Deltoid

Helland and Tabarrok’s paper ‘Using Placebo Laws to Test “More Guns, Less Crime”‘ has been published in Advances in Economic Analysis & Policy. Their objective was to correct for serial correlations in the crime data. I explained earlier how, if crimes rates in adjacent counties tend to behave in the same way, results could wrongly appear to be statistically significant. There is a similar problem with crime rates in the same county in two successive years tending to be the same. Helland and Tabarrok use a technique (placebo laws) that deals with serial corelation as well as clustering within a state. They find that almost all of Lott’s results are no longer statistically significant once corrected for serial correlation and clustering within state. Out of fifteen different estimates of the effect of carry laws on violent crime, only murder in the trend model was statistically significant, and you would expect one out of twenty estimates to be statistically significant by chance.

About the only bright note for Lott in Helland and Tabarrok’s paper was the “Cross-Equation Restrictions” where they find statistically significant the fact that there were increases in property crime combined with decreases in violent crime. Unfortunately this only happens with the dummy variable model which Lott abandoned in the second edition of More Guns, Less Crime. In that edition Lott switched to looking at changes in crime trends, where there were decreases in violent crime and decreases in property crime. If increases in property crime are evidence for Lott’s thesis, then decreases in property crimes must be evidence against it.

So what is Lott’s take on Helland and Tabarrok’s paper? Let me quote his entire comment(1/18/04 entry on his blog):

Eric Helland and Alex Taborrak’s paper in Advances in Economic Policy and Analysis uses a “placebo law” approach to test the impact of right-to-carry laws on crime rates. Unlike the clustering approach, the placebo approach can also solve autocorrelation problems and Helland and Tabarrok find that murder, rape and robbery rate trends fall consistently after right-to-carry laws are adopted. Examining county level crime data for the U.S. from 1977 to 1997 they find that:

even with the revised standard errors the trend model indicates that shall-issue laws cause a large and significant drop in the murder trend rate.”

Lott makes it look like their paper supports his thesis. He does not mention that the placebo approach produces larger standard errors than the clustering approach, making his results less certain. Nor does he mention that almost all his results become insignificant. Instead, he implies that they found significant decreases in rape and robbery when they did not. He also gets the dates wrong for their trend analysis, which just uses data from 1977 to 1992. This is an important difference, since if you use 1977 to 1997 the reduction in murder trends is halved and might not even be significant under the placebo approach.

Lott also makes it look like they set out to test his “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis and confirmed it. But as they made clear, their goal was different:

In this paper, we focus attention on the uncertainty surrounding the estimated effects, and we primarily follow Lott s formulation in the spirit of examining his results under the best-case scenario. Our goal is to explain, illustrate, and apply the placebo law technique to an issue of importance.

The best-case scenario for Lott is that only the murder trend declined significantly and even that is likely to go away if more data is considered.

This isn’t the first time Lott has misrepresented their paper. Look here and here for more.

I while ago I wrote on John Ray’s claims that environmentalists were wrong about ozone depletion. I think it is quite clear that subsequent research has vindicated the concerns of scientists about ozone depletion. The refusal of Ray to admit that the environmentalists could possibly be right about ozone depletion despite overwhelming evidence is telling—he believes that environmentalists are wrong, irrespective of the facts in any case.

I’ve found another ozone hole denier. In this post, Sylvain Galineau dismisses the ozone hole as “propaganda”. I tried to discuss this with him in his comments and he offered three arguments for his position.

1. In response to my point that the 1995 Nobel prize for chemistry had been awarded for the work on ozone depletion, he argued that this was “an appeal to authority and establishes nothing.” [Correction: That was Galineau’s co-blogger Jonathan Gewirtz.] Galineau opined that the award was a “sacred cow” and had been influenced by politics. Unfortunately, Galineau does not seem to understand that “appeal to authority” is only a fallacy if the authority is just an authority on some unrelated subject. I’m not an expert on chemistry so I have to rely on the opinions of experts. I’m certainly not going to rely on the opinion of Galineau, who is not an expert and has an axe to grind.
2. He argued that the threat of ozone depletion had been depicted at the time as something that had already occurred over habitable regions rather than as something that would happen if CFCs continued to be used. I said that my recollection was different and asked him to provide examples. He responded with this story, which wasn’t from the 80s but from just a few months ago. It does warn about dangers of ozone depletion over habitable areas, but that’s because such depletion has been observed since the 80s. I posted a link describing such observations, but Galineau deleted it, calling it an “offtopic rant”.
3. He argued that people would have just stopped using CFCs and switched to more expensive alternatives without the Montreal protocol. I pointed to this graph, which shows that, despite concerns first being raised in the mid 70s, CFC production continued to increase until Montreal. Immediately after Montreal it declined rapidly. Galineau dismissed this as a “coincidence”. He further argued that companies would have got consumers to switch (absent Montreal) by increasing prices for CFCs. This argument seems profoundly ignorant of the way markets work.

Galineau repeatedly demanded that I produce evidence for my position. When I did, he edited my post to delete the evidence, claiming that it was “offtopic”. I must confess that I did include this link, debunking Galineau’s claims about DDT. It wasn’t about ozone, but it was relevant to another part of his post.

I believe that Galineau, like John Ray, is an ideologue. They hold their beliefs about ozone regardless of the facts.

