I wonder how much leftist social dogma was created this way, with phoney "social science" studies?The panel reported that he would discuss in detail experimental designs, including drafting questionnaires, and would then claim to conduct the experiments at high schools and universities with which he had special arrangements. The experiments, however, never took place, the universities concluded.
Thomas Sowell has an interesting take on that:My late mentor, Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler, used to say that it could be very instructive to spend a few hours in a library checking up on studies that had been cited. When I began doing that, I found it not only instructive but disillusioning.If I'm still Freeping when the Lord calls Thomas Sowell home, I intend to repost that article for him then.A footnote in a textbook on labor economics cited six studies to back up a conclusion it reached. But, after I went to the library and looked at those six studies, it turned out that they each cited some other study -- the same other study in all six cases.
Now that the six studies had shrunk to one, I got that one study -- and found that it was a study of a very different situation from the one discussed in the labor economics textbook.
. . . Once a minister was explaining to me the structure of his funeral orations. He said, "At this point, you are expected to say something good about the deceased. Now, Tom, if I were preaching your funeral, what would I say good about you at that point?" He thought and thought -- for an embarrassingly long time. Finally, he said gravely: "In his research, he always used original sources."
I'll take that.
Great stuff. Thomas Sowell is a national treasure.