20. John Donohue: “I'm Frequently Called a Treasonous Enemy of the Constitution.”

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1:04If there is one thing John Donahue loves, it's a good academic fight. A Stanford professor with an economics PhD from Yale and a law degree from Harvard, Donahue has spent his career locked in fractious academic debates that have sometimes run for decades. The topic of guns is one controversial subject on which he has both researched extensively and served frequently as an expert witness. The death penalty is another debate. And then, of course, there's my own joint work with John Donahue on the impact of legalized abortion on crime. Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt. But you know what's kind of crazy?

1:47Since we've always lived in different cities, I would guess I've only seen John in person about 10, maybe 15 times. So talking to John today is actually a rare treat for me. And when we are together, we're always so focused on our joint work on abortion and crime that we've barely spoken about all the thinking he's done on guns and the death penalty. So those two topics are the perfect place to start our conversation today.

2:26I'm glad that we are friends and co-authors because I would not want to be caught in your crosshairs when it comes to an academic fight. Yeah, I tend to want to get to the bottom of things. Certainly, there have been a lot of battles over the years where I think I've mainly come out on top, so I feel good about that. Your biggest academic battle, still going strong 20 years later, has been over guns. And in particular, whether laws that allow citizens to carry concealed weapons lead to more or less crime. Could you just start at the beginning, explaining what these laws are all about and what led people to believe that maybe they led to less crime in the first place?

3:04Essentially, there are laws now on the books in almost all states that allow citizens, as a matter of right, to carry handguns if they're concealed. Back in 1985, most states either totally banned such concealed carry or restricted it greatly. But as the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby in general tried to find ways to expand gun sales, they pushed for the adoption of these laws. And in 1997, John Lott wrote a very influential paper with David Mustard in which he claimed that right-to-carry laws led to large decreases in crime. And this paper has had quite a lot of influence as the power of the NRA grew and the Republican Party really made this an important part of their platform to expand gun rights.

3:58John Lott's conclusion was that when you allowed citizens to carry concealed weapons, they could thwart or scare off criminals and that this would reduce crime. But you and Ian Ayers wrote a paper in 1999 that suggested that the data analysis that had been done by Lott and Mustard wasn't really very high quality. Is that fair to say? Lott was one of the early people doing a particular type of statistical analysis, and I suspect that he was doing the best job that he could at the time. But as you know with statistical studies, there are certain requirements if you're going to get sensible results.

4:41And in a number of ways, his analysis fell into some of these pitfalls. So you wrote this paper in 1999, where you pointed out these pitfalls that he had run into. I suppose that convinced him you were right, and that ended the debate right there? Yeah, no, John is very tenacious. I will give him credit for that. And he tried to emphasize that he was right. Lot ended up writing a book called More Guns, Less Crime. It was quite a big seller, and he got a lot of praise in certain circles for it, became sort of the hero of the NRA crowd. Once you've gone down that path, it can be hard to sort of reverse positions.

5:21Sometimes the saying is, in the academic world, progress comes one death at a time because it's hard to change people's minds. Can you give me a simple example of how you changed the methodology when you're looking at the Morgan's Less Crime analysis to come up with an answer that made more sense? One problem is that in doing these sorts of analyses, you need to have good ways to control for factors that are correlated with things like the right-to-carry law, but perhaps influence crime in a way that would obscure our ability to figure out what the impact of the right-to-carry law is. And one of those things was the crack cocaine problem.

6:01Remember, Lott was writing in 1997, and his data went from 1977 to 1992. And so the last five or six years of his data was very heavily influenced by the enormous increase in crime that surrounded the crack cocaine problem. And since he didn't control for that in any effective way, states that refused to adopt right-to-carry laws had big run-up in crimes because of the crack cocaine problem. Other states that did not have the crack cocaine problem adopted the right-to-carry law. And it was really this factor that appeared to suggest that the right-to-carry law was suppressing crime, but it was really the differential enactment of the right-to-carry laws in states with crack problems and without crack problems.

