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Freedomnomics - John Lott
Medopine
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So I'm sitting in a lunchtime talk right now with John Lott, the writer of Freedomnomics. Has anyone read this? It seems to be a conservative response to the very popular Freakanomics, which came out a few years ago. The talk is sponsored by the law school federalist society.
Anyone have thoughts on its contents? I'll update the OP once the talk is over (also the school will have a podcast up later today I think). I was attracted to this talk by the flier, which read:
L&C FEDERALIST SOCIETY PRESENTS:
DR. JOHN LOTT
TO SPEAK ON HIS BOOK:
FREEDOMNOMICS
WHY CRIME REALLY SLOWED IN THE 90s
WHY THE FREE MARKET THEORY WORKS
NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE
.AND OTHER STIMULATING IDEAS
O_o to the last claim in particular
And as a final question, is application of economic theory/analysis a good way to look at social phenomena and problems?
Paraphrasing some bits from his talk:
- Abortion availability makes people less careful about contraception
- The only women that have out of wedlock births now are the ones that consciously choose not to have an abortion
- A woman's choice not to have an abortion = they will probably raise the the child with minimal support from the dad, as "they've chosen to take on that responsibility"
- Single parent families are too costly, because for example the children from them are more likely to be involved in crime
- When people started getting executed in the 90s, murder rates went down, and the executions are why
What he said re: Women's suffrage
Governments started growing around the same time in history. The dates of women's suffrage in many countries coincide with this time period. First state - 1868, 19th amendment - 1920. Thus, a correlation.
Is there a third factor that caused both these things? No, because if it was a third factor, only the states that voluntarily gave the women the right to vote would have experienced growth in govt. That's not the case, as after women get the vote even in states that were forced to do so by the Const experience govt growth.
It takes 45 years after the 19th amendment until women are voting on the same number as men. Increasing share in women voting population correlates with changing growth rates for different state govts.
Men very rarely change their political views and voting patterns. Women change often: young = liberal, married = more conservative, divorced = more liberal again, even more than when they're young and single. You can see this by following individual women's lives. Also this has to do with taxes. Married women are in a higher tax bracket, so they start to oppose taxes when they get married. When they get divorced, they are back to advocating high taxes, because their income is lower.
"You conservative guys, if you don't want to create more liberal voters, just don't get divorced."
Divorce rates changed dramatically in the 1960's. This is because of the elimination of "at-fault" divorce, where both parties had to agree to it. A man would basically have to bribe his wife to get divorced (because the man would have more money obv). Comment from a girl in the audience at this point: "As it should be!"
Old scenario:
A man has a career. A woman "invests" in the household and does all that stuff. If the man wanted to leave the wife would get compensated for this.
New scenario:
A man has a job, but a woman also takes a job as a safety to fall back on if the man leaves. The woman also invests less in the household because if the man wants to divorce, she won't get compensated. This increases divorce rates and is bad for kids. Getting married now doesn't mean as much as it used to because of this change in divorce rate.
So I guess the negative effect of women voting is that the country is more liberal with bigger govt.
Anyone have thoughts on its contents? I'll update the OP once the talk is over (also the school will have a podcast up later today I think). I was attracted to this talk by the flier, which read:
L&C FEDERALIST SOCIETY PRESENTS:
DR. JOHN LOTT
TO SPEAK ON HIS BOOK:
FREEDOMNOMICS
WHY CRIME REALLY SLOWED IN THE 90s
WHY THE FREE MARKET THEORY WORKS
NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE
.AND OTHER STIMULATING IDEAS
O_o to the last claim in particular
And as a final question, is application of economic theory/analysis a good way to look at social phenomena and problems?
Paraphrasing some bits from his talk:
- Abortion availability makes people less careful about contraception
- The only women that have out of wedlock births now are the ones that consciously choose not to have an abortion
- A woman's choice not to have an abortion = they will probably raise the the child with minimal support from the dad, as "they've chosen to take on that responsibility"
- Single parent families are too costly, because for example the children from them are more likely to be involved in crime
- When people started getting executed in the 90s, murder rates went down, and the executions are why
What he said re: Women's suffrage
Governments started growing around the same time in history. The dates of women's suffrage in many countries coincide with this time period. First state - 1868, 19th amendment - 1920. Thus, a correlation.
