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How Often Do Economists Commit Misconduct?
schwit1 (797399) writes A survey of professional academic economists finds that a large percentage are quite willing to cheat or fake data to get the results they want. From the paper's abstract: "This study reports the results of a survey of professional, mostly academic economists about their research norms and scientific misbehavior. Behavior such as data fabrication or plagiarism are (almost) unanimously rejected and admitted by less than 4% of participants. Research practices that are often considered 'questionable,' e.g., strategic behavior while analyzing results or in the publication process, are rejected by at least 60%. Despite their low justifiability, these behaviors are widespread. Ninety-four percent report having engaged in at least one unaccepted research practice."
That less than 4% engage in "data fabrication or plagiarism" might seem low, but it is a terrible statistic . ... 40% admit to doing what they agree are "questionable" research practices, while 94% admit to committing "at least one unaccepted research practice." In other words, almost none of these academic economists can be trusted in the slightest. As the paper notes, "these behaviors are widespread.""
That less than 4% engage in "data fabrication or plagiarism" might seem low, but it is a terrible statistic . ... 40% admit to doing what they agree are "questionable" research practices, while 94% admit to committing "at least one unaccepted research practice." In other words, almost none of these academic economists can be trusted in the slightest. As the paper notes, "these behaviors are widespread.""
Depending on what policy a politician wants to push he can cite either traditional economics or Keynesian economics as part of his speel to push a bill. Economists are conflicting in their advice. Sure you can make a real good case for aiming for a surplus because that is good for the nation in the long run. But a lot of politicians are in it for their own personal gain in the short run. They'll borrow from the debt, have a spending party that feels good for a short run, but put the nation in a worse state for the long run. It is unsustainable and only benefits the elite who get crony deals.
Also scientists are supposed to be pretty unbiased, but the marketing people who use their unbiased data will take it out of context. A marketing person can tell you to put radioactive waste on your face because science has said it gives you a radiant glow. You think I joke, but I saw Lucky Charms touted as a health food on tv some years ago because a science study said oats are good for the heart and Lucky Charms has oat pieces. On top of that, it's not hard think there are times where scientists also get pressure from the corporation funding their science to give them the results they want. Just like economists might get pressure too.
God spoke to me
Never trust an economist, until you've checked his math. Even then, you don't trust him. You've got to understand economics so well that you can recognize his base assumptions from his math, or you're still not qualified to check his math.
Remember the collapse from the housing bubble burst? Who predicted that? Precious few men and women knew it was coming, and damned near none had any idea how bad it could be.
I participated in a discussion three years before it burst. My take then was, "I don't know how bad it can be, but it sure as hell won't be pretty!" I'm not even an economist, but I knew the shit would hit the fan. All those experts are either complete, utter fools - or they were outright lying to all of us!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Who purchases the services of economists? Who consumes their work product?
A lot of economists are paid by central banks one way or another:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
One useful tactic for managing the economy is manipulating public opinion. Especially the opinion of those members of the public who manage huge quantities of other people's money. The job of the economist then is not necessarily to discover the true state of the economy, but to convince others that is it in a certain state in order to influence their behavior.
I'll just leave this here...
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> You've got to understand economics so well that you can recognize his base assumptions from his math, or you're still not qualified to check his math.
Fundamentally economics is the study of human psychology. At some point it goes beyond the kind of math that you can "check."
> Remember the collapse from the housing bubble burst? Who predicted that?
That wasn't really a question of economics more so outright cheating/lying by the bond rating agencies.
Economy as such is not a science.
A civil engineer, a chemist and an economist are traveling in the countryside. Weary, they stop at a small country inn. "I only have two rooms, so one of you will have to sleep in the barn," the innkeeper says. The civil engineer volunteers to sleep in the barn, goes outside, and the others go to bed. In a short time they're awakened by a knock. It's the engineer, who says, "There's a cow in that barn. I'm a Hindu, and it would offend my beliefs to sleep next to a sacred animal." The chemist says that, OK, he'll sleep in the barn. The others go back to bed, but soon are awakened by another knock. It's the chemist who says, "There's a pig in that barn. I'm Jewish, and cannot sleep next to an unclean animal." So the economist is sent to the barn. It's getting late, the others are very tired and soon fall asleep, Bu they're awakened by an even louder knocking. They open the door and are surprised by what they see: It's the cow and the pig!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
100% of astrologists make shit up. it's pretty much the definition for it...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
...[you need to] recognize his base assumptions from his math, or you're still not qualified to check his math.
