Contemporary
academia is awash in government money. Not surprisingly, the vast
majority of its scholarly ‘findings’ exalt and promote expansion of the
state. Modern college campuses are dens of extreme pro-government,
socialist and elitist sentiment. Statistically, the American
professoriate is more loyal to the Democratic Party than the voters of San
Francisco or the government employee unions of Washington, D.C.
Because
of the ideological lopsidedness of today’s colleges, the peer-review process
barely functions as a gatekeeping device for weeding out questionable
scholarship.
Here
are three recent “studies” that have garnered overwhelmingly favorable
attention in the world of academia (and in the popular press), but which could
not withstand the slightest exposure to a critical audience, or even a random
group of people on the street.
- The Gilens/Page “democracy has
been hijacked by rich libertarians” study.
Princeton politics professor Martin Gilens
and Northwestern University political scientist Benjamin Page have authored a
widely-circulated set of studies purportedly showing that the poor and the
middle class have absolutely no influence in American politics because the rich
outlobby them and outspend them on campaign advertising. Moreover, say Gilens
and Page, the rich have succeeded in thwarting the most basic desires of
American voters by pushing American policy toward “deregulation” and
free-market libertarianism.
These findings have been met with praise
and applause
throughout academia and journalism. Yet they collapse under scrutiny.
Here is a graph showing how the government’s share of overall GDP has been
steadily expanding; not contracting:
The same goes for the claim of “deregulation.”
By any measure—numbers of regulations, pages, sections or subsections, or
enforcement budgets—regulations have
steadily increased rather than declined. And if the super rich
are in total control of American politics, they have failed to use this control
to shift the tax burden away from themselves. Here is a chart showing how
the overall tax burden has been steadily
increasing on the richest 1 percent, while decreasing for
the poorest 50 percent. These are IRS data.
Gilens and Page also appear to have misread
or overlooked a great deal of polling data which show that Americans want more
freedom; not more redistribution or central planning. Fully 60 percent
think that government is too powerful, and 75 percent describe
government as corrupt. Half of Americans describe the federal
government as an “immediate
threat” to their lives (Gallup’s words), and almost 30
percent regard government as “the enemy.” The polling
shows Americans want deregulation. Only 21
percent—an extremist minority—say government regulates business too little.
- The Brulle “climate
skepticism is funded by fossil fuel billionaires” study.
Not long ago a group of 20 science
professors wrote a letter to the Justice Department demanding that their
skeptics be investigated as participants in organized crime. The ‘RICO
20’ letter referenced a 2013 study
by sociologist Robert Brulle purporting to find that skepticism of the
government’s global-warming hysteria has been funded by
fossil-fuel billionaires.
The Brulle study may be the easiest to
debunk in world history, as it is built on plainly bad math. Brulle
apparently went on a fishing expedition, looking for proof that climate
skepticism is funded by oil and coal interests. He found very little, so
he stacked inference upon inference until he concluded that some energy
investors have influenced the climate debate by spending money on conservative
think tanks. Thus, Brulle suggests that the $87 million donated by
energy magnates to the American Enterprise Institute, the $76 million donated
to the Heritage Foundation, and the $45 million donated to the Hoover
Institution were all spent to thwart the government’s carbon-dioxide-limiting
efforts.
This is like claiming that every dollar of
the tens of billions of dollars spent by labor unions over the past decade was
spent on advocacy for the minimum wage. Except that even a
casual glance at AEI, Heritage, and Hoover materials reveals that
climate-related discourse constitutes a tinier percentage of their materials
than does minimum-wage discourse in the materials and web content of major
labor unions.
If wealthy coal and oil barons donated such
monies to conservative think tanks in hopes of thwarting climate policies, such
a method must surely have been the most inefficient political spending effort
ever devised.
- The NOAA ‘No Pause In Global
Warming’ Study.
This one popped up in
June of this year. News of it was blared on the front pages of
the Washington Post,
the Wall Street
Journal and most other major newspapers. The study’s
timing was impeccable, as the world’s governments prepared to make a major push
for a major socialist power grab to “fight” global warming even though
satellites have recorded no global
warming in 18 years. The NOAA study—built on “new
data”—proclaimed that “The Pause” hasn’t happened, and that global warming has
continued since the 1990s.
It has become increasingly evident that the
government-promoted global-warming-by-manmade-CO2 scare is more akin to science
fiction than science. Antarctic ice packs are now at the highest levels
ever measured; the frequency of
90-degree summer days in America has been declining, and total ice
pack in North America is at a 10-year high
for this time of year.
When government agencies release claims
that we are living in the “hottest ever” period, their claims are based
entirely on “adjusted” data. The raw data do not support
such claims. Government-supported scientists have been adjusting
past averages downward, adjusting past high temps lower, increasing
temp averages of the past few years, and suppressing the global cooling of the
past 18 years.
The NOAA “study” was discredited
almost immediately by climate
scientists with their eyes on atmospheric science. But unlike
the Gilens/Page study and the Brulle study, the NOAA study may soon be revealed
as more fraudulent than merely biased. A congressional
subcommittee is already reporting that “whistleblowers” are coming
forward regarding NOAA’s doctored data.
Stay tuned!
