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Join the Libertarian Christian Institute as each week they explore, debate, and analyze the issues that are directly relevant to the intersection of Christianity and liberty. Always thoughtful, frequently controversial, and never boring (trust us), it is our hope and prayer that The Libertarian Christian Podcast serve as a valuable resource to the Church for years to come.
If you'd like to reach out to us and ask a question or submit some feedback, you can reach us at podcast@libertarianchristians.com, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and of course, our website, libertarianchristians.com.
Matt Bellis:
[0:03] Welcome to the show that gets Christians thinking about faith and politics. Get ready to challenge the status quo, expand your imagination, and tackle controversy head-on. Let's stand together at the intersection of faith and freedom. It's time for the Libertarian Christian Podcast.
Doug:
[0:22] Welcome to another episode of the Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. I am your host, Doug Stewart, and I have John Lott with us today. He is an American economist and author best known for his work, his controversial book, More Guns, Less Crime, I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit. But we're really here today to talk about the book I'm holding up right now for those watching. It's called Freedomnomics. why the focus isn't working right, but it's called Freedomnomics, Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories That Don't. We'll talk about what that's meant to take a jab at. If anybody knows, it's almost obvious if you're aware of what's been popular in the last 20 years. So John, thank you so much for joining me here for this conversation.
John:
[1:04] Oh, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
Doug:
[1:06] Yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about your background and your work. You know, behind you on our video, you gun control myths as a poster there. I can't read the other one. That's a lot smaller print, but it's not meant for me to read through a camera. you, you are, you're known for your, economic analysis of, of guns and crime rates. but what else, what else should we know about, about you and, you know, maybe lead that into what was the sort of, the, the impetus for you writing Freedomnomics?
John:
[1:35] Right. Well, I've been an academic most of my life. I've had researcher teaching positions at Stanford, University of Chicago, the Wharton Business School, UCLA, Yale. was chief economist for the United States Sentencing Commission in Washington. And then more recently, I was the senior advisor for research and statistics, in the Department of Justice.
John:
[1:56] I've founded and been one of the presidents, I guess we've had three presidents, for the Crime Prevention Research Center. And that's currently what I But I've written on a wide range of topics. I'm best known for the work on crime, but most of my academic research has been on other topics. Everything from kind of like why politicians vote the way they do, how governments, why governments started to grow when it did. I've done stuff on everything from abortion to, you know, white firms price the way they do to antitrust policy. So it's a pretty wide range of things. Basically, being an academic was kind of the ideal job. You wake up in the morning and you see something, you say, I wonder, does that make sense? and you go and write a paper on it and try to figure out the answer to it. So, but... Anyway, so it gives you a rough idea, kind of my background.
Doug:
[3:02] Yeah, because you're known a lot for the more guns, less crime concept, you know, I think you've made a name for yourself there. But is that simply because you like that area of research more than any others? Or is it just more happenstance for that? What are your favorite things to research? You know, any recurring themes over your career?
John:
[3:22] Right. Yeah, no, guns was kind of by accident. It was definitely not anything I was particularly interested in. I was teaching a class at the Wharton Business School and basically dealing with corporate and white-collar crime. And I never really been interested in guns, didn't own any guns. I made the mistake of telling the students that we were ahead in the syllabus. And I had a couple of students come up to me after class and they said, well, you know, we know it's not really completely on topic, but it does deal with crime. If you do have extra time, can you go and give us a lecture on gun control type issues? I said, well, I guess I could do that. The thing is, I had read some papers in the area. They were all really amazingly poorly done. But it kind of forced me to kind of look through the literature more systematically. I just assumed that there were better research out there. And there wasn't. I mean.
John:
[4:22] All the studies were very small. People would look at one jurisdiction over time, or they'd look at 31 counties in one year from the United States. With 3,140 counties, I don't know how you picked just 31 there, none of the previous studies had tried to account for obvious factors that could affect crime, like, anything to do with arrests or convictions or prison sentence links. And when you're a researcher you do research for one of two reasons either one you have a new idea which, was about 95 percent of the work that I did or you simply think you can do a better job on it which was this in fact I got bored almost stopped about six different times when I was working on it just because it didn't interest me too much, but anyway I ended up finishing a paper.
John:
[5:16] Back in 96. And I got a call from a reporter at USA Today who I'd gotten to know a little bit when I was chief economist for the Sentencing Commission, a guy named Dennis Cushon for USA Today. And Dennis would call me up like once every six months or nine months or whatever when he'd have a crime-type story and ask me questions. And so he called me up. Asked me questions about what he was working on. And then he said, oh, by the way, what are you working on? I said, well, I just finished this paper that looked at 13 different types of gun control laws. Only one of them seemed to have a beneficial impact crime rates, concealed carry. He said, oh, that sounds really interesting. He asked me to send him a copy of the paper, So I did. And a week later, it was on the front page of USA Today. And we were kind of off to the races then. And I got attacked a lot. So I was partially just defending the work that we did. And it was.