As an economist, I want to reiterate that point.
That said, I wouldn't take the article at face value. Look at how they describe 'unaccepted research practice.' Playing devil's advocate, splitting research into smaller publishable piece makes sense if you want to get it out as quickly as possible. Or their statement about checking the contents of work cited? Do they mean ensuring that works cited are correct? Because that's ridiculous, no one can do that. Or do they mean glancing at the work cited? Because that's equally ridiculous.
I knew the shit would hit the fan. All those experts are either complete, utter fools - or they were outright lying to all of us!
They were lying.
Like many aspects of the DotCom bubble before it, the housing bubble was thoroughly well understood and predicted by pretty much every observer (and discussed as such by those with integrity). The only people who said otherwise were those who were participating for their own benefit, and who well understood the risk to themselves of prematurely bursting their giant Ponzi scheme.
Similar liars will crawl out of the woodwork to pump up the next bubble too, I'm sure.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Yup, but I don't think any were worried that suddenly looking for and then telling the truth would burst the bubble. They just knew that promotions, endowed chairs, year end bonuses, etc, were not going to be handed to the pessimists saying "you know that thing we're doing that's making all the money? Stop it. Right now."
And it will always be better politically for the government to be just as surprised as everyone else when things go belly up
No.... politically speaking: it's in the government's best interest to take any action possible to delay the next downcycle in the economy, kick the can down the road JUST A LITTLE BIT ---- just a few more years, so the collapse happens when the next guy is elected (preferably a candidate from the opposite party: so they will get blamed), even if doing so INCREASES the ultimate amount of damage, strife, and pain, the people will feel during the next down cycle. Politics actually favors increasing the total amount of pain, as long as the politicians are able to cowardly delay it, so it doesn't happen during their term, therefore, they escape the voter outrage over the issue.
This is why there will always be enough votes to raise the debt ceiling and keep the US government spending.
Would it even be ethical to tell a truth that would cause an economic disaster?
If mere knowledge of economic facts would be at risk of causing a disaster, then the disaster is practically already a certainty, because that truth is inevitably going to eventually be discovered.
The sooner a bubble or distortion is discovered, the sooner the correction begins, the smaller correction begins, and the quicker the recovery: assuming there is no government interference, which almost always tends to create new distortions and slow down the recovery.
It is natural that the economy operates in periodic cycles of prosperity and recision. Government-distortion tends to attempt to distort the cycles by delaying recessions, and ultimately --- increasing their magnitude.
Would it even be ethical to tell a truth that would cause an economic disaster?
Even in this situation it still does not make it ethical to fudge the data and lie: you simply shut up and say nothing. To know whether it would be ethical to reveal the truth you need to know the consequence of keeping quiet. For example if you found that a certain company was in financial trouble but still had a chance to pull through (and were acting to maximize that chance without dragging in new investors) you might keep quiet to help avoid financial disaster for those affected. However it would still be wrong to fudge the data and publish a report claiming that they were financially sound.
The beautiful thing about hard sciences such as climatology is that they are based on real physical phenomena. It's all out there for anyone to discover. All you have to do is find a better explanation than the climate scientists to overturn the existing theory.
Every time one of them opens his/her mouth.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
What we need is an academic separation of powers.
Those who collect data should not be the same as those that analyze it. And neither of those groups should store the data.
Data should be collected by professional data collectors that don't care about the meaning of their data and have nothing to prove by collecting it. They should merely be judged on the quality and quantity of their data. Nothing else.
That data should be submitted to an archiving department... call them librarians or archivists or whatever.
Then analysts can pull from that data and base their studies on it.
In the case that an analyst does not have the information he needs in the archive, he submits a request for the data to the archive which then posts the data request publicly as a job order to collect that data.
The data collectors get the information, submit it to the archive, and EVERYONE can see the data.
Doubtless someone has a problem with this... I don't claim to have a perfect system here. I just think too often the sources for things and the information is not readily available.
If they must cite information in the archive then they can't make it up without outright lying about what they saw in the archive.
And even then we could establish some automatic data cross referencing protocols that allow us to instantly link and cross reference claims with their data sources and instantly highlight any discrepancies. This requires that the "papers" be coded to facilitate this process but that just requires a program to stamp the correct code in the correct syntax into the document. The researchers don't need to know how to do that. They just need to run the program, key in the source of the data in the field, and then the linking code should be automatically generated.
