Cowboy Confessional

There is an interesting fellow running about the country, peculiar for his academic precision and prototypical academic personality.

His name is John Lott, a man I’ve had the pleasure of meeting twice. Lott is an almost cartoonish depiction of what he is — and university bound economist, more comfortable with crunching numbers than he is with idle chat. If you ever have the need to feel intellectually inferior, engage Professor Lott in discussion on the topic of statistics as they pertain to time-series analysis on 32 variables. You will either marvel at his depth of understanding, his utter geekishness, or fall asleep after your eyes cross and your brain implodes.

Which also explains his unfortunate decision a while back to adopt a false persona to publicly debate his detractors. Geeks will be geeks. Not that his arguments were wrong, but adopting a Second Life type guise for intellectual jousting is a bit seamy. It could be argued that our founding fathers did the same as they penned their entries into the Federalist Papers and the Letters from a Federalist Farmer, but in our uncivil age this was fodder for tangent attacks that detracted from his work.

Lott’s systematic analysis of complex problems has impressed me as much as his command of statistical analysis. I have read many academic critiques of his work, none of which were robust or conclusive, including a rather mind-numbing treatment by John Donohue, a man whose prose is only slightly more turgid than IRS tax regulations.

(Oh, and Donohue’s analysis had a fatal flaw, and one that could be assumed to be a rigging of the data)

So when Lott wrote on the topic of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), I took notice like a man watching a short skirt walk past.

Being an economist, he is mainly worried about the effects on your and my wallets if the Church of Global Warming overtakes our otherwise secular governments and impose their apocalyptic prophylactic politics upon us. He feels a bit of unpassionate analysis is required before making the masses more subservient to government edicts than they already are.

What really caught my attention was his approach to simplifying the analysis, by asking four simple questions. This approached closely matched mine, which is forever enshrines in a YouTube video. Two of our questions are identical, though Professor Lott pondered if a little warming is necessarily bad, and if so should the government regulate and tax us into submission.

It is good to see minds like Lott’s entering the debate, even lightly as he has. Alarmists are now getting push-back, and if they relent to reasoned debate, then we might not have to club them like so many baby seals.

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This entry was posted by Guy Smith on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.