Is there a third factor that caused both these things? No, because if it was a third factor, only the states that voluntarily gave the women the right to vote would have experienced growth in govt. That's not the case, as after women get the vote even in states that were forced to do so by the Const experience govt growth.
It takes 45 years after the 19th amendment until women are voting on the same number as men. Increasing share in women voting population correlates with changing growth rates for different state govts.
Men very rarely change their political views and voting patterns. Women change often: young = liberal, married = more conservative, divorced = more liberal again, even more than when they're young and single. You can see this by following individual women's lives. Also this has to do with taxes. Married women are in a higher tax bracket, so they start to oppose taxes when they get married. When they get divorced, they are back to advocating high taxes, because their income is lower.
"You conservative guys, if you don't want to create more liberal voters, just don't get divorced."
Divorce rates changed dramatically in the 1960's. This is because of the elimination of "at-fault" divorce, where both parties had to agree to it. A man would basically have to bribe his wife to get divorced (because the man would have more money obv). Comment from a girl in the audience at this point: "As it should be!"
Old scenario:
A man has a career. A woman "invests" in the household and does all that stuff. If the man wanted to leave the wife would get compensated for this.
New scenario:
A man has a job, but a woman also takes a job as a safety to fall back on if the man leaves. The woman also invests less in the household because if the man wants to divorce, she won't get compensated. This increases divorce rates and is bad for kids. Getting married now doesn't mean as much as it used to because of this change in divorce rate.
So I guess the negative effect of women voting is that the country is more liberal with bigger govt.
Medopine on
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Something to consider is that these books over simplify how economics works. A lot of people think economics is use to help the individual make as much money as possible and that it's a really simple process and that a completely free market works for every situation. It really isn't, because economics plays a part from how companies work(small scale) to how countries act towards one another(large scale). I think it would be easy to understand that covering such a huge range of situations requires a lot of different needs, even if the eventual goal is to bring all countries under the system of capitalism.
The other thing to note is that economists(the non idiots) do realize is that economics can't solve everything and that you have to account for things like gobal warming and social structures(families etc.). This is where economics starts tying in with stuff like sociology(study of "the why" of social interactions) and pyschology.
The problem is that economics really isn't that simple and there are actually a lot of disagreements among economists as to what factors contribute to all the issues in a working free market. I would wager that Lott's book (much like Freakanomics) doesn't really represent all the disagreements on certain issues in their books.
John Lott is giving a speech?
John "I'm not a woman, but I play one on the Internet" Lott?
John "I cook data like it was soup" Lott?
Does your school even understand the concept of academic integrity? Because I can tell you John Lott doesn't. The man is a hack who got booted out of the academic world when his mendacity was revealed. Luckily for him, there's always AEI, huh?
Expand.
Also it wasn't the school that brought him here, it was a student club (the Federalist society).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lott#Mary_Rosh_online_persona
Angel's quite right.
My liberal newspaper had a field day with this situation:
Lott's also the idiot that wrote "More Guns, Less Crime", which is just one among his collection of contriversial works. He stated that "official surveys" don't account for the defensive use of guns. Then he repeatedly cited a study that he conducted that stated "98% of defensive gun users only had to threaten the attacker with a gun inorder to end the attack". Then when the opposition asked Lott to produce the study, he said his computer fucked up and lost all the data.
Lott cooked the data for More Guns, Less Crime, and got outed when another team of researchers tried to replicate his findings. Furthermore, in order to drum up support for said book, he put on e-drag and sockpuppeted Amazon.com. These events resulted in his losing his bid for tenure. But, since he says the right things, he was picked up by the right-wing think tank AEI.
If you'd like more detail, Tim Lambert's blog Deltoid has lots more on Lott's lack of integrity.
First, doesn't the school have to approve the speaker? I would think the school would have a vested interest in not being associated with a man who broke cardinal rules of research, like "Don't cook data."
Second, the Federalist Society? There's a group that should make you cringe - their goal is to pack the judiciary with right-wing judges. No, I'm not joking.