Update: I posted a link to this post in Galineau’s comment thread. Galineau deleted it. Unfortunately for him, his co-blogger Jonathan Gewirtz had already responded to this post in that thread, so he did not succeed in preventing readers from seeing my comments. Gewirtz writes:

Tim scores points WRT Sylvain’s imperfect knowledge of CFC production statistics, which proves… something.

The interesting thing about the CFC production facts is not that Galineau did not know what they were, but that when he found out what they were, it did not influence his beliefs at all. I am reminded of the story about Hegel who, when told that the facts did not agree with his theories, is supposed to have said “So much the worse for the facts.”

Update 2: Galineau’s blog, Chicago Boyz, as a gesture of admiration has pictures of some distinguished Chicago “boys” at its head, including seven Nobel laureates. One U of Chicago Nobel laureate that they don’t have is seen on this page: F. Sherwood Rowland, who shared the 1995 chemistry Nobel for his work on ozone depletion. Galineau expressed his admiration for this distinguished Chicago boy by calling him a “Nobel prized sacred cow”. His co-blogger Jonathan Gewirtz wrote “Nobel committees are influenced by politics and fads”.

Kevin Drum is rather annoyed than the LA Times has published an op-ed by Lott. Lott’s argument is that if someone doesn’t answer a question he can attribute to them whatever answer is most damaging to them. If we applied the same standard to Lott, then since he never answered my question as to why he removed the clustering correction from his model, we could assume that the answer was “I was trying to cook the results”.

The Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed by Kimberley Strassel who writes about Bellesiles:

Mr. Bellesiles, when asked to explain, provided ever-more outlandish excuses: that his notes had been lost in a flood, that his Web site had been hacked, that he couldn’t remember where he’d found certain documents.

which lambasts Bellesiles for his latest defence, a pamphlet entitled “Weighed in an Even Balance” and which is critical of Soft Skull Press for publishing the pamphlet and reissuing Bellesiles’ discredited book. I don’t think Bellesiles’ pamphlet successfully addresses the the serious criticism of his work and it does not change my opinion of what he has done.

But the Wall Street Journal is hardly in a position to criticize Soft Skull when it continues to publish John Lott. And while they have extensively covered Bellesiles’ problems (see here, here, and here, their silence about Lott has been deafening. Strassel wrote this about Bellesiles, but it seems to apply to Lott as well:

But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of L’affaire Bellesiles is that despite the enormity of the scandal, nearly every institution involved—from Emory University, to Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize Committee, to the publisher–has refused to take a professional or moral stance. The silence of these bodies—groups charged with maintaining the standards and ideals of the academic profession—has been so deafening, that even the traditionally closed-mouth world of scholars is calling for some public disclosure.

I wrote earlier about ozone depletion deniers John Ray and Sylvain Galineau. I’ve found another such denier and his name is John Lott. Lott wrote a positive review* of Environmental Overkill, a book written by Dixy Lee Ray with Lou Guzzo. In his review, Lott calls ozone depletion an “environmental myth” and a “scare story”.

Now, Lott’s false statements about ozone depletion might have been forgivable if Ray had made a good case against ozone depletion, but the quality of the science and scholarship in her work is appalling. Robert Parson has written a devastating critique of her chapters on ozone depletion. Parsons categorizes the problems with Ray’s work into four categories

1. Basic misconceptions about science. For example, the claim that CFCs cannot rise to the stratosphere because they are heavier than air. If this were true all the heavy gasses in the atmosphere would collect at sea level and the air would be unbreathable there.
2. False assertions that require a more detailed knowledge of the technical literature to refute. For example, the claim that explosive volcanic eruptions are a major source of stratospheric chlorine.
3. Statements presented in a misleading context and surrounded with false information.
4. Shoddy scholarship, ignoring the relevant scientific literature and instead uncritically relying on such bizarre sources as publications by Lyndon LaRouche’s associates

Suffice it to say that checking out any of Ray’s claims against her alleged sources would have shown them to be false. But Lott described her work as “solid” and endorsed it.

While I’m on the topic of ozone depletion denialists, this discussion on Sallie Baliunas is interesting, and Jim Norton has a whole page of links debunking various myths about ozone depletion.

*Lott’s review appeared in Regulation 16:4 pp 80–82 (unfortunately not available on-line).

A while ago I wrote how Lott had seriously misrepresented NCVS data and given dangerous advice when he claimed that in robberies and assaults passive behaviour “is by far the most likely to result in injury”. Lott has now posted a response where he falsifies a table in an attempt to prove his point.

Here’s the table Lott posted to support his claim:

Percent Injured after Self Protection Action
	Robbery	Assault
Any SP with gun	7.7%	3.6%
Chased, tried to catch O	9.6%	9.0%
Ran/drove away; tried to	4.9%	5.4%
Screamed from pain, fear	22.0%	12.6%
Threatened O without weapon	5.8%	13.6%
No SP measures at all	23.6%	55.2%

Notice how the numbers in in the last row are higher? I guess that proves that taking no self-protection measures is more dangerous… Except that Kleck’s table 7.1 (the table that Lott extracted from) actually has these numbers in it:

Percent Injured after Self Protection Action
	Robbery	Assault
Any SP with gun	7.7%	3.6%
Chased, tried to catch O	9.6%	9.0%
Ran/drove away; tried to	4.9%	5.4%
Screamed from pain, fear	22.0%	12.6%
Threatened O without weapon	5.8%	13.6%
No SP measures at all	–	–

Notice how the correct table doesn’t have any numbers in those last two cells? If you think about it, you’ll realize that it doesn’t make sense to have numbers in those cells. By definition, the number is zero. If you don’t take any self-protection action, it is just not possible to be injured after your self protection action. So where did the numbers in Lott’s version come from? Well, Lott copied them from a different column. He has used the numbers for whether the victim was injured at all, even though his table is labeled differently.