John:
[6:21] I've been involved in a lot of academic debates, but I'd never really been involved with something where there was just so much inaccurate information going out there. And, I kind of convinced myself that if I didn't respond, nobody else would. And, uh, uh, it kind of messed up my academic career, a fair amount. when I was at Chicago, my book, More Guns, Less Crime came out in May 98. In November 1998, Mayor Daley called up the president of the University of Chicago.
John:
[6:58] Went through 45 minutes of all the wonderful things that the city wanted to do with the university. But then at the end of the conversation said that lots continued presence at the university was going to do, quote, irreparable harm, end quote, to the relationship between the city and the school. And then I went to Yale, and the second year I was at Yale, I had something similar happen with some U.S. senators call up and complain about me. And anyway, if I'd been on the other side of the debates, had been left-wing person, I'm pretty sure the universities would have told, the politicians to go jump in the lake someplace. But anyway, so.
Doug:
[7:45] Has anybody taken to task your arguments from an academic perspective, even if you end up not being accurate? I mean, what are the better attempts address your papers?
John:
[7:57] Well, there's been a lot of research, both for and against my stuff. On our website, we have literally, I think it's about four dozen peer-reviewed academic papers that have confirmed the work that we did, some of them even finding somewhat stronger results than what we have.
John:
[8:16] So I'd say maybe about two-thirds of the peer-reviewed academic papers have found support for our work. And then you have some that claim that there's no impact and some that claim to find the opposite effect. The ones that claim to find the opposite effect are basically ones that look at just...
John:
[8:41] Recent data. They don't look at the data for the whole period of time. And the problem with that is that you're comparing the change in crime rates when a state adopts a right-to-carry law. So they just kind of assume that when a state adopts a right-to-carry law, it's having relatively more permits being issued there than other states that you're comparing it to. But if I look at the data just from 2000 on, you know, I may have like 10 states that have adopted concealed carry laws, but I'm comparing it to all the dozens of states that had adopted it beforehand. And so the implicit assumption is that, these later states are having a relatively larger increase in permits relative to the early states. And that's simply not the case because the later states tended to be more restrictive in terms of fees that they would charge and training requirements.
John:
[9:42] And if you look at it, the earlier states that they're comparing it to actually had larger percentage increases in the percent of the adult population with permits. That's one thing. None of the studies on the other side look at the percent of the adult population with permits. They just assume that for the period of time that they're looking at that they're having a larger increase in permits. And so when you look at the whole period of time, you get a different result, than if you're just comparing, looking at, let's say, post-2000. And then there's one study that's gotten a lot of attention that what they do is they don't compare the change in crime rates for.
John:
[10:30] The state that's changing relative to all other states. They just pick a couple or a few states that they're making comparison with. And it's kind of arbitrary how they pick those states that are there. But yeah, and they also don't control for any other factors like policing or anything else after the law is put in effect. And, know, I don't know how anybody can seriously try to look at the crime rates. One of the nice things most people don't appreciate that most people.
John:
[11:02] Empirical work around the world uses U.S. data. And the reason why they use U.S. data is that we have 51 different laboratories. You have different states that pass different laws in different years. And, you know, maybe a state passes a right-to-carry law at the same time it passes some other gun control laws. Or maybe because people are concerned about crime, when they pass a right to carry law, they're spending more money on police or they're prosecuting criminals or they change criminal penalties. And if you only have one experiment, you really can't disentangle all the different things that are going on there. The benefit of having 51 different laboratories is that when you have different places, adopt different laws in different years and in different combinations with other things that may be changing. At the same time, you can begin to disentangle things a little bit. Hopefully, if you have enough changes in enough different years, you can disentangle a lot of different things that may be going on.
Doug:
[12:11] So when it comes to doing research, I'm not a data analyst. I'm not a statistician, But I've read a few books on it and have learned that there is always this sort of, kind of implicit background to what's happening, right? We could call it the narrative. We could call it, you know, factors that are hard to quantify. They could be things that are sort of out of reach of the particular person, you know, investigating it. And it seems like there's a lot of people who want to use statistics as if they are sort of, you know, just mic dropping the truth in your face, without, without so much as sort of incorporating all the other factors and even coming up with some like believable narrative. Right. So I think that's an, I don't know if you agree with that in particular, because it does seem to me that there, there are a lot of people who are just like, well, the data show.
John:
[13:04] And they just, they don't have a story to tell. surely we can go through examples to show exactly what you're saying. So I do things a little bit differently than a lot of people do. And that is most academic research has like one test. You know, they'll go and they'll look to see did crime rates fall when states adopted right to carry laws, for example. And what I think is important is to have a lot of different, qualitatively different tests. Because, so I'll give you an example. So it's not just whether crime rates fell when states adopt these laws, but did the states that issued the biggest increase in concealed carry permits, did their crime rates fall relative to ones that didn't have a big change?
