Letter

To the Editor:

Having caught up with back issues of Academic Questions on a recent vacation, may I belatedly add an old example to “The Criminologists’ Imagination: C. Wright Mills and the Legacy of Subjectivity” (vol. 28, no. 2, Summer 2015), Mike Adams’s account of seemingly sophisticated refereed studies that draw false conclusions from regressions that leave out crucial explanatory variables. Thirty-four years ago I reviewed two studies of racial discrimination in mortgage lending in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. One study concluded that mortgage lenders on the whole were obeying laws prohibiting racial discrimination. The other study reached the opposite conclusion, that racial discrimination against minorities was still widespread. The first regression analysis found that minorities were rejected 30 to 160 percent oftener than seemingly comparable whites, though acceptance rates for minorities were still 85 to