The Fraser Institute

The "research" the Fraser Institute produces is junk: have a happy Labour Day!

The so-called “institute” released a paper yesterday that asserts the more heavily the labour relations field is tilted in favour of corporate employers, the more “balanced” it is – an absolute inversion of reality.



This is no surprise because, no matter what the subject, Fraser Institute “research” always lines up precisely with the agenda of its corporate financiers.



However, in the past, the Fraser Institute at least has reported measurable facts accurately in the fine print even as it reached conclusions those facts could not support. Often, it cherry picked which numbers to count and, if that wouldn’t work, fell back on statistical sleight of hand and simply reported conclusions unsupported by the evidence.

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in the Vancouver-based organization’s 2012 Labour Day report – which unsurprisingly reached virtually identical conclusions to this year’s effort – the statistics accurately reported in the back pages showed the opposite of the “conclusions” reached by the researchers.



This is a very common Fraser Phenomenon, often noted in the pages of this blog. Recently, to cite just one other example, a Fraser Institute report that concluded “Alberta’s finances are in worse shape than other energy-producing provinces and states” was based on hard numbers that in fact showed Alberta’s finances are in better shape than other energy-producing provinces and states.

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this year, the Fraser Institute seems to have dealt with this chronic problem by simply eliminating the embarrassing data contained in their previous Labour Day releases on labour market performance entirely and moving directly to writing fiction.



The 2014 Labour Day report continues to have pretty charts with coloured bars and lots of numbers, but they don’t report on any metrics that are actually relevant to the paper’s two authors’ stated belief that laws making it hard for unions to operate produce higher living standards.



The reason, of course, is that if you actually dig out the hard numbers not found in this latest Fraser report, they show the opposite, just as economist Andrew Jackson illustrated with the numbers the Fraser Institute published in 2012.



So the “conclusions” of the 2014 Fraser Institute Labour Day paper are nothing more than the authors’ unsubstantiated opinions.



In other words, the Fraser Institute is now applying the methodology of “creation science” to the study of economics! The results, of course, are much the same.



The Fraser Institute’s holy, beneficent and all-powerful market, like the notion of “intelligent design,” is at base a religious view, although one that conveniently serves the economic interests of the “institute’s” financiers.

(AlbertaDiary)

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