Blogs on Lottâs coding errors

skippy comments on Lott's "coding errors". Tom Spencer thinks that Lott's days are numbered. Mike Spenis has written off Lott.

Chris Lawrence agrees that there were coding errors but argues that is easy to make such errors. I agree that such errors are easy to make, but, he did it twice, and the errors seem to systematically favour his position. Another thing that strikes me when I read Ayres and Donohue's paper is that they report many regression results, some of which are favourable to the "more guns, less crime" thesis, but more of them are not. The Lott and Mustard paper and More Guns, Less Crime also report many regressions, all of them supporting Lott's thesis. It sure looks like that even when he doesn't have systematic errors in his data, Lott just reports the results that support his position.

More like this

The Chicago Tribune reports:
Last year an anonymous person from the American Enterprise Institute repeatedly tried and failed to remove all criticism of Lott from his wikipedia page. He
At the The High Road there was some discussion of the cherry picked Lott article I discussed here. One poster, "agricola", criticized Lott, linking to my blog.
On July 12 The Columbus Dispatch published a letter from Paul van Doorn replying to an earlier letter from David Mayer that I commented on. Here is an extract (hyperlinks added by me):