The Chatty Cathy Principle

While not an economist there is a man perfect for the job.

John Lott knows how to "work" numbers and has the support of Mary Rosh.

Yes, the "academic world" is bought-and-paid-for, which is why this physicist lost his job at BYU:

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2009/04/04/thy-speech-shall-whisper-out-of-the-dust/

A mathemetician, a physicist and a 'respected economist are all applying for the same job. Each takes a turn at the interview which consists of only one question - "What is two plus two". The mathemetician goes first and anwers "two plus two is precisely and unambigously four". The physicist is next and answers with slightly more hesitation, "two plus two is four - plus or minus point zero zero five" The respected economist is next and when presented with the question, immediately gets up, goes to the window and closes the blinds, turns back and says "What do you need it to be?"

A bonus piece of amusement about this whole situation: they say at the end that the assumed study would then serve as "a powerful ... grass-roots document."

A study that's commissioned by a lobbying group and conceived of by "congressional allies" is almost the exact opposite of anything "grass-roots."

Hardly a new strategy for them, but a bit of a surprise to see it so starkly on display.

Some one tell me what the difference is.
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Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.
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In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.
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A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.
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“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,' ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html?_r=2&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1208689475-bo6qosQ0jvGCpjWeQeDAFw
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The Education Department paid commentator Armstrong Williams $241,000 to help promote President Bush's No Child Left Behind law on the air, an arrangement that Williams acknowledged yesterday involved "bad judgment" on his part.
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In taking the money, funneled through the Ketchum Inc. public relations firm, Williams produced and aired a commercial on his syndicated television and radio shows featuring Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige, touted Bush's education policy, and urged other programs to interview Paige. He did not disclose the contract when talking about the law during cable television appearances or writing about it in his newspaper column.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56330-2005Jan7.html
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The Bush administration payment of columnists refers to the payment of public funds to right-wing media commentators by several U.S. executive departments under Cabinet officials to promote various policies of U.S. President George W. Bush's administration. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid to at least three commentators to promote Bush administration policies.
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The payments were revealed on January 7, 2005, in an investigative report by Greg Toppo of USA Today. USA Today had obtained the information through documents provided by the U.S. Department of Education after the newspaper had made a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents showed that Armstrong Williams, a prominent syndicated columnist and pundit on CNN and CNBC, had received $241,000 of tax money through the Education Department's contract with Ketchum Communications, a public relations firm. In exchange for the money, Williams promoted the No Child Left Behind initiative and encouraged other journalists and commentators to provide favorable views of the law. Williams admitted that he had received the payments and wrote a column entitled "My Apology," admitting to the charges but writing that he "did not change [his] views just because my PR firm was receiving paid advertising promoting the No Child Left Behind Act." Williams' column was cancelled by the Tribune Company, which had previously syndicated his work.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_administration_payment_of_columnists
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The scientific integrity of medical research has been clouded in recent years by articles that were drafted by drug company-sponsored ghostwriters and then passed off as the work of independent academic authors.
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Yet the leading medical journals have continued to rely largely on an honor system of disclosure to detect such potential bias, asking authors to voluntarily report any industry ties or contributors to their manuscripts.
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But now, in light of recently released evidence that some drug makers have gone to great lengths to turn scientific articles into marketing vehicles for their products, some influential medical editors are cracking down on industry-financed ghostwriting. And they are getting help from some members of Congress.
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These editors are demanding that journals impose tougher disclosure policies for academic authors and that the journals enforce their own rules by actively investigating the provenance of manuscripts and by punishing authors who play down extensive contributions by ghostwriters.
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In medical journal circles, the exorcism of industry-financed editorial assistance even has its own name: ghostbusting.
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http://www.cnbc.com/id/32916226
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Keep in mind while you are thinking about chatty cathy, there is a even larger problem that goes beyond members of congress. Today we see increasingly agressive billion dollar public relation firms being given easy and ready access to local television news programs where fake news programs are created with the intent to sell products and push political agendas.
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Local news programs are some of the most cash strapped in the industry and are not able to employ very many truly skilled reporters. So they are willing to outsource their news reporting to advertisers and the government. Then they hide the fact that news value is not really determined by the public's right to know, but instead by market research firms.

Are our corrupt media institutions still pretending that English Major Amity Shlaes is an economist?

I'm sure there will be at least one who will jump at this.

I'd like to suggest that this phenomenon is more like "Chucky" than "Chatty-cathy"

Here's guessing respected Harvard economist Greg Mankiw is up for the job. Mankiw is already opining on his blog that, "If a government policy increases the demand for a service, the price of that service tends to rise." Pafro's suggestion of Amity Shales is a darned good one, too.

The Constant Weader at http://www.RealityChex.com

I've been through a business type graduate program. And I'm respected by my friends (mostly). I will happily sham up any study these guys want for $40,000. The $10k discount is due to my extreme patriotism and large student loans.

What is fascinating in the discussion of media accountability and the quality of reporting is the fact that the AP admitted putting 11 reporters on the job of fact-checking Palin's book.

I think back to the Judith Miller fables about aluminum tubes printed on the front page of The New York Times in the run-up to the war while reporters at McClatchy were actually unearthing the truth... That is, that the aluminum tubes in question were too thin to be used in centrifuges and were likely being used to build rocket launchers.

But the McClatchy reports were all but ignored by the media at large, while Miller;'s bogus "reporting" (sources citing the same false information that these same sources had planted in the first place) was trumpeted by many in the mainstream media -- including the AP -- and used by the Cheney administration and its lackeys to march us off into Iraq.

The twisted priorities of the AP (11 reporters on Palin's brainless, worthless, lying memoir) and cheerleading us into Iraq on the basis of false, uninvestigated WMD claims tell us more than we need to know about the sorry state of affairs in professional journalism.

" .. Let's see if any "respected economist" is that badly in need of $50,000. .."

$50,000! So an "respected economist" ponders:
Benefits: Minimalist survival on l;ess than $50 a week in the forests of Boneo => 1,000 weeks of survival. WOW!

Cost: How much is "respect" really worth?

It is said that everything, almost, has a price.
Can an aged "respected economist" use an extra $50,000 - say, to make that planned retirement in Miami even cozier?

"respect" among economist depends at times and to some degree on persuasion - as in the case of the everlasting feud between the gangs of the supply-side and the demand-side economics.

Some years ago, a presenter in a lecture I attended stated that with some agility, one can use carefully selected data and statistics to support any pet viewpoint.
[Limbaugh is, to some, a "most respected radio talk show host", right? Just as FOX shines in the 'news' area ..]

"You might also note that all of those arrangements were exposed by ... the media. As were the Chatty Cathy episodes of the past couple of days."
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Does the media have a doll they can use to illustrate that fact that when corporations spend enough money, they can not only get pretty much anybody to say pretty much whatever they want them to, they can also get our so-called elected representatives to vote for whatever the corporations want them to? No Happy Whore doll? Pity.

Can we raise enough money to form our own “KT-PAC” real folks' lobby? How much does a senator cost?

[...] the White House Chief of Staff, and caught him at a moment when he was feeling pretty amused by a report in this morning's Washington Post. That, of course, would be the one suggesting that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would pay $50,000 to [...]