that Lott's work in a special 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics had not been peer reviewed, and that papers with results opposite of Lott's had been blocked from publication in that issue.>

A federal judge found that Levitt's claim in Freakonomics was not defamation, but required that Levitt admit in a letter to John McCall that he himself was a peer reviewer in the 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics, and that he knew that "scholars with varying opinions" had been invited to participate.

The suit is not yet complete, however; Lott has appealed the ruling regarding the Freakonomics passage, citing what he claims to be new evidence that the passage damaged him professionally.

Bibliography

• Are Predatory Commitments Credible? (ISBN 0-226-49355-5)
• More Guns, Less Crime (ISBN 0-226-49364-4)
• The Bias Against Guns (ISBN 0-89526-114-6)
• Straight Shooting (ISBN-10: 0936783478)
• Freedomnomics

External links

Lott's websites

• John Lott's website
• John Lott's Personal Blog
• John Lott's data, available for downloading
• Blog For John Lott's 2007 Book, Freedomnomics

Regarding Lott's research

• John Lott's Research Papers at the Social Science Research Network
• Opinion pieces by Lott in the general press
• National Academy of Science: NAS panel report on right-to-carry laws
• Michelle Malkin: The Other Lott Controversy

Studies based on Lott's gun research

These studies discuss, dispute, replicate or duplicate Lott's gun research

Refereed Articles in Academic Journals.

• Using Placebo Laws to Test “More Guns, Less Crime”
• Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns and Violent Crime: Crime Control Through Gun Decontrol?
• Does the right to carry concealed handguns deter countable crimes?
• Testing for the effects of concealed weapons laws
• David Olson/Michael Maltz, Homicide in Large U.S. Cities
• The Effect of Concealed Weapons Laws: An Extreme Bound Analysis
• Privately Produced general deterence
• Michael Maltz/Joseph Targonski, A Note on the Use of County-Level UCR Data -
• A Note on the Use of County-Level UCR Data: A Response

Publications in student-edited journals

• The Latest Misfires in Support of the “More Guns, Less Crime” Hypothesis
• Confirming More Guns, Less Crime
• Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis.