Deltoid

I’ve been reading Lott’s new book, The Bias against Guns. Chapter 3 is entitled “How the Government Works against Gun Ownership”. The heart of the chapter is on pages 53–55, where he argues that the National Academy of Sciences stacks its panels against guns.

His first example is their panel on firearms research. He argues that the panel was set up “to examine only the negative side of guns”. Lott writes:

Rather than comparing how firearms facilitate both harm and self-defense, the panel was only asked to examine “firearm violence” or how “firearms may become embedded in community.”

Now look at the first paragraph of the project outline. (I have emphasised the parts that Lott did not tell his readers about.)

In 1997, some 24,000 victims of non-fatal gun crimes suffered gunshot wounds, and 12,382 persons were murdered with a gun. Homicide is outstripped by suicide, which annually accounts for more than half of all people killed with guns. While it is clear that firearms are heavily involved in criminal violence, homicides, and suicides, causal pathways remain uncertain. For example, there is the unresolved question of the potential role of temperament, motivation, and circumstances that is, whether in most cases, persons who commit a suicide or homicide with a gun would, because of these other influences, find another means of doing so if no gun were available. Even if firearms contribute to lethal violence, the development of successful prevention, intervention, and control policies is a complex undertaking. Significant numbers of Americans own guns for sporting, recreational, or defensive purposes. Public officials must sort through important but competing policy objectives involving the protection of Second Amendment rights and legitimate recreational and defensive uses of guns on the one hand, and the lowering the rates of gun related mortality and injury on the other.

Nor can Lott claim to be unaware that the panel considered self-defense, because Lott was a speaker (as well as Gary Kleck) at the panel’s Workshop on Self-Defense, Deterrence and Firearm Markets on Jan 16, 2002.

Lott also claims that as well as rigging the scope of discussion, the government stacked the panel with anti-gun people. He writes that panelist Steve Levitt has been described as “rabidly anti-gun”, citing this article by Dave Kopel and Glenn Reynolds. Lott does not mention that Levitt denies the charge and does not mention that the accuser was anonymous. (For all we know, the accuser could have been Mary Rosh.) Lott goes on to imply that an op-ed that Levitt wrote arguing that swimming pools were more dangerous to children than guns was written for the express purpose of hiding Levitt’s true feelings about guns. (There was some blogspace discussion last September of the Kopel-Reynolds smear of Levitt, with postings from Brad DeLong, Mark Kleiman and Glenn Reynolds.)

Lott’s second example is another NAS panel:

Unfortunately, this is not the only stacked National Academy of Sciences panel. During August 2002, I was asked to participate in a National Academy of Sciences day long workshop on “Children, Youth, and Gun Violence.” I was one of the last people invited for the September 18 meeting. Despite my concerns that I was being included simply so that they could claim that had a “balanced panel,” I was assured by the staff person who invited me, Mary Ellen O’Connell, that the workshop would be balanced. I only attended my session, and at the beginning of my talk I asked the audience of over a hundred people: “How many people here are presenters?” About twenty-five people raised their hands. I then asked of those who were presenters: “How many of you think that it might be possible, not for sure, but just possible, that existing gun control produces more problems than benefits?” All the hands went down. Not one of the presenters was even willing to acknowledge the possibility. Even worse than the bias, the problem was that the academy was unwilling to even acknowledge their biases and were unwilling to engage in a balanced debate.

Unfortunately for Lott, a recording of his talk is available online. At 18:35 in the audio we can find out what he really said:

“How many people are speakers here? How many of those people who are speakers think that on net gun regulations probably cause more problems than good? <pause> Oh, that’s a pretty balanced group.”

And no, the tone of his last sentence was not sarcastic. I also note that one of the people who presumably put his hand down was Dave Kopel, who was a speaker in the previous session. [Update: I am informed by someone who was there that virtually all the hands did go down, so it looks like he was being sarcastic. This doesn’t help Lott very much since the question he actually asked was very different from the question he claimed he asked.]

