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John Richard Lott Jr. (born May 8, 1958) is a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has previously held research positions at other academic 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 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. 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. He is also known for taking conservative positions on a wide range of political issues.

Academic career

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

Lott has also held positions 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 senior research scientist in the University of Maryland Foundation 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. Since March 2008 he has been a weekly columnist for Fox News.

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.

Among economics, law, and business researchers, Lott's research is the sixth most downloaded on the Social Science Research Network. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman said that "John Lott has few equals as a perceptive analyst of controversial public policy issues." Newsweek also referred to Lott as "The Gun Crowd's Guru." Lott is also listed in "Who's Who in Economics."

Lott's work

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

Concealed weapons and crime rate

In his 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, Cardozo School of Law professor John O. McGinnis, and University of Mississippi professor William F. Shughart. The book also received favorable reviews from academics 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. However, Lott's book did in fact account for variables such as cocaine prices and tried several other ways to deal with this question. 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 only still show statistically significant drops 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.

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 "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." 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 cited the figure frequently in the media, including publications like the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

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. Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz's 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together. Lott explained the lower rates found by others was at least in part due to the different questions that were asked. 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.

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

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With Kevin Hassett at the American Enterprise Institute, Lott has investigated media bias. 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.

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

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In work 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.

Fluorescent lighting

In June 2008 an opinion piece by Lott about compact fluorescent light bulbs was featured on the FOX News website. 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."

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

Defamation suit

On April 10, 2006, John 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. In a series of email communications to an economist, John McCall, who pointed to a number of papers in different academic publications that had replicated Lott's work, Levitt said that Lott's work 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.

A federal judge found that Levitt's claim in Freakonomics was not defamation, but 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, and that he knew that "scholars with varying opinions" had been invited to participate.

The dismissal of the second part of Lott's suit was unanimously upheld by The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on February 11, 2009. In a strongly worded opinion, the Court opined:

To the extent that Lott is complaining about an attack on his ideas, and not his character, he is barking up the wrong tree. The remedy for this kind of academic dispute is the publication of a rebuttal, not an award of damages.

Anti-gun group posing as Lott on website and emails

An anti-gun organization set up a website pretending to be run by Lott. 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. "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."

Disputed survey

In the course of a dispute with Otis Dudley Duncan in 1999-2000, Lott claimed to have undertaken a national survey of 2,424 respondents in 1997. The data from the survey was lost in a claimed hard disk crash. Only two people who claimed to have been interviewed in the survey have come forward, only ten academics who claim to have lost data with Lott in the hard disk crash or who claim to have had first hand knowledge of the crash have come forward, and Lott was only able to provide his tax records for the deductions that made to pay for the survey to select academics. A second survey that Lott conducted used the same questions from the first survey and obtained similar results.

Chatroom 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. Lott immediately 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.

