re: lott
please disregard the previous message, it was not written by me Patrick McCann
Re: Lott
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/06/03 10:30AM I'm quite sure that if this happened with a Brookings scholar he would be fired. It will be interesting to see what AEI does. Hats off to Sanchez at Cato for discovering this. - - Bill Dickens A few years ago, Michael Lerner, the Editor of Tikkun (a very left-wing magazine) was found to be writing the Letters to the Editor himself. Nothing happenned to him. Which shows (if I'm right about Brookings) that we have higher standards of intellectual honesty for our employees than the publishers of Tikkun have for theirs. Now we'll see if AEI does. - - Bill
Re: Lott
Indeed, the main finding from the surveys is not the brandishment result but the fact that guns are used defensively several million times a year (according to Kleck's survey and several others.) Which is highly suspect. It is computed by projecting the fraction of people in a relatively small sample who say they used firearms defensively to the whole population. Anyone who has ever worked with survey data knows that error rates of a couple of percent (at least) on all sorts of questions are common. Both coding errors and reporting errors substantially increase (in percentage terms) the fraction of respondents giving positive responses to questions with very low fractions of positive responses. Think also about how people treat surveys (for example the number of people who say they have been abducted by aliens). I would bet any money that the true fraction of people who use firearms in self-defense (brandishment or otherwise) is a whole heck of a lot lower (an order of magnitude or more) than what is suggested by Kleck's survey. - - Bill Dickens William T. Dickens The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 Phone: (202) 797-6113 FAX: (202) 797-6181 E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AOL IM: wtdickens
Re: Lott
In a message dated 2/5/03 12:01:23 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Indeed, the main finding from the surveys is not the brandishment result but the fact that guns are used defensively several million times a year (according to Kleck's survey and several others.) Which is highly suspect. It is computed by projecting the fraction of people in a relatively small sample who say they used firearms defensively to the whole population. Anyone who has ever worked with survey data knows that error rates of a couple of percent (at least) on all sorts of questions are common. Both coding errors and reporting errors substantially increase (in percentage terms) the fraction of respondents giving positive responses to questions with very low fractions of positive responses. Think also about how people treat surveys (for example the number of people who say they have been abducted by aliens). I would bet any money that the true fraction of people who use firearms in self-defense (brandishment or ot herwise) is a whole heck of a lot lower (an order of m While she was Attorney General, Janet Reno commissioned a study to try to prove that private firearms ownership does not deter crime. The commission concluded nonetheless that Americans use firearms .5 to 1.5 million times a year to deter crimes. Given the obvious bias of the study, this conclusion makes the Lott/Kleck numbers quite credible. DBL
Re: Lott
How would one estimate the accuracy of self-reports of self-defense? I know in medical research you can assess the validity of self-reported health by doing follow up medical exams or seeing if the respondent dies or becomes seriously ill shortly after the survey. Is self-defense just one of those issues where we'll never have decent data? Fabio On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, William Dickens wrote: Which is highly suspect. It is computed by projecting the fraction of people in a relatively small sample who say they used firearms defensively to the whole population. Anyone who has ever worked with survey data knows that error rates of a couple of percent (at least) on all sorts of questions are common. Both coding errors and reporting errors substantially increase (in percentage terms) the fraction of respondents giving positive responses to questions with very low fractions of positive responses. Think also about how people treat surveys (for example the number of people who say they have been abducted by aliens). I would bet any money that the true fraction of people who use firearms in self-defense (brandishment or otherwise) is a whole heck of a lot lower (an order of magnitude or more) than what is suggested by Kleck's survey. - - Bill Dickens William T. Dickens
Re: Lott
While she was Attorney General, Janet Reno commissioned a study to try to prove that private firearms ownership does not deter crime. The commission concluded nonetheless that Americans use firearms .5 to 1.5 million times a year to deter crimes. Given the obvious bias of the study, this conclusion makes the Lott/Kleck numbers quite credible. Can you provide a citation to this study and its methodology? I've never heard of it. If it used survey methods it could have naively produced the same results no matter what the intent of the author. - - Bill Dickens William T. Dickens The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 Phone: (202) 797-6113 FAX: (202) 797-6181 E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AOL IM: wtdickens
Re: Lott
