I couldn’t tell you and I’m wondering if Lott could. Ted Barlow puts the question to Jane Galt whether Lott has been vindicated.
There are severarl implausible items in Lott’s defense. As I mentioned earlier, in my real life I’ve lost data to conference papers. That is a bit different than this case, but I’m willing to allow that Lott is the absent minded professor (well researcher) in the extreme. Academia attracts flakes and maybe he is uber flake (before keying on this issue, I consider myself at least a minor flake).
There seems to be several possibilities about what actually occurred.
1) Lott’s story is largely true, but probably inaccurate at some points because of his absent mindedness.
This isn’t particularly flattering to him because it demonstrates a large degree of sloppiness in conducting research and especially the IRB issues are troubling to me. I think this fits with other observations of his work such at the new article Kieran Healy cites that criticizes Lott and Mustard. I have made many of the same criticisms in a less detailed way of Lott’s work (not on the blog sorry) and I find the work sloppy. Sloppy work is one thing, but Lott doesn’t seem to have any sense of humility about his work.
2) Lott completely made up the survey instead of admitting a dumb mistake.
Possible, but it seems like this is a much bigger lie than he needed to make. I guess, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt barring specific evidence of the entire thing being a lie.
3) Lott did pay students to do a bunch of stuff, but kept such lax oversight of the project, the students made up a bunch of garbage and he bought it.
Again, not a flattering perspective of Lott’s acumen as a researcher, but entirely possible. Some of Lott’s comments regarding surveys indicate he doesn’t really grasp the whole process and as such it might be easy to pull one over on him.
4) Lott is exagerating the survey and once he did it the first time, he kept on doing it. Yes this is lying, but the degree is separable from just not doing any of it.
Regardless of whether one of the above is true or some other option, the episode is telling of Lott’s view of research and his committment to research design and methodology.
I guess what I find most troubling are reasonably intelligent gun rights advocates throwing in with Lott. Even if Lott is wrong, there is little evidence that Concealed Carry increases crime (at least well regulated concealed carry). This is pointed out in the article Kieran cites that takes Lott to task. If Lott demonstrated one thing clearly, concealed carry doesn’t increase crime like Handgun Control, Inc. argues and that is important to know.
Even more troubling is the Kleck has done much better work. No work is perfect, but Kleck seems to have tried to do honest well designed research into DGUs and yet John Lott’s numbers seem to be overly important in the discussion. There have been some issues taken with Kleck’s work because he uses self-reported data, but that crticism is far different and far less troubling than the issues with Lott’s work. If Kleck’s estimates are problematic, it is due to problems of collecting quality data even with careful planning. Lott is careless in the most basic tasks of his efforts.
Finally, Lott’s new book is coming out by Regnery? Oh come on….