Just so people don’t have to take my word for the nature of Lott’s attack on Levitt, here are Lott’s exact words. On page 54:

- Another panel member, Steve Levitt, an economist, has been described in media reports as being “rabidly anti-gun.”[10]

On page 289:

[10] Dave Kopel and Glenn Reynolds, ibid., 347. Levitt apparently tried to overcome this image by writing his first op-ed about a week before his name was publicly nominated for the panel. Given that panel members are supposed to not have strong views on the topic that they are studying, it was strange that Levitt would write his first op-ed piece at this time. The op-ed argued that swimming pools posed a greater risk to children than guns, but it is hard to understand why he would choose this very time to write his very first op-ed on this particular topic when this would normally be considered the least appropriate time to do so. When I raised concerns about Levitt’s strong opposition to guns to John Pepper, who was serving as the staff director for the panel, Pepper pointed to the op-ed piece that Levitt had written as evidence that Levitt believed the same things that I believed on guns. Personally knowing Levitt, I know that was not true and one could point to several of Levitt’s academic papers. But the op-ed served its purpose.

Notice how Lott makes it look like Kopel and Reynolds are accusing Levitt of being “rabidly anti-gun”, even though the accuser was anonymous.

I asked Steve Levitt about Lott’s attack. He comments:

I wrote that op-ed piece on swimming pools and guns almost a full year before it was published. Members of the U of C publicity department can attest to that. I wrote it at the tail end of the summer, so they suggested waiting until the beginning of the next summer to try to publish it, which I did. I had certainly never heard of any NRC panel at the time I wrote it. I wrote it because it is the truth and it is an important point

So Lott was wrong about the timing of when Levitt’s op-ed was written. Lott either knew this or was grossly irresponsible in not finding it out.

I also got some comments from John Pepper, director of the NAS study on firearms:

Lott’s critique, as described on your web page, seems rather premature. We have not finished our work and, as you correctly note, we have heard formal presentations from Lott, Kleck (2x), Bronars, Wright, Blackman, and many others typically associated with the “pro-gun” side of the debate. I can assure you, as I have assured Lott and others (e.g. the NRA and Paul Blackman), that we are considering research and data relevant to both the positive and negative aspects of firearms.

John and I did speak about his concerns regarding Steve Levitt and several other committee members. I did not try to persuade John that Steve Levitt shared his views. Rather, I recall trying to get specific documentation from John and others making similar claims on Steve’s purported biases. At that time (July/Aug 2001), I knew about Levitt’s short theoretical paper in the American Economic Review, and the editorial, neither of which would indicate strong biases for or against the Lott research or firearms research more generally. Is there anything else? I do not recall whether we specifically discussed the Levitt editorial, but it is possible within this context. As an aside, I still have never seen documentation that would indicate that Levitt is biased in favor of any particular side on this debate, and certainly nothing supporting the claims that he is rabidly anti-gun.

Finally, in regards you April 9, 2003 commentary on the August 2002 meeting you should know that this was not an NAS panel but rather was a workshop held an NAS facility at the request of the Packard Foundation to showcase their work on kids and guns. It did not result in an NRC report and the comments of particular speakers were not endorsed by the NRC. Rather, it was a discussion centered around the Packard report, the record of which is up on our web-site (as you know). The Packard report can be found at: http://www.futureofchildren.org/pubs-info2825/pubs-info.htm?doc_id=154414.

It seems that Lott has misrepresented his discussion with Pepper. Lott has not the slightest scrap of evidence for his smear of Levitt. His unprincipled attack on Levitt tells us more about Lott than it does about Levitt.

You can read Steve Levitt’s op-ed on pools and guns here. It is quite clear from the op-ed why he wrote it: he lost his son and he didn’t want another parent to lose a child to a preventable accident. I am totally disgusted with Lott for accusing Levitt of exploiting the death of his child to cover his “rabidly anti-gun” views. I’m too angry to write any more.

First, a recap and a time line on the Kopel/Lott/Reynolds attacks on Steve Levitt:

16 Aug 2001

Glenn Reynolds claims that the NAS panel is “stacked” with “ardent supporters of gun control”, especially Levitt.

29 Aug 2001

Dave Kopel and Glenn Reynolds write an article in National Review Online where they claim that most of the people on the panel are anti-gun and that Levitt has been described as “rabidly antigun”. They offer no evidence to support their attack on Levitt.