How would one estimate the accuracy of self-reports of self-defense? I know in medical research you can assess the validity of self-reported health by doing follow up medical exams or seeing if the respondent dies or becomes seriously ill shortly after the survey. Well one thing one can do is ask if the survey data make sense in light of other sources of data we have. I'm _told_ that if you project the number of certain specific types of crimes that were supposedly prevented, according to the survey, that you get numbers that are many times larger than the actual number of those crimes committed. This doesn't seem plausible given that most people don't carry their guns with them when they are out on the street where the vast majority of crimes are committed. (Since I don't have a cite for this I'm not claiming its true, just suggesting it as a methodology.) Another thing one can do is compare error rates on verifiable items of a comparable nature. For example a lot more people report that they are managers than actually are (as verified by their employers). Since a lot of people would probably consider it heroic to fight of a criminal with a gun I wouldn't be surprised if people engaged in a similar sort of wishful thinking on this question. This approach in particular suggests that _all_ the reports in the survey could easily be in error (which doesn't mean that no one ever uses a gun in self-defense, just that you would need a much bigger sample to find them and accurately calculate the true rate). One could look at published reports of crimes and attempted crimes and look at the fraction of reported incidents in which victims were armed. Of course there is going to be reporting bias, but isn't this why the whole issue of brandishing vs discharging is important? We expect that if people have to discharge their weapons in self defense then we will read about it in the paper and we should be able to get an accurate estimate of how important gun use in self defense is from such sources. Suppose we never hear about cases where criminals are scared off by someone brandishing a gun but we always hear about it when a criminal is shot. My understanding is that reports of the latter are very rare. If they account for 25% of crimes prevented then there aren't many crimes prevented (4x reports), but if 98% of the time all one has to do is show the gun then the number of crimes prevented is 50x the number of reports and is considerably more important. Thus the difference between! 75% and 98% is very very substantive. A difference between 98% and 90% would mean 1/5th as many crimes prevented. Is self-defense just one of those issues where we'll never have decent data? Yes, but that doesn't meant that we can't learn from what data are available. My understanding is that depending on how you come at this issue you reach very different conclusions. If what I have been told by people I trust on these issues is true, there is very little evidence supporting the view that guns are frequently used in defense against criminals other than survey data and anecdote. - - Bill Dickens William T. Dickens The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 Phone: (202) 797-6113 FAX: (202) 797-6181 E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AOL IM: wtdickens
Re: Lott
Who knows the impact on crime of simply having an NRA sticker on the front window of a home, or a sign that says, This home protected by Smith and Wesson. No way to know (even with a survey) the number of times owning or giving the perception of owning a fire arm has provided disincentive to a would be criminal. Fred Childress Economist Bureau of Labor Statistics 2 Massachusetts Avenue, NE. Washington, DC 20212 Perhaps one could get someone on a police department to keep a record, each time he investigates a burglary, of whether there was or was not such a sticker visible on the front of the house? Or one could do a followup study--compare a random sample of houses in a neighborhood that had been burgled with a random sample of houses that hadn't, to see what fraction of each had evidence of firearm ownership readily visible. -- David Friedman Professor of Law Santa Clara University [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
Re: Lott
How would one estimate the accuracy of self-reports of self-defense? I know in medical research you can assess the validity of self-reported health by doing follow up medical exams or seeing if the respondent dies or becomes seriously ill shortly after the survey. One possibility would be to check for consistency with other measures. Suppose, for example, one had a poll of criminals, taken in some situation where they had no reason to lie. Every case of a victim frightening a way a criminal by brandishing a gun at him ought in principle to show up on both sides of the transaction. For an analogous case, one can check poll results on sexual activity by heterosexuals by comparing what men say with what women say. -- David Friedman Professor of Law Santa Clara University [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
Re: Lott
It's my understanding that Kleck uses FBI crime statistics in his computations. Those are estimates of the active use of firearms to deter crimes. It appears that the ownership of firearms also passively discourages crimes: while the US has a hire rate of public crime than in Europe, the Europeans have higher rates of home breakins and so forth. In Europe a criminal knows that people won't be armed at home; in America a criminal has a much higher chance of finding unarmed people in public than in homes. I understand that every state that's adopted general concealled carry has seen significant drops in public crime rates; Florida saw its homicide rate go from 50% above the national average to just below it in the year after adopting general concealled carry. I understand also that since the big Australian and British gun confiscations of the 1990s that both countries have been beset by large increases in crime while crime rates in America (and indeed often the actual number of crimes) has continued to decline. DBL
