We give this special award to the Friedman Foundation, which places on page two of each of its reports a section entitled, "Our Challenge To You." The passage begins, "Our research adheres to the highest standards of scientific rigor," and it ends with "prove us wrong. Judge our work by scientific standards and see how it measures up. If you can find anything in our work that doesn’t follow sound empirical methods, by all means say so. We welcome any and all scientific critique of our work..." Over the first two years of the Think Tank Review Project, six reviews of Friedman studies were published. Two reviews included substantial praise, mixed with varying degrees of criticism; the four others generally described the Friedman reports as misleading and poorly grounded – certainly not adhering to "the highest standards of scientific rigor." Yet, notwithstanding the page two "Challenge," we have received no communications from the Friedman Foundation to date, and the key shortcomings found by reviewers have never been addressed by the Friedman Foundation. The Foundation has also not softened its penchant for publishing reports that selectively and misleadingly cite research and that routinely make grand and unsupported inferential leaps to arrive at policy recommendations arguing for privatization.
Chutzpah Award
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2007
Think Tank:
The Friedman Foundation