29 Aug 2001

Levitt emails Reynolds, denying the charge, pointing to this op-ed as evidence that he is not rabidly anti-gun. Reynolds conceals the identity of the “scholar” who accused Levitt of being “rabidly antigun”.

31 Aug 2001

Fox News has a story about the attacks on the panel, quoting Lott as saying “It’s not a balanced panel” and Kopel charging that the real intent of the committee was to debunk Lott’s work.

18 Sep 2002

Reynolds repeats his attack on the NAS panel. Brad DeLong vigorously refutes Reynold’s attack on Levitt.

19 Sep 2002

Mark Kleiman comments on Reynolds’ unethical behaviour:

I still think the NRO story was shabby journalism: it made a wild, personally damaging charge based on a single anonymous source, it failed to check that charge with its subject to allow a comment, and it misrepresented the document it quoted from by selective quotation and actual misquotation. Nor was it ever updated with links to the denial and the evidence supporting it.

Reynolds has a bizarre response that completely ignores all of Delong’s and Kleiman’s arguments:

As a former official in the Clinton Administration, surely DeLong isn’t arguing that only people’s buddies are entitled to discuss questions of whether they might be biased or not. He should know better than that.

(Err, discussing it is fine, Glenn, but you should either offer actual evidence in support of your claim or retract it.)

10 Mar 2003

Lott’s book The Bias Against Guns is published. On page 54 he writes (referring to the Kopel-Reynolds article):

Another panel member, Steve Levitt, an economist, has been described in media reports as being “rabidly anti-gun.”

He goes on to falsely accuse Levitt of writing his op-ed to cover up his “strong opposition to guns” and misrepresent his discussion with Pepper about Lott. (For details see here.)

Now, who was the anonymous accuser whose identity Reynolds concealed? Well, who do we know who makes anonymous personal attacks on academics like this or this? And who would have a vested interested in keeping someone highly skilled in econometrics off the panel, lest their own firearms research relying on econometrics be debunked? And whose research on the abortion-crime link did Levitt describe (on June 19, 2001, shortly before the anonymous attack on him) as “just garbage”? And since the “rabidly antigun” charge has proven to be false, who do we know who has a habit of making things up?

Levitt informs me that he is almost certain that the anonymous character assassin is Lott. I asked both Reynolds and Kopel to confirm or deny this and neither one denied it. I think we are entitled to conclude that the character assassin is Lott.

It was clearly wrong for Kopel and Reynolds to print Lott’s smear without telling their readers of their source’s interest in the matter. And it was dishonest of Lott to refer to the Kopel-Reynolds article to make it appear that there were other people who were saying that Levitt was “rabidly antigun” when, in fact, Lott was the only source of the claim.

Kevin Drum has a nice summary on Lott’s anonymous attack on Levitt. Kieran Healy tells what Lott’s next step will be. Brian Linse thinks Reynolds and Kopel should offer some answers. Atrios links here. And Tom Spencer has two posts. First, he observes that Reynolds’ cover up for Lott raises questions about Reynolds. Second, he is impressed by Lott:

However, can you imagine the chutzpah on the part of Lott to quote an article in a book that is quoting himself as an unnamed source to bolster an argument he’s advancing in the book? You’ve got to give it to Lott, he certainly has, uh, like I said, chutzpah.

Glenn Reynolds has posted a reply to the firearmsregprof mailing list. Perhaps the most interesting thing about his reply is what he doesn’t say: he doesn’t deny that Lott was his anonymous source. Anyway, he claims that I omitted that he

“published Levitt’s response that he wasn’t rabidly anti-gun, and took him at his word.”

I did not mention that Reynolds “took him at his word” because he didn’t. Reynolds published Levitt’s denial, commented on the op-ed, and wrote that his source was sticking to the charge. Reynolds was quite clearly agnostic on the question of whether Levitt was “rabidly antigun”, writing:

“I suppose the real test of his fair-mindedness will be how he conducts himself on the study”

Reynolds also claims:

“Kopel sent an update to the NRO piece some time ago stressing Levitt’s denial of the charge. Although Lambert doesn’t mention this, I imagine that he’s aware of it.”

Neither Reynolds nor Kopel mentioned this in their emails on this subject. I also have corresponded with Levitt, Kleiman, DeLong and Pepper on this matter, and none of them seemed to be aware of this update.

