What you write there is interesting, you should have led with that. :-) Could you give me some pointers?
Coming from Sweden, we have a consensus culture. That makes it possible for the media and the politicians to whip up a frenzy and change the acceptable opinions. The point is, you don't have to dig so deep to find official lies. Quite a few of the whistle blowers are economists. I do believe a large subset in the profession have integrity.
>> I assume you would assign the "smoking" issue to the field of medicine. Which percentage of research in medicine would you expect to be closely related to public policy? Which percentage in economics?
Let me put it like this -- Sweden recently got a professor (instated by the government) in the state defence research arm, specialized in gender. He tends to write articles supporting whatever the government likes... :-)
Regarding research -- smoking was not public policy, but purely company interests. All of health questions regarding choices of medicine, treatments and diet are interesting to lots of interest groups. (And age verification of young people was a big thing in Sweden regarding the immigration -- the international research consensus was thrown out...)
The national economy researchers are much fewer. But there are also quite a variation internationally on how politically influenced academics are. Also, what is sensitive in some countries can be researched in others with e.g. a different infrastructure.
In my native Sweden, the health research is probably more interesting to influence than the economic departments at universities. The political parties are interested in the economists. The big corporations don't really care, they talk to the parties directly. (Corporatism, yes..)
>> There was no talk of "idiots and fanatics" in the comment you replied to, hence the "not phrase it so strongly" part.
The statement "scientific content in most economists is zero" needs that the practitioners are either idiots, crooks or fanatics.
But sure, I'll back down here. A group of people studying a subject without any feedback and internal tests can go crazy, obviously. coldtea used the example Freudians. You might use post modernists too -- any group with a common preconceived opinion about how the world works might become a cult.
There is just to much precedent in the crazier part of academia for my argument.
Still, to dismiss an old field of research needs damn good support.