What I Don’t Get About the Lott Controversy

Here’s what’s been nagging me about the John Lott controversy (if you need the summary, click here). There’s no doubt that Lott’s reputation, academic and otherwise, will suffer from recent events. At a minimum, we can say (a) that he shouldn’t have relied on results from a survey that he knew he couldn’t substantiate, and (b) that the sample size for the survey, if it was indeed conducted, was too small to justify the result he stated with any degree of confidence. In addition, it’s pretty creepy to pretend to be a fictional former student who defends your integrity while writing glowing reviews of your book.

But here’s what bothers me. Some of Lott’s critics are using these recent events to discredit or dismiss Lott’s famous result – publicized in _More Guns, Less Crime_ – showing that concealed-carry laws reduce the crime rate in states that enact them. Mark Kleiman, for instance, says we should regard Lott’s celebrated conclusion as “probably false” because Lott can no longer be trusted. Keep in mind that the concealed-carry study was quite distinct from the alleged survey (which concerned with the frequency of defensive gun uses in which shots were never fired). Still, if we had to blindly trust Lott in order to accept his concealed-carry study, as would be true if the results could not be independently verified, then the critics would have a point.

However, it is my understanding (and I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong) that Lott provided all of his data and primary sources to anyone who asked for them. Analysts who used these data with Lott’s econometric specifications reached the same conclusions. Analysts who used these data with different econometric specifications (for example, this paper by Rubin and Dezhbakhsh, later published in AER, which used the 1992 portion of Lott’s data) sometimes reached different conclusions. Now, there’s a legitimate debate to be had on the appropriate specifications and statistical methods, but it’s a debate that was already going on prior to the survey controversy, and it’s not the kind of debate in which academic reputations are on the line. The point is that if Lott provided his data and sources to others, there’s no issue of fabrication here. If people want to refute Lott’s claims about concealed-carry laws, they’ll have to continue attacking his work on the merits. The survey fracas is not, or at least should not be, a silver bullet.

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Osama All Fears

Al Jazeera has just released an audiotape that (allegedly) has the voice of Osama bin Laden encouraging Iraqi Muslims to fight against the United States and to conduct suicide attacks against Americans. “We are following with great concern the preparations of the crusaders to launch war on the former capital of Muslims [Baghdad] and to install a puppet government,” the speaker says, adding, “Fight these despots. I remind you that victory comes only from God.”

The advocates of war with Iraq have already taken the bait. Colin Powell, once a hold-out for peace in the Bush administration but now a team player, informed a Senate panel about a tape (presumably this one) in which bin Laden “speaks to the people of Iraq and talks about their struggle and how he is in partnership with Iraq.”

Now, does anyone actually think that Osama bin Laden, orchestator and coordinator of the devastating 9/11 terrorist attacks, is stupid? Is it plausible that bin Laden thought he could release this tape without Americans hearing it? Of course not. Bin Laden was not speaking for Iraqi ears only, or even primarily. He knew America would hear the tape, and anything he says on it must be interpreted in that light.

And what could bin Laden hope to accomplish with the statements therein? The man’s explicit objective, made clear in all his words and deeds, is to bring about a holy war that will topple secular governments and replace them with Islamic theocracies. Bin Laden has no love for Saddam Hussein, because Hussein’s secular dictatorship is exactly the kind of Middle Eastern government that bin Laden opposes. And he hates the United States even more. A war between the U.S. and Iraq would be the best outcome bin Laden could possibly imagine, as it would bring down Hussein’s government while arousing even greater anti-American sentiment among Muslims.

Osama bin Laden is one wily bastard. The message on his tape goads Muslims to fight against the U.S., while simultaneously adding weight to the single argument most likely to generate American support for a war: the suspicion that Hussein is in league with terrorists like bin Laden himself. And judging from Powell’s reaction, the administration is falling for it, hook, line, and sinker. But if Hussein were really supporting Al Qaeda, then bin Laden would want to avoid war between Iraq and the U.S. in order to preserve his supply line, and making incendiary statements like those on the tape would constitute the worst of strategies. Does anyone really believe that Osama bin Laden is that poor a strategist?

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On the Virtue of Old Musty Tomes and Their Authors

Brad DeLong pleased me greatly by posting this fascinating list of quotations from Adam Smith a few days back. But when challenged by a reader to explain why one should ruminate on the thoughts of dead economists and philosophers, when their thought has been incorporated in and corrected by the work of subsequent thinkers, he gave this disappointing reply. The gist of DeLong’s response is that dead thinkers are like an extended circle of entertaining friends.

Well, if that’s the best reason to ponder the works of old dead dudes, then I’ll pass. I can do without the stilted language and dated examples, and my real live friends are more entertaining. But I can think of at least three better reasons to read the old economists and philosophers.

First, the notion that “all that was good in the ancients is included in the moderns” is pure hubris. It would be comforting to think that the intellectual marketplace works with perfect efficiency, that every academic debate settled is settled correctly. Comforting, but unlikely. The theories of social science are accepted and rejected as often on the basis of politics as on the basis of objective truth (even supposing there’s an objective truth to be had). The macroeconomic theory of Keynes, for instance, was accepted in large part because people were looking for escape routes from the Depression, and Keynesian theory promised one. Keynesian economics eventually died, with much credit due to the stagflation of the 1970s, and was replaced by rational expectations and real business cycle macro theories. Later, Keynes was resurrected by economists who cast his arguments (or at least his conclusions) in the form of rational-expectations-with-sticky-prices. At the risk of invoking Hegel and Marx (two old dead dudes I can pretty much do without), I would suggest social scientific thought is a dialectic, not a monotonic approach to the truth. This is not to say I don’t think there is such a thing as truth -- only that finding it is more problematic than the efficient-marketplace-of-ideas hypothesis implies.

Second, even if our new theories are more correct than the old, that doesn’t mean they’re comprehensive. Not all topics that interested the ancients have been fully explored by the moderns, as the choice of what topics to examine often follows the issues of the day. To take just one example, a coauthor and I recently wrote a largish paper on the subject of slippery slopes in law and ethics, and we found that some of the best comments and examples on the topic came from Herbert Spencer, who keenly observed the ways in which political choices made in the past can ease the way for related choices in the future. I doubt that my coauthor and I could have duplicated all of Spencer’s insights without reading him.

Third, analysts are often guided in their thinking by the methods most popular among their peers. For at least the last 40 years, the economics profession has been dominated by mathematical modeling. Now, I wouldn’t claim (as do some people I know) that mathematical modeling is undesirable -- it is quite appropriate for many tasks, the most important of which is aiding logical consistency and, as an added benefit, keeping the post-modernists at bay. The problem is that, as the old saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Economists are drawn to those topics that are most tractable in mathematical terms, which sometimes leads them to ignore topics (such as radical uncertainty, radical ignorance, and systemic complexity) that mathematical models cannot (at present) explore fully without oversimplification. The old philosophers, being neither gifted nor burdened with the high-powered mathematical tools we have today, had no qualms about attacking issues with pure logic and reason. They also had little respect for the artificial lines between disciplines, and ranged freely over a variety of areas, drawing connections that might never be drawn by modern thinkers trapped in their pigeonholes. As a result, their work can be a treasure trove for modern analysts trying to break new ground and cross disciplinary borders.

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