Notice also that Levitt denied the charge on the same day that the article was posted. It has now been over 18 months and the article still has not been corrected.

Mac Diva is trying to figure out why Lott does the things he does. Atrios explains why he cares about Lott. Brad Delong says that I have “a very strong case”. Matt Yglesias has some thoughtful comments on appropriate behaviour in this case. ArchPundit has one two posts.

On Monday Glenn Reynolds wrote:

Kopel sent an update to the NRO piece some time ago stressing Levitt’s denial of the charge. Although Lambert doesn’t mention this, I imagine that he’s aware of it. I don’t know if it has appeared on their site yet or not.

It turns out that “some time ago” was Reynolds’ special way of saying “yesterday”. Nor, of course, would he have any reason to believe that I would be aware of this update. Kopel says he thinks Reynolds may have “misremembered”.

Anyway, here’s Kopel’s update:

Shortly after this article was published, Steve Levitt wrote to Glenn:

“I don’t understand your National Review article in which I am described as ‘rabidly anti-gun.’

“No one who knows me would describe me that way. I love to shoot guns and would own them if my wife would let me. I recently published an op-ed piece in Chicago Sun-Times entitled ‘Pools more dangerous than guns’ (July 28, 2001) that could only be construed as pro-guns. I have never written anything even remotely anti-gun. I think your sources must have me confused with someone else.”

Levitt’s Sun-Times article argues that the risks of gun accidents are grossly exaggerated by the media compared to other accident risks. I wrote back to Levitt something which I should have also asked to be posted on this article, so I’m belatedly posting it now:

“As Glenn’s instapundit site details, we have checked with our original source. Nevertheless, since I try (not always successfully) to shed light rather than heat on the gun issue, I think that in retrospect the adverb ‘rabidly’ shouldn’t have been used. So I promise to avoid it in the future. I’m glad to know about your swimming pools piece, and I enjoyed reading it. I did check your publications page on the web before I submitted the article, but the pool piece wasn’t there—understandably, since your page just cites journal articles.

“And, as the article said, whatever your views on guns, there’s no dispute about your scholarly abilities. My forthcoming article ‘Lawyers, Guns, and Burglars: Why Mass Tort Litigation Fails to Account for Positive Externalities and the Network Effects of Controversial Products’” 43 Arizona Law Review (no 2, 2001) cites and discusses your excellent LoJack article.

Kopel’s correction is inadequate. He doesn’t withdraw the charge at all, he just allows that it was too inflammatory. Here’s what he should have said:

In my article I quoted an anonymous claim that Steve Levitt was “rabidly antigun”. I have investigated the matter and I find that the charge is false. I withdraw it and apologize to Levitt for the unwarranted attack on his character and to my readers for inadvertently misleading them. I also apologize for not not making this correction in a timely fashion.

Max Sawicky links here, as does Brad Delong and Hesiod.

Meanwhile, in a post that seems to have drifted in from some alternate reality, the William Sjostrom take on the Kopel/Reynolds/Lott attacks on Levitt is that Brad Delong is a sleaze.

In a previous message Glenn Reynolds claimed to have taken Levitt’s word that he wasn’t rabidly anti-gun. In his blog it did not seem that Reynolds had taken Levitt’s word, so I asked him to clarify his position. He wrote:

I was quite clear in my InstaPundit post on this: I don’t know Levitt. Someone who I found credible told me he was rabidly antigun. He says he isn’t. (And, the way things work, both may be honestly giving their opinions). The proof will be in how the Committee works.

So when Reynolds wrote that he

“published Levitt’s response that he wasn’t rabidly anti-gun, and took him at his word.”

he actually meant that he

“published Levitt’s response that he wasn’t rabidly anti-gun, and did not take him at his word.”

I also asked Dave Kopel to clarify his position on the “rabidly antigun” question. He believes that Lott his source is correct, but regrets using an inflammatory word like “rabidly”. I asked for the evidence that his source produced that convinced him and was informed that it was secret. (Apparently presenting any evidence at all in support of the claim would reveal the identity of his source.)

Since neither Reynolds nor Kopel have retracted their attack on Levitt, I believe it is germane to examine the accuracy of the other statements they make in their article.

