and passionate advocate of Social Security privatization.
A recent Washington Post story (at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8000-2005Mar28.html ) on dissension over Social Security politics within the GOP mentioned some "intellectuals" who are holding to a hard line on privatization. First among them was Prof. Martin Feldstein of Harvard, now President of the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research.
What the article did NOT mention was that Feldstein's longtime rabid support for privatization seems to have led him to falsify research results twenty-five years ago. He submitted empirical work purporting to show that Social Security depressed national saving. When other researchers could not reproduce his results, he famously blamed 'computer error'. This incident earned him an extremely unflattering NY Times article, which has become part of a "Bibliography on Scientific Fraud" at
http://www.albany.edu/~scifraud/biblio/A.htm :
Arenson, K. W. "Martin Feldstein's computer error." The New York Times 1980 (5 October): F19.
Yet no MSM reporter has questioned Feldstein's credibility on this issue, the very Achilles heel that got him into a lot of hot water a long time ago. I wish Paul Krugman, Robert Scheer, Arianna Huffington, or Joe Conason would write a column on Feldstein's credibility on Social Security, and on the intellectual fraud at the heart of the entire GOP position on privatization.