I was just looking around Tim Lambert’s Deltoid in a slow moment, when I came across this priceless story from BoffoBlog about a presentation from “More Guns, Less Crime” author John Lott. In this episode, the hapless AEI scholar gave a presentation arguing that elections have become more expensive because of growth in big government:
His evidence consisted of a correlation between growth in federal spending and growth in campaign spending, and from that he concluded that Big Government caused expensive campaigns. Two lines trending upwards, and he claims with perfect seriousness — and without performing any of the necessary tests — that the one causes the other. When we pressed him on his analysis, not only had he not performed any appropriate tests, but he seemed wholly unfamiliar with the relevant econometrics literature…
It made for a very uncomfortable ninety minutes. Afterward, we agreed that it was the worst presentation any of us had ever seen at the workshop, worse than any first-year grad student’s. Then, when he gained his notoriety it did not surprise me in the slightest that his other research turned out to be as shoddy as it was. When he continued to get backing by organizations like AEI in spite of the astonishingly poor quality of his work, it only confirmed my impression that the “idea factory” of the right is less concerned about the quality of those ideas than whether it can make the most noise.
{ 12 comments }
Andrew McManama-Smith 01.27.05 at 12:01 am
Lott’s also scary looking.
Jim Harrison 01.27.05 at 12:07 am
Another instance of Affirmative Action, Republican style.
John Isbell 01.27.05 at 3:53 am
Mediocracy.
KCinDC 01.27.05 at 4:07 am
Is he made up as a Star Trek alien in that photo?
Thomas 01.27.05 at 4:39 am
For those who are interested in John’s article, it was published in the Journal of Law and Economics. Here’s the abstract:
Volume 43, Number 2, October 2000
A Simple Explanation for Why Campaign Expenditures Are Increasing: The Government Is Getting Bigger
John R. Lott, Jr.
This paper shows that most of the large recent increases in campaign spending for federal and state offices can be explained by higher government spending. This result holds for both federal and state legislative campaigns and gubernatorial races and across many different specifications. The irony is that those who seem most concerned about the level of campaign expenditures are also frequently the ones who most strongly support increasing the size of government. Evidence is also examined on whether it is the composition and not just the level of expenditures that determines campaign expenditures and whether higher government expenditures similarly results in more candidates competing for office. Finally, by focusing on the symptoms and not the root causes of ever higher campaign expenditures, this paper argues that the current public policy debate risks changing the form in which payments are made rather than actually restricting the level of competition.
__________
For those wondering: the JLE is not student-edited.
roger 01.27.05 at 5:50 am
Actually, Lott’s argument sounds logical to me. The expansion of government economic power would logically seem to increase the value of the those offices that have the most management power in directing the distribution of that largesse; so as the value of the offices rises, one would imagine the investment in acquiring those posts would also rise. This might not always be true — one could imagine conditions that would either neutralize the market value of those offices or that would put arbitrary limits to the money that can be expended in competiting for them, but a prima facie case that candidates having a chance to acquire management power at, say, IBM would invest more in the process of trying to gain that power than candidates for the night manager position down at the local convenience store shouldn’t be too hard to mount, or even to mathematize — simply make the value of the power of management a function of the amount of economic power held by the entity managed. Isn’t this simply a question about labor markets?
Tim Lambert 01.27.05 at 6:53 am
There’s some more discussion on Lott’s paper in the comments on my post. For bonus marks, see if you can guess which comment was left by Lott himself (not under his own name, of course).
Barry 01.27.05 at 10:48 am
If Lott’s student paper was so bad, how did he get a Ph.D. in economics from Chicago? No matter how much they’d like his ideology, I’d have thought that they had standards. High ones, too.
John Isbell 01.27.05 at 1:49 pm
Maybe they assumed “John Lott” was an alias. Aliases are glamorous. They make you think of the Lone Ranger. Dumb name, when you think he had Tonto with him. Dumb enough to suggest the Lone Ranger couldn’t count.
Jason Kuznicki 01.27.05 at 1:50 pm
It sounds like evidence for rent seeking, though clearly some more work should have been done to connect the dots.
Or is one bad presentation enough to toss the very notion of rent seeking? That would be even more, um, convenient than Lott’s presentation.
Ted Barlow 01.27.05 at 2:56 pm
Barry,
It’s not hard to find shabby or dishonest work from people with good resumes. Also, he got his Ph.D. at UCLA, not Chicago. Not that there’s anything wrong with that in the slightest; I’d be proud to have a Ph.D. from UCLA.
John Baughman 01.27.05 at 4:39 pm
To clarify the story I posted a few weeks ago: The paper presented by Lott was an early version of the one published in JLE. The published version was an improvement in some respects, though in other important ways it was not. Fundamentally, even ignoring issues with data and modeling, neither the paper presented nor the article shows that the apparent relationship between size of government and campaign expenditures is substantively meaningful relative to the other changes in campaign finance occurring during that period examined. I suspect that those reviewing the manuscript had only a limited knowledge of the research on campaign finance, since obvious questions simply aren’t addressed. Peer review is not a foolproof mechanism.
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