Hi Pierre,
>
> I don't see how the incentives of government, public-health
> bureaucrats, or the way they are selected, makes them more impartial.
> The EPA's manipulation of evidence in the secondhand-smoke case
> illustrates this quite strikingly. U.S. District Judge William Osteen:
> ?The court is faced with the ugly possibility that EPA adopted a
> methodology for each chapter, without explanation, based on the
> outcome sought in that chapter. ? The record and EPA?s explanations to
> the court make it clear that using standard methodology, EPA could not
> produce statistically significant results with its selected studies?
> (Flue-Cured Tobacco Cooperative v. EPA, No. 6:93CV00370 at 60, 77,
> M.D.N.C. July 17, 1998).
>
I agree with you--I don't believe that public health bureaucrats will
necessarily be more impartial. The point of Ropeik's article was that,
initially, the EPA and the automobile industry each wasted millions of
dollars funding studies that the other side would not accept as valid
(precisely because, as you write, the automobile companies didn't trust
the EPA bureaucrats' impartiality, and vice versa). So they agreed to
jointly fund the Health Effects Institute to perform the studies.
Neither side could then claim that the studies were skewed by
ideological motivations.
Unfortunately, in my initial post, I implied that the Health Effects
Insitute was a part of the EPA--I believe that it's actually an
independent non-profit organization. I'm sorry for the error.
Chris