To see the difference this makes, here are the corresponding numbers for the other rows:

Percent Injured either before or after
	Robbery	Assault
Any SP with gun	12.8%	27.9%
Chased, tried to catch O	34.4%	58.2%
Ran/drove away; tried to	32.3%	38.4%
Screamed from pain, fear	69.3%	94.1%
Threatened O without weapon	30.0%	57.1%
No SP measures at all	23.6%	55.2%

Once you use comparable numbers, passive behaviour doesn’t look so bad.

Now, to be fair, this table doesn’t show that screaming is more dangerous than doing nothing since most of the people who screamed did so after they were injured, so you can’t blame the injury on the screaming. Unfortunately neither table tells us what we need to know to get an idea which is the safest choice. Really you’d have to ask the “No SP” people something like: “Consider the point in time when you had a chance to scream or try to run away or something. Were you injured after that point in time?” And I’m not sure whether you’d get a sensible answer from such a complicated question.

None of this, however, justifies Lott fabricating a table by mixing numbers from two different columns.

Apart from the one or two posts about John Lott I’ve also posted about ozone depletion denial, creationism and astroturf. All these topics, as well as Lott, come together in the person of Steve Milloy. Milloy runs a website junkscience.com that purports to debunk “junk science”.

Unsuspecting visitors might think that Milloy’s site is devoted to criticizing shoddy science, but they would be wrong. If you look at what he “debunks” you will find that the real criterion for deciding what is “junk science” is not the quality of the work, but the political agenda that it might support. Studies that support a right-wing agenda are endorsed, while studies that don’t are harshly criticized. John Quiggin noticed the same thing, while Milloy almost admits it in his definition of junk science:

“Junk science” is bad science used to further a special agenda, such as personal injury lawyers extorting deep-pocket businesses; the “food police,” environmental Chicken Littles and gun-control extremists advocating wacky social programs; overzealous regulators expanding bureaucratic power/budgets; cut-throat businesses attacking competitors; unethical businesses making bogus product claims; slick politicians; and wannabe scientists seeking fame and fortune.

He no longer uses this definition (too much of a give away?) but archive.org has preserved a copy.

Armed with this knowledge we can predict the junkscience.com verdict of any scientific result without having to even look at how the study was carried out. Here are some examples:

The ozone hole? Completely natural:

The same seasonal (and localised) depletion was actually discovered in the 1950s and recognised as an interesting natural phenomenon (interest then was centred on the massive increase in ozone levels over the south pole in late spring, early summer as the massive high concentrations from the adjacent temperate regions penetrate the weakening polar vortex). In the misanthropic ’80s it was given significant publicity and a character change - this time it was big, bad and (you guessed it) man-made while the parallel build up of ozone outside the polar vortex no longer rated a mention. Stratospheric ozone levels are volatile and seasonal, whether there has been any unusual change in ozone levels over the period is moot. There is only one certainty and that is that perceptions changed purely because the great ozone ‘hole’ got a new publicist.

Oh really? Look at this graph, which shows ozone levels in October at Halley Station in Antarctica. (from this page). Pretty obviously there was no hole in the 1950s. Anyone writing about ozone depletion who is unaware of this fact has to be actively avoiding learning the facts about ozone depletion.

The Theory of Evolution? A plot to promote atheism. (OK, Milloy didn’t write that article, but it was endorsed as the “Commentary of the Day”).

Laws that require safe storage of guns? A study by Cummings et al used a pooled time series design similar to Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime” to study the effect of laws that make gun owners criminally liable if someone is injured because a child gains unsupervised access to a gun. They found that the laws were associated with a 23% reduction in unintentional shooting deaths of children.

Here’s what Milloy writes about Cummings study:

This was an ecologic epidemiology study, meaning the conclusion is based on very “macro” comparisons of groups of people. The study involved no data about individuals, just groups. Traditionally, these studies are only useful for forming hypotheses for further testing, not irrefutable facts.

In particular, no data was collected on compliance with these laws and the relationship of compliance to the decrease in injuries. There may have been fewer unintentional firearm-related injuries in states with safe storage laws, but this study assumed compliance with the laws and assumed that compliance is responsible for the decrease in injuries. A big assumption considering the result.

The reported 23% decrease in injuries is a pretty weak result-probably beyond the capability of the ecologic type of study to reliably detect. Even in the better types of epidemiology studies (i.e., cohort and case-control), rate increases of less than 100% (and rate decreases of less than 50%) are very suspect.

So how much stock can be put in a weak result based on inadequate data?

