Blogs > JUST HOW DISHONEST IS JOHN LOTT?

Dec 27, 2003

JUST HOW DISHONEST IS JOHN LOTT?



Pretty damn dishonest it appears:

I wondered when Lott had created this new version of Table 3a, so I looked at the modification date on the file. It said January 18, 2004, which is, uh, next year. Of course, the modification date doesn’t have to be when the file was last modified—you can set it to any date you please, but why would Lott set it to next year? It was only when I wrote the date out in numerical form that I was able to figure it out. The modification date was set to 01/18/04. On the page where you download the file, Lott claims that it was “corrected: April 18, 2003”, or, in numerical form, 04/18/03. Bingo! Lott was trying to set the modification date to April 18, 2003 so it would look like he created this version of the table first. He managed to set the day of the month to 18, but screwed up and set the year to 04 instead of setting the month to 04.
My goodness. I'm speechless. Not only is Lott trying to falsify his data (read the post), he's even trying to alter the dates on these newly-changed tables to make it look like he didn't change anything!

All right, Insty and Clayton, it's now time to admit that Lott's a fraud.

Even if you can't understand all the econometrics Glenn, Tim has now demonstrated that Lott is deliberately trying to mislead people about his research results.



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