JOHN LOTT UPDATE….Today, the Los Angeles Times atones ? partly ? for having continued to publish op-eds by John Lott well after Lott’s extreme hackitude had become obvious to anyone with a pulse. They do so by providing space for UC Irvine historian Jon Wiener to explain exactly why Lott is a hack and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Good for them. My favorite part of Wiener’s piece is something I didn’t know before. Here is Lott’s response to Steven Levitt’s statement that other researchers have been unable to replicate Lott’s thesis that right-to-carry laws reduce crime:
Lott and his supporters disagree. They say it’s not true that other researchers have been unable to validate his results. They point to a 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics that contains several articles by scholars who agree with Lott.
But it turns out that all the papers in that issue were originally presented at a conference organized by Lott, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle reported that Lott not only “arranged for the papers to be published in a special edition” of the journal, which is not unusual, but he also paid for the printing and postage.
It’s sock puppetry on steroids!