Doug:
[13:56] Right, because they could change the law and nobody could go get kermits.
John:
[13:59] Yeah, right. Well, I'll give you a simple example. You compare Illinois and Indiana. In Illinois, only about 4% of the adult population is a concealed carry permit. In Indiana, it's 23%. Well, why the difference? Well, in Illinois, the total cost with training and everything else of getting a permit is like $450. In Indiana, it's literally zero. Okay, they don't even charge for the background check. Now, why is that important? Well, it not only explains how many people get permits, you make it more costly, fewer people are going to get permits. It also changes the mix of people who go and get permits. In Illinois, it's basically wealthy people who live in the suburbs who go and get permits.
John:
[14:51] In Indiana, it's much more poor people who live in heavily minority, high crime zip codes that go and get permits. Now, the thing is, you could have 100% of the people in an area where there's no crime go and get permits. You're not going to have any impact on crime rates. You have to have it so that the people who are the likely victims of violent crime be able to go and get permits. So, you know, I look at the two states there and I say, well, you know, Illinois, which was the last state to have concealed carry law put in effect.
John:
[15:30] You don't expect much of a drop in crime there because they're making it so costly that the people who go and get permits aren't the ones who are the likely victims of violent crime. If my research convinces me of anything, the people who benefit the most from having guns are the people who are the most likely victims of violent crime, who are blacks, who live in high crime urban areas. So you expect, not only because you have a greater percentage of the potential victims, being permit holders in Indiana, that you're going to see a bigger drop in crime, but also it's the right people, the people who are the likely victims getting permits, that you're going to see the drop.
John:
[16:14] But you also have predictions in terms of across different types of crimes. So, for example, I would predict that you're going to see a drop in violent crime relative to property crime. And the reason is, is that violent crime involves direct contact between the victim and the criminal. Property crimes like larceny, there's no contact between the victim and the criminal. Well, if I have a concealed carry permit, that's going to affect crime where the victim's coming into contact with the criminal. You also see differences across different types of violent crimes so for example, you would expect to see a much bigger drop in mass public shootings than you're going to see in terms of murders generally when you have concealed carry. And the reason is pretty simple. Let's say I have 5% of the adult population with a concealed carry permit. Well, you know, if criminal is going to attack a victim who he sees alone late at night someplace, you know, there's a 1 in 20 chance that the victim's going to be able to go and defend themselves and that's some risk and you see some deterrence that's there but let's say i have a.
John:
[17:26] Crowded place a movie theater or a grocery store or an in and out place like we just had in idaho uh, where i may have 50 people or 100 people there, well even though there's a five percent chance that any one individual is going to have a concealed carry permit the fact that somebody, somebody who's unknown to the attacker is going to be armed, is going to be near 100%. And so you see, you know, if the increased risk, to the criminal doing the attack should have greater deterrence, you should see a greater drop in places where people are allowed to carry in terms of mass public shootings. And I think the evidence shows that's pretty clearly on both the property crime versus violent and the other there are other things to.
Doug:
[18:15] Do harm but people who don't look helpless.
John:
[18:17] Right exactly and so uh and there's other qualitative tests that we have that i have in the paper one in the books one is Look at counties that are on opposite sides, of state borders where a county is in one state that adopts a right to carry law, where the county adjacent county in the next door state is in a state that doesn't have a right to carry law. What you see is that you see a drop in violent crime in the county in the state that just adopts it, whereas you actually see an increase in crime at that exact same time in the neighboring county across adjacent county in the state without it. Because what happens is, and this is particularly true when you're talking about two urban areas.
John:
[19:12] Some of the criminals move from the place where you have concealed carry to the county that doesn't have concealed carry. And the gap increases over time as you see more people carrying. So those are just a few of the different tests. And how does this answer the point that you're bringing up before? And that is, the thing is, anybody who's read my research knows I account for hundreds of different factors that can affect crime rates. But there's always possible something that you're missing, okay? Some other explanation that's there.
Doug:
[19:48] Yeah.
John:
[19:49] By having all these different qualitative tests... You have to come up with an explanation that explains all these different results that's missing there. You know, maybe somebody can come up with something. I think maybe this might explain, you know, why crime rates fall when states adopt these right-to-carry laws. But does it also explain why you see an increased drop that's related to the percentage of the population with permits over time? Does it explain why violent crime falls relative to property crime? Does it explain why mass public shootings fall relative to murders? Does it explain why these two adjacent counties on opposite sides of a state border, the one in the state with the right to carry law, sees a drop while the adjacent, county right across the border sees an increase that occurs right at the same time? You know, it's just you and there are other tests that I had there. But you put all those together, you know, you make it much harder for somebody to go and argue, well, I think I wonder if you left out this factor. And the other thing is, anybody who reads More Guns, Less Crime knows that.
