Talk:Steven Levitt

Footnotes??
Someone erased the footnotes section!! Put it back. —Preceding unsigned comment added by TCO (talk • contribs) 15:56, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime
I made a revision in the content of this section. The original article was confusing and misleading; for example, there was no way that an uninformed reader could know that the "two Fed economists" were Foote and Goetz themselves. Also, it contained some erroneous word choices, such as using "showed" instead of "argued". Finally, the original article contained a couple of sentences with broken grammar and some ambiguous, unspecific wordings ("regression was done"), which seem to be in part due to lack of knowledge. I changed it so that now the article uses more specific, correct terms. Hychu 18:01, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Defamation suit
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, "Freakonomics" (Harper Collins, 2005) claimed about Lott:

"When other scholars have tried to replicate his results, they found that right-to-carry laws simply don't bring down crime."

Levitt & Dubner 2005 cite as an authority Ian Ayres and John Donohue, "Shooting Down the "More Guns Less Crime" Hypothesis," Stanford Law Review, Apr 2003.

In Ayres & Donohue 2003 p.129:

"Table 9, line 1 presents our replication of Lott’s 2SLS estimates for the 1977-1992 time period. ... we were gratified to see that we had basically succeeded in replicating Lott’s 2SLS results."

Then Ayres and Donohue go on to do what I would call "testing robustness" by tweaking the data and math to see what happens.

The comment of Ayres & Donohue on their Table 9 line 1 is consistent with "replication" in the peer referee sense described in Paragraph 12 of Lott's lawsuit, in Bruce McCullough "Numerical Accuracy of Econometric Software" JEL June 1999, and on the current policy page of the American Economic Review (AER) on sharing code and data. (Bruce McCullough is considered the expert on replication in the economic science, and AER requires that data and math must be made availble for both replication and testing before publication of an article in AER.)

On the Lojack controversy above mentioned: Lott has stated that he would have liked to have tested Ayres & Levitt's thesis but their Lojack data was withheld as proprietary. Lojack and concealed handguns both rely on the theory of a concealed deterrant affecting criminal behavior: proof that Lojack worked as a concealed deterrant would actual complement Lott's concealed carry theory. Under Levitt's editorship, the data on a JPE article on music sharing was also withheld as proprietary information of one of the music-sharing companies. AER would not have published those articles. Either the data would have been made available for replication and testing, or the articles would not have been published. If Lott published an article relying on proprietary data and withheld it, his critics would not let up. Albert Alschuler in an article otherwise critical of Lott wrote: "I am grateful to John Lott for calling my attention to the Ludwig study and for sharing it with me. Lott's willingness to share data, to explain his work, and to facilitate criticism of it provides a model of academic cooperation and graciousness." -- Valparaiso University Law Review Spring, 1997 Naaman Brown (talk) 18:22, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Perhaps you could be more specific about what this means in terms of amending the Wikipedia article. Thanks. Rd232 talk 19:15, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
 * My one amendment to this entry was to cleanup a piece of vandalism by 61.8.114.3 "work in such films as crime police" should be "work in the field of crime". My discussion of the issues I limit to the Talk page: amendments to the article ought to be done by neutral parties without axes to grind on either abortion or gun control. Commentary might lead to a useful amendment to the Entry but such discussion should be left in Talk.


 * Levitt & Dubner Freakonomics 2005 implies other scholars try but cannot replicate Lott's results and cite Ayres & Donohue (2003) who state "we were gratified to see that we had basically succeeded in replicating Lott’s 2SLS results" on page 197. Other scholars have replicated Lott's results; when scholars test his results, most found that right-to-carry laws bring down crime to some degree while some found no statistically significant effect but a few (such as Ayres & Donohue) found an increase. The first judge in dismissing the defamation claim on the Freakonomics quote noted that Levitt's position that only abortion brought down the crime rate in the 1990s is disputed by other scholars just as Lott's thesis is disputed by other scholars. Foote & Goetz could not replicate the Levitt & Donohue abortion results from their data and math apparently because L&D changed their math in what seemed to be trivial ways that actually had a large impact on their results: that illustrates the importance of replication in the peer referee sense. One issue linking the abortion effect, the Lojack study and the defamation suit is replication. Naaman Brown (talk) 15:17, 4 March 2009 (UTC) signed myself (somehow was logged out when posted)