Re: Lott
... The thing that makes me extremely skeptical of these numbers is that I don't know a single gun owner who carries his/her gun outside the house unless the trip is to use the gun (to hunt or for target shooting). The vast majority of crimes against individuals are not perpetrated against people who are at home with their guns. For these numbers to be right I suspect there would have to be a whole lot more people carrying concealed weapons or a whole lot more home invasions that statistics would suggest. - - Bill Dickens I'm not sure of just how the figures are stated. What about business owners in high crime neighborhoods? I can imagine lots of cases where the owner has a gun behind the counter or wherever, pulls it, and the person trying to rob him leaves. -- David Friedman Professor of Law Santa Clara University [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
Re: Lott
Two last comments on the Lott business. First, there is a reasonably good summary by Tim Noah in Slate, http://slate.msn.com/id/2078084/ Second, a private email pointed out that in my deeply cynical post on Lott, my reference to the Lott discussion was about the whole dispute, much of it on web logs, not just the Armchair discussion. So my post very misleadingly sounded like an attack on Bill Dickens, the only critic of Lott on the list. It was not intended as such, because the criticisms Bill makes of Lott are fair, although I think overstated. My apologies. Bill Sjostrom + William Sjostrom Senior Lecturer Centre for Policy Studies National University of Ireland, Cork Cork, Ireland +353-21-490-2091 (work) +353-21-463-4056 (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ucc.ie/~sjostrom/
RE: Lott
Thanks for the link about Slate, but there is something fairly annoying. Lott claims: In 98 percent of the cases, such polls show, people simply brandish the weapon to stop an attack. Tim Noah, disputes this, yet also FAILS to say what the polls do show. But polls by the Los Angeles Times, Gallup, and Peter Hart show no such thing. So what do they show? 95% 50% 88.8%? If it's over 90%, then Lott's exageration is not such a big deal. Tim's other attack is on the fake persona. But I agree more with D. Friedman about accepting fakes on the internet. As an aside, CIAO is an org where, among other things, reviewers review lots of stuff -- including other reviewers. And they can signify trust in various reviewers. On the other hand, Lott doing this makes me trust him much less. Tom Grey
Re: Lott
I seem to recall a journalist in Boston being terminated for writing a "composite" story a few years ago. While the "facts" of the story were accurate, the "character" was ficticious. Shouldn't academics be held to the same standard? TW
Re: Lott
He represented himself as someone who had taken courses from himself and presented testimonials about his character from that persona. That isn't lying? I confess I find the whole discussion of John Lott a bit bizarre, although it may be that after nearly two decades of working as a full time academic, I am willing to settle for academics who do not commit battery on their colleagues (I have seen it more than once, and it has been unpunished). I am not pleased by Lott's presenting false testimonials, although given the massive personal assault he has endured since his book, it does not surprise me a lot. It is unusual academic behavior. In my experience, academics are more inclined to stick to anonymity when they start libelous rumors about other academics. But if we are going to talk about firing people, then it seems to me that a little consistency is in order. Remember the JMCB replication project, that ended with piles of irreproducible papers? I do not recall that leading to dismissals. Lott has his data sets available, online. I had no economist, now at Harvard, tell me he would not publish in the AER once they started demanding that data sets be revealed. I do not think he was hiding fraud, just acknowledging that the profession offers zero rewards for putting together a good data set, and he did not want anyone to beat him to publications. Nevertheless, if replication is the hallmark of science, then Lott is among the least of the profession's sinners. I have rarely had an economist refuse to share a data set; they just ignore the request. So let us start with the serious offenses. Should every failure to share data be a firing offense? What if you share the data and your published results are reproducible? Those of not at think tanks have to teach. A former colleague walked into a seminar one day, completely unprepared, with his coffee cup, and spent two hours telling grad students they should think of questions to ask about the coffee cup. He called this cupology. Will every case of unprepared teaching gets the same scrutiny, or is it just the politically unfashionable Lott who gets scrutiny.. Lott's offense strikes me as trivial by academic standards. I am willing to cooperate with pillorying Lott if every academic gets the same degree of scrutiny. William Sjostrom + William Sjostrom Senior Lecturer Centre for Policy Studies National University of Ireland, Cork Cork, Ireland +353-21-490-2091 (work) +353-21-427-3920 (fax) +353-21-463-4056 (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ucc.ie/~sjostrom/
Re: Lott
