More discoverys about John Lott

Until recently I just didn't know much about John Lott, I'd not really paid much attention. I knew he wrote a book arguing that guns prevent more violence than they cause, although I'd never read the book. I knew he's sued Steven Levitt, although I didn't realize how weak the lawsuit was.

I didn't know he was delusional though. I think you pretty much have to be delusional to invent a sock puppet and use if for three years to prop up your ego. In my view anybody who behaves that way is at best intellectually unreliable.

His lawsuit against Levitt is a joke. There were two parts to it, one part was something Levitt said about Lott in the book Freakonomics. The other part was something Levitt said about Lott in a private email to a colleague.

The book part is really funny. Lott is using a take off on the Freakonomics title, calling his book Freedonomics, in a obvious attempt to boost sales. That's funny.

I've since read a couple of his research articles and I'm not impressed. I'll post about them later. For the most part his work seems driven more by politics than by theory, and his models are full of implicit assumptions about independence that I don't think stand up to close scrutiny. I'll get more specific over the next week or two.

I stand by my previous statement that they guy is scary. He seems just both intellectually and emotionally empty, yet he's held positions at places like University of Chicago, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, and the US Sentencing Commission. That's what makes him scary. He's unstable but has all this apparent influence.

What's sad to me is that I actually agree with his politics about gun control. Usually I think that anybody that agrees with me about something must be a smart guy. But not this time.

Cops, panhandlers, and income

I recently made a comment on a post at Steven Levitts Freakonomics blog.

He quotes some cop who wrote a book (a cop who went to Harvard, someting Levitt seems to think is signigicant).

I handed Tommy some money, he held up his hands and said, “C’mon, Eddie, you don’t have to, it’s okay.” I said, “It’s all right, you guys work, you take risks for us, you should get paid.” He took the money, but he shook his head.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I feel a little funny, since you guys pay out of your own pockets. Do you know how much we make out here, panhandling, during rush hour?’
“No, how much?”
“About a dollar a minute.”
“Oh.”
I didn’t take my money back, but I saw his point. Charlie and Tommy made more money than us. I should have realized that earlier, as the math was not complicated — we took home less than a hundred dollars a day, while their habits were at least that. I tried not to dwell on the fact that, economically, a New York City police officer was a notch down from a bum.

Most of the comments seem to translate "a dollar a minute during rush hour" into 1x60x8=$480 a day instead of 1x30=$30 a day (how long is rush hour? I don't think it usually lasts an actual hour).


My comment is

Depending on how long rush hour is $1 a minute might well be less than $100 a day.

If he thinks $1 a minute during rush hour means they make more money than him than I'm not sure I'd want to trust his judgement all that strongly.

It may well be true that panhandlers make more money than cops, but you don't demonstrate that by looking at their peak earning rate, you demonstrate that by looking at their mean rate.

Also, cops in NYC make a lot more than $100 a day.

When you ask a stripper, a waitress, a drug dealer, a poker player, a panhandler how much money they make they'll typically respond with an expected maximum, not an expected value. I don't expect some random cop, whether he went to Harvard or not, to understand that. I'd think Levitt would know that though.

John Lott gets more scary

He doesn't just rely on simple-minded economic models. He also appears to be somewhat controlling.

I didn't know much about the guy. I know he's written some books arguing against gun control. He's somewhat lawsuit happy, having sued Steven Levitt over something he said. That's about all I knew about him, I hadn't read his books, didn't have much of an opinion about him. But I saw him give a talk on C-spam and I wrote a short post on my thoughts about what he was saying.. My comments did not flatter him.

He responded to my comment. And this is where it gets interesting. He didn't just comment on my blog, he said something about it on his blog also, linking to my post. The reference to me and my blog is gone.

Here's what it said 8 days ago.

Go see it, the book is wonderfully ingenious, clearly written, and the balance of evidence and analysis makes John one of the formidable economists in the public policy arena." On the negative side you can find this: "John Lott is scary. He's on CSPAN2 right now, giving a talk on his book. What's scary about the guy is that he has no concept of the idea that human beings might be less than rational in the way they go about making life decisions. He really thinks I did put in a reply to his post on his website. It will be interesting to see if he has any response. Update: Well, there wasn't a substantive response, just some name calling.

He made that post on two different blogs. It's still there in one of them, but it's been deleted in the other one. I'm not sure what that's about.

He didn't publish the comment I made on this blog last night, I made a comment on the other blog this morning. I don't know what will happen to it.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the change in the old post on his blog is some kind of accident. If so I certianly apologize. But putting together everything I know suggest to me that's not the case.

My choice of phrase

Hyper-rationality probably wasn't a good choice of phrase on my part. I think that the phrase simple minded rationality better conveys the concept I'm trying to get across.

More on John Lott and hyper-rationality

I recently made a short post about John Lott after watching a CSPAN presentation he made on his recent book, Freedonomics.

I had said he seemed to be assuming that humans are hyper-rational, and that's a scary mindset for someone who had been in a position to influence US Sentencing Commission policy.

