A new paper published the National Bureau of Economic Research has given an insight that may explain some of the personal decisions that led to the recent EPA corruption fiasco Massive fraud at the EPA from agency’s top paid climate official (where a top climate specialist defrauded the taxpayers out of millions of dollars and made wild claims about being on CIA missions) and to Climategate, since I see some significant parallels between the two and this study. Links to a story about the paper and the paper itself follow.
As readers know, in a nutshell, Climategate was about the stonewalling of FOIA requests so that independent researchers (such as McIntyre) could not replicate the scientific work. That access for data to allow scientific replication was unreasonably blocked, and someone who was in a position to see what was going on behind the scenes decided that they would do something about it. Virtually every person involved in Climategate emails had some connection to government, either being directly employed by a government agency, or a government funded university.
On 17 November 2009 a large number of emails, together with other documents and pieces of code, from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were posted on a Russian web server, and announced anonymously at the Air Vent blog, Climate Audit, Real Climate, The Blackboard, and WUWT with the comment:
We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.
Of note, was the immediate deletion of the comment at Real Climate, and then a campaign by Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS to convince Lucia at the Blackboard that the release wasn’t to be trusted.
In that release from the “FOIA” leaker, we saw revelations like “Mike’s Nature Trick“. Here is a list of some of the emails and their content.From this Google document page: http://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/climategate
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Massaging the presentation of data:
- 942777075.txt the infamous “trick” to “hide the decline” in tree-ring data
- 939154709.txt “They go from 1402 to 1995, although we usually stop the series in 1960” (also referring to tree-ring data)
- 1225026120.txt “I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down” (referring to recent temperature data).
- 1254108338.txt “So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean” … “It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip”. This relates to the rapid warming before 1940 followed by cooling after 1940, which the ‘scientists’ would like to remove because it does not fit with their theory.
Attempting to get papers with a sceptical view on global warming rejected from journals, and not referred to in the IPCC reports:
- 1089318616.txt “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !”
- 1054756929.txt Ed Cook discusses with Keith Briffa how to get a paper rejected even though the mathematics is correct
- 1054748574.txt where Briffa says “I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review – Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting”
- 1080742144.txt where Jones “went to town” rejecting two papers that had criticised his work.
Refusing to provide data and supporting information when requested, and deleting emails (all quotes from Phil Jones):
- 1107454306.txt “The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone”.
- 1109021312.txt “I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !”
- 1182255717.txt “Think I’ve managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit.”
- 1211924186.txt Tim Osborn informs Caspar Amman that an FOI request has been received from David Holland about papers included in the IPCC report (May 27 2008) ….
- 1212009215.txt Jones suggests what “Keith could say” and “Keith should say” (May 28 2008) …
- 1212073451.txt “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? … We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.” (May 29 2008). [Under paragraph 77 of the FOI Act it is an offence to delete information subject to an FOI request].
- 1228330629.txt “When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise” … “About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little – if anything at all.”
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This LA Times story from November 2013 suggests that there may be a connection between dishonesty and government employment.
Cheating students more likely to want government jobs, study finds
November 18, 2013|By Emily Alpert Reyes
College students who cheated on a simple task were more likely to want government jobs, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania found in a study of hundreds of students in Bangalore, India.
Their results, recently released as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggest that one of the contributing forces behind government corruption could be who gets into government work in the first place.
…
Researchers ran a series of experiments with more than 600 students finishing up college in India. In one task, students had to privately roll a die and report what number they got. The higher the number, the more they would get paid. Each student rolled the die 42 times.
Although researchers do not know for sure if any one student lied, they could tell whether the numbers each person reported were wildly different than what would turn up randomly — in other words, whether there were a suspiciously high number of 5s and 6s in their results.
Cheating seemed to be rampant: More than a third of students had scores that fell in the top 1% of the predicted distribution, researchers found. Students who apparently cheated were 6.3% more likely to say they wanted to work in government, the researchers found.
