Corruption Much?

Why am I not surprised that a distinguished economist, a chair of Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advistors, took $100,000.00 from Uber to put his name on a piece of PR from the ride share firm and pass it off as an actual academic paper that he wrote. (see also here)

Should bought-and-paid-for corporate white papers get published under the auspices of the venerable National Bureau of Economic Research? That's the question raised by new disclosures from the Uber files leak.

State of play: A major NBER research paper c0-authored by Alan Krueger, the former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, was revealed last week to have been paid for by Uber as "part of a production line of political ammunition that could be fed to politicians and the media," in the words of Guardian investigative reporter Felicity Lawrence.

Context: NBER, more than a century old, is one of the most venerable economic institutions in the world. It's funded mostly by U.S. government agencies, but also by a broad range of corporations and foundations. There is no more prestigious venue in which to publish economic research.

By the numbers: Uber paid Krueger $100,000 for the controversial 2016 study, which has been cited by 981 scholarly articles to date. A payment of that magnitude "is not trivial and is relevant," one high-profile economist tells Axios.

………

The bottom line: It is commonplace for companies to pay economists to write research that then gets published by the company itself. When the research appears in academic outlets, however, the current disclosure regime can feel insufficient.

Not just insufficient.  Deeply corrupt, and completely consistent with the ethics and practice of economics, which is why, among a legion of corrupt professions, (think of all of the conflicts of interest, payments, and corruption in medicine and pharmaceuticals) economists are the least trustworthy.