John:
[21:01] I ran like 30,000 different estimates on this because it's just not accounting for the different factors, but trying to account for all the different combinations, of all the different factors that are there. And, you know, it's just, and so, you know, you include this, but don't include that, you know, and run it in all possible combinations that you have with all the variables. And when you do that, you in fact find a very consistent set of estimates across these different tests.
Doug:
[21:37] Yeah, I think, you know, a key word that you use is there's some things left unaccounted for. There's a lot of times I will read, I don't really read the report, but I'll read something like a headline that says, you know, study shows this or study shows that. And I often think, well, what are they missing? And I think, you know, to get to the topic of your book, Freedomnomics, I think so-ish years ago when the book Freakonomics came out, I think that they really sort of, capitalized on the idea that there's some things people are leaving out and we have these creative and sometimes sensational, you know, explanations that are behind the scenes. You know, the most famous one is the abortion crime, uh, to crime hypothesis, uh, from, from, uh, Levitt, uh, or is it Dubner? I can't remember which one's which.
John:
[22:22] I think it's Leavitt.
Doug:
[22:23] Leavitt's the, uh, the economist.
John:
[22:24] Yeah. Well, Dubner is kind of the writer and kind of helped popularize Levitt.
Doug:
[22:29] Yep. He was the New York, New York university guy. So I guess the question I'd want.
John:
[22:34] New York times.
Doug:
[22:36] New York times.
John:
[22:36] Dubner is New York times.
Doug:
[22:38] Got it. It's been a while since I've read the, thank you for that. the. What do you think of, you know, sort of my like, you know, that sort of shooting from the hip explanation for why people liked Freakonomics because it was this sort of like, hey, we're going to tell you some secret cool things that are really going on behind the scenes that, you know, most studies don't account for. Is that is that why they took off in popularity, you think?
John:
[22:59] Well, I think, I'm not sure I would phrase it in terms of other things don't account for it. I think the book basically goes through and asserts lots of conclusions. It doesn't really explain often the logic and never really deals with kind of what the alternative arguments are for any of the claims that are there. And so it's just a simple thing, you know, people go through and they say, well, liberalizing abortion, reduce crime. And, you know, they'll say, well, it's because you don't have unwanted children anymore, that unwanted children aren't taken care of and they're more likely to grow up and be, problematic in terms of crime or other types of problems. You know, I've done work on that. I talk about it in the book. You know, first of all, just mentioning this wasn't a new argument for them. Anybody who goes and reads Roe v. Wade knows that the Supreme Court made that exact same argument with regard to unwanted kids and justifying, its conclusions that they had there.
Doug:
[24:09] I think people are more likely to read a New York Times bestseller in the early 2000s than the actual Supreme Court argument Right.
John:
[24:17] No, I understand Look, here's the deal The, 1970s, saw huge social changes, many of them which seem inconsistent with each other, and they don't deal with these things. Again, this kind of gets back to different qualitative tests that I was talking about before, which is very different from the way Levitt would approach these problems.
John:
[24:39] So 1970s, you saw a huge increase in abortions, but you also saw a huge increase in out-of-wedlock births. And you think, why is that happening? If I'm having more abortions, shouldn't I have a drop in out-of-wedlock births? How can I possibly have more that are occurring there? You also saw a huge drop in the rate that children were being put up for adoption. Well, you know, if I'm having all this big increase in out-of-wedlock births, shouldn't I have an increase in children being put up for adoption. You know, you look during the 1940s, 50s, 60s, you'd have, I mean, I'm old enough to remember the 60s, you'd have these national ad campaigns trying to get people to adopt kids, you know, just like you have unwanted animals now, you know, adoptions now. Back then, it was very common to see ad campaigns saying, look, we have all these children that are looking for a home. Can you adopt them? But by the time you get to the end of the 1970s, people were traveling abroad, to try to find children to adopt because there just weren't children to adopt in the United States.
John:
[25:56] You also saw an end of shotgun marriages, the rate shotgun marriages when a woman would get pregnant that there'd be pressure on the guy to go and do, quote, the right thing to get married, if you look at the data from the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, The rate of shotgun marriages was fairly constant. But by the end of the 1970s, shotgun marriages had disappeared. Well, how do all these things fit together? I think it's pretty simple to fit them together, and it has to do in significant part with the liberalization of abortion rules. So imagine that there are two types of women out there. You have those that if they can go and have an abortion, will go and have an abortion. And those who just refuse to have an abortion if they get pregnant, okay? When you have the liberalization of abortion rules, you're going to have a lot more premarital sex among women who are willing to go and have an abortion, okay? There's a lot of evidence that indicates, both in terms of surveys and in terms of venereal disease rates, that.