Bibliography

References

  1. Social Science Research Network
  2. John Lott's Website
  3. Fox News
  4. "Revealed Performances" Worldwide Rankings of Economists and Economics Departments 1969-2000, by Tom Coupe, Ecares, Universite Libre de Bruxelles (pdf)
  5. "" European Economic Association
  6. "Social Science Research Network"
  7. "Peter Brimelow, Guns, Drugs And Insider Trading, Forbes Magazine, September 18, 2000"
  8. "Matt Bai, The Gun Crowd's Guru: John Lott has a high profile--and a target on his back, Newsweek, March 12, 2001"
  9. "Mark Blaug and Howard R. Vane, Who's Who in Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing, September 2003"
  10. Benson, Bruce L. (1999). "Review of More Guns, Less Crime". Public Choice. 100 (3–4): 309. doi:10.1023/A:1018689310638. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  11. McGinnis, John O. (July 20, 1998). "Trigger Happiness". National Review. 50 (13): 49.
  12. Shughart, William F. (April 1, 1999). "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws: Review". Southern Economic Journal. 65 (4): 978. doi:10.2307/1061296.
  13. Back cover, More Guns, Less Crime
  14. Hemenway, David (December 31, 1998). "More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding crime and gun-control laws / Making A Killing: The business of guns in America". The New England Journal of Medicine. 339 (27): 2029–30. doi:10.1056/NEJM199812313392719.
  15. "Plassmann and Whitley Stanford Law Review (2003)" Confirming More Guns, Less Crime, by Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley, 2003, p. 1361
  16. Ayres, Ian (2003). "Shooting Down the 'More Guns, Less Crime' Hypothesis". Stanford Law Review. 55 (4): 1193. doi:10.2139/ssrn.343781. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  17. Kleck, Gary (1997). Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control. New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.
  18. Black, Dan A. (1998). "Do Right-to-Carry Laws Deter Violent Crime?". Journal of Legal Studies. 27 (1): 214. doi:10.1086/468019. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  19. "Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review (2004)" Appendix A Dissent by James Q. Wilson, retrieved January 11, 2006
  20. Glenn, David (May 9, 2003). "'More Guns, Less Crime' Thesis Rests on a Flawed Statistical Design, Scholars Argue". The Chronicle of Higher Education. 49 (35): A18. Retrieved 2007-05-27.
  21. "How Dramatically Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?" by John R. Lott Jr. and Larry Kenny, Journal of Political Economy, 1999
  22. Lott, Jr., John R. (1998-06-23). "Keep Guns out of Lawyers' Hands". Wall Street Journal. p. 1.
  23. Lott, Jr., John R. (1998-12-01). "Cities Target Gun Makers in Bogus Lawsuits". Los Angeles Times. p. 7.
  24. McDowall, David (Summer 2005). "John R. Lott, Jr.'s Defensive Gun Brandishing Estimates". Public Opinion Quarterly. 69 (2): 246. doi:10.1093/poq/nfi015.
  25. Gary Kleck, and Marc Gertz, “Defensive Gun Use: Vengeful vigilante imagery versus reality: results from the National Self-Defense Survey,” Journal of Criminal Justice, Vol. 26 (1998)
  26. Discussion of different surveys on defensive gun use http://www.johnlott.org/files/GeneralDisc97_02Surveys.zip
  27. "The Reputational Penalties for Environmental Violations: Empirical Evidence" by Jonathan M. Karpoff, John R. Lott Jr., Eric Wehrly, Journal of Law and Economics, Forthcoming
  28. "SSRN-Is Newspaper Coverage of Economic Events Politically Biased? by John Lott, Kevin Hassett". Papers.ssrn.com. Retrieved 2008-12-26.
  29. "Does a Helping Hand Put Others At Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime" by John R. Lott, Jr. Economic Inquiry, April 2000
  30. "Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births" by John R. Lott, Jr. and John Whitley Economic Inquiry, April 2007
  31. "Looking at Fluorescent Bulbs in Different Light" by John R. Lott, Jr, June 2008
  32. "A Simple Explanation for Why Campaign Expenditures are Increasing: The Government is Getting Bigger" by John R. Lott Jr., Journal of Law and Economics., October 2000
  33. "The Judicial Confirmation Process: The Difficulty in Being Smart" by John R. Lott, Jr., Journal of Empirical Law and Economics, 2005: 407-447
  34. "Nonvoted ballots and discrimination in Florida" by John R. Lott, Jr., Journal of Legal Studies, January 2003
  35. PDF of Lott's complaint v. Levitt
  36. Higgins, Michael (2006-04-11). "Best-seller leads scholar to file lawsuit; Defamation allegation targets U. of C. author". Chicago Tribune. p. 3.
  37. "Judge Castillo issues decision on Lott v. Levitt" on John Lott's website
  38. Glenn, David (2007-08-10). "Dueling Economists Reach Settlement in Defamation Lawsuit". Chronicle of Higher Education. 53 (49): 10.
  39. "7th Circuit Affirmation of District Court Dismissal of Defamation Lawsuit"
  40. Jennifer Harper, "Gunning for Lott," WASHINGTON TIMES, August 1, 2003.]
  41. ^ Jeff Johnson, "Fraudulent 'Ask John Lott' Website Now Claims to Be Parody," Cybercast News Service, August 6, 2003.
  42. Jeff Johnson, "Gun Statistics Expert John Lott Victim of Identity Theft," Cybercast News Service, August 04, 2003.
  43. ^ "Evidence of Survey". Cite error: The named reference "reason" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  44. "Scholar Invents Fan To Answer His Critics" Richard Morin, Washington Post, February 1, 2003; Page C01

External links

Lott's websites

Regarding Lott's research

Studies based on Lott's gun research

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

Refereed articles in academic journals:

Publications in student-edited journals:

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