Lott responded.

I definitely am not assuming that people are hyper rational in the way that you describe. All I say is that if something becomes more costly, people do less of it. If you get a greater return from doing something, you do more of it. I do not say how much they change their behavior, just that they do. If the price of apples go up, everything else equal, you buy fewer apples. If the cost of committing crime increases (higher arrest rates or conviction rates or longer prison terms), fewer crimes will be committed. What is hyper rational about that? What is "scary" about that? I am not saying that all criminals will change their behavior, but that on net there will be a reduction in the amount of crime.

Of course what he says here is true. But that doesn't mean it has relevance to actually making government policy choices. And that's where the scary part comes in, he uses his simplistic assumptions and arguments to make policy.

His apple example is an example of the dangers of his hyper-rationality. "Everything else being equal" is his argument. That pretty much negates the relevance to policy determination of anything he's saying. The world is not linear, just because something might be true if everything else is held constant does not mean it's going to be true when everything else isn't actually equal, and we know it's not going to be equal.

Let's think about drug policy as an example. Everything else being equal, if we raise the price of drugs to the recreational users then they'll use less. Right?

No, that's not true. It's not true because many of the policies we use to try to raise the price of drugs tend to raise the search costs. When you're buying an illegal substance the search cost of acquisition is a big deal. You have to actually find the product and that might take all day. Maybe even a couple of if your usually supplier just got arrested.

If the search cost component of a purchase is high then the buyer will tend to want to buy in bulk. If he knows he can easily find some tomorrow then he'll just buy what he wants for a day today. But if he doesn't know he'll want to buy in bulk and stockpile.

Him having a stockpile means two things. 1. He'll probably sell some to his friends. 2. He's more likely to engage in binge usage.

It's not clear one way or another whether increasing the cost of drugs by making them harder to get will actually decrease drug usage. It might. But if you follow the line of thought above it's also clear it might not. It will tend to increase binge usage however, which almost certainly tends to make the effects of drug usage worse.

This is just an example of how simplistic arguments based on simplistic economic models of hyper-rationality lead to bad policy.

I'd never read anything by Lott before. I knew he'd written some anti-gun law stuff, but I didn't really know much about him other than that. After seeing his CSPAN presentation and seeing his comment on my blog post I went to his site and read some of his op-ed stuff linked to from there.

He has an op-ed about murder rates in Philadelphia that illustrate further how simplistic economic thinking can lead to bad policy.

Philadelphia was experienced high homicides and low homicide clearance rates. The city was arguing that they needed strong gun control to reduce the homicides. I think that's just silly, and I agree with Lott when he says it's silly. But Lott's proposed solution to the perceived problem is just as bad. He thinks they need to hire more cops.

On the other side of the spectrum, House Speaker John Perzel (R., Phila.) wants more police, with the state picking up half the cost of any new hires.

So why are Philadelphia's crime rates increasing so dramatically? To put it bluntly, the city isn't doing a very good job at law enforcement. While the arrest rate for violent crimes such as murder has fallen across the state, arrest rates have plummeted in Philadelphia. Criminals are simply not being caught. The drop has been stunning. While 81 percent of murderers were arrested in 2000, just 61 percent were arrested in 2005. And the rate has continued falling this year.

Over the next four years, Perzel's police program, if enacted, could help fund as many as 1,345 officers in Philadelphia - a 20 percent increase from today. Up to 10,000 police could be hired statewide. Hiring more police is one proven way to reverse much of the recent decline in arrest rates, though one must be careful to ensure that the money isn't diverted by localities into other activities. Perzel also seems serious about avoiding many problems that plagued President Clinton's police program, where buying items such as computers were counted as hiring police or the money was spent planting trees or doing other non-police work.

The idea that increasing arrest rates for homocides will automatically reduce the homocide rate is something right out of the economic model of deterrence. The idea being that if you increase the probabilty of arrest you'll increase the expected cost of the crime and reduce the number of the crimes committed.

But there's actually a possibility it will have exactly the opposite effect. Why are these murders being committed? Are they over turf wars for illegal drug distribution?

If that's the case then more cops will tend to increase the immediate profits from owning drug turf. And criminals tend to have a high discount rate, putting more weight on the immediate benifet and not much wieght on the costs they might have to pay later.

If turf control becomes more valuable it may well increase the incentive for killing potential competitor drug dealers.

So, depending on what is driving the homocides, increasing clearnace rates might cause a decrease in homocides or it might not.

But it's very likely that stopping the drug war and having fewer cops will cause a decrease in Philidelphia homocides.

But of course Lott doesn't want to consider that. The model gets to complicated to fit into an op-ed.

John Lott is scary

He's on CSPAN2 right now, giving talk on his book Freedonomics.

What's scary about the guy is that he has no concept of the idea that human beings might be less than rational in the way they go about making life decisions. He really thinks everybody is hyper-rational. And, he's the chief economist for the US Sentencing Committee.

No wonder our prisons are overflowing.

Scary

Update: More on this here.