John:
[27:11] When abortion was legalized, you had a lot more premarital sex that was occurring, among women who are willing to have an abortion. The problem is, You have kind of a competitive dating market out there. The women who are willing to have an abortion, they have more premarital sex. But the women who aren't willing to have an abortion, they have more pressure on them to have premarital sex. Because, you know, if, you know, the third date and there's not having premarital sex, the guy drops them and moves on to another woman where they can go and have premarital sex. And so what you have is more premarital sex for both groups of women. The ones who get pregnant and are willing to have an abortion have more abortions over time. And the ones who.
John:
[28:04] Won't have an abortion, they have more premarital sex and they also have pregnancies. Yeah. And so you have those women who aren't willing to have an abortion have more, because the huge increase in premarital sex, you see an increase in how to wedlock births. That turns out that women who aren't willing to have an abortion also when they get pregnant are more likely to keep the child. The ones who wanted to have an abortion before when they got pregnant and couldn't have an abortion, they didn't want to keep the child and they put the child up for adoption. And so you had all these unwanted kids out there who end up getting adopted.
John:
[28:49] But here you have women who, for whatever reason, because they feel maybe more of an emotional connection to the child or there's religious views or whatever, they keep the child. So you have an increase in abortions. You have an increase in out-of-wedlock births. You also have a big increase in single-parent families because shotgun marriages have disappeared, you know, before there'd be pressure on the guy. Now the guy says, well, sorry you're pregnant. I'll pay for the abortion. But if you're not willing to have an abortion, that's your choice, okay? I'm not going to force you to keep the child. But if it's your choice, I'm not going to feel obligated to have to marry you because it's your decision whether or not to keep the child. And so you see more out-of-wedlock births, fewer adoption, kids being put up for adoption. The women are keeping them and they're raising them on their own. And there's no pressure or much less pressure on the guy to go and do the right thing that's there.
John:
[29:51] So you can explain all these different changes by just liberalizing abortion. Now, what impact does this have on crime?
John:
[29:58] There's a huge academic research showing that when you have single-parent families, I mean, it's hard enough to raise a kid in a two-parent family, okay? But to go and raise it in a single-parent family where the mother is working and trying to go and take care of the children at the same time, she simply, it's physically impossible for her to make the same investment in the children as she would have otherwise. So, you know, you can, and there's a huge amount of academic research that shows that children from single-parent families do more poorly in school. They're more likely to end up getting pregnant themselves in school. They're more likely to be involved in crime. They're more likely to be involved in drug use.
John:
[30:46] And so, you know, you can go and say that, you know, So their unwanted child argument from Roe, that can be true. At the same time, you also have these kids that are raised in single-parent families have less of an investment in them. And the question is maybe which is bigger in terms of the impact. Now, one thing I did in my research was while Levitt's paper originally just looked at murder rates generally, you can look to see murder rates by year of age. And if they're right, what you should have seen, because there's a drop in murders during the 1990s, it should have been the youngest people where you see the drop occur first and then gradually at older and older ages because it's only going to be the younger people, not over 65 originally, who are going to be initially affected by the change in the abortion rules that are there.
John:
[31:48] And in fact, what you see is that the drop in murder rates during the 1990s start with the oldest age group and gradually work its way down, which is the exact opposite of what they would be predicting there in terms of their result. So anyway, I think you actually see an increase in murder, everything else equal, after the liberalization of abortion rules. And so anyway and in terms of other types of violent crime and that's the other thing they don't look at is other violent crime that's there and have you.
Doug:
[32:24] Have you interacted with levitt at all directly or of.
John:
[32:27] Course we used to be both at the university of chicago i was there when he was there yeah i mean it wasn't very friendly levitt i don't think likes me very much, and I've been critical of his work. And, you know, we're very different economists. So, I... The vast majority of economists are like Steve in the sense that they work on a project for three months or six months. They come up with an idea of why businesses should be doing a certain thing. And then they just assume that the businesses are stupid and not doing what they should be doing. And they never talk to the businesses. You know, my belief is that if somebody has their money at stake, okay, for getting things right or wrong, they have a good incentive for figuring things out. And if something has been a pattern that you've seen over a long period of time, there's probably a good reason why it's there. So I'll give you—.
Doug:
[33:32] Even if they don't like the reason, that doesn't mean it's not a reason.
John:
[33:35] Yeah, well, and maybe they're not good at explaining to academics and academic
John:
[33:40] jargon why they're doing the things that they're doing. They just know it works. So I'll give you an example from one of Levitt's papers. And that has to do with LoJack devices. These are devices that you used to put on cars that when the car would get stolen, the police could send out a radio signal and the LoJack device would essentially allow the police to, locate the car and pick it up. They claimed in their research that they could reduce auto theft by 20% by having LoJack devices on cars. The puzzle was, and I noticed this, that.