“Overall, we find that dishonest individuals — as measured by the dice task — prefer to enter government service,” wrote Hanna and coauthor Shing-yi Wang, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Full story here: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/nov/18/science/la-sci-sn-cheating-students-government-jobs-corruption-20131118
And here is the paper abstract:
Dishonesty and Selection into Public Service
Rema Hanna, Shing-Yi Wang
NBER Working Paper No. 19649
Issued in November 2013
NBER Program(s): DEV
In this paper, we demonstrate that university students who cheat on a simple task in a laboratory setting are more likely to state a preference for entering public service. Importantly, we also show that cheating on this task is predictive of corrupt behavior by real government workers, implying that this measure captures a meaningful propensity towards corruption. Students who demonstrate lower levels of prosocial preferences in the laboratory games are also more likely to prefer to enter the government, while outcomes on explicit, two-player games to measure cheating and attitudinal measures of corruption do not systematically predict job preferences. We find that a screening process that chooses the highest ability applicants would not alter the average propensity for corruption among the applicant pool. Our findings imply that differential selection into government may contribute, in part, to corruption. They also emphasize that screening characteristics other than ability may be useful in reducing corruption, but caution that more explicit measures may offer little predictive power.
Source: http://www.nber.org/papers/w19649
….
CONCLUSIONS:
In this paper, we offer evidence that the college students who cheat on a simple task are more likely to prefer to enter government service after graduation. This relationship does not appear to vary by ability, suggesting that screening on ability does not change the level of honesty of those chosen for government service among the pool of applicants.
Importantly, we show that cheating on this task is also predictive of fraudulent behaviors by real government officials, which implies that the measure captures a meaningful propensity towards corruption. Given that the existing methods of measuring corruption only apply for those who are already entrenched in the bureaucracy, our validation of a measure of cheating against real-world corruption outcomes offers an important tool for future research on selection and corruption.
These findings are important because they demonstrate that the variation in the levels of observed corruption may, in part, be driven by who selects into government service. In addition, they offer two key policy insights. First, the recruitment and screening process for bureaucrats may be improved by increasing the emphasis on characteristics other than ability. It is important to note that individuals may not want to reveal their characteristics, especially their propensity for dishonesty, so the method of measurement matters. The simple, experimental measure we employed predicted the corrupt behaviors of the government employees, but the game in which corruption was explicitly framed and the fairly standard attitudinal questions had little predictive value. Second, while recent empirical papers have shown that reducing the returns to corrupt behavior decreases the probability that bureaucrats engage in corruption, our work suggests that these interventions may have had even broader effects by changing the composition of who might apply.
The full paper: http://assets.wharton.upenn.edu/~was/corruption_selection_paper.pdf
The test method is innovative though still just scratching a surface.
For reasons which would be lengthy to get into and delve enough into ideological-political alignments to be a relatively unsuitable topic for WUWT posting, I have a suspicion the difference might be more than 6.3% if conducted in the U.S. and, more importantly, if not talking about all government jobs in general but rather:
(1) those inclined to work for the EPA
(2) still more so, those inclined to work in climatology where it basically requires working for the CAGW movement
(3) very most all, the subset of #2 who are relatively well on their way and experienced, e.g. the equivalent of having seen http://img250.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=45311_expanded_overview2_122_15lo.jpg while still wanting others to believe claims about CAGW & about manmade CO2 as the pretend prime climate driver
The core of the CAGW movement is like a religion but not one for which honesty was ever a cardinal commandment nor seen in its saints.
Separate from (or in addition to) a desire for money, there are some who have particular desire to bring down others of ideologically disliked groups (and/or general anti-human bias), even aside from whether any gain to themselves, or to exercise power without good purpose for it — and some way to measure variation in willingness to cheat for the latter goals, not just variation in willingness to cheat for money, would probably be still more illuminating.
– – – – – – – –
Let’s start a process for inference.
Premises:
1. The above research about “hundreds of students in Bangalore, India”
2. There are common essential characteristics that are fundamental to every government that exists.
3. There are common essential reasoning capabilities and action potentialities that are fundamental to all human beings
4. There are common essential economic factors within the extent of countries active in the global economic sphere. India is a major participant is in that sphere and has been for at least a generation.
5. There are commonalities among cultures shown by comparative cultural studies
Discussion:
The identification of the characteristics / capabilities / factors in #2 through #5 allow inference.
Next step before inference begins is to identify and confirm them . . .
Then infer away . . .
John
Steve Richards says: @ur momisugly January 8, 2014 at 1:25 pm
…. politicians are the most corrupt!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
And this is news?