1. They claim that the panel ignores “research into the benefits of firearms.”. As Mark Kleiman pointed out last year, the project description quite clearly includes research into the benefits of firearms. Reynolds claims that the language about benefits wasn’t in the document that he looked at. However, the Wayback Machine shows that the language was in the page that they linked to. (The date on the Wayback Machine’s copy is a little later than their article, but the internal evidence on that page shows that it hadn’t been changed since before their article was written.)
2. They claim that:

   The committee members were not given even one of the many social-science articles detailing the failures of various gun-control laws.

   This is contradicted by Paul Blackman, who on the firearmsreg list stated that 75-80% of the articles were “anti-gun”.
3. They assert that a 1993 study by Kellermann et al that found that gun ownership was associated with a three times greater risk of becoming a victim of a homicide in the home was “junk science”. They argue that

   hardly any of Kellermann’s murder victims were killed with a gun from their own home, and a significant number of the murder “victims” were lawfully killed by police, and the whole factoid disappears once you account for the true rates of gun ownership among the “control group” of people who weren’t murdered

   All of these claims are false. Enough of the victims were murdered by the gun in the home so that all of the extra risk from guns was associated just with gun homicide and homicide by people with access to the home gun. Only four (out of 400) were killed by police. You can speculate that the correlation may have be caused by gun ownership being more underreported in the control group, but that does not make the speculation true.

With so many inaccuracies in their article, it is probably best to entirely discount their claims about Levitt.

Roger Ailes comments on Reynolds and Kopel’s failure to show any evidence in support of the “rabidly antigun” claim. Greg Beato also has some extensive comments. Tom Spencer has two comments, as does Atrios here and here.

Glenn Reynolds finally gets around to blogging on the accusation in his article that Levitt is “rabidly antigun”. Remarkably, Reynolds does not mention or link to any of the discussion about this that has occurred on many blogs.

Some 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 expect Lott to be aware of Levitt’s denial if Lott is Reynolds’ anonymous source. Ailes also has some pointed comments about Reynolds’ misrepresentation of what the controversy has been about. Note further that Reynolds still has not explained why he called Levitt an especially ardent supporter of gun control.

Dave Kopel has also blogged on the affair. Like Reynolds, he avoids mentioning or linking to any of the recent discussion about this matter. Anyway, he starts with a false claim:

Perhaps our warnings had some effect; the panel’s “charge,” which we linked to from our article, focused only on examining the negative effects of firearms in society. That link is no longer operative, and a more detailed charge has replaced it; the new charge requires the panel to also consider beneficial aspects to firearms ownership.

You can see the original charge that they linked to here, courtesy of the Wayback Machine. You can compare it with the current version to see that there has been no significant change. Mark Kleiman also checked with someone on the panel who stated that the charge had not been changed. Numerous other errors of fact in the Kopel/Reynolds article are detailed here.

Kopel then points to two articles by Levitt that Kopel claims are “anti-gun”. The most important point is that not even Kopel is willing to claim that that the articles are “rabid”. Having failed yet again to present any evidence that Levitt is “rabidly antigun”, the decent thing to do would be to withdraw the charge and apologize for the unfounded slur, but Kopel does not do this.

Anyway, Kopel somehow construes the two Levitt articles as being anti-gun. He does not dispute the accuracy of Levitt’s statements, so apparently making any correct statement about harm done with guns means that you are “anti-gun”. By this measure, even Lott is “anti-gun”. Nor can Kopel claim that Levitt just concentrates on the harm and avoids the potential benefits, since the first paper models the effects of concealed carry laws on crime.

Kopel finishes with:

There is nothing logically inconsistent with a scholar favoring gun control to address the very large problem of criminal homicide with guns, while also recognizing that the magnitude of the problem of fatal gun accidents involving children is not nearly as large as the media imply.

Nice attempt to shift the burden of proof. If Kopel makes an unsubstantiated claim about Levitt being anti-gun, then it is up to him to prove it. It is not the responsibility of others to disprove it.

