There's also a bunch of stuff between error and malice. As we saw yesterday here, it's very obvious in pharmaceutical research, where the stuff getting funded and published is often heavily biased despite the best intentions of everybody (or almost everybody).

I suspect there are plenty of similar issues in economics. People with money are much more likely to support researchers whose work benefits or protects people with money. E.g., I happened to read a paper from a U of Chicago prof arguing that insider trading is actually beneficial. Boy, I wonder who the big donors are there. Probably not Mother Jones Magazine.

The economic benefit of insider trading is a well established economic possibility. It's not a pure transfer to rich people.

> I strongly believe that errors are a much more pervasive problem in science and related fields than malice is.

The problem is that economics is not a field related to science. The vast majority of public policy economics starts with a conclusion, and then creates facts to support that conclusion. This is not science, it is religion.

(insert disclamier about this being an overgeneralization)

> I strongly believe that errors are a much more pervasive problem in science and related fields than malice is.

In science generally, probably. In areas tightly connected to perennial areas of sharp ideological policy divides, like macroeconomics, I'm less convinced.

"science and related fields "

But we are talking about economics, and republican groups like fox news eat it up.

My favorite example is the 2011 chart distorting the display of the unemployment rate:

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/12/12/today-in-dishonest-f...

Fox News is not in the business of science. I used the term "related fields" as a euphemism for Econ and Psych because I didn't want to get drawn into a demarcation debate.

Wherever the line is drawn, the dishonesty of some random Fox News chart is not related to the honesty or dishonesty of actual scientific research.

The much bigger problem in science is error.

" didn't want to get drawn into a demarcation debate."

Econ and Psych really do lie in a gray area, and by avoid the demarcation debate you completely miss the relevance of the issue at hand.

If policy makers weren't using this study to justify more austerity, then we probably wouldn't have such a prolonged discussion.

Distorting the truth about the state of the economy is not something confined to one partisan side, and the need for data transparency extends beyond economics regardless.

"is not something confined to one partisan side"

True, but I haven't seen a liberal think tank manipulate charts in that specific manner.

Then look harder.