A very pessimistic view on the state of research quality in the US, particularly in public health research. Some choice quotes:
My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields.
Yet, more importantly, training in “science” is now tantamount to grant-writing and learning how to obtain funding. Organized skepticism, critical thinking, and methodological rigor, if present at all, are afterthoughts.
From 1970 to 2010, as taxpayer funding for public health research increased 700 percent, the number of retractions of biomedical research articles increased more than 900 percent, with most due to misconduct.
The widespread inability of publicly funded researchers to generate valid, reproducible findings is a testament to the failure of universities to properly train scientists and instill intellectual and methodologic rigor.
academic research is often “conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure.” In other words, taxpayers fund studies that are conducted for non-scientific reasons such as career advancement
Incompetence in concert with a lack of accountability and political or personal agendas has grave consequences: *The Economist* stated that from 2000 to 2010, nearly 80,000 patients were involved in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted.
Still, there the author says there is hope for reform. The last three paragraphs suggest abolishing overheads, have limits on the number of grants received by and the maximum age of PIs, and preventing the use of public funding for publicity.
Without making claims about the conclusions, I think this argument is of very poor quality and shouldn't update anyone in any direction.
Taking all claims at face value, you should not be persuaded that more money causes retractions just because retractions increased roughly in proportion with the overall growth of the industry. I checked the cited work to see if there were any mitigating factors which justified making this claim (since maybe I didn't understand it, and since sometimes people make bad arguments for good conclusions) and it actually got worse - they ignored the low rate of retraction ( It's 0.2%), they compared US-only grants with global retractions, they did not account for increased oversight and standards, and so on.
The low quality of the claim, in combination with the fact that the central mission of this think tank is lobbying for reduced government spending in universities and increase political conservatism on campuses in North Carolina, suggests that the logical errors and mishandling of statistics we are seeing here is partisan motivated reasoning in action.
willbradshaw made the exact same point, earlier, and had lower karma. What's up with that?
EDIT: Retracted because the parent comment is substantive in different ways. Still, acknowledging the earlier comment would've been nice!