Objectivity, Probability, and Scholarship
By Art Carden • Wednesday April 20, 2011 9:00 AM PDT • 2 Comments
I’m pausing from completing a faculty survey to offer a couple of quick thoughts on the following directive. I’m to register the degree to which I agree with the statement “Private funding sources often prevent researchers from being completely objective in the conduct of their work.” My options are “Agree Strongly, Agree Somewhat, Disagree Somewhat, and Disagree Strongly.” Three points:
1. My answer was “disagree strongly.” I’m pretty sure that money matters less in scholarship than it does in politics. Here’s Will Wilkinson discussing Tyler Cowen and Kevin Drum on the “money and politics” link. Obligatory disclosure: I supervise student programs funded by a grant from the Koch Foundation, and some of my professional travels have been paid for in part or in whole by the Koch Foundation and/or organizations they support. As I’ve written before, if I were looking to sell out, I would follow Arnold Kling’s advice and work for the government.
2. Speaking of which, there wasn’t a question about whether public funding corrupts scholarship.
3. The key word in the statement is “often.” My rule of thumb is that something happens “often” if it happens more than half the time. The percentage of privately-funded research projects that have been corrupt have is certainly not zero, but it’s almost certainly far less than 50%. I will be interested in seeing what fraction of my colleagues and compatriots answer this with some form of agreement based on the fact that it has happened before. Just because it is possible and just because it has happened before does not mean that it is probable.
My sense is that “economic impact studies” funded by industry lobbying groups aren’t worth the paper on which they are printed or the server space on which they are stored, and no doubt, some of these are corrupt. When compared to the body of scholarship that is funded by private money, however, I’m pretty sure corruption is relatively rare. As I wrote a few months ago, I think there’s a great project for an interested student somewhere.
“2. Speaking of which, there wasn’t a question about whether public funding corrupts scholarship.”
- I’m familiar with studies involving marijuana and other controlled substances, where government grants are available to investigate negative impacts of the use of said drugs, but no funding for studies that show any positive or beneficial aspects of these drugs.
For example, you could not get gov’t funding for a study of the beneficial effects of marijuana on squamous cancer cells and you could not get the permits that would allow your lab to possess marijuana legally.
Paul | Apr 21, 2011 | Reply
Your definition of often is my definition of more often than not. I’m not sure you can put a percentage on often. Depends on context and probability. To win often on the PGA might mean 4 times out of 20. But that’s beside the point.
Research might often (that word) go awry because they have their answer first and go looking for evidence rather than drawing conclusions from the evidence. This backwards way of doing it might lead research astray more than the funding source. Who knows? I don’t. And I don’t know who would. Which is the problem with polls. As much as we like to cite them they really don’t tell us anything but what people think.
What helps keep people honest is responsibility. Paying for your mistakes. Ask, who pays for the researcher’s mistakes. The less a researcher or patron might pay a price for bad research, seems the more likely you’ll get bad research. So it might not be only a matter of who profits from bad research but who doesn’t lose from it.
T M Colon | Apr 26, 2011 | Reply