It 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 multiple speakers from Hand Gun [Control] Inc and other anti-gun types giving testimony - but no one to speak of the positives. I asked him if he would have Professor John Lott speak and the reply was a sneer. (I should state that the study director was a typical liberal type - goatee, whiny voice, upset at the stolen election - much like most of the people I encountered there (except the goatee…)

However, in the same posting Reynolds writes:

I noted a report by Sam MacDonald of Reason who attended the first meeting of the panel and who thought it seemed reasonably fair.

And if you look at MacDonald’s report you find:

the committee did hear from an NRA spokesman, and there was some talk of trying to calculate the benefits of gun ownership along with the costs.

Reynolds also mentions the “considerable discussion on an email list”. Prominent in that discussion was the fact that Lott had spoken to the panel as you can see here. I don’t think it was right for “Dooher” to play such a mean trick on Reynolds, but Reynolds really should have noticed that the stuff “Dooher” was telling him was plainly false.

Expect to see something like the following at InstaPundit.com soon:

FURTHER UPDATE: Archbishop Heywood Jablome, reader and astronaut, emails:

I can confirm that the NAS Panel is like, totally biased. I talked to the panel commissar and while twirling his moustache he told me: “Our task of creating a socialist America can only succeed when those who would resist us are totally disarmed.”

Interesting. I checked Google and got 529 hits for “Heywood Jablome”, so that establishes his bona fides. Heh.

Tom Spencer comments on Kopel’s “update” to his attack on the NAS panel.

ArchPundit has a short post about Lott’s weighting and a long, interesting post on the Kopel/Reynolds attack on the NAS Panel. I think he nails the problem with the Kopel/Reynolds approach when he writes:

Perhaps it is their background as law professors that is the problem. While law journals serve their purpose, I’m a bit mystified by this almost post modern view of social science Kopel and Reynolds seem to be promoting. A fair panel is one that examines the issue from a social scientific view–not just a balance of pro and con.

I 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 it. Tom Spencer and Atrios linked to my comments about Dooher’s email. Atrios also has some good comments on ArchPundit’s thoughts on Reynolds’ post-modern approach to science. ArchPundit has an update to his thoughts about Reynolds and the NAS panel. And the Iraqi Information Minister apparently supports Lott and Reynolds.

William Sjostrom gamely defends Lott against the charge that he anonymously accused Levitt of being “rabidly antigun”.

Brian Linse responds to William Sjostrom’s attempt to defend Lott.

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 death also informed Levitt’s work.

He and Jeannette joined a support group for grieving parents. Levitt was struck by how many children had drowned in swimming pools. They were the kinds of deaths that don’t make the newspaper—unlike, for instance, a child who dies while playing with a gun.

Levitt was curious and went looking for numbers that would tell the story. He wrote up the results as an op-ed article for The Chicago Sun-Times. It featured the sort of plangent counterintuition for which he has become famous: “If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”

In The Bias Against Guns, after writing that Levitt had been described as “rabidly anti-gun”, Lott wrote:

Levitt apparently tried to overcome this image by writing his first op-ed about a week before his name was publicly nominated for the panel. Given that panel members are supposed to not have strong views on the topic that they are studying, it was strange that Levitt would write his first op-ed piece at this time. The op-ed argued that swimming pools posed a greater risk to children than guns, but it is hard to understand why he would choose this very time to write his very first op-ed on this particular topic when this would normally be considered the least appropriate time to do so. When I raised concerns about Levitt’s strong opposition to guns to John Pepper, who was serving as the staff director for the panel, Pepper pointed to the op-ed piece that Levitt had written as evidence that Levitt believed the same things that I believed on guns. Personally knowing Levitt, I know that was not true and one could point to several of Levitt’s academic papers. But the op-ed served its purpose.

(Actually the op-ed was written the previous year and Pepper disputes Lott’s account of their conversation.)

It is obvious if you read the op-ed that Levitt wrote it to try to help prevent another parent suffering a loss like his, but according to Lott it was written to cover up Levitt’s true beliefs about guns. In a radio interview, Lott once said:

“I have five kids. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose any of them”

Try asking Steve Levitt, Dr Lott.

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 and whites in the first two years of schooling; gambling and the National Football League; and teachers who cheat in appraisals of their students’ performance. Among the work he has published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals are a series of papers on crime and punishment, drug-gang finance, penalty kicks in soccer, money and elections, drunken driving, and the effect of ideology as opposed to voter preferences on the policies supported by politicians. In 2002 the impeccably sober American Economic Review published a paper co-written by Mr Levitt on corruption and sumo wrestling. You get the idea….