Possible alternate interpretations are that people who want to go into government work don’t care as much about being caught, are measurably more gullible, or do not have basic intuition skills. The obvious intent is to detect who will lie for gain. It could not be more obvious without a video of Admiral Ackbar shouting “it’s a trap” on repeat. As a known measurement of an absurdly indirect system, the value of the result is dubious and as a method of screening, useless. In an interview setting, people are on their best behavior and say and do what the interviewer wants to hear. They would be scrupulously honest about the results in an interview, even if they put all 6s down when unmonitored.
A better measurement would be to have students perform an unrelated task (waiting tables, for instance), and then be responsible for their review cards, written in pencil (unkown to them, written beforehand and carefully tallied). Then, they’d be left alone to review their cards and make any notes (also, with a pencil). They want to impress the teacher, so the dishonest would increase their scores. Something where they don’t know the cheating is being monitored.
Apologies
source
Recognition that taking the public dollar brings with it accountability of a public servant, but arrogance and indifference of the governments themselves has allowed the arrogant and deceptive to avoid the accountability and elevate themselves in their own perception to be a protected species who cannot be questioned.
Bring back the concept of public service, the humble public servant, who strives to serve our best interests and of course make FOI mean exactly what it should!
What are the error ranges for the dice study? Somehow, I do not find significance where a study ‘assumes’ student culpability without absolute verification or any controls. Coupling this study with climategate is injurious to rational attention to fraud exposed in climategate.
I remember one game that showed up in our house where, at first, everyone wanted to use the dice for all games as they tended to come up sixes and fives. Then after everyone thought about it, the dice were trashed and casino dice became the favorites for their dependable randomness.
A career in a government occupation has not disposed me to think many civil service employees are criminally inclined. Incompetent and/or arrogant, all too often; but people inclined to criminal actions in the United States Government usually expose themselves early in their careers.
There are problems in the study venue that weaken any potential generalization. Once you reach Asia Minor and proceed eastward, baksheesh is standard. So there’s no wonder that in the subcontinent cheaters will gravitate toward areas of enterprise where they can benefit from it – and east of the Mediterranean, that’s the government, ranging from the local constable to the prime minister. Going east the situation doesn’t improve until you reach Japan. By “improvement” I mean that people are not out right dying as a result of corruption. People are not killed by collapsing buildings or poisoned foods as a matter of course, or because a local warlord owns the police and has decided you occupy space that could be put to better use.
Our cheaters are comparative amateurs.
Yeah,, speaking of valid inferences, of conspiracy theories and of FOI requests, let me throw another data point on the pile … er, curve … trajectory:
Navy blunders in sending reporter details on how to avoid his FOIA request
“A US Navy official mistakenly forwarded an email to a local news reporter this week outlining the Navy’s method of avoiding the very Freedom of Information Act requests that reporter had filed.”
http://rt.com/usa/navy-foia-reporter-accident-294/
Is our bureaucrats learning?
I used to believe in taxes until I worked in a large government deportment. The idiocy and outright obstructionism is incredible. I would estimate government departments to be about 10% efficient. That is in comparison to my estimate of large private sector organisations at about 50% efficient, and small ones at about 80%, although all these figures may be a tad generous.
That is 45c of the 50c in each dollar I estimate I pay in tax being p!$$ed up against the wall. As a friend of mine is wont to point out, if they could tax us at 100%, they would still spend it all and need more. The USSR proved that point.
Gave you a link along with some further comments: http://classicalvalues.com/2014/01/government-attracts-the-corrupt/
The “hockey stick” shot the goal that scored for the warmists. Doesn’t matter now that the hockey stick was declared illegal. The game is over in the minds of the general public. That’s why they continue to use “The Science is Settled” even though they have to adjust it yearly. That’s why they continue to say the models say global warming, even though the models don’t work, at all, ever, … but the public still accepts them. This gift of north american arctic temperatures, the gift of scientists stuck in the antarctic ice. Have to be pointed out over and over and over so the public starts to wake up to the scam. None of it is settled, there is no global normal temperature, its not heating, its not cooling. 34 years of satellite data, 150 years of temperature recording, historic high periods, historic low periods, all add up to nothing is new. But they scored the first goal with an illegal hockey stick and that’s what people remember, not their own recollection of childhood temperatures, or the stories of parents and grand parents. Just big fat Al Gore and incorrect descriptions of polar bears playing on summer ice and a stupid hockey stick. BTW the 30 year satellite trend is the same as the hockey stick a chart with .5° up and down range over 34 years is not a valid chart. Not when the normal range of the data creating the chart is -65°C to +45°C.
or because a local warlord owns the police and has decided you occupy space that could be put to better use.