Make as a part of every submission a computer check of the files. Anything cited that doesn't exist in the archive gets flagged... and thing cited from the archive that doesn't match the archive gets flagged.
The actual validity of the claims cannot be checked by computer. But we should be able to ensure data integrity.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
> Remember the collapse from the housing bubble burst? Who predicted that? Precious few men and women knew it was coming, and damned near none had any idea how bad it could be.
That would be pretty much the entire Republican party. Here's Ron Paul explaining exactly what would happen, in 2002. This is six years before the collapse:
http://www.ronpaul.com/2008-09...
So when a new study lumps plagiarism in with fabricating data, we see all too plainly what really drives this shit - Credit, credit, credit. Publish or, worse than perishing, you get stuck actually *gasp!* teaching those obnoxious freshmen your name attracted to the school in the first place.
It's also the influence of capitalism, and corporatism. The grant money has to come from somewhere. If you want to keep getting it, you're going to need to maintain your reputation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Remember the collapse from the housing bubble burst? Who predicted that? Precious few men and women knew it was coming, and damned near none had any idea how bad it could be.
A bunch of people predicted it. They were ignored.
"Irrational exuberance" Greenspan called it
Here's a website devoted to documenting the people who predicted the bubble
http://investorhome.com/predicted.htm
They even quote Warren Buffet calling derivatives "time bombs."
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
They are economists. Their "profession" is somewhat less respectable than astrologers. Anyone who puts any faith in anything that they say deserves to be a victim of their fraud. Sure, our whole economy might suffer, but since there is no real science to anything to do, it would suffer no matter if they used unaccepted research practices or not.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The next bubble is student loans, and it's already very far along in the pumping process.
Let's hope the whole thing collapses and students get back their right to go bankrupt.
I believe that in order for the free market to work, the banks who made bad loans should take the hit and go out of business. Their investors should lose their investment. That would make them more prudent in the future.
http://www.scientificamerican....
Mar 17, 2008 By Robert Nadeau
RTF, if not Economics are about as scientific as Chinese medicine.
Because governments over the last couple centuries (other than perhaps the Reagan administration) don't do stupid stuff based on what astrologers make up.
Who forced the banks to inflate $10.6 trillion in mortgage debt into $62 trillion in derivatives?
The defaults alone weren't the problem. The groupthink and perverse psychology of the private sector was the problem. Government just wanted to help people get homes. The greed of the private sector created such a mess that everything crashed because of their shenanigans.
If government was guilty of anything, it was not being cynical enough about the moral hazards and perverse incentives that drive markets.
We got Occupy Wall Street because some Canadians generously came down and showed us how it was done. It picked up for a while and then it died down. I hope it will have an influence on people.
They were designated a terrorist threat and the FBI shut them down. Nationwide.
This is not a conspiracy theory, it is backed up by FOIA documents.
...[you need to] recognize his base assumptions from his math, or you're still not qualified to check his math.
As an economist, I want to reiterate that point.
As another economist, I want to re-reiterate that point.
I've got some tulip bulbs I'd like to sell to you.
Greenspan was in a position to do something about it but kept mum. My Econ degree is from Podunk U. but I saw it coming. These guys know.
The earlier the bubble is burst, the small the correction needs to be and the quicker the recovery afterwards can be. Knowing a burst will happen, it is ethical to make the information public as quickly as possible.
The tricky bit comes when you are 55% sure of a crash, but knowing that making those fears known publicly will definitely cause a crash. How sure do you need to be before it is worth causing a small crash to offset the chance of a bigger crash later on? 60%, 70%, 80%?
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
I'm not sure you understood the GP's point. In fact you seem to have interpreted it completely backwards.
Allowing the companies making the loans to go bust, rather than trying to protect them by not allowing Student Loans to be cleared by bankruptcy is the attenuation that you are looking for. It's sends a clear message to other companies loaning money that there are risks and that they should be filtering potential customers.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
That's still judging the adjustments on your perception of bias by the scientists. Read and understand the papers that describe the reasons and means for the adjustments. Then we can have a reasonable conversation.
This is rubbish. Economics demonstrates that when there are high stakes involved, some scientists will prostitute themselves, insuring that their conclusions meet the desires of their masters. And they have no trouble coming up with plausible excuses such as your above "reasons and means for the adjustments".
I believe there is a strong correlation between economic ignorance and the belief that we must do something about climate change. The first paragraph is part of the reason why.