Now this criticism applies equally to Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime”, only more so, since the crime decreases found by Lott were much less than 23%. (For the bit that reads “assumed compliance with the laws” you need to read “assumed frequent encounters between criminals and permit holders”.) So what is Milloy’s take on “More Guns, Less Crime”? Does he call it an even weaker result based on inadequate data? No, he endorses it

I emailed Milloy and asked him to explain his inconsistent treatment of the Cummings and Lott studies. His reply:

That wasn’t my summary… but quotes from the article.

The weakness is the article is that there is no direct link that it is gun ownership that is causing the decline in violent crime. But the statistics cited are actuarial, not estimated or hypothesized.

Yes, he didn’t write the summary that praised Lott’s work, but he did endorse the summary instead of treating Lott’s study like that of Cummings. And actually Cummings’ study used actuarial statistics while Lott did not, so his “explanation” is nonsense. No, it is clear that to Milloy, Cummings is junk science, while Lott is to be endorsed.

Given all of the above, it should come as no surprise that junkscience.com is another astroturf operation. As part of the Tobacco Settlement Agreement Philip Morris agreed to release millions of documents about their operations. These detail how TASSC (The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition) was a front secretly created and funded by a PR firm acting for Philip Morris. Here is the key document (with annotations by Stewart Fist). TASSC and junkscience.com shared the same address and were both run by Milloy. Studies that find harmful effects from tobacco smoke seem to attract particularly venomous attacks from junkscience.com. PR Watch has the full story of Milloy’s history.

And this conduct by Milloy is absolutely disgraceful.

Update:The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was folded up in 1998, but the term “sound science” continues to be used in the same, political, way. Chris Mooney has the scoop on the latest developments.

Apparently, authors have been using reviews at Amazon.com to anonymously praise their own books and pan rival books. Who knew? It seems a glitch at Amazon’s Canadian site revealed the names of all the anonymous reviewers. And yes, I checked and it’s fixed now. I also checked Google’s cache and archive.org. If you have looked at Lott’s book at Amazon’s Canadian site in the past week, then check your browser’s disk cache—it might contain something interesting. I was actually looking at the reviews at Amazon’s main site last week, because Greg Kopp had posted in comments to this post, insisting that his fairy story about his review of Lott’s book was true, but I hadn’t looked at the Canadian site. Darn. (Hat tip for this story: Will Baude.)

Still on the subject of Amazon self-reviews, Lott’s famous self review gets a mention in a new paper on the effects of Amazon reviews. Tyler Cowen discusses it here.

Update: On his blog, Lott comments:

In other developments, the NY Times has a rather sympathetic discussion of authors who anonomously post reviews of their own books on Amazon.com. Apparently a glitch at Amazon.com resulted in the names of anonymous reviews being posted this last week on Amazon’s web site. Some people were apparently able to confirm (or not confirm) their suspicions on who writes all those positive or negative negative book reviews. Some very well known authors, such as John Rechy, were identified as writing reviews of their own books. Recently others such as Mark Moskowitz, an independent filmmaker, have been found to have solicited up to 3,000 friends to write a favorable review of a movie that he has coming out on DVD.

Phew! It’s OK, everyone else does it. Mind you, Lott’s not admitting to doing this himself, and he denies writing the Mary Rosh review of his book.

When I looked at the reviews of More Guns, Less Crime I wasn’t sure that this review was written by Lott:

If you are interested in the facts, read this book, July 10, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from Miami, Florida
A couple of friends of mine have been nagging me to read this book for a couple of years. When the second edition came out I finally gave in and got it (for $9.60 I couldn’t argue that the price was too high). Anyway, I am only sorry that I didn’t read this book earlier. As an academic and a person who has been somewhat anti-gun, I had two reactions to the book…

The only reason why I wasn’t sure was that the reviewer’s location was given as Miami. All the other Lott reviews were posted from places where he lived or worked. Maybe he was visiting Miami when he posted it, but there was still some doubt.

So I looked for other reviews posted from Miami and found this review of Kleck’s book:

Interesting reference book, though somewhat dry, July 10, 2000
Reviewer: sherwinrl from Miami, Florida

Kleck has but together quite a useful overview of the research on guns. I liked the detailed discussions of the existing literature, and, as a nonacademic, I did not find it too difficult to read. Unlike the other reviewers who are picking a fit between Kleck and Lott, I thought that both were valuable. They both have their strengths. Kleck’s is to use survey data, while Lott’s is to examine the impact of gun ownership and gun laws on crime rates. Both books go into the other’s territory (as they should), but their relative strengths are clear.

On the survey data, I wish that Kleck would have dealt more with the survey data about offensive gun use. I also wish that he could explain why his survey data does not imply a net benefit from using guns.

My only real complaint on the quality of the writing is that too much of the book is such and such shows this and such and such shows that and …. This is fine if the book is to serve as a reference source. It is not too thrilling to have to read through.

Posted the same day from the same location. Contains the phrase “as a nonacademic” while the other one has “as an academic”. Writes about Lott while reviewing Kleck. And look who supposedly wrote it: sherwinrl. That would be Sherwin R Lott, John Lott’s fourth son, the Sh in MaRy RoSh and no more than eight when this review was posted. Lott also posted a review under the name maximcl, his oldest child. Cute trick he has, posting under his children’s names. Anyway, the first review is confirmed as one by Lott and I’ve found yet another one of Lott’s reviews of Kleck.