That is in fact enshrined in the Kelo Supreme Court decision.
Or how about New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and a contributor to his mayoral campaign Steve Nislick, a real-estate tycoon with an eye on the stables. What stables you ask? The stables for the horse drawn carriage horses that will be vacated with the banning of the carriages by the mayor. The Mayor of course will be ending the cruelty to the animals.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/new-yorkers-take-last-ride-on-carriage-horses-before-deblasio-ban/
Anyone who has ever been present at a government policy meeting, knows the nature of the beast.
If you do not know what is being discussed, do not ask. Nod and sagely go along, as you would not want anyone to suspect that you are ignorant.
I am not sure cheaters predominate or if this study comes close to supporting its conclusion.
But govt provides a haven for those who want to do as little as possible for the most constant reward.
The lazy and incompetent run interference or act as cover (involuntary) for the regulation lovers, people without skill or competence who know(No self doubt at all) they are the supreme authority, on some tiny irrelevant set of regulations. And they rule supreme in their bubble of authority, obey all the processes and cripple all producers who come into contact with their tiny reign.
Followed by the natural bureaucrat, who holds it all together, from a situation of few rules and free transactions between adults, to now where only those permitted activities will be tolerated.
Crooked, evil intent are not required, natural stupidity, incompetence and good intentions are enough to create climate science as practised by the IPCC.
Science by committee, what could go wrong?
Who amongst our senior bureaucrats would challenge the science?
They have to trust their scientists, they appointed them.
How many can even describe the scientific method, or proper procedure for policy documents?
“This opinion came from our scientists, it is the best science.”
Most employee behaviour relates to the closeness of the connection with the employer who pays them.
If that employer is a person they talk to every day, they’ll do what the boss asks or lose their job quick smart. If that employer is Joe Public the taxpayer, they’ll never meet him or talk to him, because of course he’s not real. So they can rearrange their job to suit themselves as much as that’s possible.
Why not? That’s what human beings have always done with their personal environment.
KenB says: @ur momisugly January 8, 2014 at 2:31 pm
….Bring back the concept of public service, the humble public servant, who strives to serve our best interests and of course make FOI mean exactly what it should!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
AND make civil servants and politicians obey the same laws as we do.
If a cop blows a guy away he should be placed on trial like everyone else. Congress doesn’t get any special treatment….
Get your 3D glasses. This is what they’re after:
Perhaps I have not been following the aftershocks of Climategate closely enough. I have yet to find a definitive wrap up of who got a hold of the computer files and who released them. First, I think whoever did it deserves our never ending thanks and appreciation. The revelations stopped the momentum in its tracks of a deceitful and exaggerated thesis of man made global warming. The Copenhagen conference was about to transfer the wealth of the western world to the corrupt third world dictators all in the name of global warming. That didn’t happen.
Certain aspects have never been explained and I am a loss to find information about it. Specifically, I recall reading about 3 or 4 months before Climategate either on this site or Climate Audit that someone tried to access the secure files at the East Anglia site in the middle of the night and found the door open. Was this an oversight at the university, or had someone hacked into the site and the writer stumbled into the open files coincidently? Or was this a governmental project? At least 4 nations likely have the technical ability to access these files. Some had reason to expose the fraud. My recollection is the British police investigation came up with no conclusions, but again I haven’t followed this very closely.
If any of you reading this knows of any stories about “who dunit”, please post the links in the comments section here.
I am a public employee who never wanted to be a public employee. It was the only job I could find that allowed me to use my education in a small town. I could still be corrupt so you will have to take my observations with a grain of salt. I worked for many years in the private sector before becoming a public employee. I can’t see any difference in the general honesty of people in the two sectors. The commonality that I see is that big organisations, whether public or private, provide niches for the incompetent or dishonest to hide.