I don't really know how to edit wikipedia, but someone might want to update the status of the defamation lawsuit with this: http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/docs.fwx?submit=rss_sho&shofile=07-3095_022.pdf 68.24.102.108 (talk) 11:58, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
 * done. Naaman Brown (talk) 17:36, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Abortion "material"
It seems that this "material" is spread over a bunch of different sections. Can this be "cleaned up" under one section, ect? TIA --Tom 14:04, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

♪ ♫ don't know much about......
The quote ""I just don't know very much about the field of economics. I'm not good at math, I don't know a lot of econometrics, and I also don't know how to do theory."" sourced to Stephen J. Dubner, "The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life)", The New York Times, 3 Aug 2003, was removed 08:02 24 Dec 2010 by LyingLikeAMumRa with the comment (Removed incorrectly attributed quotation - )

Source for the quote is Levitt's co-author Dubner who says "he says".

Quote Dubner: "But if you were to ask Levitt his opinion of some standard economic matter, he would probably swipe the hair from his eyes and plead ignorance. "I gave up a long time ago pretending that I knew stuff I didn't know," he says. "I mean, I just -- I just don't know very much about the field of economics. I'm not good at math, I don't know a lot of econometrics, and I also don't know how to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock market's going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the economy's going to grow or shrink, if you ask me whether deflation's good or bad, if you ask me about taxes -- I mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything about any of those things." " http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01EFD61E3FF930A3575BC0A9659C8B63

Now, either Levitt's Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner is misrepresenting what "he says" or the quote is correctly attributed. Naaman Brown (talk) 18:00, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

How come his online CV still says he is co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy although the journal does not list him since December 2007?

 * CV on his website: "Editor, Journal of Political Economy (August 1999-present)"
 * index to volume 115 (2007), still listed
 * index to Volume 116 (2008), no longer listed Knopffabrik (talk) 00:18, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Creation and modified date of the CV PDF is 7/20/2005. Open Levitt-CV.PDF in Acrobat Reader, select File, Document properties. --Naaman Brown (talk) 20:44, 26 April 2012 (UTC) Follow up: Levitt-CV (current, creation/modified date of PDF 9/30/2013) shows "Editor, Journal of Political Economy (August 1999-March 2009)". --Naaman Brown (talk) 13:57, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Quote farm
I notice the quote sectiom was removed, citing WP:Quotefarm. However, one of the notable products of Levitt and Dubner "Freakonomics" has been the prolifieration of quotes attributed to Levitt. I'll park the text and cited sources in Talk for now. Question I have, does the widespread quoting of "Freakonomics" in one-liners or sound bites justify a quotes section in the Levitt article? -- Naaman Brown (talk) 14:14, 6 August 2014 (UTC)
 * "Regression analysis is more art than science." Steven Levitt with Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, William Morrow, 2005, p.163.
 * "An expert doesn't so much argue the various sides of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one side. That's because an expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention. An expert must be bold if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom." Levitt and Dubner, Freakonomics, p. 148.
 * "....if you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is." Steve Levitt, "Pools more dangerous than guns", op-ed, Chicago Sun-Times, July 28, 2001.
 * "Of course, ocean acidification is an important issue. Now, there are ways to deal with ocean acidification, right, it's actually, that's actually, we know exactly how to un-acidifiy the oceans, is to pour a bunch of base into it, so, so if that turns out to be an incredibly big problem, then we can deal with that." interview about Super Freakonomics on Diane Rehm Show, WAMU, 26 Oct 2009, 11:00am.
 * "That's the nature of modern business—to be inundated with data. Your people don't have the time to analyze it, or the specialized training, but we do.  There is nothing we love more than finding things in data that no one else can see." Direct quote by Steven Levitt, TGG Group company brochure, 2011.

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Replacing "Work" Section
@Spintendo added the Third Party template in June and it seems like it applies to the entire "Work" section. This page reads like an advert for Freakonomics more than a biography of an individual. I think we need to get rid of basically all the summaries of papers published by Levitt unless there was some media coverage of it, or unless it was part of a particularly notable academic dispute between Levitt and someone else. I realise that this means jettisoning the majority of this page, which is why I've opened this talk page section, so if anyone comes across my edits and thinks I'm on the wrong track and wants me to pull back, let me know. Samuelshraga (talk) 11:14, 25 December 2023 (UTC)