John:
[34:19] You have states that regulate insurance company premiums. Some states would mandate that if customer put a LoJack device on a car, you'd have to lower the insurance premium by $1,000, some by $500, some by $100. And many states didn't require that you had to lower the insurance premium at all if you put the LoJack devices on the car. Leavitt basically said, these insurance companies are idiots. Given the large reduction that you see in auto theft, they should all voluntarily, without being forced, to go and give reductions in insurance premiums. They should do it on their own. And he was basically arguing that the insurance companies were greedy, and that's the reason why they weren't doing it.
John:
[35:11] And that there's a bit of a free rider problem that's there. So anyway, I called up the insurance companies just to say, you know, why is it that you guys never, when you don't have to, you never give, a discount and you never give more than you're mandated by the different state regulatory agencies? And the insurance companies I talked to said, well, you know, it's true. we will eventually get the car back often, but the problem is the car's already stripped, completely stripped by the time we get it back. And so there's really no gain for us doing this. And.
John:
[35:49] so, you know, it's not that they didn't think about this. Plus the thing is, there are ways for car companies to solve this problem. So, you know, the, the claim was that, uh, there was a free riding problem and that if you, if you put your low jack device on your car, that would reduce auto theft generally, not just for the car that put the low jack device on, because, you know, know if 10 percent of cars had it uh, that would raise the risk to the auto theft thief stealing any particular car but he wouldn't know because the whole point is to hide the low jack device on the car you wouldn't know that your particular car is the one that's going to be tagged by the police well here's the problem, and that is let's say you're you run north american porsche all Right. Well, you could just say, look, we're just going to put low-tech devices on all the Porsches. All right. So if I have a Porsche sitting next to a BMW in a parking lot someplace, and the auto thieves learn that all the Porsches have it, and maybe the BMWs have it or not, then they don't steal the Porsche, if that really is the deterrence that's there. And so you can easily solve the free rider problem just by, you know, the company.
John:
[37:14] You know, if it really reduces auto theft by that much, you know, it's going to pay for them to go and put the devices on their cars. And yet no car company did that.
John:
[37:26] So is it just that all the car companies are stupid too? And so, you know, when I see something like that, my belief is that, well, you know, let's find out. Maybe there's a good reason for it.
Doug:
[37:40] Yeah.
John:
[37:40] But most academics, see, the thing is, academics think that they're the smartest people around, okay? And they tend to think everybody else is stupid. And I guess I've learned over time that there are lots of really smart people outside of academia. that's there. And I don't think academics appreciate that fact.
Doug:
[38:06] So I have a question. You said no car companies did LoJack. Now, I realize that was a specific technology and brand, but does this relate at all? I don't know if you remember OnStar when GM came out with OnStar.
John:
[38:19] They already have the device on the vehicle for other reasons. And so the additional, you know, they have it in case you get into an accident so that they can track where your car is, okay, and send out help there. And so they already have it there, okay, on the vehicle.
Doug:
[38:36] Well, my question is, do you know if that also helped with theft of GM for newer GM once OnStar started?
John:
[38:43] Yeah, I don't know. I assume it might.
Doug:
[38:44] You don't know?
John:
[38:44] Okay. But the thing is, they also have it on all their vehicles, all their new vehicles for like a year. It's, you know, you don't have to pay for anything. It's automatically included in the car there. So, again, it's kind of like the example that I gave with Porsche is that, you know, if you put on all the Porsches, so if I have a new GM next to another car, then the auto thieves, and if it does matter, and, you know, it may, then, you know, the auto thief knows to stay away from new GM cars.
Doug:
[39:18] What are some other things you take aim at with the sort of Freakonomics way of thinking in your book?
John:
[39:23] Well, I have to say I have about 50 different examples. Some of them have nothing to do with the Freakonomics stuff. Most of them have to do with just my research and just the idea of just trying to explain things that we see. But I'll give you one other example. but one of the claims that they have in the Freakonomics book is that real estate agents are like the Ku Klux Klan, okay? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the argument is that real estate agents basically just try to intimidate sellers into selling their house a lower price and more quickly than they should. And what the evidence is is that when real estate agents sell their own homes, They get about a 2% higher price for their home than when they're selling homes for somebody else. And that's an example that they go and argue is evidence that the market isn't working very well out there. Here's the problem with that. And that is, my guess is doctors probably get better medical care than non-doctors, okay? They've gone to school. They know what questions to go and ask. They can go and evaluate, you know, whether they're sick or not on their own. And and they know which doctors they trust.
Doug:
[40:48] OK, they know when they're being B.S. Yeah.
John:
[40:50] Right. And so but that's just a return to all their years of schooling and all their work as doctors. So it's not like, you know, I would be shocked if doctors were getting it, not because, you know, other doctors are being unfair to their patients that are there, but just.