On top of all those he has a 2003 paper not in the NBER archive entitled: Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Seven That Do Not. He argues that neither carry laws nor gun control laws were responsible for any part of the crime decrease in the US in the nineties. (The four that did were: more imprisonment, more police, the decline of crack, and legalized abortion.)

And yet Glenn Reynolds claimed that Levitt was an especially ardent supporter of gun control. Odd.

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”?

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 the first paper. I guess he never bothered to read our response to Joyce in which we show in Table 1 that the results are nearly identical when we use his preferred data source. It is understandable that he could make this argument five years ago, but why would he persist in making it in 2005 when it has been definitively shown to be false? (I’ll let you put on your Freakonomics-thinking-hat and figure out the answer to that last question.) As Lott and Whitley are by now well aware, the statistical results they get in that paper are an artifact of some bizarre choices they made and any reasonable treatment of the data returns our initial results. (Even Ted Joyce, our critic, acknowledges that the basic patterns in the data we report are there, which Lott and Whitley were trying to challenge.)

(Thanks to John Fleck for the tip.)

Back 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’ computer code and found the controls missing. In other words, Messrs Donohue and Levitt did not run the test they thought they had—an “inadvertent but serious computer programming error”, according to Messrs Foote and Goetz.

Unlike Lott, they immediately admitted making the error. Nor did correcting the error make their results go away, though it did reduce the size of the effect. The Economist article has more on where that leaves their thesis, but what I find very interesting is Lott’s reaction to all this. He writes:

Personally, I think calling this a “programming oversight” is being much too nice. More importantly everyone who works with panel data knows that you use fixed effects.

Yes, he’s implying that they deliberately cooked their results. I think this tells us more about Lott’s approach to econometrics than it does about that of Donohue and Levitt. He must think that everyone else operates like he does.

Steve 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 makes a good point here:

Finally and most importantly, this is about as far from a double blind trial as you can get. I’ve written in the past about the perils of data mining in econometrics, and to be honest, all that is lacking in the series of changes to the data and the model that the Freakonomics blog presents is a phalanx of dwarves singing “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It’s Off To Data-Mine We Go”. What has happened here is that Levitt and his research assistant have sat down in the knowledge that a perturbation to their model doesn’t deliver their result, and decided to have a think about what kinds of alterations to the data ought to be made.

You don’t need to suggest any intentional dishonesty to say that it is somewhat unsurprising that the outcome of the brainstorming session on “What sort of changes ought one to make to this data, in an ideal world?” was a dataset and model in which the result that Levitt is famous for was present. Even if Levitt and Ethan Lieber had sat down at a table with no computer on it, starting with a blank sheet to discuss the changes to make and not touching the model until they had finished, I would still guess that it would be the easiest thing in the world for someone who was intimately familiar with the dataset to subconsciously put his thumb on the scales. And I don’t think this is what they did; colour me cynical but I would bet quids that lots and lots of iterations of different possible changes to the data were tried. I note once more that there is no accusation of intentionally cooking the books here; medical science certainly doesn’t insist on double blind trials to protect them from unscrupulous doctors.

I think that there’s a general issue here which is endemic to the territory that Levitt chooses to operate in. By their nature, political debates are debates. One side produces arguments, the other side produces counterarguments and so on, so iteratively. This is an environment which is absolutely poisonous to datasets. By the time you’ve been through two or three iterations of a “controversy” like this it’s more or less impossible to pick a model without failing even the most homeopathically weak version imaginable of a double blind criterion. This is why I now say that we’re simply never going to know the truth (by which I mean, even the simple statistical truth about the existence of a comovement, much less the truth about the underlying causal hypothesis) about abortion and crime in the period 1976-2000. Stick a fork in this dataset, it’s done.

I don’t think that the situation is as hopeless as that. Foote and Goetz have access to the same data and tools so we can see if they can come up with another measure of abortions that makes the results go away. Another possibility is that Donohue and Levitt present the results for a whole slew of alternative formulations of the abortion measure so we can see if their results are sensitive to the particular way that it is defined.