And notice how in this review he writes “Unlike the other reviewers who are picking a fit between Kleck and Lott, I thought that both were valuable.” He’s referring to two previous reviews, one by “A reader from Philadelphia” and one by “A reader from Madison Wisconsin“. Only they were two more of Lott’s sock puppets. We’re entering higher-order sockpuppetry when you have your socks arguing with each other.

Seems like everybody is trying out the Gender Genie, which analyses a piece of text and guesses the gender of the writer.

So I gave it Mary Rosh’s writings to analyse. The verdict? Male. Well done, Gender Genie!

There has been quite a bit of reaction to my post on Milloy.

Michael Peckham writes “Milloy’s criticism may be right some of the time, but only when it fits his preconceived anti-regulatory agenda. ”

John Quiggin, at Crooked Timber and at his own blog observes that the link between Cato and Milloy reflects badly on Cato. Also the comments in the Crooked Timber have some attempts to defend Milloy against the charge that he is boosting creationism. Yes, Milloy offers the Theory of Evolution some faint praise, but he also thinks Creationism should get equal time with evolution and while he savagely criticizes real science, he won’t criticize creationist bunk.

Steve Michel writes

I read Milloy’s book a few years ago, and while some of it’s good, in general it’s just a conservative rant. It’s more interested in protecting big corporations from lawsuits (which are, admittedly, sometimes on the edges of science) than it is in, say, the kind of religiousy-correct junk science promoted by conservatives around the country.

Jeff writes “Tim Lambert does a good job illustrating the moral bankruptcy of a typical anti-liberal - Steve Milloy of junkscience.com”

Radagast examines Milloy’s article on mad cows and finds it wanting.

Demosthenes comments on Milloy and TASSC (the tobacco companies’ astroturf operation).

I always have believed and always will believe that it’s not the arguer but the argument that is important. Even if Milloy works for Phillip Morris, he may have a point. Still, this sort of willful misrepresentation bothers me a lot.

I agree that the argument is more important than the arguer, that’s why I didn’t mention Milloy’s funding source till after I had demolished his claims. The funding explains why he made so many false claims, it does not prove that those claims are false.

Meanwhile, John Brignell has attempted a defence (scroll to bottom of page) of Milloy. He ignores the substance of the criticism and focuses on the language so that he can dismiss the criticism as name calling. He complains that pointing out that Milloy is funded by tobacco companies is “playing the man and not the ball”. His objection would have a tiny bit more force if he hadn’t immediately turned around and gone for the man himself by implying that John Quiggin is unqualified to criticize Milloy:

A is able to call B a charlatan. B holds a B.A. in Natural Sciences from the Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Health Sciences in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, a Juris Doctorate from the University of Baltimore and a Master of Laws from the Georgetown University Law Center. The qualifications of A must be pretty impressive. Wonder what they are.

Unfortunately, when Brignell goes for his man, he misses and falls flat on his face. Compare Milloy’s CV with Quiggin’s CV. As far as I can tell, Milloy has never conducted any research and has published only one paper, which was a poster at a conference and he wasn’t even the first author, while Quiggin has well over one hundred refereed journal papers. I wrote to Brignell suggesting that he provide links to both CVs so his readers could judge the matter for themselves, but Brignell did not so (though he did list Quiggin’s degrees).

In an update, Brignell finally gets around to commenting on the substance of the criticism. He claims, without offering any evidence, that on the scientific issues Milloy is largely correct. He does disagree with Milloy about the gun lobbying, so it would seem that he thinks that this claim is correct:

The same seasonal (and localised) depletion was actually discovered in the 1950s and recognised as an interesting natural phenomenon (interest then was centred on the massive increase in ozone levels over the south pole in late spring, early summer as the massive high concentrations from the adjacent temperate regions penetrate the weakening polar vortex). In the misanthropic ’80s it was given significant publicity and a character change - this time it was big, bad and (you guessed it) man-made while the parallel build up of ozone outside the polar vortex no longer rated a mention. Stratospheric ozone levels are volatile and seasonal, whether there has been any unusual change in ozone levels over the period is moot. There is only one certainty and that is that perceptions changed purely because the great ozone ‘hole’ got a new publicist.

And just to be sure, here is what Brignell wrote about it earlier:

Watch out for a new bunch of mysterious figures lurking about Britain’s beauty spots at the dead on night. They are not smugglers or clandestine lovers, but fridge dumpers. It is the latest coup by the almighty Greens of the EU. Believe it or not, because of new EU regulations, DEFRA, fresh from its foot and mouth triumph, is asking the British to refrain from buying fridges. It is now illegal to dispose of both the coolant and the insulant in fridges, but in Britain there is no legal way of doing it. All because of a hole in the ozone layer that was probably always there and an unproven theory as to how it was caused.

Brignell read my post which contains this graph, that shows ozone levels in October at Halley Station in Antarctica. (from this page). It is perfectly clear that there was no hole in the 1950s. It is perfectly clear that the hole was not always there. There is not one scrap of evidence to support Brignell’s claim. Yet even when confronted with the evidence that proves his claim is false he continues to maintain that it is true. Disgraceful.