6:56So what you're saying is that there are a bunch of states that passed these laws that gave people the right to carry guns. And these happen to be a bunch of maybe Republican states or Western states that weren't really affected very much by crack cocaine, which was very much an urban phenomenon that hit California and New York in particular in the Midwest. And so what you're saying is what happened was the states that got hit by crack, their crime skyrocketed. They just by chance happened not to be the same states that had passed these laws that John Lott was looking at. And so by accident, really, he found a correlation between crime and his laws, which you're saying is really driven by crack, not by the law change.

7:35Yeah, that's a great way to say it. And another thing you could look to is the fact that Lott's article was referring to more guns leading to less crime. And we didn't see any drop in crime in these jurisdictions that passed these laws. We just saw big increases in crime in the jurisdictions that had the crack problem. And it was that differential that made him procure these results that suggested these right-to-carry laws made a difference, even though it was a spurious correlation. So in the spirit of your bulldog nature, you kept on writing on the subject. And one thing I love is the title to the fourth paper you've now written on the subject, which makes clear that you think the debate is over.

8:15Because that paper was entitled, quote, The Final Bullet in the Body of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis. But I have to laugh out loud, because looking at your curriculum vitae that lists all the papers you've written, since you fired that last bullet, I can see you've written 13 more papers on concealed weapons. So obviously this debate has a really long life to it. And some of those articles I've written are responding to criticisms from Lott or some of his co-authors. I usually don't want them to have the last say if they're saying something that's clearly erroneous. How important do you think ideology is to this debate?

8:53Like maybe you hate guns and John Lott and the other defenders of this hypothesis, they love guns. Is it those deeply held views that are dictating the conclusions? Certainly there are ideologues who have a strong position either way and want to push that agenda. But there are also very powerful economic interests, and that drives a lot of the work in this area. And what's made the NRA so powerful, of course, is that they've been able to wed the ideologues who love guns with those powerful political or economic interests. I'm sure you're accused of being anti-gun. Is that a fair assessment of you?

9:32Oh, yeah. I'm frequently called a treasonous enemy of the Constitution. Do you ever shoot guns? I have in the past. I'm not a particular fan, although when I was a young kid, I had a BB gun. I teach a class on the economics of crime, and every year I take my students to a gun range in Indiana. And it's interesting because none of my students typically have been exposed to guns, maybe only one or two out of 100. And they're very afraid of guns, and they hate gun culture. And I have to say, after one day of shooting guns at that range, they're often quite enthusiastic about guns. It's one of the things I do that I think has the biggest impact on my students in terms of changing their perspectives, for better or for worse.

10:15I do think it's good for people to be exposed to a wide range of experiences and make their own choices. People who go to target ranges usually are not the big problem in the gun world. Most of the problem comes from people who want them for protection as opposed to hunters or target shooters who really know what they're doing. And it turns out that a lot of things can go wrong when you're relying on guns for protection and you really are not adept at using them. All new drinks are now at McDonald's. Like the strawberry watermelon refresher and the mango pineapple refresher with popping boba, you've got ice cold drinks for every moment.

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12:05I feel like there are remarkably poor mechanisms in the social science for determining the truth when people disagree. When I think about science, I somehow have this image that truth prevails. and someone does a particular experiment that proves that the theory of general relativity holds and that Newtonian mechanics aren't exactly right. But there doesn't seem to be anything like that in social sciences, which strikes me as a problem. Certainly in the physical sciences, you can do experiments that will validate a theory or disconfirm the theory much more precisely and concretely than one can doing these empirical studies.

12:45Some of the things I've worked on, such as guns and the death penalty, are areas where randomized experiments are not easily done. Before I became an academic, I had this view that there were a lot of erudite people who were reading over literatures and making decisions about who was right and wrong, and that the journals were the answer, that if you got published in a good journal, then it was, quote, right, and if it didn't get published, it was wrong. And I have to say my experience over the last 30 years doesn't really bear that out very well. Things that are really wrong can have long legs and survive.