I disagree on the second point. John Lott's children are just as free to submit reviews as anyone else--and lots of people use false names on Usenet. The more interesting question is whether his son had read the book--but I gather his mother helped with the review, and she surely has. -- David Friedman David, I wouldn't dispute his son's or his wife's right to write the review or use assumed names. However, if any member of my family did that (particularly if they were using my pen name as in this case) I would certainly ask them not to as I would consider it very dishonest. Using a pen name isn't necessarily a breach of ethics, but if the purpose would be to cover up ones personal relationship to the author, it certainly is. That is information that should affect how people reading the review interpret it (I would put less weight on a review of one of my books from my family than from an anonymous third party). Further, if my family went ahead and submitted the review, despite my request that they not do it, I would inform Amazon of their true identities. I would hope that I would do this without any extrinsic incentive simply because it would be the right thing to do, but in part I would do it because I would be scared silly that: 1) people would think that I had written the review and had committed a serious breach of academic ethics (there would be no way to prove that I didn't if the review is submitted from my home computer) . 2) Such a breach of ethics would rightly call into question my integrity and therefore my reliability as a scholar. I wouldn't think it at all unreasonable for people to believe that someone who played fast and loose with truth in one arena wouldn't in others. Most of the value of an academic work is lost if you can't trust the written to accurately represent the facts. If you have to check every footnote and re-run every regression that someone presents in most cases there is little point in reading what they write. 3) The perceived loss of integrity would adversely affect all my colleagues at Brookings as people would rightly ask what sorts of standards Brookings was applying in its hiring. 4) I would therefore expect that the institution would investigate the facts of the matter and finding that I took no action to stop the publication of the deceptive review or to inform the public of its deceptive nature once it was published that I would be fired to protect the reputation of the institution. As I said, it will be interesting to see how AEI responds to this. - - Bill Dickens
Re: Lott
--- William Dickens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm quite sure that if this happened with a Brookings scholar he would be fired. It will be interesting to see what AEI does. Hats off to Sanchez at Cato for discovering this. Writing under a pen name while creating no lies regarding the actual issues involved is a fireable offense?! -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Lott
Writing under a pen name while creating no lies regarding the actual issues involved is a fireable offense?! He represented himself as someone who had taken courses from himself and presented testimonials about his character from that persona. That isn't lying? More to the point. Allowing a family member to submit a review of a book under a false name is a pretty serious breach of academic integrity. - - Bill Dickens
Re: Lott
--- William Dickens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: He represented himself as someone who had taken courses from himself and presented testimonials about his character from that persona. That isn't lying? Not about the issues involved. The debate is about violent crime, not Lott. Frankly, given that he was writing under a pen name, I think it is funny that he'd make up a goofy little story about himself. It did have him saying to take listen to other economists and get difference views after all. If under his nom de plume, or however it's spelled, he fairly represented the facts and arguments of the gun-control debate, then he's committed no transgression--other than having a little fun. Probably the only reason he shouldn't have done it is that the state of logical reasoning in our society is so poor that ad hominems have considerable weight with alot of people. He has probably given fodder to those whose rhetorical style is a little, for lack of a better phrase, ad captandum vulgus. More to the point. Allowing a family member to submit a review of a book under a false name is a pretty serious breach of academic integrity. To amazon.com? I don't know about that. The forum operates under effective anonymity, with no references, virtually no standards, and little (if any) editorial review. His kid writes a review and submits it to amazon.com under his pen name? I don't see the harm. I respect your view on this, but I strongly disagree with it. I see no reason to judge Lott poorly as a result of this. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Lott
Writing under a pen name while creating no lies regarding the actual issues involved is a fireable offense?! He represented himself as someone who had taken courses from himself and presented testimonials about his character from that persona. That isn't lying? More to the point. Allowing a family member to submit a review of a book under a false name is a pretty serious breach of academic integrity. - - Bill Dickens I disagree on the second point. John Lott's children are just as free to submit reviews as anyone else--and lots of people use false names on Usenet. The more interesting question is whether his son had read the book--but I gather his mother helped with the review, and she surely has. -- David Friedman Professor of Law Santa Clara University [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
