More on Lott Mike Rappaport

Tom mentions Jim Lindgren’s post on Lott’s lawsuit.   Based on Lindgren’s post, we can say that:

In Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner wrote: “When other scholars have tried to replicate his results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply don t bring down crime.   While Levitt and Dubner were correct that some scholars had failed to replicate Lott’s results using different data or methods, they ignored that Carl Moody, a professor of economics at the College of William andMary, said he successfully replicated Lott s findings and published theresults in 2001.

Given this, the question is, when Levin and Dubner wrote the above italicized sentence, should they be understood to be denying that any scholars have been able to replicate Lott’s results.  And I think the answer is yes.  My impression from reading the sentence is not that some scholars have replicated Lott’s results and some have not, but instead that nobody has replicated his results.  That is clearly false.

I don’t think the question turns on whether using different methods is one means of replicating a result, as both Lindgren and Lott seem to suggest.  Clearly using the same data to test a study is one means of replicating and Levitt and Dubner seem to deny, mistakenly, that a replication had occurred.