13:22And really everyone's so distracted that there's not a lot of attention given. And people like me, who probably should be reading these papers, aren't reading them. And so we can't really weigh in very intelligently about who's right or wrong. The National Academy of Sciences put together a panel a number of years ago looking at exactly this issue. And at that point, they said that the evidence was not clear enough to establish what the true answer was, but they were convinced that Lot's work was too weak, a body of science to generate the conclusion that he did. But I think now in the last five years, my paper and those of a number of other individuals has pretty much established that when you go into these state laws expanding access to concealed carry, you're going to get increases in violent crime.

14:14The academic literature you're saying has really come to the conclusion that not only do these laws not reduce crime, but they increase crime. Has public policy followed suit? I think you correctly note that a lot of the academic world is just going about their business and not focused on this particular question. But in certain settings, people like Lott and me are showing up to present evidence. For example, the University of Missouri had a ban of guns on campus, and the attorney general of Missouri sued the university to say it's now the public policy to allow guns throughout the state. and we actually had a trial and the judge heard the evidence and decided that it was more likely than not that this would elevate crime.

15:02So there are settings where the debate is being focused very acutely, but so much of this is politics at this point because guns have become a very important way for the Republican Party to expand its influence. And once that becomes part of the discourse, the niceties about what the impact is or not recede into the background. I think because of things like the growth in mass shootings in America, the public, I think, is getting to the point where they would like to see more restrictions on guns. The Supreme Court has moved in exactly the opposite way, with Trump getting three NRA-approved nominees that are going to try to cut back as much as possible on gun regulation in America.

15:48We could see the public leaning in one direction and the court taking away gun regulations. So even putting politics aside for a moment, do you think there are actually approaches to gun control that could work? Because I'm skeptical of gun control in general. We have a basic problem, which is that there are 200 million guns out there and guns last basically forever if you take care of them. So you have this stock of guns that will be there forever. And I don't really understand how you legislate around that. What does gun control even mean in a world where you already have 200 million guns on the streets?

16:21The most dramatic illustration of a problem, of course, are the mass shootings, but they're a small part of the overall gun problem. We also have big problems with suicides. One thing that the law can try to do is keep guns away from people that seem to be at higher risk. And, for example, the public, by a very large majority, endorses the notion of universal background checks, but that is something that would cut into gun sales quite a bit, so there hasn't been any political enthusiasm. One of the big problems that we have experienced since the end of the federal assault weapon ban, which had been in place at a federal level from 1994 to 2004, is that we've gotten a big increase in the number and deaths from mass shootings.

17:14Again, it's a relatively small portion of the overall gun crime, but it has a very big impact on the public psyche. And it's a growing problem because the weaponry is getting much more sophisticated. You made the point earlier that guns last forever. And it used to be that you had the gun that was the family gun. Now guns have become a lot like cell phones. Every year there's a new tweak on them and you want to make them faster and more powerful. We do live in a world now where at some point, I think you're going to see a thousand people killed in a single shooting incident. And so the question is, should we be trying to prevent that?

17:55Or is it really just too hard with all of the guns already in circulation? Your point is, sure, there are a lot of guns out there, but not the kind of guns that can kill hundreds of people at a time. Keeping those guns out of the hands of potential killers would be really valuable, which I think makes a lot of sense because my reaction to gun control is typically anchored in the idea that if you have 200 million guns and you have an active resale and black market and theft market in those guns, people who want guns the most are going to find ways to get them. But I see your point. If you have universal background checks, it just makes it a little bit harder for people to get access to new guns.

18:34And these limits on assault weapons could also be useful. And another interesting problem is that when people start carrying guns on their person, they expose them to theft a lot more. And of course, every time a gun is stolen, then it's immediately in the hands of a criminal. Reasonable estimates of the number of guns stolen simply by virtue of the adoption of right-to-carry laws is in the neighborhood of, you know, 100 to 150 ,000 per year. So it's not a trivial impact on criminal activity.

19:08You're listening to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with economist and law professor John Donahue. After this short break, they'll return to talk about their academic work on abortion and crime.