John:
[41:09] If I were to go and spend 20 years learning about medicine, I'd be able to go and get the same benefits that the doctors are getting that's there. And the same thing, similar thing is true for real estate agents. Real estate agents, they're out there every day looking at houses. And if they see one that's a really good deal, maybe they pick it up for themselves. Okay. And so and also they may know things about how to stage or how to improve or the changes that to be made in the home that make it a better deal there. And so, you know, I don't go and spend all my day going and looking around at houses to try to go and find some really good deal that's out there. you know, so it's just, in fact, 2% seems too small, to me almost as a return to going and spending all that time looking around houses and seeing if you can get, you know, find a good deal out there that others are missing. And so I don't, I don't view it as, you know, somehow them being unfair to, uh, to the people that they're selling houses for, you know, I view it.
John:
[42:23] And there are ways that they solve these problems, you know, in terms of reputation. If I don't think the guy's doing a good job and I buy a house through them, I'm not going to go back to him to go and sell the house. There are other things that economists just in general. I'll give you one example. And that is.
John:
[42:42] What's called the lemons problem with cars. And you'll hear these claims that as soon as a car is taken off a new car lot, its value falls by 25% or something like that. In fact, I go through the data and it's not true. But the claim is is that the problem is is if i buy a car and want to resell it right away, then there's probably something fundamentally wrong with that car okay and that's the reason why you see a particularly large drop in new cars that you don't see you know a much larger drop you know after a couple years, somebody's had the car right well here's the problem and that is.
John:
[43:27] And supposedly, the new buyer, if I were to buy a car from somebody who just bought a new car, I'm not going to be able to tell whether or not the car has some big fundamental flaw in it or not until I actually buy it myself. And so I'm going to discount it a lot. Nobody's going to pay very much for a new car. Well, here's the problem, and that is, can I go and take it to a mechanic to go and evaluate the car? How much? Can I pay the mechanic $500? You know, so if I buy a $30,000 car and it's going to supposedly fall by $7,000 or $8,000 as soon as I take it off the lot there, for less than $7,000 or $8,000, can I figure out whether the car has some hidden problem with it or not? Can I take it to a mechanic for $500 or $100 and have them check it?
John:
[44:22] Can I have people sell, you know, checked, pre-checked used cars that's there and guarantee it? But it's even weaker argument than that because they're warranties. You know, like a three-year warranty on the car that covers everything. And so if I have a three-year warranty on the car and somebody's selling me the car after they've had it for three months, if there is a problem, I'm still covered for the next two and three-quarters years with the warranty for the car. If there's a problem, you know, the manufacturer is going to fix it. And so, you know, the issue that you have is that can I, for less than $7,000 or $8,000, figure out whether or not there's really a problem with the car or not?
John:
[45:14] And to me, it's just a very credible argument that's there. And the data that I show in the book by looking at the, Kelly Black Book prices and Kelly Blue Book prices for the cars show that they, in fact, don't have those drops in value that is kind of the mythology out there. But as I say, I look at a lot of different things in the book.
John:
[45:40] I try to explain things like, How the rate that people report crimes to the police changes over time. You know, most people don't know that only about 40 percent of violent crimes, only about 30 percent of property crimes are reported to police. But we have a lot of information about why and how that changes over time. And the big thing that determines whether it changes is what happens to the arrest rate. If you're not catching the criminals, people are less likely to go and take
John:
[46:12] the time to go and report the crime to the police. The other things that I have in there, some of my research that's gotten a lot of attention, has been trying to explain why government started to grow when it did. You know, the federal government was about 2% or 3% of GDP from our founding up until the early 1920s. You'd have a war that would occur and it would go up, but as soon as the war was over, it would come back down. And so there's this puzzle among academics, this huge literature trying to explain why government started to grow when it did. Why is it in the 1920s that the federal government starts to grow? Not in the 30s. It was already starting to grow in the 20s there.
John:
[47:00] And why around the world? Because around the world for hundreds of years, governments were the same size. And then there's about a 50-year period of time around the world where governments started to grow. And there were lots of explanations. None of them, I thought, made any sense. And I found an explanation that I think, has kind of carried the day a lot of this. And that's basically we gave women the right to vote. That...
John:
[47:28] you basically from like 1870 through 1920, uh, different states gave women the right to vote in different years. Uh, obviously you had the 19th amendment to the constitution that gave women the right to vote. Um, and that went into effect in 1920. And, uh, within about, just a few years after women were given the right to vote, you'd see about in different states, you'd essentially see a doubling, in the size of their state governments that's there. And now the big problem that existed there for that research was causation. Was there something else that made you give women the right to vote at the same time that people were changing their views about the role of government? You know, maybe.
Doug:
[48:16] Yeah.
John:
[48:17] You know, but there's a way to deal with that with U.S. Data that you don't have for other countries, and that is some countries, some states voluntarily gave women the right to vote, while other states were forced to give women the right to vote as a result of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. So if it's something that's causing a political change, that's causing you to both give women the right to vote, and you're just changing your views on government. You should see an increase in the size of government in the states that voluntarily gave women the right to vote versus the states that were forced to do so because they didn't have that same overall change in the views on what government was supposed to do. In fact, you saw the same growth in government in both sets of states.
