Scientist Who Discredited Meat Guidelines Didn’t Report Past Food Industry Ties

The research may still be valid, but the industry ties do give one pause.  Read the following New York Times article to get a sense of the problem:  https://nyti.ms/2LMGJkF.  You may find the issues similar to those we discuss in relation to hormone replacement therapy in The Critical Assessment of Research: Traditional and New Methods of Evaluation.

Foreign Government Contributions to American Think Tanks

From the first article linked to below, you would think that The New York Times had never reported on how money can taint research in think tanks. That is hardly the case. Still, the articles below do provide some interesting information about the contributions of foreign governments to American research groups. What is not really discussed, however, is how the money can affect outcomes. To use terms from The Critical Assessment of Research, is it a matter of what gets disseminated, the paradigms that are used or the very research itself? One sentence in the first article seems to suggest it is the actual research: ” Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.”

http://nyti.ms/WrPy6h
http://nyti.ms/1qrTa4U

Think Tanks and Donors

The Critical Assessment of Research focuses attention on the role of money in research.  The following link is to a New York Times article that describes how political that influence can be: “Think Tank Plays Down Role of Donors”.

State Department’s Report on the Environmental Impacts of Keystone XL: Who Did the Research and Was it Unbiased?

On March 1, 2013, the US State Department released a Draft Supplementary Environmental Impact Statement on the environmental effects of the proposed building of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The report concludes reassuringly that “environmental and climate change impacts are manageable.”  As reported in InsideClimateNews, the relatively benign conclusions of the report on the environmental impact of the Keystone proposal were based on analyses provided by companies with significant ties to the oil and pipeline industries.

On June 11, 2013 the The Huffington Post reported that the Sierra Club is sufficiently alarmed about these industry ties that it has filed a lawsuit against the State Department. The lawsuit alleges that the State Department is withholding crucial documents related to its Environmental Impact Statement, including “evidence related to potential conflicts of interest.”

Do the ties between the companies involved in preparing the report and the energy industry cast serious doubt on the independence of their conclusions? The Critical Assessment of Research (see Chapters 3 and 5) discusses the various ways in which the financial interests of researchers or the sponsors of research can affect the conclusions of the research.  Is this another case where financial self-interest trumps our need for disinterested research?

Standard & Poor’s “Research”

In February 2013, the United States Justice Department filed a law suit against the credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s. The Justice Department alleges that S&P contributed to the financial crisis of 2008 by knowingly and deliberately inflating the ratings of mortgage investments in order to make them appear safer than they really were.

The Critical Assessment of Research (pp. 24-28) discusses the role of Arthur Andersen, the highly-regarded accounting firm, in the fall of Enron in late 2001. Enron had employed Andersen as its auditor, but the company overlooked—and deliberately spun—Enron’s forged documents and illegal financial transactions. The book noted the inherent conflict of interest between Andersen’s responsibility to oversee the financial integrity of Enron and its other clients and its business interests: Enron was Andersen’s client. An accurate reporting of Enron’s financial transactions would have created a conflict with Andersen’s financial self-interest.

This conflict of interest is at the heart of the law suit against S&P. Just as publicly traded companies are permitted to hire and fire their own auditors (The Critical Assessment of Research, p. 25), the agencies that rate the products issued by financial institutions are paid by the issuing institution. As noted in a February 7, 2013 editorial in USA Today,  the “issuer pays” business model means that the “rating agencies get paid directly by the institutions selling the securities being rated, which puts pressure on the agencies to give high ratings or risk losing business to competitors” (http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/02/06/credit-rating-agencies-sp/1897449/).

What is the significance of the conflict of interest whereby rating agencies are paid by the very companies whose products they rate? Investors large and small depend on the rating agencies to provide accurate information about the financial products sold by financial institutions. Indeed, as we saw in the 2008 financial crisis, the health of our financial system depends on investors’ being able to rely on  accurate information about these products. The inherent conflict of interest between the responsibility of the ratings agencies to the public and the financial self-interest of the agencies means that  “if someone wants a complex issue researched, he or she has to pay for the research to get it done, or risks getting a biased product.” But how many everyday investors can afford to do that?

Bradley Foundation, Political Advocacy and the Funding of Research

Before the 2012 presidential election, anonymous billboards sprung up in battleground states warning voters that voter fraud was a felony. These billboards were placed in areas where minorities live in Ohio and Wisconsin. It has been widely assumed that the intent was to frighten minority voters and to suppress their vote, which would likely be heavily Democratic.  More recently it was learned that these billboards were funded by the Bradley Foundation (http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/176675811.html), whose president, Michael Grebe, was the campaign manager for Scott Walker, the controversial right-wing Republican governor of Wisconsin (http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/11/11834/bradley-foundation-bankrolls-controversial-billboards-treading-controversial-new-).

What many people may not be aware of is the Bradley Foundation’s role in supporting the writing of the influential scholarly work, The Bell Curve, which claimed that IQ is a genetically inheritable trait, directly related to socioeconomic success.  Charles Murray, one of the authors, was given $800,000 over a period of 10 years by the Bradley Foundation to support his work on this book (The Critical Assessment of Research, 35).   Many reviewers of The Bell Curve, both in the mass media and scholarly periodicals, lauded the book.  It was  called “a landmark study,” “meticulous,” and “honest,” with findings that “cannot be easily dismissed” (The Critical Assessment of Research, 29-31).  However, given its advocacy of hard right wing positions (see http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/from-local-roots-bradley-foundation-builds-conservative-empire-k7337pb-134187368.html and http://www.jsonline.com/news/134079498.html), is it likely that the Bradley Foundation was funding research whose findings were anything but a foregone conclusion from its very inception?

Women and Literature: Who Reviews and Who Gets Reviewed

In The Critical Assessment of Research we discuss the close relationship between the literary works that are considered the classics in a culture, the literary canon, and the theories about what gives an artistic work value and significance (52ff). We discuss how literature from certain groups is more likely to be considered important worthy of attention, while literature from other groups is more likely to be ignored, and less likely to become part of the literary canon. It is therefore significant when whole classes of literary works are given less media attention than other classes of work, or when those selected to review the works tend to be from one group rather than another.

Given this, two related pieces during 2012 suggest that literature written by women, despite all indisputable advances (The Critical Assessment of Research, 54-57), is still given rather short shrift.  One of these pieces is a study by VIDA, an organization devoted to a discussion of “the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current culture.” This organization counted the number of books written by men and written by women reviewed in prestigious mass media venues. Also included is a count of the number of male and female reviewers. Here is the relevant link: http://www.vidaweb.org/the-2011-count. Similarly, an essay published in The New York Times Book Review by Meg Wolitzer entitled “The Second Shelf” discusses the issue in a more personal vein: http://nyti.ms/URu7Yg.

Does any of this matter to those of us concerned with research in the literary arts? Absolutely, because works which are not brought to the attention of scholars or the public in general are not likely to become part of the literary canon (The Critical Assessment of Research, “Artistic Canons,” 52-60).  The degree to which men and women are represented in a literary canon affects what gets studied and discussed in academia and elsewhere.  And this, in turn, affects our perception of men and women and the way we see the world.