Have They No Shame?

While the ACA was being debated I was deeply concerned by the statements of an MIT Economics Professor who was saying things that were just not correct. I wrote extensively about this and lo and behold I was right. As this Professor has acknowledged (from Reason):

"This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO [Congressional Budget Office] scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that.  In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass....Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not."

 Well some of us were not that stupid. First he is he is an economist, and that knocks off a few IQ points anyhow. However the obfuscation, sadly seemingly supported by the publication in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), is, in my opinion,  on the verge of being conspiratorial. We are now all suffering from this massive mess.

One wonders if any of this is ever taken into account in the Academic world. From time to time I am reminded of Heidegger, and his academic foibles.

The tale gets even better when reading Forbes which states:
 
The new ..... comments come from a panel discussion that he joined on October 17, 2013 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He was joined on the panel by Penn health economist ..... was the first to flag .... remarks. In fairness to.......American voters are not the only people whose intelligence he questions; elsewhere in the discussion, he describes New York Sen. ....... as someone who “as far as I can tell, doesn’t understand economics” and calls a staffer for .....—presumably .....—an “idiot.”

 This an amazing statement. Here we have the alleged self-proclaimed architect saying that it was an attempt to deceive the American voters. Well frankly many were not fooled, as I had indicated many times. But institutions were used. In my opinion, MIT was used, NEJM was used, and the consequence is what? If this were a physician who did this, most likely he or she would be banned. But as a Professor of Economics, well what does one expect?

Yes, they have no shame. Nor, quite frankly, it seems to appear in my opinion, do the institutions who have seemingly supported them.

Now consider if this were a biologist who had devised a putative cure for say Ebola, but was just posing as such and then admitted publicly that what was done was just a way to  deceive the public to sell the drug. What would that persons Institution do? Most likely send them packing. The same would apply to any scientist, physician, or engineer. But apparently not to an Economics Department instructor, and that says something about business. Would Harvard allow this? Possibly not. In fact most likely not.

Consider the classic case of David Baltimore, the brilliant and revered Biologist, who was attacked by Congress with Congressman Dingell at the fore. He had a student make a sloppy entry in a lab notebook and after the bemoaning of another post-doc it started a Federal case. Where is the Federal case here. One assumes the good Professor was compensated by the Government so why not the same level of outrage. Baltimore actually did great deeds for mankind. Rarely if ever does one see this in an Economist.

Academic freedom permits the investigation of ideas not the promoting of error. In my view, it does not permit the propagation of known falsehoods. Back to Heidegger.