JOHN LOTT -
or does he now go by Mary ???
Defamation suit
On April 10, 2006, John Lott filed suit
[48] 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Journal of Law and Economics had not been peer reviewed, Lott had paid the University of Chicago Press to publish the papers, and that papers with results opposite of Lott's had been blocked from publication in that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.
[49]
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.
[50]
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.
[51][52] The
Chronicle of Higher Education characterized Levitt's letter as offering "a doozy of a concession."
[53]
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.
[54]
Charges that gun makers or the NRA have paid for Lott's research
In 1996 when Lott's research first received media attention,
Charles Schumer wrote in the
Wall Street Journal: "The
Associated Press reports that Prof. Lott's fellowship at the University of Chicago is funded by the
Olin Foundation, which is 'associated with the
Olin Corporation,' one of the nation's largest gun manufacturers. Maybe that's a coincidence, too. But it's also a fact."
[55] Olin Foundation head
William E. Simon strongly denied Schumer's claims in a reply letter in which he stated that: Olin Foundation was funded by the personal estate of the late
John M. Olin independently of Olin Corp. Like all candidates, Lott was selected to receive his Olin Fellowship by the faculty of the university, not by Olin Foundation and certainly not by Olin Corp.
[56][57]
In a debate on
Piers Morgan Tonight on July 23, 2012, Harvard Law School Professor
Alan Dershowitz claimed: "This is junk science at its worst. Paid for and financed by the National Rifle Association." Lott countered: "The NRA hasn't paid for my research." Dershowitz continued: "Your conclusions are paid for and financed—The National Rifle Association—only funds research that will lead to these conclusions."
[58][59] Separately both Lott and the NRA have denied NRA funding of Lott's research.
[60]
Disputed survey
In the course of a dispute with
Otis Dudley Duncan in 1999–2000,
[61][62] 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.
[62] 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,
[63] 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. Critics alleged that the survey had never taken place,
[64] but Lott defends the survey's existence and accuracy, quoting on his website colleagues who lost data in the hard drive crash.
[65]
Use of econometrics as proof of causation
In 2001,
Rutgers University sociology professor
Ted Goertzel[66] considered multiple regression to be not of much use in proving causal arguments in studies by Lott (and by Lott's critics Levitt, Ayres and Donohue).
[67]
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 the 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.
[68] The criminologist on the NAS panel,
James Q. Wilson, wrote a dissent from the econometricians' conclusion. Wilson noted in the report that all the panel's estimates on murder rates supported Lott's conclusion on the effect of RTC on murder.
[69] 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."
[70] They further noted that the full committee, including Wilson, agreed that there was not convincing evidence that RTC policies affected other kinds of violent crime.
In a 2011 article for
ALER, Donohue claimed the NRC panel results published from the hybrid model "could not be replicated on its data set".
[71] Lott replicated the NRC's results using the NRC's copy of the Ayres & Donohue model and data set, pointing out that the model used for the
ALER article was different and introduced a truncation bias.
[72]
Mary Rosh persona
In response to the dispute surrounding the missing survey,
Lott created and used "Mary Rosh" as a sock puppet to defend his own works on Usenet and elsewhere. After investigative work by blogger
Julian Sanchez, Lott admitted to use of the Mary Rosh persona.
[64] 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".
Many commentators and academics accused Lott of violating academic integrity, noting that he praised himself while posing as one of his former students,
[73][74] 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.
[74]
"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.
[74]
