-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of
I agree with you--I don't believe that public health bureaucrats will
necessarily be more impartial. The point of Ropeik's article was that,
initially, the EPA and the automobile industry each wasted millions of
dollars funding studies that the other side would not accept as valid
(precisely because, as you write, the automobile companies didn't trust
the EPA bureaucrats' impartiality, and vice versa). So they agreed to
jointly fund the Health Effects Institute to perform the studies.
Neither side could then claim that the studies were skewed by
ideological motivations.
For this strategy to succeed, don't we have to assume that there are no
principal-agent problems, that both funders could monitor the work and thus
be tied to the results? How likely is the absence of principal-agent
problems?
John Samples
Cato Institute