When people actually have experience with economics, they realize two things. First, that there actually are scientifically valid aspects to economics, such as the "law" of supply and demand, which are just as solidly demonstrated even by the standards of say, physics.
Second, that economics is not just frequently, but routinely and normally overwhelmed by conflicts of interest. There are way too many cases of things assumed to work merely because it is in the interest of the relevant parties to act on that assumption.
It sounds as if you think climate models are merely numerical exercises in curve fitting rather than models of the actual physical interactions that occur in the climate.
And you should be worried about that as well.
So far models are accurate within the expectations the modelers have for them.
My expectations count more to me than the modelers' expectations. They aren't accurate to within my expectations.
Economics has a huge problem here in spades. Expectations are a conveniently amorphous thing. I doubt that there are many economic models (most particularly, the blatantly dishonest ones) for which modeler expectations aren't being met. That doesn't make the model not actively baneful.
No one cares how much students in the UK protest, because they don't vote. Students are a demographic with one of the worst turnouts in elections. For allegedly intelligent people, it's surprising how few seem to realise the correlation between this and getting shafted by their elected officials. Go back to the '60s, and they had a lot more influence because they were much more likely to vote.
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Fundamentally economics is the study of human psychology. At some point it goes beyond the kind of math that you can "check."
No, it is not. For example, answer this question. What is the largest market in the world?
Here's a hint, this market has somewhere in the neighborhood of 10^30 participants estimated.
The math of economics works whether humans are involved or not. I can say meaningful things about economics in another galaxy.
That wasn't really a question of economics more so outright cheating/lying by the bond rating agencies.
Conflict of interest is a standard economic feature.
economists are not scientists.
economics is not a science as we commonly accept the word.
it is a behavioural science, which by nature incorporates a large measure of unpredictibilty and irrationality, because it by default deals with human behaviour.
As for GW: Not only have the models successfully reproduce all historical data since 1900, but the actual results of the past several years have continually been within the predictions of the models. So I dont know what your expectations are, but we've covered this many times and I expect your expectations are neither realistic, nor relevent. They are accurate to actual climate scientists expectations (though they naturally continually work to refine them, to narrow that margin of error), and you aren't one.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Never trust an economist, until you've checked his math. Even then, you don't trust him. You've got to understand economics so well that you can recognize his base assumptions from his math, or you're still not qualified to check his math.
You could say the same about almost any profession involving predictive models, particularly those involving human behavior or chaotic systems. (economics involves both) I used to make statistical models of factory operations. I had a manager once ask me to list the assumptions in my model. He asked me to stop when I got to the third page of (single spaced) assumptions built into the model. As the saying goes, "All models are wrong. Some models are useful". Plenty of economic models are useful as long as you understand and respect the assumptions in the model.
Remember the collapse from the housing bubble burst? Who predicted that?
I can introduce you to people who were publicly predicting it as far back as 2003. People I know personally, some of whom are economics professors and some others who are investment managers. They couldn't tell you when the bubble would burst or precisely how bad the fallout would be but they could tell you it was VERY likely and they could give you a pretty good overview of the range of possible outcomes.
Precious few men and women knew it was coming, and damned near none had any idea how bad it could be.
Not true. Quite a few people including plenty of economists suspected some sort of bubble burst was coming and they could tell you the possible range of outcomes. The problem was that it was damn near impossible to predict WHEN it would burst and as a result it was impossible to predict the collateral damage and fallout. It's also impossible to predict specific decisions. The government could have chosen to bail out Lehman Brothers but for various reasons that seemed good at the time chose not to. (mostly due to wanting to avoid moral hazard) It's difficult, bordering on impossible, to predict specific actions with that level of specificity. Most economic models are statistical and tend to break down when you get to specific decisions. Events like the crash in 2008-9 are chaotic events and thus are very hard to predict with great specificity ahead of time since you don't know the starting conditions even if everything afterwards behaves rationally (which never happens).
Any theory of economics that assumes things dramatically at odds with reality (eg rational actors, perfect information, fair behavior, etc) is utterly useless when applied to reality.
Incorrect. Many models, including many that have justifiably won Nobel prizes, are extremely useful with the caveat that you need to know and understand the underlying assumptions and limits to the model. You get into trouble when you start using models to predict things that do not fit the underlying conditions of the model. It's ok to presume rational actors and perfect information for a model so long as you don't use that model in conditions where those things don't apply.