John:
[49:08] And, you know, the interesting thing is that... And also, this gets back to the earlier stuff that we were talking about in terms of qualitatively different tests. It's not just the fact that when states gave women the right to vote, there was an increase in the size of government, but also how it changed over time. When you gave women the right to vote, not all women went out and voted. It basically took about 45 years before women ended up voting at the same rate that men did. Because basically the younger women voted, the older women who had been voting over their whole lives, they didn't really vote at a very high rate. It was only as they kind of died off and were replaced as these younger women aged that the rate that women were voting began to approach the rate for men. And you can see as different states, the growth in the percentage of voters who are women is increasing, that those states had relatively faster growth rates in terms of government size relative to the ones that had relatively slower rates of women going and voting.
John:
[50:18] But the interesting thing also is, so that gets you to the 1960s. Obviously, government kept on growing after that. But what changed was the divorce laws. What you see is that when women...
John:
[50:32] Young women and young men, there's a gap. Men pretty much stay in the same position, their political views over time. Women change a lot. When women get married, about half the gap between men and women disappear. When women are married with kids, about half the remaining gap disappears. But if women get divorced with kids, then they become much more liberal than they were even before they were married to begin with. Men pretty much are just staying in the same position women based on marital status and kids are moving back and forth there and the thing is.
John:
[51:10] When you move to no-fault divorce laws, you had an increase in divorces, and also that impacted women in a bad way. Because what happened was when you had at-fault divorce, if a guy wanted to go run off with his young secretary someplace, he'd have to go and essentially go to the wife and bribe her to go and agree to the divorce that's there when you had at-fault. And he'd have to pay her essentially to go and agree to the divorce. And so she would be able to go and get a fairly good financial settlement as a result of having the divorce there. And so if she had been out of the job market or whatever to go and stay home and raise the kids, she would get compensated. But when you went to no-fault divorce, the guy could just leave. He didn't have to go and get the wife's permission really anymore to go and get the divorce. And she would almost have to pay him to stay in the relationship at that point. Well, the problem is that that put women in a very difficult financial situation.
John:
[52:25] And it basically caused women to stay. One of the reasons why they stayed in the workforce at that point. So you also have fewer kids because you don't have the specialization in the household that was there. Household, yeah. And the number of kids you have also affects the divorce rate. If you, you know, just take a simple example, there are all sorts of shocks that happen to relationships over time. But if I have five kids, I'm much less likely to have a divorce than if I have zero kids that are there, okay? And so what happens is that, Women stay in the workforce in order to protect themselves financially when you move to no fall. They have fewer kids, okay,
John:
[53:15] It's easier for the guy to go and get a divorce than it was beforehand. And so, you know, you have a higher divorce rate. You have more single-parent families that are occurring. Plus, you have the changes that we talked about before in the abortion during the 1970s and the huge increase in single-parent families that were occurring after that. So it's not just the divorces that help explain that. All those things help explain why women, particularly women, single women with kids, vote so liberally relative to what women used to vote beforehand. And so anyway, those are just some things I have. Yeah. Work on vote fraud and other types of things that I go through in the book.
Doug:
[54:01] Yeah.
John:
[54:02] A lot of different types of issues.
Doug:
[54:04] Yeah, well, I have thoroughly enjoyed reading it for certain. The book is Freedomnomics, Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories That Don't.
Doug:
[54:12] The author is John Lott. He's joined us today to talk about this. John, appreciate the detail in which you've explained some of these ideas, both in this conversation also and in your book. So is there anything else people need to know about you, where they can reach you, anything you're working on currently?
John:
[54:29] Well, I mean, we're, I'm working on lots of different things. I don't want to bore you with everything there, but we, people can go and, and go to our website at crimeresearch.org, crimeresearch.org. And, they can go and see the research that we're doing. We're doing everything from policing to vote fraud to gun control type issues, So, we have a report that should be out in the next week on, on school shootings. so, you know, we have, uh, uh, a lot of different types of research that we, we do.
Doug:
[55:07] Excellent. Well, John Lott, thank you so much for being here today.
John:
[55:10] Oh, thank you for having me on. I greatly appreciate it.
Norman Horn:
[55:15] Thank you for listening to another episode of the Libertarian Christian Podcast. If you liked today's episode, we encourage you to rate us on Apple Podcasts to help expand our audience. If you want to reach out to us, email us at podcast@libertarianchristians.com. You can also reach us @Lciofficial on Twitter. And of course we are on Facebook and have an active group you are welcome to join. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.
Katherine Williams:
[55:39] The Libertarian Christian Podcast is a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute, a registered 501(c)3 non-profit. If you'd like to find out more about LCI, visit us on the web, at LibertarianChristians.com. The voiceovers are by Matt Bellis and Katherine Williams. As of Episode 115, our audio production is provided by Podsworth Media. Check them out at Podsworth.com.