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20:32So in economics, we have this concept called an externality. It's when one person's actions end up impacting the welfare of a bystander. Now, almost always in the real world, externalities are negative. For instance, when I drive my car, the pollution I emit negatively impacts others. Examples of positive externalities, in contrast, are exceedingly rare. The textbook example is a bee farm that happens to be located next to an apple orchard. Having the bees nearby helps pollinate the apples, which is good for the orchard owner, and having the apple blossoms close, that's good for the bee farmer.

21:08Now, John Donahue's research on guns, well, that actually happens to be one of those rare examples of a positive externality, and here's why. It turns out that John Lott, the academic who John Donahue has been fighting with for so many years, well, when John Lott isn't fighting with Donahue, he fights with me. He sued me in federal court because he didn't like what we wrote in Freakonomics, And after we published Freakonomics, he responded by writing a book entitled Freedomnomics, which had the subtitle, Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't. And you can guess whose theories were supposedly the half-baked ones.

21:43So why does John Donahue's research on guns have a positive externality? Because every minute that John Lott is busy fighting John Donahue on guns is one minute less that John Lott has available to try to make my life difficult. In the second half of this interview, I want to first talk a little about the death penalty. I think it's fair to say that John Donahue and his co-authors have done some of the most careful empirical studies of whether the death penalty leads to less crime through a deterrent effect. And finally, I'm looking forward to reflecting a bit on the research that Donahue and I did together, both our original study on abortion and crime and our latest paper, just published, which takes as its starting point a series of predictions that we made in that first abortion paper regarding the patterns of crime we expected to see over the next 20 years.

22:31And those 20 years have now passed.

22:38Another academic debate you've been in the middle of is over the death penalty. Can you lay out the question that's being debated and what makes it so hard to arrive at a definitive conclusion on that question. The question for the death penalty is, does the additional deterrence beyond the harsh penalties that homicide generates give you additional deterrent value? And that's where the evidence is almost non-existent that there is any deterrence. The work of Isaac Ehrlich had originally claimed that every execution would lead to eight fewer homicides. And that paper actually came out when I was in law school, and it was only years later when I had a PhD in economics that I realized it was a really bogus claim.

23:25Some of the early work in the 70s really was about how do I come out with a conclusion by manipulating data that I think is the right answer to a problem. And we're trying to get away from that over the last 20 years or so using better techniques. I got to graduate school in the early 1990s. And when I would read the papers from the 1970s and the 1960s, it was amazing how poor the data skills were among the academic elites in those years. It's really hard to imagine. The data didn't really exist prior to the 1970s. And consequently, there wasn't a scientific method around really analyzing it in the social sciences.

24:15And so the kind of papers you're talking about, the early papers on the death penalty from the 1970s, really use a set of methods which, if my undergrads were to present that as their thesis, I would reject it. I would say that's not good enough to do it. When you think about this issue, you have to think about two things. First is there's the harshness of the death penalty. The second thing is how often do we actually implement it? Because executions don't happen in this country often without a 20 or 25-year delay. The results suggest that there's no way the death penalty could actually deter anyone.

24:49Yeah, absolutely. And there's one additional factor, which is the death penalty, at least as administered in the United States, is incredibly expensive because you've got litigation, which means lawyers and judges going on for extended periods of time. And if you actually took all of the resources that are used to run your capital regime and put it into the effect of crime-fighting measures, even if there happened to be some deterrent value of the death penalty, you'd get a much bigger bang for your buck in expending the resources in a different way. When I think about the death penalty, honestly and openly, it strikes me that the death penalty ultimately is a political tool through which politicians are able to signal that they're tough on crime.

25:36And in particular, conservative Democrats. There's some evidence that when conservative Democrat governors are up for re-election, they use the death penalty extensively to try to win the next election, which I think it's a really interesting way to use scholarship to understand what the actual purpose of the death penalty is rather than to reduce crime. And that's one of the unfortunate things about the death penalty because it probably is one of the easiest things that you can do to garner some political support. Just say, I'm going to kill the murderers, and that can generate an enthusiastic political response, but it really doesn't solve any of the serious crime problems.