A study that found a link between antibiotic use and breast cancer has been in the news and sure enough Steve Milloy has attacked it, calling it “baloney”. One interesting thing I’ve noticed about Milloy is the large number of people who independently come to the conclusion that he is full of it. In this post modisch details how dreadful Milloy’s arguments are. While in this post Myria, who seems generally sympathetic to Milloy, concludes:

Frankly FOX should be embarrassed to have this poorly thought out criticism on their site.

When I saw the story about the Amazon.ca unmasking anonymous reviewers, I took myself over there to see what I could find. Well, they had fixed the glitch, but I noticed that for some reviews, the location given for the reviewer was different on the Canadian site. This difference lets me more more certain that Lott has reviewed his own books, and also helped me find three more Lott self-reviews.

Amazon’s Canadian and US sites treat the location of the reviewer differently. On the US site, all the reviews by a reviewer have the same location—the one given for the most recent review. On the Canadian site the location is the one given when the review was posted. For example, in Lott’s review of Joyce Lee Malcolm’s book his location is listed as Swarthmore on the US site and as Washington DC on the Canadian site. There are several other reviews with the same pattern—these ones are certain to have been written by Lott. This table lists all the reviews for which there are two locations—notice how the Canadian location is always some place where Lott lived or worked.

Title	Date	Amazon.ca location	Amazon.com location
More Guns, Less Crime	August 8, 1998	Chicago	Madison, Wisconsin
Are Predatory Commitments Credible?	July 29, 1999	Washington, D.C.	(none)
More Guns, Less Crime	July 30, 1999	Philadelphia	(none)
Gun Violence: The Real Costs	September 21, 2001	Washington, DC	Swarthmore, PA USA
More Guns, Less Crime	November 8, 2001	Washington, DC	Swarthmore, PA USA
Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control	December 31, 2001	Philadelphia	Washington, DC
Guns and Violence: The English Experience	September 16, 2002	Washington, DC	Swarthmore, PA USA
Nine Crazy Ideas in Science	October 23, 2002	Washington, DC	Swarthmore, PA USA

And notice that two reviews did not have a location at the US site. I picked them as probable Lott reviews because of the style. The Canadian site places them in Philadelphia and in Washington, confirming that Lott wrote them.

Also this review, posted at Barnes and Noble on April 19, 1999 by “A reviewer, from Madison, Wisconsin”, was also posted to Amazon on January 15, 1999. Amazon.com doesn’t give any location, but Amazon.ca says it’s from Chicago.

There was no location given for the reviewer below at Amazon.com, and while the writing style is Lott’s it was too short for me to be certain enough to call it as another Lott review, but at Amazon.ca, the reviewer’s location is Madison, where Lott was living at the time.

Extremely well written book, August 10, 1998
Reviewer: A customer from Madison, Wisconisn
This book explodes many myths about crime and guns. Professor Lott has put together a truly monumental study on crime. This is one book that people will be discussing for many years to come.

This review has no location at Amazon.com. Lott was working in Chicago at the time.

A straight forward accounting of both the benefits and costs, April 30, 1999
Reviewer: A customer from Chicago, Illinois

This book may not have completely changed my mind on the issue of gun control, but I have certainly gone from automatically supporting controls to a much more agnostic position. A friend of mine had been begging me for a while to read the book, and I have to confess that I am glad that she did. It has surely caused me to think more critically about the current debate.

I must say I have been most impressed by Professor Lott’s ability to acknowledge both the costs and bennefits of guns. When there are costs or benefits Lott lays them out and tries to measure them.

I have also been learned that what might appear to be the most obvious response is not always the best. With all the heat that this debate has generated, it is nice to see someone clearly and dispationately lay out all the evidence.

Lott pretends to be a gun control supporter swayed by his book. And promotes himself to Professor again. Cute.

Anyway, I’ve found three more Lott self-reviews, and strongly confirmed Lott as the author of several other reviews.

After finding some clues on Amazon’s Canadian site that revealed three more of Lott’s reviews, I decided to check their other sites. On their German site I found the review below. This review seems to have also been deleted when the Mary Rosh review was deleted. I think that was because this review was posted anonymously from Mary Rosh’s Amazon account (it’s from Philadelphia, just like Mary’s one). and when Amazon deleted deleted all of Mary Rosh’s reviews they also deleted the anonymous ones.

Very well written, solid researched book, 30. Januar 2000
Rezensentin/Rezensent: Rezensentin/Rezensent aus Philadelphia

This book is an excellent read that demolishes the many myths spread in the popular press about guns and crime. By grossly exaggerating the risks of having a gun in the home and failing to report the frequent defensive uses of guns, the media endangers people’s lives.

I have a hard time believing that most of the negative reviewers have even read the book. The reviewer who worries about the impact of Florida on the results could not have read the book (see for example pp. 139-41). It is simply bizarre to claim that Lott doesn’t give enough attention to the issue of causality. Not only does the decline in crime occur in many different states when those states adopted their laws in many different years. But the decline is closely related to the number of permits issued. Lott also goes through evidence of counties which border each other in neighboring states with and without the right to carry laws. Guess what the crime rate goes down in the county with the law at the same time that it is going up in the neighboring county without the law. Lott has about 5 other points on the issue of causality.

The earlier reviewer from Australia who mentions the international comparison has definitely not read the book. Lott specifically points out how when you look at all the countries for which the data is available higher gun ownership countries do not have higher homicide rates. This myth is because of the selective picking of only a few countries to make a comparison with.