Unfortunately sometimes the best models we currently have aren't robust enough to account for all the real world conditions so we necessarily use them in ways that might not be ideal. For instance most stock options are priced using the Black-Scholes equation which won a Nobel prize in 1997. It's brilliant and hugely insightful but it has a large number of assumptions which do not apply to many of the securities that are priced with the model. This doesn't make it useless but it does mean that anyone who uses it for securities that do not fit the assumption profile are taking on additional risk - sometimes substantial amounts of risk.
Thankfully physics has gotten rather far beyond such toy models, hopefully economics will get there too.
Most of physics doesn't involve chaotic systems and human behavior. You're comparing apples to oranges here. I've got a masters degree in finance but my undergraduate degree is in engineering with a minor in applied physics. I've worked as a researcher and as someone who builds financial models. Building and testing models in physics is in a lot of ways hugely more straightforward. I don't think many people here really appreciate how sophisticated a lot of financial models are. But the systems being modeled aren't so easy (for lack of a better word) to tease apart. Predicting economic outcomes is rather like predicting the weather if human emotions could cause hurricanes. It's a chaotic system with imperfect information and irrational actors.
Lots of people predicted it. I'm not entirely familiar with the US housing bubble, but in the UK the bubble collapse could be seen from a mile off. I remember yelling pointlessly at the radio when someone from one of the demutualized building societies was trying to justify lending an even more stupidly massive amount of money to people charging interest only "because we want to make property affordable" when it was doing the exact opposite (fuelling the bubble and making it more unaffordable). I also remember discussing it with my Dad on numerous occasions who had got caught up in all the hype. The problem is people got so greedy (both banks and customers alike) with the banks breathlessly falling over themselves to give people mortgages on ever more unsustainable and ridiculous terms, and customers falling over themselves to take them including lying on mortgage application forms, it was obvious that it would only take a slight upset in the economy to make the whole thing come crashing down. It was so blatantly unsustainable. Anyone who wasn't one of the breathless banks or customers could see it coming. The only thing that wasn't entirely predictable was the timing of the burst or the cause of the burst. That upset at least here was skyrocketing energy prices causing all the people who had got mortgages so big they were living paycheque to paycheque with nothing left over to begin defaulting as increased fuel and food costs demolished their non-existent reserves.
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Boom and bust is a natural cycle, true enough. But not a huge problem by itself - booms are short and shallow, and so are the busts, and overall it's a rising tide lifting all boats, it's only a slightly jerky ride.
The problem comes when you have financial policies intensifying the boom, extending it, and pushing the bust part of the cycle down the road. By the time the bust happens, a small correction is no longer sufficient. The bubble has been nurtured and grown to monstrous dimensions, and the resulting damage intensified by orders of magnitude. A few profit from this each time, but at the cost of the general welfare.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Austrian-school Economists don't have this issue at all. They avoid it entirely in fact by the simple expedient of expressing disbelief in the scientific testability of Economics in the first place. To them, the only thing that can be relied on is pure logic. Thus any annoying data that might seem to show something they don't like is clearly a figment of your imagination. To them essentially economics is not a science at all, but rather a philosophy.
As such, starting with the right axioms and some clever inductive reasoning, an Austrian can prove any economic fact his funders want him to. Not so coincidentally, the Koch brothers are big believers, and have funded entire departments with the proviso that they teach only this school.
So if you don't like scientific dishonesty, the solution is clear: Go Austrian and get rid of the science entirely!
Wrong.
Yes, cutting interest rates helped inflate things big time. No, that wasn't the full extent of the problem.
1) Government cancels Glass Steagall and Interstate Banking Acts allowing massive consolidation of the banking sector which increases risk of catastrophic failure
2) Government pushes the home loan industry to encourage home ownership more broadly and allows higher banking leverage ratios
2) Securitized debt like mortgage backed securities and collateralized debt obligations become popular and banks start selling off all their risk, removing much of the prudence they previously displayed
3) Bond rating agencies operate with a major conflict of interest, the issuers being rated are paying the bills for the rating
4) The Federal reserve lowers interest rates which encourages borrowing
5) As the pool of good debtors begins to dry up banks lower lending standards in order to keep the MBS gravy train rolling
6) Eventually everyone who wants a loan, worthy or not, has one and with the market saturated all it takes is a minor spark to set things ablaze
7) A minor economic wobble starts the ball rolling down hill and it's all over but the screaming