The primary difference between the two sectors is that the private sector overtly states that they are out to get money by whatever means society allows them to, so nobody is surprised by rampant lying in the private sector with regards to such things as cosmetics that don’t work as they promised, patent medicines that don’t work, obscene markups on goods of all kinds but most notoriously substandard goods and fake and real medications made in Asia, massivie markups on food while fixing prices to producers at unsustainably low levels, inadequate safety procedures on drilling and other industrial operations, lying about the danger levels associated with goods transported by train etc., etc. etc. What would be considered immoral behaviour is normal business practise in the private sector and we don’t even notice it anymore. The only people who are really held up to scrutiny for their moral behaviour are public servants, and not surprisingly some of them are to varying degrees less than perfect. I can say with a pretty high degree of certainty that if I came to work each day with the primary intent of maximizing my profit I would be considered a complete failure as a public servant.
From my viewpoint science has failed because it has become a money making enterprise. We are encouraged to go into science because it will get us good jobs. Science as a philosophical pursuit barely exists anymore, universities and campuses in the US and Canada are filled with on campus businesses. If you want to see where science is going, just look at what is happening with pharmaceutical research. As soon as big money gets involved, then the temptation for big corruption exists. This is probably part of what went wrong with the climategate people, some of it was probably noble cause syndrome and another part was probably that they never ever had a philosophical devotion to the truth.
corkyboyd says:
“If any of you reading this knows of any stories about ‘who dunit’, please post the links in the comments section here.”
Nah, let’s not. That would be dropping a dime on him [for younger readers, that means being a snitch, after the old 10¢ phone booths that used to be everywhere].
He did a great public service. If he wants to out himself, he can at any time.
What’s really sad is the number of people who still try to claim that the ClimateGate e-mails actually exonerated the warmistas.
@BC Bill, so in the trenches of the govt, a paranoid view of private enterprise also lives?
Having worked in both, most private businesses still depend on their word being their bond, ethics are important.
But the companies who service government contracts, even ethical tradesmen are corrupted when dealing with officialdom, the process is obscene, an honest bid, will fail to compensate for all the obstruction, interference and time wasted by the government people overseeing the job.
I used to use x3 for time but now its x5 to just break even.
Of late I refuse to bid, the waste and corruption is too much, the endless paperwork, compliance requirements are not worth dealing with.
Given a choice between spending hours to do the work of a few minutes, then having to file endless forms to be partially compensated, or working for people who want their work done, help anyway they can and pay on time, it is no contest.
The most corrupt private companies I have been involved with specialized in contracting to the government.
EW3 says:
January 8, 2014 at 1:31 pm
The Democrat presidential nominee in 1988, Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis, said about the ethical standards of the Reagan Administration, “There’s an old Greek saying … the fish rots from the head first. It starts at the top.” Dukakis went on to say that scandal and misconduct had become “almost an epidemic. It’s the guy at the top who has to be held accountable.”
What was most ironic was that Reagan was ramping up drug prohibition at the same time his minion Ollie North was bringing in Kilos of something to support the CIA/Contras. I supposed the black market price was better with stronger enforcement. And let us not forget the arms deal with Iran as part of that three cornered trade. In case you have forgotten – Iran/Contra – was the name of that episode. I would be surprised if something similar wasn’t on going in Afghanistan.
http://www.ctrl.org/boodleboys/boddlesboys2.html
But the rotten head at this point is our current President. Which is to say that they have all been rotten for quite some time.
Just think about the NSA vetting all or political candidates.
john robertson says:
January 8, 2014 at 6:49 pm
The most corrupt private companies I have been involved with specialized in contracting to the government.
I worked as a contractor for Stewart Warner and I must say – although I’d rather not explain the episode – that was very true. I got fired for uncovering what was done. My worst sin – I wouldn’t participate. I wasn’t about to blow the whistle – too many unknown forces – but obviously they couldn’t trust me if I didn’t have my hand in the cookie jar.
Stewart Warner is now defunct.
It was so bad the government didn’t like them. Not because of the corruption but because of the potential for embarrassment.
A lot of it has to do with the government paperwork requirements. Requirements generated by previous bouts of corruption.
lying about the danger levels associated with goods transported by train
How about those oil trains from Canada. They are real killers. Warren Buffet has a stake in them. Pipelines would be safer. Warren couldn’t do it without the assistance of the left and the government.
I was looking for old news of a destroyed Canadian town. And here I come across breaking news:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/09/oil-train-fire-crash–canada-us-