Finally, let me say that those who attack the book because it is supposedly not a fun read are just trying to discourage others from reading the book. I have seen statements from everyone from Tom Sowell to Milton Friedman to James Q. Wilson saying what a well written book this is and how valuable of a factual source it is. Those attacking the book will stop at nothing to keep other people from even looking at it. They know that once people read it they will understand that all the attacks on it are completely bogus. The media has done a horrible job covering this book. It is so easy to verify whether Lott has taken into account the other explanations for why crime rates have changed over time, and they are afraid that those who have lied about Lott’s research will lose their credibility.

Those attacking Lott will stop at nothing to keep you from reading this book. Don’t let them succeed. As Sean Hannity says, “this is the most important, best written book that has ever been written on guns.”

Once again we have Lott replying to previous reviews. His claim that the reviewer who said his book was not a fun read was trying to stop people from reading it seems rather paranoid. That reviewer was recommending the book despite its dullness. Here’s the review that set Lott off:

In More Guns Less Crime, John Lott fires away at the fatuous assumptions that empower most forms of gun control. While he hits many bulls-eyes and scores several important points, the book misses the mark of being a real page-turner. It reads more like an extensive case study (in reality it summarizes the findings of numerous case studies) and fails to really engage the lay reader. Tumescent with charts and graphs, it plods along rather than flying like a bullet. I certainly admire the author for being a straight shooter who relies more on facts than emotionally-charged but empty slogans. He is destined to be ambushed by Rosie O’Donnell and her myopic clones in Hollywood for daring to tell the truth rather than their version of reality. I just wish it could have presented with more of a blast. Although he sends a barrage and hits many targets in the gun control movement’s poorly defended arguments, the dragging pace of this book may turn off some readers. However, those who complete the book will learn quite a few facts that gun control advocates do [not] want disseminated

Amazon has now deleted the first two of the three Lott reviews of Targeting Guns and edited the third one to remove the praise of Lott. However, while they deleted two, I found three more of his self-reviews. I’ve put all of his reviews together on this page. It’s an impressive body of work, with eighteen five-star reviews of his own books and ten anonymous pans of rival’s books.

Two of the newly discovered reviews aren’t very interesting—they just repeat stuff about how wonderful Lott’s book is, but this one is almost poignant: Powerful book that sets the standard for academic research, April 19, 2003
Reviewer: A reader from USA

Few books have had their conclusions evaluated as closely and carefully as this book. Academic after academic has replicated his results, and since he has made his data available to others many have examined to see how sensitive to including other variables to explain whether the crime rate declines after shall issue concealed handgun laws are adopted. The data has been re-examined by academics at many universities and has survived remarkably well. The fact that Lott can write so well and clearly and that his findings can be understood by a large audience only helps explain why gun control advocates attack him so viciously.

This classic has stood the test of time.

You see, on April 18, Ayres and Donohue’s paper was published. They re-examined the data and Lott’s thesis did not survive “the test of time”. Lott reacted with an anonymous review declaring that it had. Sad.

Allan Lichtman posts on spoiled ballots in Florida 2000. (Hat tip: Ralph Luker). He rightfully refers to Lott’s claims about ballot spoiling as “bizarre”. Lott claims:

African-American Republicans who voted were 54 to 66 times more likely than the average African American to cast a non-voted ballot (either by not marking that race or voting for too many candidates). To put it another way: For every two additional black Republicans in the average precinct, there was one additional non-voted ballot. By comparison, it took an additional 125 African Americans (of any party affiliation) in the average precinct to produce the same result.

So 50% of black Republican’s ballots were rejected? How is that even possible? Can anyone even think of a mechanism? This is an obviously spurious correlation. Any normal person would decide that this meant that there was something wrong with their statisitical model, bu not Lott—he goes ahead and publishes. His nonsense was actually published in The Journal of Legal Studies, indicating some serious deficiencies in the reviewing process at that journal.

Lott’s numbers don’t even add up. He states that 5% of blacks are Republicans. If 50% of their votes were rejected, that means that 50% of 5% or 2.5% of black votes were rejected even if not one black Democrat ballot was rejected. But Lott claims that 1 out of 125 (less than 1%) of black votes were rejected. I guess the rejection rate for black Democrat votes must have been negative.

Summary: Lott now claims that an incriminating file where he had been caught cooking his results was not meant to have been on his website and was only there because his webmaster screwed up. Unfortunately, his latest story is full of holes.

Way back in September last year I detailed how, after Ayres and Donohue showed that correcting Lott’s coding errors made his results go away, Lott changed his model to bring his results back. Then when I asked him questions about the changed model, he tried to cover up the change by replacing the file at johnlott.org which contained the changed model with a new, different one. And in what appeared to be a botched attempt to rewrite history and backdate the replacement, the date on the new file was set in the future. Lott’s response to all the questions about the changes to his model was to duck the most important one (why change the model?) and focus on the date on the file from the future. He dismissed the idea that he could have been trying to backdate the replacement as a “conspiracy theory” and argued that because he used a Mac he could not have messed up when changing the date on the file. This argument was met with wide derision and Lott soon removed it from his blog. Over a month later he replaced it with a new explanation: That incriminating file? It was posted accidently and wasn’t meant to be there. The new file that was created in September? That was supposed to have been there from May. Yes, after calling the idea that he was trying to backdate the new file a “conspiracy theory” his latest explanation involves backdating the new file. Read on for all the details.

