Americas Most Feared Economist
By Ann Coulter
AnnCoulter.com
You can tell the conservatives liberals fear
most because they start being automatically
referred to as "discredited." Ask Sen. Ted Cruz.
But no one is called "discredited" by liberals
more often than the inestimable economist John
Lott, author of the groundbreaking book
More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and
Gun Control Laws
Lott's economic analysis of the effect of
concealed-carry laws on violent crime is the
most thoroughly vetted study in the history of
economics, perhaps in the history of the world.
Some
nut Dutch professor produces dozens of gag
studies purportedly finding that thinking about
red meat makes people selfish and that litter
leads to racism -- and no one bothers to see if
he even administered questionnaires before
drawing these grand conclusions about humanity.
But Lott's decades-long studies of
concealed-carry laws have been probed, poked and
re-examined dozens of times. (Most of all by
Lott himself, who has continuously re-run the
numbers controlling for thousands of factors.)
Tellingly, Lott immediately makes all his
underlying data and computer analyses available
to critics -- unlike, say, the critics. He has
sent his data and work to 120 researchers around
the world. By now, there have been 29
peer-reviewed studies of Lott's work on the
effect of concealed-carry laws.
Eighteen confirm Lott's results, showing a
statistically significant reduction in crime
after concealed-carry laws are enacted. Ten show
no harm, but no significant reduction in crime.
Only one peer-reviewed study even purported to
show any negative effect: a temporary increase
in aggravated assaults. Then it turned out this
was based on a flawed analysis by a liberal
activist professor: John Donohue, whose name
keeps popping up in all fake studies purporting
to debunk Lott.
In 1997, a computer crash led to the loss of Lott's
underlying data. Fortunately, he had previously sent this data to his critics --
professors Dan Black, Dan Nagin and Jens Ludwig. When Lott asked if they would
mind returning it to him to restore his files, they refused. (One former
critic, Carlisle Moody, conducted his own analysis of Lott's data and became a
believer. He has since co-authored papers with Lott.)
Unable to produce a single peer-reviewed study to discredit Lott's conclusions,
while dozens of studies keep confirming them, liberals have turned to their
preferred method of simply sneering at Lott and neurotically attaching
"discredited" to his name. No actual discrediting ever takes place. But liberals
think as long as they smirk enough, their work is done.
Average readers hear that Lott has been "discredited" and assume that there must
have been some debate they didn't see. To the contrary, the leading source for
the claim that Lott's research doesn't hold up, left-wing zealot Donohue, has
been scheduled to debate Lott, one-on-one, at the University of Chicago twice
back in 2005.
Both times, Donohue canceled at the last minute.
Donohue accuses Lott of libel for pointing this out. Suggestion for Mr. Donohue:
Instead of writing columns insisting you've been libeled, wouldn't it be better
just to agree to a debate? It's been eight years!
Scratch any claim that Lott's research has been "debunked" and you will find
Donohue, his co-author and
plagiarist Ian Ayres, or one of the three "scholars" mentioned above -- the
ones so committed to a search for the truth that they refused to return Lott's
data to him. (Imagine the consequences if Lott had been forced to admit to
plagiarism, as Ayres has.)
Donohue's previous oeuvre includes the racist claim that the crime rate declined
in the 1990s as a result of abortion being legalized in the '70s. (Nearly 40
percent of the abortions since the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade were of black
children.)
This study was discredited (not "discredited") by many economists, including two
at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, who pointed out that Donohue's study made
critical mistakes, such as failing to control for variables such as the crack
cocaine epidemic. When the Reserve economists reran Donohue's study without his
glaring mistakes, they found that there was
"no evidence
in (Donohue's) own data" for an abortion-crime link.
Curiously, the failure to account for the crack epidemic is one of Donohue's
complaints with Lott's study. It worked so well against his own research he
thought he'd try it against Lott. The difference is: Lott has, in fact,
accounted for the crack epidemic, over and over again, in multiple regressions,
all set forth in his book.
Donohue and plagiarist Ayres took a nasty swipe at Lott in the Stanford Law
Review so insane that the editors of the Review -- Donohue's own students --
felt compelled to issue a subsequent "clarification" saying: "Ayres and
Donohue's Reply piece is incorrect, unfortunate, and unwarranted."
When you have to be corrected on your basic anti-gun facts by an ABC
correspondent -- as Donohue was by "Nightline" correspondent John Donvan in a
2008 televised panel discussion -- you might be a few shakes away from a
disinterested scholar.
But the easily-fooled New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has repeatedly
called Lott "discredited," based on a 2003 a non-peer-reviewed law review
article by charlatans Donohue and Ayres. In a 2011 column, for example, Kristof
dismissed Lott's book, "More Guns, Less Crime," with the bald assertion that
"many studies have now debunked that finding."
The details of the chicanery of Donohue,
plagiarist
Ayres, as well as all of Lott's other critics, are dealt with point by point in
the third edition of Lott's
More Guns, Less Crime
Suffice it to say that of the 177 separate analyses run by all these critics,
only seven show a statistically significant increase in crime after the passage
of concealed-carry laws, while 90 of their own results show a statistically
significant drop in crime -- and 80 show no difference.
"Discredited" in liberal lingo means, "Ignore this study; it didn't come out
well for us."
COPYRIGHT 2013 ANN COULTER
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