I am intimately familiar with a couple of their studies. One dealt with the moral hazard of unemployment insurance and the other compared hospital ancilary workers wages to hotel worker wages. The unemployment study contained a fundamental error in math that, when corrected, invalidated its findings. Even though the author formally admitted the error, the study still gets cited to "prove" what it never proved. Which goes to show that accuracy doesn't really matter if you're selling the potion that the big boys want to buy. The wage comparison used such a narrow data base and made such bizarre assumptions of comparability that a credible researcher -- even a partisan one -- would have been ashamed to make it public. This kind of fast and loose with numbers happens all the time in negotiations between private parties and in advertising, but the Fraser takes used cars sales technique to new heights.
Pete Vincent wrote, > Unfortunately, the "Fraser Institute" is widely known and understood > in this part of the world to be such a blatantly shameless sycophantic > propaganda machine for megacorporate hegemony (from which they derive all > their funding) that if they issued a report declaring that the sky was > blue, everyone would rush to their windows to discover what colour > it had actually turned. It is never worth the trouble to try to > untangle the mess left by the high rpm spin on their pronouncements to > extract what litle actual fact is buried under it.