On Oct 19 Lott posted this explanation from Jeff Koch, the webmaster for johnlott.org:

I’m hesitant to enter this debate with your critics. But since I am the one who screwed things up, I guess the least I can do is to explain what happened. No doubt, the scales will fall from the eyes of your critics after they read this.

On August 20, at 5:23 p.m., I sent you an e-mail telling you that I had added, at your request, a link, “Statement regarding the data”. This was located just above the link “Confirming Figures and Tables 1 * 5.doc”. However, I was away from my “home” computer when I made this revision, and so rather than using my normal web-editing tool, I just used the little editor that is built into my browser, and made the change manually.

On August 31, at 5:30 a.m., you forwarded an e-mail to me, saying that some fellow named Mooney could not download the “Tables 1 *5″ file. Apparently, in the process of editing the page to add the link, “Statement regarding the data”, I broke the link to “Confirming Figures and Tables 1 * 5.doc”

I was unavailable to fix the broken link right away, so on August 31 you added a link pointing to your JohnRLott.com site and offered the “Tables 1-5.doc” file there.

It appears that I fixed the link to the “Tables 1-5.doc” file on September 1, 12:03 p.m. However, apparently when I did this, I clicked on an old copy of the file that you had corrected last spring. I still had it floating around on my computer, and didn’t pay attention to what I was doing, and so clicked on the wrong file name.

Apparently, you noticed my error almost immediately; because you sent me an e-mil at 7:20 a.m. on September 2, with a new copy of the file, asking that I please correct it. It looks like I uploaded the corrected file on September 2 at 9:47 a.m.

So it appears that I was distributing the old, uncorrected file, for less than 24 hours. Does that sound right? When I started looking into this, I thought I’d served the wrong file for a couple weeks. But it looks like it was less than a day.

If someone has any questions, I can be reached at webmaster@JohnLott.org.

Sincerely,
Jeff

There are severe problems with Koch’s story. The “corrected” file, which was supposed to have been present before Sep 1, was actually not created till Sep 2. He wasn’t serving the “wrong” file for a day or even for two weeks. David Powell downloaded it in May. I downloaded it in June. Not only did Chris Mooney download it in August, but Lott emailed him a copy of the same file. From Mooney’s article:

On the website, Lott claimed the “corrected” table used “clustering,” when it did not. In a heated interview on August 19 (transcript), Lott said this labeling claim must be an error. But the very next day, he e-mailed a file containing precisely the same table, claiming that all the tables on his website were “clearly and properly labeled.”

Both Chris Mooney and I emailed Koch to ask for an explanation. The only immediate response was that the invitation to send him questions was removed (you can see the current version on Lott’s site here), but eventually, weeks later, Koch responded. He asked that his email not be posted, so I’ll summarize it instead:

Koch conceded that his explanation was incorrect, but had no explanation for the fact that the “wrong” file had been served up since May. He conjectured that Lott had emailed the “wrong” file to Mooney because Lott had coincidentally also accidently clicked on the wrong file. He said that he thought that the “wrong” file might have been been created by a research assistant of Lott’s called James. He stated that as well as the “wrong” file (dated May 9) and the current file (dated Sep 2) there was a third file dated May 1 and that the Sep 2 file was just the May 1 file converted from Word to Acrobat. This May 1 file was the one that was supposed to have been available on the web site the whole time.

I asked him to send me a copy of this May 1 file, since no-one had ever seen it. He did not respond. Nor did he respond to repeated requests for the file. And even though he conceded that his explanation was incorrect, no correction has been made.

Some readers might be wondering if there really is a Jeff Koch or whether he is yet another one of Lott’s Internet personas. A whois search revealed that johnlott.org was registered to Jeff Koch and gave a Texas phone number. Calling the number got an answering machine with a message from Koch, so I think he is a real person.

Could the “wrong” file have been posted by mistake? Well, since it was the one at johnlott.org since May, the only way this could have happened is if Lott sent Koch the wrong file in the first place perhaps because he thought it contained the version of the table that is currently available on his web site. This could also explain why he sent that same file to Chris Mooney in August. Unfortunately, this explanation founders on Lott’s own statement about what the table shows. On August 20, he wrote:

As to the claim that “correcting his errors did eliminate his finding.” The data used in the Plassmann and Whitley paper can be downloaded at www.johnlott.org and one can readily see from the corrected tables and figures that while there are some changes in the results, this statement is false.

Lott can’t be referring to the table that he currently has on his site, because that table uses his original, uncorrected data. The only table that he has produced using the corrected data is the one he is now trying to write out of history.

So what really happened? There isn’t any need to invoke a conspiracy between Lott and Koch. Lott needed to pretend that the incriminating table never existed, so he just told Koch that Koch had put the wrong file up at johnlott.org. Koch took Lott’s word that it was his fault (notice how in his explanation Koch assumes that it was his fault and he tries to deduce when he made the mistake), and took the blame for the “error”, when really it was just another one of Lott’s attempts to rewrite history.

Chris Mooney writes that he hasn’t received an adequate response from Lott’s webmaster about the changing files on Lott’s website either.