Breaking news – some economists are biased

Breaking news – some economists are biased

“Economists like to say they’re immune from ideological influence. Our research shows the opposite”. That’s the summary of research by Mohsen Javdani and Ha-Joon Chang, published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. They report on an experiment in which academic economists were asked to comment on their agreement with economic quotes which were deliberately mis-attributed, without participants’ knowledge, to authors with “left” or “right” reputations. They found “economists’ self-reported political orientation strongly influences their ideological bias, with estimated bias going up as respondents’ political views move to the right”.

Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, right, shakes hands with U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres during the Youth Climate Summit at United Nations headquarters Saturday. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez)

Good Monday morning. This is a big day for our world and climate. Today is the U.N. Climate Action Summit. Vox’s Umair Irfan has what we should watch for from the summit. For climate coverage, a good place to start is Covering Climate Now, a project co-founded by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation. Led by The Guardian, more than 300 news outlets are now a part of the project. Last week, after a week of climate coverage, The Nation’s Mark Hertsgaard and CJR editor in chief Kyle Pope wrote a piece about what they learned during that week.

Additionally, Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network has organized 31 fact-checkers from 17 countries to fact-check the U.N. this week.

That’s what's happening today, but now let’s look back at the big stories of the weekend, including the whistleblower story.

Making America dumb again

The Pew Research Center  finds that more Americans believe that colleges “have a negative effect” on their country. In 2012, 60 percent of Americans believed they had a positive effect; that figure is now down to 50 percent. The decline has been almost entirely due to a sharp fall in support among Republican or Republican-leaning voters, only 33 percent of whom now believe universities and colleges have a positive effect. Seventy-nine per cent of Republican supporters believe higher education is “going in the wrong direction”, because “professors are bringing their political and social views into the classroom”.

Writing in The Atlantic  Reihan Salam offers  possible explanations. Some are partisan political: in the mid-term elections Republicans did badly in districts with high levels of education, and scored 16 points higher than Democrats among “whites” without a college degree. (Not dissimilar to our own federal election.) Some explanations are to do with the poor workplace performance among graduates with generalist degrees, many of whom are overqualified for available jobs but lacking in technical skills.

PREMIUM Deep links between the private sector and Defence have been to the nation’s benefit. But it’s complicated. The department has expanded its toolbox to manage this ‘revolving door’

CODE OF CONDUCT: Former government employees with defence-related skills will end up working in defence-related industries. The Department of Defence has been refining its approach to this perceived conflict of interest.