Sure, but his fan base has a much different reaction. To wit:
Well, it's a bit more serious. Lambert has a detailed explaination, but the tl;dr version is that when another team of econometrists tried to replicate his findings using his data, they found flaws in the way the data was encoded. When they fixed the data set, they found they were unable to replicate Lott's findings.
Yeah I'm not in the society or anything, I just went to see how mad it would make me.
Unfortunately it's a joke paper that comes out once a semester.
I might zap an email off to the Federalists though asking if they knew this shit about him (my guess is they probably did, but they just don't care).
We're talking about an organization dedicated to the takeover of the judiciary by the right wing. Saying that they didn't care is an understatement.
I don't have a problem with someone wanting their ideology to take over the judiciary. I'd certainly like to see mine dominate it myself.
Consider that Scalia is sort of their model of the perfect judge. Still comfortable now?
You clearly don't understand what I'm saying.
To wit, I disaprove of their ideology, but have no problem with someone wanting to influence government policy.
I just walked in the bathroom and the Federalist society has another flier up. They are bringing in an anti-immigration speaker and afterwards they are serving TACOS.
hahahha.
Fuck, they're dropping all pretense now, aren't they?
On the black screen
Email them and try to have as humorous of a back and forth as possible, slamming them for their speaker choice.
Then post it in your newspaper.
It's a win-win!
This guys ideas about women are so idiotic that no one has even bothered to slam them.
Though admittedly there isn't much there, its just 21st century BS used to justify a 19th century worldview.
When he talked about divorce laws and such it was bad as well. He opened that part of the discussion by saying "So before, with at-fault laws, a man couldn't just decide to trade his wife in for a newer, younger model."
Ick.
Great, another guy making every other conservative look good. </sarcasm>
How many people attended the speech?
Good question.
Sigh. The biggest problem for economics, is that many people, like Mr Bass here, don't have the slightest fucking clue what it is but believe they do, and confidently make silly assertions like the ones quoted above.
Economics is not simply about money; it is not about pure economic theory; it is certainly not about simple formulae (they are bloody complex). Economics is about society. A fair definition of the purpose of any economic system is: "the best allocation of scarce resources between competing ends". Sound familiar? How about: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Marx. That's right, economics is politics. It is about society. It is about people and how they interact. It is the study of how they do so, just as much as sociology is, and it was around long before that science. You think that social distribution is a political question? Actually, it's an economic one long before you ever mark a voting ballot, and it was and will be an economic one if there is no vote on it at all. Serious economic theory is not simplistic formula or systems, and serious economists recognise the infinite complexity of people, the systems they use & the world, and try their best to take these into account. If you want an example of how the complexity of these systems often produce results wildly different to the 'common sense' solution, try my posts in the Global Warming thread.
Serious economists also toe a very fine line between taking people & politics into account, but not letting their judgement be influenced by their own personal or political opinions. John Lott is not a serious economist; he is not even an economist. He is a hack touting a partisan political slant and dressing it up as 'economics' to try and give himself credibility, which judging by the arguments in the OP, he desperately needs.
For me the liberal bias did not come through so much in that book as it very clearly does with this guy today. So there's that. But it might just be me.
In light of that, I submit that the only women that have births of any kind now are the ones that consciously choose not to have an abortion.
Medopine, you are correct.
Bass, the reason he didn't write that book is because he cannot.
If you do want to read that book, I would suggest an excellent book by John Kay called The Truth About Markets. He is an economist, and quite a good one too. It is also a good high-level introductory book, and particularly interesting when demonstrating the complexity of modern economic systems and how they are often most counter-intuitive.
PS I've avoided reading Freakanomics; not to sound like a snob, but I have too much to read as it is, and more pressing things. Also it wasn't quite so popular over here as in the US, it's only been around relatively recently in the UK.
PPS FuriousNU got it spot on in his description of economics in the first page.
Not every woman in the world or even in the US has access to safe abortive methods.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think that this is just the same reaction as conservapedia: paranoid conservatives deciding that the world needs to be divided into right and left.
Which is why what Lott was claiming, that abortion seems to be the DEFAULT for all women that get pregnant unless they choose otherwise, is pretty retarded.